She Was Wearing Angel Wings And Rabbit’s Ears – Andrew Button

She Was Wearing Angel Wings And Rabbit’s Ears Andrew Button

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Andrew Button

Life is about trusting the future. These earthquakes have broken a

lot of that trust. When the ground beneath you, the ground on which you stand upright and depend on begins to move, when it hobbles

the crap out of you, it starts to open up a lot of questions. How do I keep my family safe? How will we exist? Do we stay or do we go?

In the beginning you have no notion at all. It’s a complete

unknown. The future could be great. It could be terrible. At this point I have no idea. Everything has changed. It’s a case of having

to stand back, review everything and ask yourself the question, why? What is the purpose of this? All this stuff that’s happening around you. All the stress and dust and liquefaction and cracks in

the ground and broken roads and broken houses. You just have to review everything. What has actually happened? Where are we now?

What is really important?

When it happened we weren’t even here. My wife and I and our

eldest boy, Willem, we were all up in Hanmer. It still woke everyone up. You felt it like a strong rolling bump and then everybody’s cell

phones started going nuts in the dark. We’ve got four kids, and two, Lois and Jose, were back in town; one was with grandparents and the other with a friend. My first response was bugger it, let’s get in

the car and go back immediately because our kids, especially our

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youngest, will need us. But Leanne was more pragmatic, or more stoic about it. She didn’t feel it was that bad.

I had another sort of thought in my head. Years ago, when I was at

university, I’d done some geology—this is back in the late eighties, early nineties—and we talked a lot then about the potential for liquefaction in Canterbury if there was ever a severe earthquake. It was thought that

Christchurch could be hit far worse than Wellington or any other area

because of this liquefaction. The idea being that the soil, the ground, would just turn to some sort of liquid and spew everywhere. And so

that was the memory I had in the back of my mind; if it did happen in Canterbury one day, how bad it could actually be. Real information was

more difficult. We had this very fuzzy reception in the campground.

We were getting a strange idea of things from the television but not really knowing what exactly it was like. In the end we stayed there for

another night, which felt extremely stressful for me. I didn’t want to be there.

We got back the next day and the children were fine, although Jose,

who was only twelve at the time, struggled to sleep and has done since.

Not good for a growing girl who needs to get a decent whack of kip

every night. I’m sure there are kids—people—all over Christchurch who are the same.

It wasn’t until we got back that day that we started to understand

properly what had happened to our house, our land and our

community—what was happening to the people that we were closest to. It was also the day when we started shovelling shit by the barrow

load. We counted over two hundred full barrows of the stuff—of

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liquefaction—all through our place. I mean holy crap. What do you do

with this stuff ? How do you get rid of it? Does somebody come and

help? What happens? Plus, we’ve got no power, we’ve got no water, we’ve got nothing except a phone. An old-fashioned landline phone

I’d kept stashed in the shed that works without the need for power or battery.

I suppose my immediate feeling, as a parent, was a snatch of panic.

You want to make sure you can provide for your kids and that everything

is safe and sorted. But to begin with there was no information coming out. We just didn’t know anything. So that’s when Leanne and I started

knocking on neighbourhood doors, talking to and getting to know

people that we’d never met before. Helping to organise the Avonside

community group, which at first was about checking up on people, especially older people we knew to be about and making sure they were okay.

Basically, the idea was that a street would have a co-ordinator who

checked on everybody in the street that day, just to make sure they had whatever they needed. Some of the bigger streets had a couple of co-

ordinators. One did the left-hand side; the other did the right hand.

In a way, after all the bad stuff that had happened, that was the silver

lining. We’d been living there for five years and now, all of a sudden, we knew more people in our neighbourhood than we ever had. In that regard at least things actually started to feel quite good.

It’s interesting, that Christchurch thing. Physically there are some

lovely parts of the city and despite what’s happened there still are. There were great opportunities and there still are, but at the same time the

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city has never felt to me like a place that connects. If anything, it’s felt very disconnected. I liked Christchurch—I didn’t love it, but I

did like it—and I saw the benefits of being here. But the whole eastwest divide thing and the weird questions about what school did you go to and it’s gentrified class system—the little clubs and so on—

all very Canterbury and fine if you happen to be part of this stuff.

