earthquake photos

having finally gotten my poor camera to allow me to transfer photos again, i figured i should finally post some of the photos i took right after last month's earthquake. certainly there are better pictures available, but hopefully this will help you see it from our perspective.

not having experienced any earthquakes before, we had no sense of magnitude and actually expected a 7.1 to feel much worse than it did. our upstairs bedroom shook violently for those few seconds, some pots and pans fell out of the cupboards, but afterwards we look at each other, laughed, and guessed its magnitude as a 4.0. it wasn't until a few hours later, not being able to go back to sleep (the earthquake occurred around 4:30 am) because of the excitement, that we wandered outside and saw that not every building had fared as well as our solid little home. we had planned to grab a bite to eat at the daily bagel, but from the picture below, you can see how that turned out. i was originally glad to see that next door my favorite local eatery, the new york deli (look for the red sign), was still standing, but it has since been torn down.

one of the first evidences of the quake, visible along the street just outside of our house, was the strange mud-like substance that lay in small hills along fences and in streams in the gutter. we've since learned that this is silt from the river that forced its way up through the soil when the quake triggered a sudden wave down the river...something like that.

i think my favorite destroyed building, if i can be so insensitive as to call it that, is the one that housed the south of the border restaurant (it was reportedly terrible) on colombo st. mainly i just like that the second-floor bathroom is fully exposed, a roll of toilet paper still hanging on the wall.

one of the shops that i felt bad for was the painted room, a sort of odds-n-ends/antique shop that had just moved into this new location (left) weeks before. its old location (right) was just a block away, and didn't appear to have sustained any damage save for this poor mannequin sprawled awkwardly on the floor. terrible timing.

while the suburbs near the beach didn't fare too well, in general the damage was limited to chimneys falling through roofs, like this sad example in a lovely old home. even now, six weeks later, any residential street contains homes with tarps strapped over chimney holes.

we're still experiencing aftershocks daily (anything above a 4.0 is worth remarking on), and expect the same for the coming months. in one sense, i think we'll miss the experience when it's all over, but don't tell that to the poor people who've lost homes or who are suffering psychologically (which is actually quite a large part of the population). hope this gives you a taste for what the christchurch streets look like - while many of the damaged buildings have been demolished, just as many are still cordoned off, their doors and windows marked with spraypainted Xs and the words "NO GO".

-rachel

my apologies for the long delay between posts of late - we are still alive and living it up in new zealand, never fear. the big thrill for bryan this week was the much-anticipated arrival of about 70 of our movies (plus some great treats that my parents threw in) that we, of course, have not had access to for the last 14 months. so when i threw open the curtains last weekend and decided to spend my warm spring saturday dayhiking in the port hills, i found that i would be going alone, as he could not be convinced to leave his comfortable position on the couch. not a problem - i think a person is entitled to spend their saturday however they see fit, though i have been reminding him all week about the fantastic experience that he missed out on.

my hike was absolutely perfect, the kind of little day trip that i'd easily repeat with a friend (or husband!) who's up for a little activity on a nice day. i took the bus out to lyttleton, then walked up the popular and unexpectedly steep bridle path that the early settlers used to climb over the hills between the port and the plains where they would eventually build their homes. this path connected me with the crater rim walkway, part of which we explored back in march, which i followed out to godley head, where the remains of a WWII base can be seen. from there, i took a coastal track down to taylor's mistake, a quiet little beach where lifeguards were training, and ultimately along to sumner, a long and popular beach with a boardwalk that we've visited with friends quite a lot in last few months. i finished my walk around 4 pm, purchasing an ice cream for the remaining barefoot stretch down to the bus stop at the far end of the beach. it's as if i'm just now discovering that i live on the coast, having spend last summer exploring the city itself and not bothering to venture out too far in the cold of winter, and i am embracing this discovery wholeheartedly.

on tuesday i was fortunate enough to join the teenage girls from the church youth group on a mini-retreat to the french settlement of akaroa, about an hour and a half from christchurch along very windy roads, where they had rented a beautiful house that overlooked the harbor. i arrived halfway through the 3-day retreat, so we checked out of the house the morning after i arrived, and then drove to the north side of the peninsula to spend the day soaking up the sun in okains bay. it was the middle of the two-week school holidays, so i was surprised to find that the only other people at the beach were so far away that i had to squint to see them clearly. i got a lot of reading done, received my first sunburn of the season, and even managed to get in the frigid water up to my waist. good, good times.

next (mini) adventure: biking the 40-km christchurch to little river rail trail, which should be gorgeous, though i've heard rumors that it's still blocked by a landslide because of the earthquake. speaking of earthquakes, we're still getting aftershocks from the quake 5 weeks ago, generally at the rate of one a day that's large enough to feel. what a strange experience.

