I remember talking to one of the students about my hopes for the convent.

“I hope it collapses in the aftershocks. Or they take a huge wrecking ball to it and demolish it.” She wasn’t shocked by my words. She just nodded in agreement.

We sat in a resort center eating Oreo brownies and topping up our endless mochas from the coffee machines. After nearly 10 hours on the navy ship plus other several hours of waiting in an arena to get our luggage and bags (the same arena I had seen Ellie Goulding in concert in a month earlier), we took a bus to our final destination. Away from the destruction and constant rumblings, Kaikoura and the Old Convent began to feel distant. Our journey home had begun.

And yet, large parts of us remained in that building and on that campus. A p...

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