To me it just showed a lot of judgment and exclusion and I think

these earthquakes might have done something about that. Perhaps

broken down a lot of those barriers. Today it feels like maybe they could have, or at least moved things in the right direction. It’s a

pretty horrific thought to think it took something like this to shake us up—no pun intended—but perhaps that’s another positive that might come out of it.

Back in the neighbourhood we had the bumpy roads and the being

shaken awake at night to get used to. Our house wasn’t too bad at that

time. We had some land damage. There were cracks and big splits in the ground some of which were metres deep, but the house itself was

pretty level. It wasn’t too bad at all. I think the shaking from that first

one seemed to have been more sideways, not up and down, so the

damage wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Even so we ended up living in a motel for about a fortnight afterwards. We just couldn’t do it. Not with kids and no water. It felt a little odd at times because while we ate and showered and slept at the motel, we spent most of our time

at the house. The kids didn’t like it at all; they just wanted to be at

home. Strange times with a lot of change going on. Little did we know then how enormous that change was going to be.

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Later we were yellow stickered and became part of what was called,

The Twelve Hundred. It meant that our land was one of the twelve hundred worse affected sections in Christchurch. At that stage we started to think this was beginning to look pretty severe. We had no

idea of where it was going to go and what was going to happen us. The two neighbours down from us were in the same boat but at that time there was no hint, no notion at all that we might have to get off the

land. In fact, we had begun talking together about how we’d have new

houses built to replace our old ones. We even started to meet with an

architect and a builder and formulate a few ideas about what we could

possibly do together. We put quite a lot of time into it because it felt like a positive thing to do, designing a house. It was something we had thought about before but not something we thought we’d be doing

for at least ten or fifteen years down the track. Amongst all the crud we had to deal with at that time it was something we could start to be excited about.

There was other personal stuff that didn’t go so well. I’d been

working for the same company for ten years. I’d started up in Nelson with them and five years later I was promoted down here. Five years on from that I decided it was time to have a go at something else. I made it

my New Year’s resolution. By the fifteenth of February I had three new job offers sitting there for me. They’d all arrived on the same day. I rang

all three of them back and said, ‘Look, I need a week to decide, to think about it.’ I figured if this was going to be the next ten years or so of my

life, I needed a week to think about it. One company was a little bit iffy

with that but the other two were fine about it. No problems at all. So

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with that in hand I pulled the pin on my job, gave them my notice, and set about making my decision. By the twenty-second of February, I had

reached a conclusion. I had decided what it was I wanted to do and felt good about it. I just had to ring and let them know.

As it happened, Willem, my ten-year-old, had the day off and we

had gone off together into town. We were in the Square having some lunch, some sushi, when it happened. The noise and that fearful

shaking was suddenly upon us… not the sort of thing anybody wants to experience. Not the sort of thing you want your ten-year-old son to see.

Straight after lunch we were going to go up the cathedral tower.

He’d never been up there before and I wanted to show him what it was all about, and now it was hurtling down towards us. We seemed to be

right under the spire as it fell. Horror. Absolute terror. Thick pink dust

filled the whole place but I could still see the spire. It was coming… it sort of rocked one way then the other, and then it was coming straight towards us. I kept watching it as it came; I wanted to make sure it wasn’t actually going to hit us. The cross itself landed with a bang about

ten metres away. Just crashed down there and I’m trying to hide my boy’s head so he can’t see the horror of what is happening. I’m still

certain to this day I saw people falling out of it, saw people beneath it

when it fell. There was a cop there who thought so too. I tried to hide

it all from my boy but he twisted his head around so he was watching it as well. That was something I didn’t want him to see. I spoke with Peter Beck, the Dean, about what I’d seen, talked it all through with him and he said, ‘You weren’t the only one.’

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At that point we stood up and left the Square fairly smartly. Jose,

our twelve-year-old, was in town as well. There was some sort of teacher only day at Hagley so she was in town too. I knew she was going to the

Time Zone, a gaming type shop with her friends—first time she’d ever

been to town by herself. Leanne was there too, working on Hereford

Street in Brendon Burns’ office. So that was two people we had to find.

I didn’t know how we were going to get in touch with either but I expected Leanne would be somewhere round her office. Jose had sent a text to me just before the earthquake hit saying that she was going to

the bus exchange, which meant I had no idea where she might be now.