-rachel

national conference

Last night we returned home from a 4-day conference up in Auckland that we attended with the rest of our church staff and most of the interns. I believe I've hinted at the fact that we're moving into a new role at the church, but I don't know that I've ever actually explained it. Since March/April we've been heading up what we've termed Family Ministries, a program that runs in conjunction with our kids ministry by providing one event for families with young kids each month. Ideally this would have been run under the leadership of the kids ministry staff, but the volunteer kids pastors have five kids of their own and just didn't have the time to do it. The more recent development is that, having served in this role for five years, they've decided that it's time for a change and will be stepping down from kids ministry at the end of November, and Bryan and I have agreed to take on this role in their stead. Over the past few years, especially having been involved with fantastic kids ministry teams at our church at home (Oak Hills Church) in Minnesota, we've felt drawn to kids ministry, and so we feel like this is a very natural (though still very challenging!) step for us.

So we flew up to Auckland on Monday for the annual National Conference for our church movement, staying with the family of a friend that we met here in Christchurch at their home on Auckland's lovely North Shore, just a 10-minute drive from the conference in the beachside suburb of Takapuna. We'd been there before, having stayed at a campground a block away from the conference center on the last night of our 34-day Cape Reinga-Auckland hike last September, and were struck by how different our circumstances were. We miss our backpacking lifestyle, but also embrace the good friends that we've found over the last year and the strong sense of local identity that we've cultivated in Christchurch. 

The Saturday before we left for the conference, while saying goodbye to our good friend Ann-Kristin at the airport, Bryan and I discovered that we weren't actually registered for the conference, each of us having thought that the other person had taken care of this crucial step. We shared a good nervous laugh but boarded our flights anyway, having no opportunity to contact anyone about the problem but knowing enough about the workings of our small (and often disorganized) movement to have a fair amount of confidence in our ability to attend anyway. To our relief, this was the case, though it was painful to see the money we could have saved had we qualified for the early-bird rate. I think my mom would say "you live and you learn" here.

I think all of us from City Church enjoyed the conference, though as a first-time attendee, I had some expectations that did not match up with the actual event. For the first time in my life, probably because I'm recognizing how much I have to learn as a new kids pastor, I was looking forward to networking with other people in similar roles, and was disappointed to find that this conference made no attempt to assist with this process - no workshops, no discussion groups, no special lunches, just eight long general sessions. Yikes! The keynote speaker was an American, Pastor Glen Berteau from Calvary Temple Worship Center in Modesto, CA. He had plenty of great things to say, though his proud declaration that he doesn't read books, just the Bible, made me squirm more than just a little. I'm not sure if he was serious about this or just emphasizing a point (that we need to know the Bible itself, not just what other people have to say about it), but it didn't exactly make me want to put him on my favorite people list.

The highlights for me were a short message preached by Jordan Smith, the movement's youth ministry guy, who spoke inspiringly about our ability to make an impact no matter how large the size of our team, which is especially relevant for us as most of the kids ministry work is done by the two of us and our fabulous (and hilariously innocent) intern, Hannah. I was also able to connect meaningfully with Sarah Thompson, who's been the kids pastor at South Life Church in Dunedin (we were at this church a few months ago for the Branded Conference) for 6 or 8 years and who is making valiant efforts to build a kidmin community nationwide. I'd stumbled upon her blog last week through a kids ministry website and had been hoping to meet her while up north. We went out for coffee and talked about check-in systems, teambuilding, and her desire to create meaningful experiences for kids throughout their Sunday morning kids program. Good stuff, and hopefully just the beginning of a fruitful relationship that someday I may actually have something to contribute to.

So that was my first experience with the ACTS Churches National Conference. I'm glad we went...and thanks to Joel and Karen for helping make that possible for us.

-Rachel