Category: Earthquake

Children, lift up your voice

I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the world last night and sat up writing a blog. I had literally just finished the draft of this when the earth started shaking and blue lights lit up the sky

I couldn’t work out whether it was a sign to publish or not. I could use a distraction though, so I’m going with publish. Warning though this is possibly one of the more emo things I have written

I know my readers come from all walks of life, from all over the globe and with many different points of view. I like that. I like that the readers I have met – be they sailors, mental health advocates, butchers, bakers or candlestick makers – all have their own experiences, their own stories to tell. I like that we can listen to each other and challenge each other, disagree with but still respect each other. That’s really important to me.

That’s one of the reasons why I very deliberately stay away from overtly political posts.

But just watching the fallout over the last few days, the hurt and the hate I am seeing on social media, I feel that silence is complicity.

What shocked me more than the result of the US elections was the immediate aftermath. Not the protests, but the hate.

People being assaulted, threatened with rape and told to go home at knife point because of their colour, their religion, their sexuality. College kids who think it’s okay to put on blackface and pose in front of a confederate flag. And these aren’t just isolated incidents. I’m hearing about it everywhere.

At first I saw this whole situation as a bit of a twisted joke – and yeah, I took part in the Trump memes. But this is real, this is ugly and it frightens me.

And yes, I know there are checks and balances. I know the system will protect itself and that the world really isn’t going to end.

That is not the point. The point is this is happening. All this hate. It’s like a lid has been lifted and people now have an excuse.

Looking at it dispassionately and can see how this happened. I can see why people voted the way they did. The disaffected, the distrustful, the people who are hurting financially, who haven’t had the support they needed from their government. People who have been suffering and whose voices haven’t been heard for too long. But you can’t tell me this is what all these people wanted. This hate, this fear? And the people who didn’t vote because they felt they had no real choice. I can’t believe this is what they want. I wont.

It struck me while listening to Nick Cave’s O’Children yesterday why this bothers me so much.

To me this is a song about the previous generation right royally screwing things up.

Forgive us now for what we’ve done
It started out as a bit of fun
Here, take these before we run away
The keys to the gulag…

…We have the answer to all your fears
It’s short, it’s simple, it’s crystal clear
It’s round about and it’s somewhere here
Lost amongst our winnings

The chorus feels a little hopeful though, which saves it for me (though knowing Nick Cave it’s probably not meant to be!)

O children
Lift up your voice, lift up your voice
Children
Rejoice, rejoice

When I was a kid I had an inherent belief that the generations before us had done just that – stuffed things up. The environment, genocide, wars where so many were sacrificed. I felt firmly that it would be okay because our generation understood. We wouldn’t let these things keep happening. It would be our job to fix it.

I did all the things you do when you’re young and idealistic – bullied my family into recycling, took part in and helped organise anti-war protests, wrote and shared truly terrible poetry. It would all be okay for the next generation. We were going to fix it.

Now I’m the previous generation and we didn’t fix it. If anything it has gotten worse. We didn’t save the world and I am so sorry.

It hit me like a tonne of bricks on election night when I watched a friend of mine’s young daugher say “Mum, is there a chance Donald Trump will get in?” and her Mum had to say “yes darling, there is.” The look of fear on her wee face broke my heart.

And yeah you can say I’m being melodramatic that, again, there are checks and balances. But you try looking at it through the eyes of a child. We’ve all been joking about building bunkers, about what could happen if Trump got the nuke codes. We know it’s not that simple, but children don’t pick up those nuances. They are seeing people on the news spitting hatred, talking about building walls, rounding up people and sending them away. You can’t blame them for being scared.

I remember another friend of mine, a bit older than me, who talked about living through the cold war saber rattling in his teens and thinking there was no point in studying or looking to the future because there was not going to be one.

We can’t let our kids feel like that.

I don’t care what your political beliefs are – they are allowed to be different to mine. But please, please don’t support hatred. Please call it out when you see it. Please love and support each other. People keep saying we are in for a rough few years. Prove them wrong.

