‘We are not broken’
The Christchurch terror attack, one month ago today, broke our hearts but not our spirits.
On the day after a terrorist attack against two mosques, there was supposed to be a cricket match.
For one of the teams involved, formed by the Afghan Association, it was their first year in existence, and they had made the semifinal.
Then the shootings happened. Four team members were in the Masjid Al Noor, and all survived. One, however, lost his father, Matiullah Safi.
The semifinal, like many other sports events, was postponed for a week while the city remained in shock.
By the following Saturday, the team was still not ready to play. Their community was in mourning. They were going to default.
Instead, members of a lowergrade T20 team formed a side to play on their behalf. The makeshift side, some of whom had never played one-day cricket before, won, sending the Afghans to the final.
But a week later, the Afghan side still wasn’t ready. Family and friends had flown in from Afghanistan to support the closeknit community, which had lost two members, and it felt inappropriate to play cricket.
Once again, the makeshift side assembled to play the final. They looked set to lose: with their last two batsmen at the crease, they needed 48 runs.
They did it. On the last ball,
they won the match – in their first year, the Afghan team won the competition.
‘‘Sometimes you feel a bit helpless when something as large-scale as that [happens] and there’s not a hell of a lot you can do,’’ club captain David Stack says.
‘‘This is one way the guys could help out.’’
While the semifinal took place, another cricket match was under way between Riccarton and Sumner, on the other side of the city.
The Riccarton team, unusually, had 14 players: so many wanted to honour a team-mate killed at the Masjid Al Noor that they had to make an exception.
‘‘They could have filled it three or four times over from people wanting to play to acknowledge Junaid,’’ says the club’s secretary, Tim Murdoch.
Junaid Ismail had lived in Christchurch since he was 5, and ran the Springs Road Dairy.
The dairy has become a focal point for grief in the community. It has been plastered with flowers, cards and messages of support.
Days after the massacre, regulars came in to support the family: some had known Junaid and his twin brother, Zahid, since they were boys.
For the past month, every day, rain or shine, one man has sat outside the dairy looking after the flowers.
He is Junaid’s father-in-law, who arrived from India to support his recently widowed daughter and her three young children.
The dairy itself is being run by Junaid’s family. His mother, Sara, was holding the fort alone on Friday.
‘‘We’ve had ups and downs,’’ she says, about life since her son was killed. ‘‘It’s been a wonderful response from the community. They’ve been very supportive.’’
If the attacks were like a stone dropped in water, casting ripples across the country and around the world, the waves were biggest at the point of impact.
The 50 victims, combined, left behind 33 spouses, 90 children, and more than 100 siblings, according to a Stuff analysis.
Many of the victims had large families, spanning multiple continents, comprising nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, grandparents and cousins. Among the dead were citizens of more than a dozen nations, as diverse as Malaysia, Syria, and Mauritius.
Twenty-seven victims were New Zealand citizens, and had forged vast and complex lives here as business owners, members of sports teams and community groups, as neighbours and colleagues and teachers and friends.
Four families lost multiple family members at once.
Mariam Gul, who lives in Pakistan, lost her brother and both her parents at the Linwood Masjid – her entire immediate family.
‘‘At first I was very sad – I was crying,’’ she says from her home in Karachi.
‘‘In our religion, when
somebody dies in such a manner, they are supposed to be in paradise. This has given me courage that they are in a good place right now.’’
Another person who lost multiple family members was Ambreen Naeem, also from Pakistan, but who lives in New Zealand.
The death of her husband, Naeem Rashid, and eldest son Talha has left a colossal void in her life.
‘‘I had a big loss,’’ she says. ‘‘My husband and my son . . . It’s a big loss. I’m trying to be as strong as possible.
‘‘Bringing [my sons] back to their normal life is what I’m doing. I’m just controlling my feelings and helping them, too.’’
Every victim had at least one immediate family member, but most had many more.
The median age of the victims was 45, a stage of life where one may have a young family. Of the 90 children of victims, at least 31 were under 18. The youngest was one week old: her father was praying for her health when he was killed.
Another child is yet to be born, but has already lost its father.
SPORT AND SCHOOL
Quantifying the scale of the loss is impossible. Some victims alone left a crater-sized hole behind.
One of them was Atta Elyyan, an unusually talented tech entrepreneur, futsal goalkeeper, and even once a semiprofessional Counter Strike (a popular video game) player.
His team-mates wept at the cordon, where flowers had been placed honouring the dead. Two weeks after the shooting, they awarded Elyyan the ‘‘Player’s Player’’ award at their annual prize-giving.
A few days after his death, Elyyan’s friend, emerging soccer star Elliot Collier, scored his first goal in the American Major League Soccer competition. He was wearing a black armband, and says he knew he would score that day.
