in the beginning - part 1

so. i went to sichuan. in search of the rural scene again. (part hidden objective is to scout for new place to do a yes! project on.) followed my HK prof to wenchuan county, shuimo town. which was right smack at the epicenter of the earthquake. learnt many points about the chinese social welfare system and the social work scene there..

note: click the photo for hi-res. so you can see clearer. haha. if u didnt know.

so yes. this is dedicated to the yy pple, especially if u are interested to know more about china's rural scene. you might be able to do some comparisons, especially about the school.

Part A - the earthquake.

this is to give some background about the area. so it starts with the earthquake. it happened and it was rather bad (duh.) what made things worse was that there was a combination of many things. the area is mountainous (just like yunnan kind of mountains.) so there were rock slides, which send boulders flying down the mountain onto villages that were by the foot of the mountain. boulders are house-sized. so yeah.. imagine hdb flats being dropped on you.

e.g. of a boulder.

lol! they used it as a memorial monument after that. had a random transport that was sending us to dujiangyuan, he made us stop and take picture with it. lol. but we didnt mind anyway! but the driver couldnt take proper shots..


this was a school. the remains are still there after one year, cos they are preserving it as a tourism sight in the future.

so the town where the school was, completely flattened. as you can see in the picture below, there is another building on the left of the school. totally caved into the ground. if u stare hard enough at the mountain, there are brown patches. those are the rock slides from the mountains, which hurled dirt, pebbles, stones, rocks, and boulders onto villages down below.

the light blue roofs are temporary housings for the affected people.

so in the entire area, buildings disappear, 4-storey buildings sink into the ground and become a roof only, rock/land slides buried entire villages (imagine gan tang zi totally covered with soil!) in that area above, estimated 10000 pple died. they didnt even find the bodies. because villages were covered entirely. they dug out bodies after bodies and after awhile they gave up. cos there were simply too many.

even transport was a problem. bridges collapse like the photo below.



this bridge (its quite long!) was one of the main arteries into a section of the county (where shuimo was, plus other towns.). So the earthquake literally cut them off form the rest of the world.

the place (shuimo) now is just one mega construction site. the school was built finish first so everything else is still under construction. locals say need another 2 years before it can be a proper town again.



story 1: so immediately after the earthquake happened, there were announcements over radio, etc. that a very bad earthquake happened. and one very amazing thing that happened, was that thousands (or maybe just a thousand) of taxi drivers drove out of chengdu, into the affected areas to help to look for survivors and give any form of help they could. and they provided very significant help cos they had a vehicle which can transport aid in and casualties out. all these happened out of total altruism, and it was UNORGANIZED. nobody ordered them to. they just went out of service to their countrymen. really great story. and example of the wonders of the china spirit. touched my heart. honest! (and if u know me well, you might know hard it is to do so!)

to be continued...