I could feel the panic starting to rise. The need to keep my family safe.

As it turned out, Leanne was reasonably easy to find. She was on

the side of the road pulling a brick off somebody’s head whilst another aftershock was still going on. The building behind was popping

bricks out. Firing them across the street. Horrific sights all around, and me trying to drag her away. Four of our family were in town and

I really wanted to get us together. Get us out of there. Just get us

into the middle of Latimer Square so no buildings could fall on us.

I was desperate to get us down there but Leanne had a very different mind-set. She wanted to stay there and help people. There was a lot of frustration in that for me. In the end I managed to get her to come and

then the task was to try to find Jose. I have never been more worried

in all my life. Can you imagine your daughter lost in all this mayhem, I was really scared for her. I had no idea where she was. Buildings were

down everywhere. I didn’t know whether she was in a building that had collapsed or whether the smashing panes of glass had got her. I had no

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idea. I just had to constantly ring and ring and ring her phone until eventually I got through.

She had just that moment run into Cathedral Square, she was

trying to get through it and come on to us. I ran straight up Worcester

Street from where we were in Latimer Square, trying to get around

the back of the Cathedral and into the Square but The Press Building

had collapsed. There was rubble everywhere and no way through.

I turned and ran back down to Manchester Street where I sat and tried to get her on the phone again. Eventually it happened, a very scratchy phone call. I told her to go through the Square, up as far as Gloucester and then turn right towards Manchester. We had all by

then started walking up Gloucester Street to meet her. And finally she came, with her friends, running out of the rubble and the clouds

of dust everywhere. It was quite a momentous sight. She was wearing

angel wings and rabbits’ ears, and the relief—I can’t tell you what it felt like, that would be too hard to describe.

It was all high stress, all these girls plus Jose, all hanging onto me

as we tried to walk, all hysterical as girls that age can be. Well fine.

After what they’d been through and seen, it was what you’d expect.

We hadn’t met her friends before. These were new friends from

Hagley High School where she’d just started. When we got back to Latimer Square we had to try and work out what we were going to do

with them. They were trying to get in touch with parents and so on

but that wasn’t an easy process. The brother of one of them eventually

turned up and she went off with him. For the other two we found a group of adults in their fifties that we thought we could leave them

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with. People that wouldn’t have younger kids they were trying to race round and find themselves. We thought they’d probably be the safest

people to leave these kids with and it seemed to work out fine. At that point we were able to leave and head home to find the rest of our family.

We had two cars in town but they were history. I didn’t get my

truck out for at least three weeks and it was something like three months before we saw Leanne’s car again. I have no idea how long it took to walk home but it wasn’t a nice walk. Everywhere we looked there were collapsed buildings and broken roads and what roads

could be used were completely jammed. You looked about at what had happened and basically you thought how the hell are we going to

come back from this? What can you do with this? It’s just so broken.

A horrible, horrible feeling came over you. I can actually remember gagging on my way home. One particular building we were walking

past had just collapsed, it had completely slumped in the front and for some reason that just did me in for a couple of minutes. Yeah, gut wrenching.

When we eventually got to the house, India, our eldest girl, was

there with her one-year-old baby. We were surrounded in liquefaction

again, and it was very deep. Deeper probably than in September. They’d

carted all the furniture from inside outside, so it was absolutely covered

in liquefaction by this stage. There was an almighty mess everywhere.

Mud all through the house. It was quite horrific. Arriving home to

this appalling state I struggled to make my mind up as to where and

what we should do next. Leanne was the same. Eventually I said,

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‘Look, let’s just go to my parents’ place.’ They live over in Papanui and they’d had no damage at all. So over we all went and stayed there for a couple of nights.

Eventually we got all the liquefaction cleaned up and then we

disappeared to Auckland for ten days. Took the kids up there. We just needed to get them out of it. It wasn’t a healthy place for them the way

it was and also Leanne was doing a lot of stuff in the community and because of that we had a lot of media around our house much of the time. People on the phone hounding her for stories; it all added to the

pressure. Personally, we wanted to be there. Both Leanne and I have

got a heart for our community and so we wanted to be here helping out and doing what we could—you feel torn—but we had to step back for a bit, get away with the kids. That was our responsibility also.