Back to Nick Cave. Harry Potter geeks will know that O’Children was the song that Harry and Hermione danced to in Deathly Hallows Part 1. While they were facing the worst kind of violence, hatred and genocide – they listened to illicit radio and danced.

In the face of fear and hatred they fought back.

The same friend who is trying to keep her kids’ spirits up found this quote from Luna Lovegood

luna-quote

“We’re all still here, we’re still fighting”

And another friend this from Dumbledore

dumbledore-quote

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if only one remembers to turn on the light”

It put me in mind of another song by Jason Webley (which spookily enough started playing on my ipod on shuffle the second I started thinking about it) Dance While the Sky Crashes Down.

It’s also a bit dark but I love it. I love the idea of dancing while everything is going to shit.

But we need to do more than dance. We need to fight. We need to fight any hatred that comes out of this.

That’s all I can offer the next generation. The kids that are inheriting the mess that I inherited and didn’t manage to fix.

Don’t give up on love and hope and peace. Fight for it and we will fight with you.

Stand up for what is good and fair and right and we will be right there beside you.

“Lift up your voice”.

Christmas at Sea

As you can probably tell by the title of this blog, we didn’t manage to make it home for Christmas day.  The original title was ‘Weather Forecasters are Lying Bastards Part 3’ – but after the lovely Christmas day we had on the water I decided that was far too negative.

When we were finally able to leave Auckland it looked as though our biggest problem would be not enough wind – and for the first couple of days that was pretty much true to form. When the wind did blow from the South (the direction we were trying to travel in) there was so little of it that it was inconsequential – which was why the 30 knot Southerlies we got in the middle of the Bay of Plenty came as such a rude shock.

We’ve been in stronger winds and much more uncomfortable conditions in Wildflower before and coped fine, but I think that must have been the last straw for me, because I kinda lost it. I was still able to do everything I needed to, including clambering up on deck in the howling wind (with a harness on Mummy!) to reef the mainsail and frantically pulling on ropes while the poor boat’s sails crashed and banged, but once all that was done I am ashamed to admit that I hunkered down on the floor of the cockpit and bawled like an angry kitten. I had had enough, I wanted off the boat, I wanted out of these shitty conditions and most of all – I just wanted to get home.  It felt like we had been trying to get down south forever. We had already planned to have a belated Christmas with my family in Christchurch, but I was really missing them and was just a teensy bit over it all.

Paddy handled it like a champ. He held my hand and let me rant and rave, which was exactly what I needed. In the end we tacked out to sea for most of the night to keep us clear of the land and tacked back in again in the morning so we could round East Cape. It meant we lost about a day going out of our way but by the time we got round East Cape (which has a reputation for being a little windy) conditions had settled down and it was pretty uneventful.

Unfortunately for Paddy my next attack of Neurotic Crew Syndrome came the following day when we finally got the chance to check our Winlink radio email. Paddy came up to the cockpit, gave me a hug and said “there’s been a couple more quakes in Christchurch, but everybody’s okay.” Dad had emailed us to let us know because he had assumed we would have heard something on the news and been worried, which was absolutely the right thing to do. Unfortunately we hadn’t had any traditional radio access for a while so I didn’t really know the extent of what had happened – though I had figured if Dad was able to email then things must have been alright. I replied straight away and then checked our email before I went on my first night watch. We hadn’t had a response (though it turned out Mum, Dad and little sis had all taken turns writing in an email but for some reason it hadn’t gone through then). This meant I had spent a large chunk of my first watch glaring at my celphone and waiting for some sort of reception and when I got it – at 1am – I immediately woke my poor parents up to make them tell me they were okay. After hearing their voices everything was so much better and when the email came through in the morning it really made me smile.

So when Christmas day dawned, I was in a much better headspace. It helped that it was a lovely, calm, sunny day. Sure, we had to burn some diesel because there wasn’t much wind, but at that point I was okay with that!

