Amidst the chaos that is Christchurch, I’ve suddenly and unintentionally become a manager of livestock.
The neighbours have moved out because their house is a write off, and are living in a small place five minutes away. Their two dogs, five puppies and two out of three cats have moved with them, but the chooks remain.
So chook manger I am. Little things are important at the moment because the big picture is...well just too big. With much of inner city and some suburbs wrecked, a mass dislocation of people and winter just around the corner it’s hard to get your mind round the enormity of the problem.
So survival tactics for those of us with some resources and still in our battered homes perhaps should be 1) Try and get pleasure out of doing the small stuff well, 2) Support other people and 3) Don’t whinge unnecessarily about the authorities.
So far there hasn’t been too much whingeing, but as the adrenalin wears off I can see it coming. We have to remember we are in the middle of New Zealand’s biggest natural disaster and the emergency response so far has been superb.
Resources will just not stretch to sorting out everyone’s minor problems quickly, we have to concentrate on those in dire difficulty.
Just two weeks after the quake we now have power, cold water and a functioning sewer. The hot water cylinder ended up on the floor, but that will be fixed in a couple of days. Unbelievably we have already had the services of a builder, a plumber, a glazier and a drainlayer.
Services have been stretched like never before and there will be hold ups and occasional cock ups, but things are very different now and will be for a long time. If I feel a disgruntlement coming on I have to tell myself “think Haiti”.
Because parts of the neighbouring house are teetering and both accessways are dangerous I have taken a sheet of tin out of the fence to get to the chooks. It’s like having a secret garden.
Good livestock managers know that culling is important. Yesterday one of the chooks had to go because it has been sick for a while and the others were starting to attack it. They are not animals I particularly warm to, but I guess that makes culling easier.
Now that the local supermarket is condemned we have to drive a lot further for supplies, but the question is where. I liked the friendly intimacy of the local New World, knew where to find everything, and I wonder what has happened to the numerous immigrant women they employed and the handicapped guys who gathered up the trolleys in the carpark. I’m not looking forward to having to shop at the more industrial barn type supermarkets.
Water has suddenly become a much more precious commodity, and that’s how it should be. Even though we now have mains back on we’re minimising what goes down the sewer. Any spare washing water is used to flush the toilet, and up until this week’s rain other household water was going on the vege garden. I don’t know how long this will last, but it does make you realise how much water normally goes down the drain and how inefficient our use is.
Someone in authority came round to look at the house on Saturday and was very impressed with the roped off lounge and the notice on a door to the downstairs toilet and bedroom saying “Unsafe area, do not enter”.
Authorities like health and safety warnings. The yellow sticker I think means we can live here, but keep out of those areas.
Just for the record while I was writing this we had a thumper of an aftershock (1.20pm Wednesday) which spilt my cup of tea over the desk. GeoNet tells me it was a 4.1 centred less than 1km away on Mt Vernon farm track.
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