When we finally got back, our house was an utter state. Things were

just so broken. It was really tipped up. We had no sewer. The toilet

had snapped off at the base. We had to get a plumber round to help

us put the water back on because all the pipes leading up to the house

were broken. He tried to get approval to replace the toilet also but he couldn’t, and that was the end of it. We never had a toilet again. Not

there, never. I don’t know where the shower and bath and sink water went, they just seemed to disappear down the drain. I never saw it

bubbling up inside the section anyway. Wherever it went, it went deep.

We had a deck at the back of the house that had a Clearlite roof

over it. I ended up lining all of that with plywood because the dust and

silt was really starting to build up. We were getting quite a few nor

‘westers at the time and the dust was just everywhere. So there we were.

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We had three households basically living on our deck. We all cooked

together. Shared our water. We did everything together. Dug one massive great toilet because for some reason we didn’t get a portable

toilet for, oh, it must have been three weeks. Yeah, three or four bloody

weeks. There were dozens and dozens of them outside every second

house in Sumner but in Avonside, there was nothing. Nothing at all.

Civil Defence have admitted it now, basically they completely ballsed it up, big time.

The best thing to come out of this is that we came together as one.

People looked out for each other. In a weird way you can probably thank the Council for that. For doing absolutely nothing and leaving

us hanging there, swinging. The only thing we could do was band

together. Yeah, we had no other option but to come together as much

as we possibly could. The Council’s lack of action was to our benefit in a way. I mean no one could expect this to happen. No one was prepared

for a disaster like this. And I understand there’s a need to be getting it right, to do it properly, and I was content with the fact that this would take a bit of time. They needed to think. But never forget that people

are at the centre of this whole thing. Not the demolition, not the rebuild, not the bureaucracy, it is the people. People make a community

and communities make a city. That’s who’s important and that’s who

should be communicated with. They must have the opportunity to have their say and sadly, that is not happening, not near enough.

It took probably a couple of months really for things to start to come

back together again. By this stage they’d set up this group and Leanne was working full-time doing earthquake recovery stuff. That meant

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somebody needed to be at home so I did the house dad thing for six

months. Obviously at home I had to dust and vacuum the house every day, there was always a lot of cleaning up, so that was something to

do. I was dropping the kids off and bringing them home and spending time with them and so that was fine. It was great for a month or so and

then it got—well, it was hard filling in the day and to tell the truth I began to find it a bit boring. I’d always looked forward to doing it, I

always wanted to do it at some stage in my career, take six months out and do the house dad thing, but it wasn’t me.

Around about that time things seemed to slow down in terms of

decisions. At first, we didn’t know what was happening or how it was going to happen. Then after a time this thing started to appear, began

to loom over us—the probability that we were going to lose our land.

What did that mean? What was the next step? And how did that work?

Those were the questions to be found on most people’s lips.

There was a decision made just after the June earthquakes —about

ten days after I think it was. In the middle of it happening all over again. And this time the house really did start to break. We took a motel for five nights and then it was back to the worst liquefaction

ever. And holes in the ground. We had a two metre by two metre hole at the back which we discovered while Jose was raking sand off the

grass. Suddenly it just collapsed underneath her. With that sort of land damage – well, we knew then that we wouldn’t be staying. There was just no way.

We’d only been there for four or five years but it had definitely

become our home. We loved it. Absolutely loved it. It was great for the

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family and we had come to know a lot of good people around here. We didn’t want to live anywhere else unless we were going to move by the

beach somewhere or perhaps move back home to Nelson again. They were the only things that would have got us away from where we were living. This was our home and the place we wanted to be.

After June… after June that all changed. We both… part of us,

wanted to go, didn’t want to be there anymore. There was a feeling that we should pack up and go. Just walk away from everything and

start again. We’ve got some friends who did just that, but we needed

to be here and there were reasons for that. One was Leanne’s work at

Earthquake Recovery. She’s doing a fantastic job and is getting well recognised for it. It’s good for her career and I want to support her with

that, help her out with what’s she doing. I also think we need to show

the kids strength, rather than just running away if there’s a problem.

That probably sounds a harsh way of looking at it but I think we need to. We need to show them that we won’t be beaten, even though things

are really tough. Actually, things are fine now but, yeah, there were times when they were really tough and we were very tempted.

