By Wang Xu (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-20 07:27

Quake survivors from Juyuan Middle School resume classes yesterday. As their classroom was devoured by the earth, classes are taken in the open air. But even that fails to allay the fears of some parents, who refuse to leave their side. Gao Erqiang

At 7:50 am, 14-year-old Jiang Yulu, a student at Juyuan Middle School, left home for class. But rather than going to the schoolhouse, she was bound for a blue makeshift tent.

It had been exactly one week since the magnitude-8 earthquake that devastated Sichuan province destroyed the schoolhouse in the town of Juyuan, Dujiangyan. And yesterday's class dealt with psychological counseling for surviving students rather than academic subjects.

"The disaster has destroyed our home, but our spirit remains," a teacher told the students.

None of Jiang's classmates were killed or injured during the disaster, because the building in which they studied was among the newest on campus. But local officials said 280 students at the school were buried in rubble.

Before the flag-raising ceremony, which began class for the day, medical staff disinfected the tent to prevent any outbreak of disease.

Jiang is among the luckier of the surviving students in that she is still able to attend classes.

Zhao Xiaofeng holds the portrait of his daughter, Zhao Xue, who died at Juyuan Middle School. Gao Erqiang

Li Pengyao's father took the 15-year-old to the makeshift campus, where he scanned the rows of blue tents for any familiar face from his school - to no avail. He left disappointedly.

Only the first graders have resumed classes, and its unsure when the other grades will also be able to do so, headmaster Gu Shengcong said, adding that six teachers were killed and two injured in the quake.

Li said that one of the four students from his village was among the dead.

"He was in grade three and was a very good student," he said. Li managed to escape from the building in time but lost his textbooks in the turmoil. And one of his teachers had left the city.

The tent city was constructed by a group of workers led by Huangfu Zhiyou, who came to the town from far-away Tangshan. The 33-year-old was a year old when the earthquake devastated Tangshan. While he hardly remembers that disaster, he does recall how his family was forced to inhabit a 7-sq-m shelter until he was age 7.

Upon hearing about the May 12 quake, Huangfu gathered 51 of his workers from an iron mine in Tangshan and drove through the night until they reached Sichuan. At first, they were busy with relief work, but upon seeing the collapsed school, they decided to build a new one.

Huangfu spent more 2 million yuan on the school. Part of the money came from his savings, and he borrowed the rest. He has built eight classrooms using materials he said would withstand any future quakes.

Just five minutes' ride from the temporary middle school, a dozen parents were mourning at the site of the once-bustling campus. They had all lost their children in the quake and burst into tears at the site of the rubble and twisted steel.

Among them was Zhao Xiaofeng, whose daughter, Zhao Xue, was a third-grader in the school. The 16-year-old girl was always among the most hardworking students in her class and was eager to get into Dujiangyan's best senior high school.

(China Daily 05/20/2008 page9)