It's not a good time to be a New Zealander.

So in case you people didn't know, recently there was a rather large and violent earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. If you didn't know, then clearly you must be living under a rock, because this quake has been on the news world wide.
Currently as it stands, the body count for this quake is 147.
147.
And it's looking to rise. I saw in a news article, by The Daily Mail I think it was, that to put it into a British perspective, in terms of population, we need to multiply that number by 20. That would make it 2,940, for a British perspective, in terms of population counts. Now, to put it into an American perspective, population wise again of course, we need to quadruple that number. That would make it 11,760. This quake has hit us worse than the San Francisco quake of 1906. It has hit us worse than Hurricane Katrina. Right now, it's hard to be a New Zealander, to see all this destruction, all this death.

I thought I'd give everyone a view of it from my side of it. I don't live in Christchurch, I wasn't in Christchurch, but you don't need to be at the moment for this to affect you. I may not be injured, I may not of even been there, but this is my story.

When I heard about the quake, I was at work. I was about to head upstairs to the staff room to have my break. I hadn't actually felt anything here in Dunedin, I know a few people did, but I wasn't one of them. Anyway, I was about to head up for my break, and one of my colleagues came up to me and told me there had been another quake in Christchurch, and it was a bad one. I shrugged it off to begin with, thinking that he was exaggerating, as he does, and thought nothing of it. When I got the staff room though, things were different. Everyone was huddled around the TV, I saw the damage, I saw the fallen buildings and it almost put me in a panic. I have a lot of friends in Christchurch, and my flatmate was there at the time. I simply turned to someone in the staff room, I can't remember who it was, and told them I needed to find a phone, I needed to call some people.
It wasn't an easy task finding a phone at work that could dial an outside line, they've limited this ability to us because, I don't know, it saves the company money? It's annoying and stupid, sometimes you *need* to be able to dial an outside line from the closest phone to you. Hell, you can't even dial the emergency services from the phones, but back to what I was saying. I was searching for a phone that I could use.
Normally, I would've just called people using my cellphone, but it was going flat. I hadn't charged it for a while and it had been constantly beeping at me through the day threatening to shut itself down, so in self defense I had turned it off to conserve it's power, just in case I needed it. I'm thankful I had turned it off, because if it had gone completely flat I wouldn't of been able to grab peoples phone numbers out of it to be able to call them. And it seems that my flatmate had sent me a text message at 12:55pm, only a few minutes after the quake. I don't think at that time she had even realized how bad it was.
I ended up grabbing a cordless phone off of one of my bosses. Using that, I dialed a few friends. First, I tried calling my flatmate. Disconnected tone. Next, a couple of good friends of mine who had recently, much to my protest, moved to Christchurch. Disconnected tone. In a last ditch effort, I tried calling another one of my friends who had also moved to Christchurch with his partner and child. Also, disconnected tone. The cellphone towers were out, due to there being a lack of power in Christchurch. Instead of trying to continue to call them, I texted them instead, asking if they were alright. As I said, I didn't have much battery life left on my cellphone at that point, so I only texted two people, hoping that I would hear from my other Christchurch friends once I got home and managed to charge my phone.
I texted my flatmate, and my good friends who had just moved there. My flatmate had her cellphone off as she was having similar difficulties as me, except her lack of cellphone charge was due to her forgetting to take her charger with her, so I didn't receive another message from her, which had me worried, but I did receive a text from my other friends, they were alright. I was happy.
Throughout the rest of my shift, I was worried about everyone, I came close to having a panic attack a few times, but managed to calm myself down. I hate having panic attacks at work, it really doesn't do good things for me. I managed to get through it OK though, and came home to immediately jump on the internet to check the news, and to check Facebook and Twitter.
I heard from a few of my friends straight away, some parts of the city still had power and cellphone coverage, the phone companies here made sure to get their services back up and running as soon as they could. There were a couple of messages on Facebook from my friends, and one on Twitter, which made me happy. I texted my flatmates mother to see if she had any contact from my flatmate, which she had. She called me and let me know that my flatmate was safe and sound and hadn't been injured in the slightest. Good news is always good to hear.
Arrangements were made to get my flatmate back home safe and sound, she got on a bus the next day and made her way back to solid ground. I still hadn't heard from a few of my friends, I did get quite worried about them, but now I have heard from all of them. I am pleased.

So that pretty much brings us up to date on what I have done. I feel a bit useless at the moment, as there isn't much I can do to help. I can't go the Christchurch to help as I don't have any way of getting there, and I have a job to go to. The only thing I can do at the moment is donate money, or supplies. I wish I could do more, I really do.
I've been checking the news every few hours, and it's hard. It really is. Each time I see that they've found more bodies, and they haven't found anyone else alive, it hurts. I don't like it. I've come close to tears a few times.
Right now the news website is saying "More than 200 feared dead.". It's going to be a larger figure than that. I have a feeling that this will be ranked at the top of the list of New Zealand's Worst Disasters. It's going to rank higher than the 1931 Hawke's Bay Earthquake, higher than the Mt. Erebus air crash. I don't think these people giving the figures actually realize how many people there are trapped around the place. There could be over 100 people in the CTV building alone, 20 odd in the Cathedral. That's just two buildings. That isn't including the PGC building, unless they've got everyone out of there, and all of the rest of the CBD. There's also all the residential areas where houses have just collapsed, possibly with people inside.

We've received a lot of international help, which is good. Help from Singapore, Japan, China, Australia, United States, Great Britain, and probably some more places I haven't listed. There have been countless celebrities tweeting about it, linking to the Red Cross website for people to donate, which actually crashed the Red Cross website. We've received messages from The Queen, The Pope, The Dalai Lama, Barack Obama. The international aid we've received has been phenomenal.

It is a sad time to be a New Zealander. This is one of the worst disasters to strike in our time.

Thank you for reading this giant wall of text. It's been a bit disjointed at points, and I've repeated a few things, but I'm far too lazy to go through and edit it all.