It was a Monday morning unlike any other the city had seen before. Residents of Christchurch, with its bucolic hills and expansive gardens, awoke to face the week after a weekend of fear.
As workers trudged to their offices under a grey sky, faces were etched with exhaustion following sleepless nights, grief and disbelief.
Three days after a gunman killed 50 people during Friday prayers at two mosques in the city, police helicopters continued to circle above the city; outside schools there were armed police.
As well as officers on foot, in cars and in the air, trauma teams were sent en masse to local schools as children struggled to understand the deaths of their friends and the sadness that filled the city. On Friday, schools were in lockdown for hours, as police worked to ascertain if they were chasing one gunmen or many.
“There’s a sense of weariness. It’s been a very long, hard weekend, and I think people will be a little bit washed out and will be pleased to be back in their places of work and study, and congregate with their friends and colleagues,” Raf Manji, a Christchurch City councillor and a Muslim, told Nine to Noon.
“People coming together will be a good thing for the city … this is an attack on the whole community, we talk about the Muslim community but they’re just part of us, they’re part of our normal everyday life. The way the public has come out here shows the community is rejecting what has happened to it.”
On Monday, schoolchildren performed a haka during a vigil near the Al Noor mosque. One of the students who coordinated the the vigil told Stuff.co.nz it was a “student-led initiative to spread love and peace”.
Police commissioner Mike Bush has urged locals to return to their normal lives, to remain “vigilant” but to reject fear and reclaim the streets of their city.
But it was hard for residents to embrace routine and normality when a fleet of diggers were fanning out around the city, striking sodden autumn earth to prepare 50 graves for the burials of the victims that would begin on Monday. Experts in Islamic burial rights also converged on the city.
A steady stream of mourners brought wreaths to lay at Linwood mosque, targeted on Friday by the gunman, where a blessing was held on Monday morning.
Then there were the hundreds upon hundreds of flowers lying on the grass on Dean’s Avenue, near Al Noor mosque. In a cafe a Muslim woman sat alone eating a plate of eggs, steeling herself against a stream of well-meaning strangers approaching her table.
“I’m glad you feel safe to sit out here,” said one woman. “You should feel safe in our city.”
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