Anyway, eventually we made that next step. There was a nice long

break in the earthquakes during which we settled on the house and

bought another. The Government now owns our old place and we are happily living out at Waikuku Beach. To be frank we did very well

out of the shift; in a way the whole business helped us there. It all happened because after June, an Anglican parish in Wellington gave

Peter Beck five nights at a beautiful lodge right on the sea, on the

foreshore at Eastbourne, and Peter in turn, kindly gave that to us. It

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was fantastic. And while we were there we found this place on the

Internet that we’ve now bought. We had no idea whether it would work for the insurance company or whatever but I rang our insurance

manager and talked to him about it. Sent an email off with pictures

and things like that and he said he would come and see us. I said, ‘Well, we’re in Wellington at the moment,’ and he told us to come and see

him instead. ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘we’re on the twenty-ninth floor.‘

‘Nah’. I said, ‘you come down to the bottom storey. I’m not going

up the top, no way.’

The long and short of it was we talked through the whole process

and finally his manager approved it all.

There are a lot of bad news items out there but this was a good

news story for us. Perhaps you don’t hear so much about the good

news because there’s a fair amount of weird guilt, which we shouldn’t feel but we do. Our process has been smooth, professional, and we’ve

won financially out of it. I think we own a better place than we had

before. But there’s that feeling in your gut. It’s called survivor guilt.

Yeah, my parents are exactly like that in Papanui. They have no damage. Everything’s fine. My brother’s over in Burnside and he’s had no damage. But they feel this huge amount of guilt. I’ve talked to my brother about it. Every time there has been a big quake we’ve had the

liquefaction. And guess who’s been the first one there; he has, with a

gang of blokes walking up the drive to start carting wet sand. Okay,

he’s my brother. But there is also this guilt factor. He’s said to me, that’s why we do it, because I feel so bad for you. I feel terrible. This

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happened and I’ve got nothing, nothing’s happened, nothing’s broken.

I’ve got to do something with my guilt so I’ll come and shovel crap for you.

The twenty-third of December, that was just the biggest slap in the

face, I mean it was such a beautiful, beautiful day. We’d all just finished work and were sitting down in the café out at Waimairi when it all blew up in our face. The table left the ground and the glasses flew like

missiles round the room. It was the most horrific thing. The energy. The aggression of that earthquake was just heinous. We had family coming down from Nelson for Christmas. We had all this stuff happening and everybody was feeling good. We had this lovely house now by the

beach and we were all looking forward to Christmas. Everything was fantastic and then it came again… all that same stuff, again.

As it turned out there were a number of earthquakes that day. At

least a couple must have been close to a six. Where we were they were

very aggressive. At home it was a different thing but we didn’t know that then. Willem, our twelve-year-old was at his cousin’s place over

in Burnside, by the airport. So off we went to get him and then we had to get back out to Waikuku Beach. I don’t know how we did it

so fast, maybe we were going against the traffic the whole way, I don’t know, but we got out there very quickly. I was concerned the whole way

thinking the Waimakariri Bridge might be gone, I had no idea where

the quakes had been centred. Then we got home and discovered there

was no liquefaction and no damage to the house. My in-laws, who had just arrived down from Nelson, had been there at the house the whole

time. They said they’d felt a little wobble, a little shake of the TV they

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were watching and that was all. A while later the next one hit and yeah, they felt that. We all did.

I had rung my mum in Papanui, she was standing in her lounge

and I was actually talking to her when that one hit. I’ve never

heard my mum panic before, but this time she was very upset.

She was very frightened. She thought it had been the biggest of them all. There are a lot of people on the brink. Very fragile, very

broken. Very on edge. I understand why. People worry there are more to come. I’m expecting there are more to come. I don’t think

they’ve finished. I only hope they are not substantial and that nobody dies. I hope there’s no more liquefaction for those still living in homes that are prone to it. And I hope that everybody

who has to get out of their home will do okay, come through it all as well as we have.

No matter where you are or who you are, there is ongoing stuff

that affects everybody who lives in this city. Things get turned

on their head. Obviously, you want to be there for your kids, but

that’s not so easy when you’re feeling strung out yourself. Every small shake can put you into your own little head spin at a time

when the kids need you to be strong and consoling and gentle—all

of those sorts of things—and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you

just want to tell the thing to bugger off before it drives you insane.