‘‘It wasn’t about me, or my team, it was just a feeling,’’ he wrote in an open letter to Elyyan.
‘‘I think maybe it was about you, and the others we lost that day. Maybe it was a way of saying goodbye. Of celebrating together one last time.’’
Elyyan was also a mentor. The day before he died, he was with the Christchurch Boys’ High School futsal side, which he was coaching.
They had been preparing for the national secondary schools futsal competition a week later, in Wellington.
Sayyad Milne was the second youngest victim. He bore a resemblance to Elyyan, in some way, despite being unrelated. He, too, was a talented goalkeeper; he, too, was meant to be at the futsal tournament in Wellington.
Sayyad was one of two Cashmere High School students killed. The other was Hamza Mustafa, who had turned 16 two days before his death.
He was at the Masjid Al Noor with his younger brother, Zaid, his father, Khaled, and his mother, Salwa. Only Salwa and Zaid survived.
The Mustafas had come to New Zealand from Syria, escaping the civil war. They are Circassians, an ethnic group originally from an area near the Black Sea, who were driven out of their homeland by Russia in the 19th century.
As in many diasporas, there are tight bonds within the Circassian community, even when they may be physically separated.
As news of the attacks spread around the world, a Circassian woman living in New Jersey feared for her childhood friend – Hamza’s mother, Salwa Tsay.
There were other similarly small global communities disproportionately affected by the attacks. Three of the victims were from Fiji, two of whom lived there.
One of those victims, Musa Patel, was a respected imam in Fiji, who was visiting New Zealand with his wife.
Patel was well known in the Fijian community – he had been a marriage celebrant, and a radio personality for many years. Thousands attended his funeral in Auckland, so many they spilled out of the botanic gardens, where it took place.
Another six of the victims were of Palestinian descent, a devastating blow to a fragmented but close international community. Because Palestinians cannot have officially recognised citizenship of their own state, they often struggle to travel, meaning they went to great lengths to get to New Zealand.
One of them was Osama Abu Kwaik, who was born in Gaza and was applying to become a New Zealand citizen, after spending his last dollar to bring his family here. His youngest child, born in New Zealand, was the first in three generations not to be a refugee.
Three of those killed were Somalis, out of a population of about 350 in Christchurch. One of them was Mucaad Ibrahim, 3, the youngest killed in the massacre. Three more Somalis were injured.
WORK
Beyond families and friends, the victims made connections through their work.
Many of the victims were highly skilled, and had forged strong professional ties in their respective industries.
At least 10 of the victims were engineers, practising in a range of disciplines.
‘‘This has an impact not only on their wha¯ nau but also their friends, colleagues and clients, everyone who knows and cares about them,’’ says Paul Evans, chief executive of ACENZ, the representative body for engineers.
Some had been business owners, well known among their customers, such as Junaid Ismail.
Ashraf El-Moursy Ragheb, originally from Egypt, ran a souvlaki shop. He was fond of animals, and would feed stray cats at the back of the shop. Ahmed Gamaluddin AbdelGhany also migrated from Egypt and ran a souvlaki shop. He also had a food truck called Egyptian Donuts, often seen in Cathedral Square on Fridays.
Several of the victims had been teachers, who would have interacted with many students.
Among them were Naeem Rashid and Dr Haroon Mahmood, both of whom were business tutors at private education colleges in Christchurch. Unsurprisingly, the two men were themselves good friends.
Some of the more recent immigrants to Christchurch moved there to escape the violence overseas. ‘‘And then they come here – it’s heartbreaking,’’ says Muslim Association of Marlborough chairman Zayd Blissett, who knew 11 of the victims. Those killed were ‘‘just regular guys’’, with a range of good professions between them.
ONE MONTH ON
A month has now passed. Tears still flow in Wajid Hussain’s eyes when he thinks about his friend Naeem Rashid. Naeem’s 21-yearold son Talha was set to be married in June. There are scenes that will stay in his mind for a long, long time, he says.
Although sorrow, grief and pain still linger for many, strength, courage, and love thrive in Christchurch.
Mayor Lianne Dalziel says she is proud of the way the community came together. ‘‘This atrocity, inspired by hatred, was designed to divide us. Instead it has united us as a city and a nation.’’
Volunteers are still offering to help from all around the city.
‘‘We’re all brothers and sisters,’’ Zayd Blissett says. ‘‘Some Muslims around the world forget that, but anyway, it’s still very much alive here in New Zealand.’’
‘‘This atrocity, inspired by hatred, was designed to divide us. Instead it has united us as a city and a nation.’’
Mayor Lianne Dalziel