I had an interesting conversation with our hotel staff this morning after inquiring about the delays in rebuilding Christchurch.  The devastation is still so palpable and in juxtaposition to everything else in New Zealand being so neat and tidy I wondered what was causing the paralysis in rebuilding.  First off, New Zealand’s economy is built on small businesses.  Over 97% of businesses employ fewer than twenty people.  That in itself is an indication of the ability to tackle such large-scale projects.  Second, the devastation of the quake was much deeper than us Westerners were able to perceive through our limited CNN lens.  Third, nothing on this scale had ever happened before and while almost all homeowners had earthquake insurance, the insurers held back payments for rebuilding until almost all claims were filed so they could sort through and categorize the scale of the claims.  To further complicate matters, New Zealand is a country that doesn’t “build” like the Americans, Chinese, UAE, or Japanese.  They don’t even have enough large construction equipment in the country to take on this size of work.  So hence three years after the quake the rebuilding process is moving at a snail’s pace.