Five days after Canterbury's devastating 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck, Guardian reporter Erin Bishop and photographer Carmen Rooney took a trip to Christchurch and Kaiapoi.

He's lived in Christchurch since he was five and he never dreamed he'd ever see what he's seen this week.

Saturday's 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook him to the core – as it did much of the city.

He lives in Avonside, one of the hardest hit areas in the quake. He's lived there since 1939, but it looks very different today. There're cracks in the road, silt and sand everywhere and the school which he attended as a boy is almost unrecognisable.

"My whole heritage is gone," he told us.

He said he could barely bring himself to leave his house on Sunday.

His house was damaged by the earthquake but it wasn't hit as hard as some. He's allowed to stay there.

When the Guardian meets him, Mr Nevin is out walking the same streets he has his whole life as residents and volunteers work around him to clean up the mess left in the earthquake's wake. They look very different today.

He takes us for a walk down the street to his old school – St Paul's in Dallington. It's a school with about 300 students but they won't be going back any time soon.

The back half of the church on the grounds has virtually fallen off and the basketball court is riddled with cracks – in parts the ground has been raised half a metre.

When you look closely at the school's classrooms, they're also covered with cracks.

For Mr Nevin, it's devastating. But he feels areas like his have been forgotten this week.

"TV are doing a great job but they are focusing on the city; this is a disaster zone," he says as he looks around his neighbourhood.

And he's not alone. Some residents in hard-hit Kaiapoi also feel they have been brushed aside.

Anthea Terris lives on Cass Street in Kaiapoi. Her family's home is cracked, it's moved and there's silt and sand everywhere. But for the first couple of days after the earthquake it was the other side of Kaiapoi which received much of the attention. She said the television cameras only wanted to see the houses which had the most damage visually.

And visually the most dramatic footage from the earthquake has been in Christchurch's central

city. But by yesterday, the clean-up was well advanced.

The cordon, which was manned by both police and army personnel and encompassed much of the central city, was hoped to be lifted early this morning.

Even yesterday, Colombo Street was open and many shops were open for business and owners of businesses within the cordon were being allowed through.

While contractors work long hours to get those businesses cleaned up, or in some cases demolished, in some areas it's goodwill and a sense of helplessness which is leading people to pick up shovels.

A Facebook appeal had prompted a group of St Bede's College boys out onto an Avonside street – one with a broken hand – with shovels yesterday, while in Kaiapoi a whole family from Amberley is helping clean up Mrs Terris' property; people she doesn't even know.

They're all hoping it's a case of many hands make light work.