Neptune started giving us our Christmas presents at first light, when the fishing rod started going nuts. We caught three decent sized tuna in quick succession before I made Paddy put the fishing rod away (we hadn’t managed to get anything done that morning because we were constantly running to the fishing rod, and there’s no point in being greedy!) We had a couple of albatross fly around us for a bit after that and, no sooner had I started thinking ‘the only thing that would make this more perfect would be dolphins’, they started to turn up.

First it was just a little guy on his own who jumped out of the water a couple of times and then disappeared but he must have got some of his mates because the next thing we knew we had a couple of pods of them hanging out with us for the rest of the day. It was really lovely.

Paddy and I and the goodluck trolls pulled Christmas crackers, wore silly hats, told awful jokes and ate scorched almonds – so all in all it was a pretty awesome day.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful and we even got a bit of good sailing in and were able to give poor old Big Red the engine a bit of a rest. We got a classic Wellington welcome home this morning though, with a couple of knots of tide against us going up Cook Strait. It was reasonably comfortable though, just made the going a little slower. The wind pretty much dropped off completely until we hit the South coast of Wellington, which decided to remind us what city we were heading towards by cranking things up from about 2.5 to 35 knots in rather quick succession. There is a bit of a wind funnel effect there with the land but, because there is such little sea room between the land and you, there is very little swell. So you have a lot of wind but the boat isn’t bashing around. It is a little surreal.

Once we got into Wellington Harbour though everything had settled down and we were able to enjoy watching home appear over the horizon (in between the ferries and mad buggers kite surfing). Once we had managed to get the boat docked at Chaffers Marina we jumped off and hugged each other. We’d made it! Around the South Pacific and back all in one piece and without killing each other. It has been an incredible experience and one I will not forget in a hurry.

I also – despite the way I felt in the Bay of Plenty – definitely want to do it again. There is a line in an Irene Quinn song about a rotten sail in wretched weather that says ” it’s a good thing sailors have got short memories” and I think that’s pretty much it. The rubbish stuff feels like it is going on forever while it is happening, but it is only a tiny part of it. A chap we met in Opua before we left summed it up pretty well too, while climbing soaked out of a dinghy in rough weather, “sailing – the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff” he said, before shaking himself dry and heading towards the yacht club. And, having now experienced it, I couldn’t agree more!

We are headed to Christchurch (on a plane!!!) tomorrow to spend Christmas with the whanau and will be back in Welly early Jan when I will be forced to get used to being back in the real world again by starting back at work. I am actually really looking forward to catching up with my friends and workmates, so it should all be good.

I still have a couple of retrospective blogs to write when I get the chance – so don’t think this is the last you will be hearing from us! I am also working on converting this blog into a book (with lots of extras of course!) so I will keep you posted. If you love me, you will buy it 😉 xxx

A shout out to the journos

Just a quick note to all the reporters out there who are busting a gut to get information about the Christchurch quake out to the public – and particularly those in the city itself.

You are doing an amazing job – I can’t even begin to imagine what you guys are going through right now. 

Before I turned to the dark side and became a communications advisor I was a journalist for a daily newspaper, and it was the ambulance chasing that I struggled with the most. Jumping into a car and heading towards the sirens, not knowing what I was going to find.

I was really lucky. Nothing even remotely close to what is going on in Christchurch happened on my watch. The hardest interview I ever had to do was speaking to the mother of an 18 year old boy who died in a fire as a result of a very sad accident.  She was incredibly strong and just wanted to talk about her wonderful son – and in the end she was the one offering me a drink! At one point in the interview she made a very poignant comment and, almost without conscious thought, the first thing that popped into my head was “that’s my intro.” I felt revolting, like a vulture. After I left her house I pulled the car over, had a cry, then went back to the newsroom and wrote up the story – and that was only one death.

After the paper was published, the boy’s family called and thanked me for getting his story across and some of his school friends came into the office to buy extra copies of the paper. Those people will never know how much I needed that thank you.

So here’s my thank you. I have been glued to the internet/newspaper/television hungrily searching for information and trying to make sense of what is happening to my home town. Many of you will have friends, family and colleagues affected by this tragedy. You will be physically and emotionally exhausted, but you will keep going because that is what you need to do.

