Scum of the Earth?

The Sumner-Redcliffs parish declares war on liquefaction.

11 Oct 2010

As soon as the quake hit, youth groups and students around Canterbury rolled up their sleeves and began shovelling mud to help affected families.

Alex Summerlee was part of two vanloads of people from the Sumner-Redcliffs parish who worked all day on the Monday after the quake, assisting those in the suburb of Dallington. “There was a church group going out to help someone from our parish whose house was badly damaged. There were two waves of us – about thirty people. Once we got that house done, we just moved on to other people’s,” says the 18-year-old.

He returned to the badly-hit suburb on the Tuesday, helped run the Sumner youth centre mid-week, and by the end of the week was shovel-in-hand in Kaiapoi. “If there’s one good thing that’s come out of this earthquake, it’s the bringing of all these communities together,” he says.

Across town at St Timothy’s in Burnside, Lyndon Rogers speaks of helping out in the Burwood vicinity. “We talked about it at church and decided to send a bunch of us out. We trucked on over to Horseshoe Lake for the day and got shovelling and chatting to residents,” says Lyndon, one of the parish’s youth group leaders.

About ten students and young people participated: “There were probably more girls than guys actually; they were getting out there!” he laughs. From Lyndon’s description, it was an unpleasant, smelly job. “Taking some of the older children from our youth group to help out has also been a really cool discipleship thing.”

WORDS: Megan Blakie