What I was doing in Christchurch

I've been in Christchurch for the last five or six days (arrived there last Tuesday, around tea-time, and left Sunday lunchtime).  Christchurch, site of New Zealand's most famous earthquakes, considerably outranking the huge ones that flattened the smaller city of Napier back in the thirties.

I didn't go into central Christchurch, an area I previously knew better than anywhere else in the city, because I couldn't bear to see live what I'd already seen on television: the devastation of fine heritage buildings would have been more than I wanted to handle, I think.  Apart from that, I didn't have any real time to go exploring, or sightseeing.  The area I was working in had enough of its own visual demonstration of the effects of the earthquake: a suburban area on the East side of the city where much of the worst damage happened.  Houses here have been demolished completely, are due to be demolished, are boarded up, have boards up to protect them until they're repaired, have wonky paths and driveways, and are situated on streets where your car's suspension is likely to get a hammering.  In fact, the roads are one of the most obvious factors in terms of gauging the city's overall damage: everywhere you go there are roadworks, and changes being made to the layout of roads, and this constant feeling that you're going over a lot more bumps than you're used to.

When you go inside the houses, even the ones that look okay, you see the cracks in the plaster, the corners where wallpaper and plaster has pulled away, the gaps between ceilings and walls, the floors that aren't quite flat.  We were in St Ambrose's Anglican Church yesterday for a service: the building itself doesn't seem too bad - at least not to look at - but the floor is all over the place.  Our base during the week was Parklands Baptist Church, and again, while the building seems pretty much okay, there's a  fair amount of taping up of large cracks in the flooring.

To my great relief, we didn't have any tremors while we were there.   People are still on edge, however; they've more than once got to the point where they've thought quakes and tremors had come to a standstill, only to have another large quake, the sort that's big enough to upset you all over again, bring back all the tensions and fears.

I went up to ChCh with a team of 12 other people from our church, Dunedin City Baptist.  The church has done these local mission trips before in a variety of places, including our home town, and while the leader has remained the same for all of them (they happen once or twice a year), the remainder of the team varies considerably from trip to trip.  They almost always stay in a hall connected to the local church they're working with, and they cook meals together and have prayer times together and 'debriefings.'  They go out in pairs, usually, knocking on doors and asking if the people would be willing to answer a few questions on a survey.  Being a Christian group, the survey naturally leads onto discussing what people feel about church, and about Jesus.  But that's only part of it: they're also looking out for people in need within the area, and once these needs are identified, the local church follows up and does their best to alleviate the situation.  In the process, of course, it makes contact with the people and hopefully they feel comfortable enough with these church people to want to get to know them better.

Of course it has an evangelistic bent; there are enough plain social workers out there without us primarily doing social work as well (although it was the church that began 'social work' to a great extent, two millennia ago.

This trip, however, had a number of differences: firstly we were going to a church that had already done a great deal of door-knocking.  Secondly the door-knocking in question was primarily to find out how people were doing as a result of the ongoing earthquakes, and to put them in touch with people and organisations who could assist them further.  The group overseeing our visit, CCR (Christchurch Community Response) has been up and running for some time, and has a good relationship with groups like the Red Cross.  It has a number of volunteers who are able to assist more quickly than some of the bigger, more official organisations, as well.

Thirdly we were there to help out CCR (it doesn't stand for Creedence Clearwater Revival, or Revisited, by the way) in any way we could.  So, on and off for two days we did door-knocking, and completed some of the streets that CCR wanted covered.  We also assisted at St Ambrose's in such tasks as dropping off free firewood, or taking round care packs and such.  On top of this two of our team got themselves into Bake-a-thon mode, and not only gave away a good deal of the baking we'd brought up from Dunedin, baking that was intended to be part of our in-house food, they made a great deal more and gave that away too.

In fact giving things away was a delight: the leader and I, on Friday morning, went round one long street giving away some sixty fleecy blankets, the sort that you wrap around yourself if you're watching TV, or reading a book in your chair.  The Warehouse used to sell them a great deal, and may still do so.  The sixty blankets we gave away had been donated to the CCR people, but no one had had time to dispose of them.  So we walked from house to the next, and wherever people were home, gave the blankets a new home.  There's nothing quite like someone knocking at your door and asking if you want something free, something which is obviously of use to you.  It's warmed up in ChCh, but it's still not the hottest, so I suspect those blankets will already be coming in handy.   To be continued....

Going Local

On the bus this morning a friend and I were talking about the slow trend away from outsourcing to other countries and towards in-sourcing - in other words going more local than overseas. Interesting, then, to see this extract turn up in The Daily Asterisk, a six-day-a-week quote that I get by email.

Going local does not mean walling off the outside world. It means nurturing locally owned businesses which use local resources sustainably, employ local workers at decent wages, and serve primarily local consumers. It means becoming more self-sufficient, and less dependent on imports. Control moves from the boardrooms of distant corporations and back to the community, where it belongs.

Michael Shuman
Going Local

Wendell Berry

Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. The abstractions of sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as the abstractions of industrial economics.
Local life may be as much endangered by those who would 'save the planet' as by those would 'conquer the world.' For 'saving the planet' calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know - and thus will destroy - the integrity of local nature and local community.

Proposition number XVII in Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse, an essay in the book, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community.

I suppose it could be said that Berry's own proposition deals with an abstraction: 'the enemy wherever it is found.' But I wouldn't dare to criticise the great essayist!

Local Hero

Local Hero is one of those quirky Bill Forsyth movies that never go where you expect, and keep leading you up paths that turn out to be red herrings. No character in it can be said to be straightforward, even the main character, Mac, played by Peter Riegert. He’s supposed to be a tough wheeler and dealer for a big oil-company, but he proves just as soft as all the rest. Burt Lancaster has an odd role as the chief of the company, who spends most of his time on his own, or with his therapist, a man whose absurd agenda doesn’t quite seem to match that of his client. The rest of the cast are typical Forsyth characters, people who seem unwilling to go quite in the direction a typical story would take, which consequently often leaves the audience shaking their head at the weirdness of it all.
There are daft scenes at every point. Half a dozen fishermen stand around talking to Mac, with a toddler in a pram amongst them. Mac asks who’s child is it. The men look to one another in turn. Are they indicating that it could be anyone’s child, or that they don’t know, or that they’re not even sure what the child is doing there? We never find out, because the scene cuts and moves to something else. The publican turns out not to be the publican, even though he runs the hotel, and cooks the meals, and acts as barman. He’s also the local accountant, and a bit of a wheeler-dealer himself. The priest is black, with a Scots name, a man who doesn’t quite seem to know what he’s doing in this out of the way place. A young girl dressed in ragged jeans, with her hair spiked up, and a painted face, wanders in and out without remark by anyone else – except when she starts to chase the Scotsman who works for the oil company in Aberdeen. Then it turns out she already has a boyfriend – in the local band. The main female character spends most of her time in the water, like some nymph, or silkie. An unidentified person buzzes past on a motor scooter almost every time someone steps into the street. The publican and Mac agree to exchange their lives in a tipsy moment and then carry on as normal the next day. An old guy does impressions of famous film stars for another old man – all the impressions look the same – and the other old man gets them wrong every time. And the ending is a slap in the face for the audience, with Lancaster swapping places with Mac, and Mac arriving back home in Texas with two pockets of sea shells. Suddenly the film stops.
The film is well known – there are plenty of reviews on IMDB – but isn’t much seen. As someone notes, the film score is better known than the film.