The fact the Press got an issue out after what happened to their building is nothing short of amazing.

There are so many people out there so desperate for information and you are doing an incredible job.

PS – You have probably already read this story, but if not, please do. It is written by Vicki Anderson from the Press who was in the building when the quake struck and it is the most beautifully written piece I have read on the quake so far: The day the earth roared

When disaster hits home (and the power of Twitter)

I was planning to blog on the huge amount of work required to get the boat up to Category 1 standard so we can leave the country. I was going to write about my insecurities about getting everything organised and my worries about the time that is so rapidly ticking by.

But yesterday threw all that sharply into perspective.

I am from Christchurch. My family and friends are in Christchurch – I lived and worked and partied in places that are now rubble.

I can’t stop staring at the television. I keep recognising places where friends and I lived, loved, ate and drank too much, listened to bands, op-shopped and held meetings that were going to save the world. Places where people I know still do these things.

I managed to contact my parents shortly after the quake happened and nearly cried with relief when I heard  Mum’s voice on the other end of the phone. They were shaken, but okay. Another big aftershock struck while I was talking to Dad – I could hear it through the phone. I heard Mum cry out in the background and then the phone went dead. The few seconds it took for me to reestablish contact after that felt like years. It was so scary. But they are okay. They are strong, amazing, wonderful people – and I know they will be fine (but it doesn’t stop me wanting to shovel them on to a plane and get their arses up to Wellington!)

I have also managed to track down a lot of my friends – mostly through twitter and facebook, and I have a whole new respect for social networking. I only begrudgingly set up a twitter account for work purposes, so I can keep an eye on what’s trending in the education sector. But I gradually started to find interesting people to follow and began to embrace it more. Yesterday however I saw it in a whole different light – not just because it was a fantastic way of finding out what was happening as it was happening, but because of the way it brought people together. I have already heard of several people who found out that loved ones were okay because a complete stranger tweeted the name of the person sitting next to them and that information was retweeted and retweeted until it reached the person it needed to. People have also been tweeting the locations of people they are concerned about and people in those areas have looked out for them – complete strangers helping people who were too far away to offer any practical assistance.

I’m not going to beatify Christchurch – it would be hypocritical. I have done my fair share of pissing and moaning about its clique-iness, how judgemental people could be, how the most important thing seemed to be what school you went to and woe betide you if you wanted to dress or act a little bit differently. But, just as they say you can’t pick your family, you can’t pick the town you are born in either and, despite its foibles, you  also can’t help  loving it. It’s home.

I’ve had some shitty times in Christchurch and I have had some great times and met some beautiful people – and it is those people that are coming to the fore in this crisis. People helping eachother out, looking after eachother.

I feel helpless here. I want to be down in ChCh pulling bricks out of buildings. I couldn’t even donate blood because the bloodbanks here have been inundated with offers (which is wonderful!)

All I can do is donate some money and offer my love and support – through, twitter, through facebook, through this blog – to all of those who have lost loved ones, to those who are still waiting to hear from people, to those who are picking up their lives and soldiering on. I wish I could do more.

For those of you wanting to donate to the people of Christchurch there are a number of ways to do it

The Salvation Army is running an appeal – you can donate online, through their Westpac account 03 0207 0617331 00 or call 0800 0207 0617331 00

You can donate to the Red Cross at www.redcross.org.nz/donate or send a cheque to: New Zealand Red Cross 2011 Earthquake Appeal, Freepost 232690, PO Box 12140, Thorndon, Wellington 6144or you can donate to their Kiwibank account 38-9009-0759479-00 or direct credit transfer to their special appeals banks account –  ASB 12-3192-0015998-02 at any branch of the PostShop Kiwibank, ASB and ANZ

You can also donate to the collections that I am sure are springing up all around the country. I am going to a quiz night tonight at the Mighty Mighty, by way of distraction – they will be collecting money there.

I will write the category 1 blog – but now is not the time. It’s tough and it’s tiring, but I know we will get through it, and there are so many others who need our thoughts and words right now.