It can be very scary for families—yeah, it can make your life

seem very brittle. You need really to find strategies to deal with

it. It probably sounds awful but I’ve come to really enjoy a beer over the last year. It’s not that I get drunk or anything but having

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a glass or whatever, after dinner, or before dinner, maybe three or

four over an evening, it does relax you. I’ve started smoking again

too. Not that I’d say smoking and drinking are a coping strategy.

Better to go for a walk, which I try to do fairly regularly. That and

just chill out and try not to talk about it. Okay I say that, but you

have to talk don’t you. Anyway, I try to find stuff that is positive.

And I still go back to Avonside, to the old house, yeah, every week

or so, just to check up on it. It was so unbelievably hard to actually leave it. It was awful, it was really… sad. So now I still go there

every once and a while just to check up on the place. To check

the letterbox and make sure there is no squatters or any other problems with the house. Not that it really matters, it’s not my house anymore. But there I am, still doing it.

Willem, who was with me in the Square, he came with me a

while back and was supposedly hanging out just two doors down

with some friends of ours who are still stoically staying there.

He was supposed to be there for the afternoon with them. When I came back to get him, he saw me and he took off. I mean this

was very out of character and I’m thinking what’s going on here.

I couldn’t find him anywhere but eventually I wandered back down to our old house and there he was on the back doorstep just sobbing his heart out. When I asked him what the problem was

he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘why don’t I give you ten minutes to relax and then we can have a chat after that. Or if

you don’t want to talk about it now, we’ll talk about it when we get back home, whatever.’

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‘This is home,’ he said.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry buddy, but we just have to let this go.

I know what you’re feeling, I’m in the same place as you, but we just have to let this go. It’s all we can do.’

I left him there for a bit and then came back and I couldn’t find

him again until there he was, lying in the long grass on the front lawn, which is now rather overgrown.

I said to him, ‘What are you doing?’

He said, ‘I’m just thinking about the cricket dad, all the cricket

we played here on the lawn.’ And he’s just sobbing and sobbing and sobbing.

Seeing Willem letting go like that, yeah, it was probably the saddest

day of the lot for me. He really struggled, but since then, since getting

it all out like that, he’s been much better. It’s like an itch that place.

I’ve just got to keep touching it. Like something you know is hot, one of those things where you know it’s going to hurt but you still have to reach out and touch it. Hmmm, complicated stuff.

I suppose everything has become more complicated. Back to front

and upside down. Once I would have described myself as fairly driven.

A fairly positive sort of person, and generous. This, what has happened, has changed that. I see myself quite differently now. I’m far more inward looking than I ever thought I was. Especially when it comes to my family. Once I would have seen myself as being like Leanne, out

there, pulling bricks off of people’s heads. But when it happened, all I

could focus on was my nuclear family. I thought I was one way, it turns out I was another way. Just get my family together and get us out of

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here. Forget about everybody else, just keep us safe. And I suppose that surprised me.

Before, my career was so important to me. Very important to me.

Money was important to me. How others looked at me and viewed what I had, my relative success and all the rest of it, that was important

to me. None of those things are important now. What is significant, what is of crucial importance today, is keeping my family safe. Perhaps

that has now broadened a bit. Wanting to keep my friends and wider family safe and happy and content, to look after them as well, that’s part of it now too, but I don’t want that net to go too wide. I want to keep it so I can actually control it and make sure those people are absolutely, genuinely safe.

That’s one side of it. In that part of it you think your spirit will cope

with fighting it, trying to pull everything in so you can keep it under

control. But after a while, because it’s been such a long event, I think you just have to roll with it. Even though you are very highly wound

up and strung out and all the rest of it, you also learn to be able to say, okay. If another one happens, it happens. There is nothing you can do about it. You can’t stop it.

What’s left to us now is to be positive. That wasn’t easy in the

beginning. All I thought about was how the hell are we going to get out of this. We’re stuck. We’re screwed for life. We can’t move. It felt like some sort of Doomsday. But now, after we’ve been through the

process and that part of it is finished, there’s a lot more light around

here than there was before. We lost our home but eventually we found this house out at Waikuku and it was like it was a beacon. Almost

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a sanctuary for us and others who have, from time to time, come to stay. Something for us to walk towards. Out of all that darkness it has became our shining light.

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