I “Heart” Port Waikato
Yesterday I posted a few photos of Port Waikato on my blog under the heading “Cool Places”, and the river mouth and the beach are very cool. But the community there are even cooler. The Port is a small place, with a population of approximately 400, but after the February 22nd earthquake in Christchurch they got together and organised themselves—under the umbrella “Lyttelton, We Care” —to fundraise for Lyttelton—a port community helping a port community.
And they’ve raised $10,000.
Very impressive, huh, for a small community of 400?
To me, this is the sort of community spirit, not just local community but New Zealand community, that has been the the only silver lining of the post earthquake situation. And on Friday evening I got to share wine and pizza with the “Lyttelton, We Care” committee, to talk a little bit about the current situation in Christchurch, and have a great time with a great bunch of people who have put their hands up to “heart” Lyttelton—and given both time and money to achieve a fantastic result.
I also shared several of my poems from the new Earthquake Witness sequence: Indifferent Planet; All Over; The Sparrows, and Allow Me To Say … If you would like to read these or other poems in the Earthquake Witness sequence you can find them here.
Oh, that is wonderful. What an awesome thing for them to do. Lyttelton has been rather overshadowed by all that’s going on in Christchurch — much like Kaiapoi — so it’s wonderful to hear of something being done especially for them. I always worried that the rest of NZ would forget what was happening in Canterbury, get weary of all the bad news and sad tales, but they haven’t. That’s pretty special.
I think the news media definitely blow hot and cold and it is easy to forget—the everyday grind of endurance and rebuilding is nowhere near as interesting as major destruction and death, sadly. But Lyttelton was hit very hard in February and again on June 13 so I agree that it’s great to see them getting some special attention. And I think it helps, when the need is so great, to pick a single focus for fund raising and stick with that–especially for a small community like Port Waikato, otherwise its energy could so easily have been dissipated or overwhelmed.
That’s very true. It’s too easy to get lost in everything that needs done, when really, lots of little things being done soon add up. It’s better to concentrate on what you can do and how you can help even in a little way than to do nothing at all because it seems too huge.
In the case of the Port Waikato community this strategy has proven very effective.
It’s great that you loved Port Waikato, and that the community is so amazing. I myself have mixed feelings about the place – burnt feet on the black sand in summer, and memories of a particularly nasty Bible Class camp held mid-winter at what used to be a health camp. There was no heating. Apparently, if you survived health camp you could survive anything.
Ah, those black West Coast of the NI sands—I am very wise to their ways having done part of my growing up in the ironsand mining community of Taharoa, just south of Kawhia. The combination of the iron in the sand and the black colouring were lethal in hot weather! I grinned over your description of the Bible Camp, which did rather remind me of my boarding school years when the bare minimum of heating in the winter made for a ‘spartan soul.’ Obviously the same kind oif ‘health’ as the Victorian notion that had folk sleeping on roofed but otherwise open verandahs in midwinter, again for the health benefits—ie if you lived, you’d probably be healthy! But I visit Port Waikato to spend time with a very good friend of long standing, so I think that always makes for the very best experience of ‘place’—and I do feel that the community’s fundraising effort for Lyttelton has been outstanding.:)