Bit sad for Cynthia

Its been a quiet night here, Jason didn’t come in, the poor babe was exhausted after fencing all day.

My youngest daughter Talia is not well and running a high temperature, there has been a lot of sickness at her school and she has now come down with it as well. Poor hon is not having a good night with vomits and sweats.

I had one of my oldest friends over tonight, Cynthia was moms best friend and she has sort of taken me under her wing. The poor woman is getting quite distraught over the house repairs that are not being done. Since the earthquake June 2011 she still has no working toilet and has to use a chemical toilet. This for an old lady who is 80 years old has to wander down the road to empty the toilet into the containers provided.

They have told her they can’t repair her sewerage because the water level is too high and because she is not in the red zone and the actual damage to the house is not all that bad she doesn’t get any Government or local council help, she simply gets over looked. She can’t sell her house and she won’t leave because vandals will just wreck it, so she is trapped. The insurance company say their hands are tied because the fault can’t be repaired, i.e. the water level.

Both Pop and I have chased up the Earthquake Recovery People to do something, but they just come back with the same crap, the water level is too high and they can’t relay the pipes, she has to wait. We have tried repeatedly to get her to move in here but she won’t hear of it, so our hands are tied, all we can do is make sure she has warm meals and we do the washing etc for her.

Cynthia is a real battler, a proud woman who asks for nothing apart from the basics, she does not live that far away so she comes here quite often for a bath and sometimes and only very occasionally just to get a good night’s sleep. There are a lot of empty house around her home and at night she says she can hear the vandals and thieves breaking into nearby houses, she sleeps with the lights on all night and she has a very large black Lab that is fiercely protective of her, so the local scum give her house a wide berth.

Her husband was in a elderly care home at the time of the earthquake and the home was damaged/destroyed and all the elderly people had to be moved out, Jack died 6 weeks later, the greatest tragedy is he was moved from Christchurch to Auckland into a temporary home until they could find somewhere for them to go, and like so many others the shock of the earthquake and being torn away from everything familiar was too much.

For Cynthia she not only had her own dilemma with the house, the man she lived with for 50+ years was taken away and died without her being able to see him.

It just seems so unfair that there are still elderly people living in our city in very sub standard housing. Now that the media hype has passed and the earthquake recovery people talk about rebuilding the city business people and the large sports complexes, there are people like Cynthia who lived in a beautiful house that was kept spotlessly clean, now through no fault of their own sand literally is now living in squalor in our city.

There are many people like Cynthia in our city, who not only had damaged homes they had the embarrassment of having to plead for help just to get by.

The all too common sayings that sprang up at the time of the earthquakes

Be strong Christchurch

Rise up

Stay strong

They are hollow words, and that is all they are; until we as citizens make the supposed leaders of our city and nation see the absolute squalor some of our citizens are being forced to live in. It’s not only the elderly, the poor, single mothers and a whole gambit of people who have struggled for so long, where is the justice, where is the humanity that make 80 year old people struggle to hold their lives together.

Cynthia has said so many times that she wishes she would just die so she could be with Jack, but alas God has other tasks for her.

God if you are listening, our Cynthia is tasked out, give her a break.