excellent developments on the job front

just wrote a long blog all about my new job - only to have it post a blank one and delete all of my writing. fantastic.

summary: i found a full-time job. it's sweet. it's as a lab assistant in a pharmaceutical company. this means we can stay in new zealand. hooray!

maybe i'll rewrite it when i'm not quite so annoyed.

-rachel

deconstructing church

Here are some before and after photos that our senior pastor snapped yesterday of our church building getting demolished. Apparently they've just instituted some new policies today that would require a longer permit process for demolishing a building, but yesterday these weren't yet in force and it was taken down, as I hear it, in a matter of minutes. The auditorium that was torn down hasn't been used since the September earthquake, when some bricks from a supporting wall came crashing through our offices, but it had been hoped until last week that it would still be able to be repaired. Actually, the insurance company was still hoping this - the rest of us wanted the old converted building to go so that we could rebuild one better suited to our needs. We've been using our much smaller youth hall building for the last six months, which has proven to be impressively earthquake-proof; this is what we expect to move back into in a month or two. The plan until then hasn't yet been finalized.


After: Just the Youth Hall

Before: Youth Hall (left) and Auditorium (right)



-Rachel

earthquake update: part 2

In the days immediately following the quake we stayed at home, never straying far from the TV where the news coverage gave round-the-clock updates on the rescue and recovery efforts with frequent briefings by our well-spoken mayor, Bob Parker, on whom I have a bit of an older-man crush. We listened especially for information about the CTV building, which had caught on fire after its total collapse, where Paul, one of the elders from our church, had been working on Tuesday morning. Having not had any live rescues since Wednesday afternoon, just 26 hours after the quake, the media were especially sensitive to any possible signs of life and issued reports on a few trapped survivors that were later found to be not true. On Thursday or Friday we were all discouraged to hear the USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) chief declare 100% certainty that the building was no longer a survivable environment and began to acknowledge that we had lost a valued member of our church and a man who had been a good friend to us.

Paul and his wife Nancy were the first people that we met at City Church last January, and if it weren't for their kindness we probably wouldn't have stayed in New Zealand as long as we have. They took us out for lunch at their favorite restaurant, drove us up to the Port Hills to introduce us to a bird's eye view of our new city, and helped us sort out Bryan's internship at the church. At Christmas, knowing that I was still unsuccessfully looking for work, they gave us a lovely gift basket of tasty food as well as a very generous monetary gift that bought us groceries for multiple weeks. We had just invited them over to our place for lunch to repay their many kindnesses to us, but as we were waiting for the school year to get into full swing (Nancy's a teacher), the opportunity hadn't yet come around. As far as I'm aware, his body hasn't yet been found or identified, which isn't surprising, as work at the CTV building has been progressing slowly because of the extent of the damage there. 



Towards the end of the week we began meeting at Westside, one of the other churches in our movement, to arrange food distribution, help shovel liquefaction off of lawns and driveways, and sort out any other needs of families in our churches and in their communities. Bryan headed up the team that hosted sausage sizzles at a couple of water distribution sites on the east side of town, and I went out with them on Thursday to Cowles Stadium in Bromley, where one of the welfare centres was beginning to wind down as the newly homeless sorted out longer-term accommodation options. Our two BBQ stations were swamped with kids and adults who hadn't had hot food in days, most of the residents in that area still being without power and water, and many of them filling their couches and floor space with friends and family whose homes were even less inhabitable.

On Sunday we had a combined church service at Westside with the 4-5 other churches of our denomination in the Christchurch area, the most energetic Sunday service that we've had in a long time. We were surprised at the number of families that decided to venture out to the far side of town, and threw together a kids program at the last minute. We'd originally been expecting to just support the kids programs that Westside was already running, but we found that we quickly outstripped the resources that they had available, especially with many of the normal volunteers needing to sort out their own family's needs as well as recover psychologically from the experience.

Today our pastor will be sorting out the building situation for our church, trying to find a place that's closer to the city as we expect to be out of our building for a month at the very least. One of the options is having an afternoon service at a church that's half a block away from where we live, which would really help us with our lack of transport as the bus system doesn't seem to be anywhere near up and running. We'll see what happens.

-Rachel