Survivors still have a mountain to climb

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-14 09:21

Waterfalls spewed from the ground-floor doorways of an apartment complex perched on a ridge, just downstream from the splinters of an ancient wooden dam.

A world away in downtown Shifang, the county-level city bears few visible scars from last May's seismic violence. However, nearby Yinhua township remains a scattering of ruins, a constellation of tents and temporary houses.

Yinhua in Shifang is located only 20km away from Wenchuan county, the epicenter. Both cities of Mianzhu and Shifang are under the jurisdiction of the city of Deyang, which borders Wenchuan.

Survivors still have a mountain to climb

Xie Zifa and his family of four live in one of the few houses still habitable. He runs a cookware shop from the ground floor.

"Actually, the quake was good for business. A lot of people have had to buy new household goods to replace what they lost," he said.

For all those families living in their partially destroyed old homes, the government will tear the building down and replace them with new 25-sq-m houses.

Xie's will be ready within a year, he said, while neighbor Cheng Weifu said his family expects to have theirs within two, but first they must clear the rubble of their old farmhouse.

"The temporary house is OK to live in for now but it isn't as convenient as our home before the quake," said Cheng, whose 12-year-old daughter died when the roof of Yinhua Middle School classroom collapsed. His three other girls survived.

The school still stands, barely. Zhang Yuyang, 15, a former classmate of Cheng's daughter, said: "I miss our old middle school. Our temporary school is just so-so."

Her friend, 14-year-old Sun Ying, added: "I hope we can go back to how it was before the earthquake. I want to live a peaceful life."

Students and teachers in Hongbai township in Shifang have also been grappling with the emotional upheaval caused by the quake.

"There's a lot of psychological trauma," said Zhang Yong, a teacher at Hongbai Middle School, who explained a sign of this was the growing number of discipline problems at the school. "Some of the students have started misbehaving in classes," he said. "Many of them don't like to talk and won't raise their hands to ask questions."

The teachers have now built a wooden room in their temporary school that serves as an escape and a place for them to discuss their problems with peers. Hongbai also has counselors, but Zhang said he is concerned about their qualifications.

Most were trained by volunteers for not even a month, he said. "But good psychological counseling requires longer training, and there just aren't enough people who can provide this."

He believes the emotional problems arising from the quake are not confined to those who lost loved ones.

"Even for those who haven't lost love ones, the destructive force of the quake has devastated their sense of security," said Zhang. "Only time can help heal the trauma."

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