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Fulfilling a dream of helping others
By Du Wenjuan (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-06-12 16:37

He was a volunteer rescuer, but he is as brave as a soldier.

Yang Dong is a 21-year-old farmer who has just returned from the quake-hit Sichuan and he did what he didn't have a chance to do when he was a soldier.

"What I did in Sichuan was much harder than when I served in the army," he told chinadaily.com.cn on the sidelines of the ongoing 16th Chinese Youth League National Congress Wednesday in Beijing.

Yang Dong 

Yang decided to help spontaneously after his father called on him on the night of May 12 to go to Beichuan, the worst affected county during the 8-magnitude earthquake last month.

"There was really no time to mourn but to take action as even a second cannot be wasted," he explained.

A group of 13 farmers in a village in Yutian county of Tangshan, the city shaken by a similar tremor in 1976, packaged their belongings with a total of 19,000 yuan donated by the villagers there. They along with Yang and his father took the train to Zhengzhou, Henan Province.

In order to get to Beichuan, they paid over 5,000 yuan to take a taxi from Zhengzhou to Beichuan. They arrived the next morning and began volunteering right away.

Using their bare hands, Yang and his fellow farmers pulled out five survivors from rubble in Beichuan Middle School within three days. In total, they saved 25 people's lives, but they themselves only slept two to three hours every day.

Wearing a camouflage outfit and a pair of ordinary black cotton shoes, Yang seems older than his age with his tanned face from hours of working in the sun.

He said he didn't want to recall exactly what he saw during the first few days after they arrived. He only said it was really sad to find all those cold bodies, of people younger than him.

After finishing middle school, Yang joined the army and served for two years. He had always wanted to be a soldier, but in going through the rubble of a collapsed school, it was worse than a battlefield in the training camps he experienced during his army years.

Now after his volunteer work, Yang says he wants to find a job to support his family.

"Father told me 'Jiayou' during the nights in Sichuan, and I’d like to say the same to those youth in the quake areas. They have a long way to go."