Christchurch from the outside

Forgive me, New Zealanders, especially people of Christchurch, for presuming to comment on the massive complexities you are living with. This is how one outsider has reacted after only one day in Christchurch and I welcome any corrections of misapprehensions or errors. I hope that what I say doesn't upset anyone.

I took many, many pictures and felt that this creative and perplexing hoarding on an unbuilt-on site best summed up my feelings. I walked through the city reeling at the devastation: the centre full of flat gravelled car parks that were buildings just over two years ago; many signs indicating things and routes that are no longer there (reminding me of Pompeii, frozen in time); and many examples, since I was there only three days after the anniversary of the earthquake two years ago, of a poignant way the people of Christchurch mark the date - by placing flowers in the tops of traffic/building site cones.

The fenced-off, inaccessible centre (some of the land there is too unstable for rebuilding) was one thing to take in but learning how people are still, two years on, living in damaged or unstable homes with huge cracks or tarpaulins over the roof, or even in cars, was more shocking. Many roads need repairing but there is little point doing them well until the water supply pipes and sewerage pipes have been replaced. All of them.

Gradually the phenomenal scale, hence cost, of the recovery started to sink in. Thousands of homes and hundreds of business premises, the repair of which runs to billions of dollars to be funded from the taxes paid by the workers in a population of 4.4 million. What can they do? How can the sums possibly work?

Everywhere there are signs of creativity and resilience. But there is also stress, frustration and despair. The most shocking thing of all was realising that my reaction is indicative of the rest of the world having forgotten.