one month after
> From: Jenny Bowen <xxxxx@halfthesky.org>
> Subject: The Earthquake – a month later…and news on the Torch
> To: "Grant Balfour" <xxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxx.xxx>
> Date: Friday, June 13, 2008, 10:28 AM
> Hello Friends,
>
> We got a call today telling us that, for security reasons,
> our Torch leg
> is now scheduled a day earlier. I will be running in
> Wanzhou, Chongqing,
> on Sunday, June 15 - Father's Day. I will still run
> for the children,
> especially those of Sichuan. Somehow, we will manage to
> bring the children
> there. I hope it doesn’t change again!
>
> I just arrived in Chongqing from Sichuan. Yesterday was
> the one month
> anniversary of the earthquake. We traveled several hours
> to a hard-hit
> mountain town in Beichuan, Hongbaizhen, and worked with
> children and
> volunteer teachers. I have added many photos to our
> website:
> http://www.halfthesky.org/work/earthquake08-healing.php#part2
>
> A couple of weeks earlier, we braved the rock-strewn roads
> and broken
> bridges of Hongbaizhen to deliver relief goods to the
> children. The whole
> town was in shock. As painful as yesterday’s visit was,
> we began to see
> signs that the town will slowly begin to come back to life.
>
> Our communications director, Patricia King gave me this
> moving report:
>
> An 8-year-old boy stands in front of the pile of rubble
> that had once been
> his school and explains that he was the last student to
> have been pulled
> out alive. When the earth shook, he was one of the obedient
> children
> sitting with arms crossed at their desks—some naughty
> boys were still
> outside, safe on the playground. For ten frantic minutes,
> trapped between
> a piece of concrete and brick on the second floor, he
> waited. His cries
> couldn’t be heard over the wailing adults, but finally
> when the crowd
> outside the collapsing school quieted down they heard him
> and came to
> rescue him with their bare hands.
>
> In the first days after the quake, he couldn’t return to
> the pile of
> debris that had once been his three-storey school, but with
> the help of a
> volunteer teacher from his tent school, he has visited the
> site several
> times and now is not afraid when he comes back. Today, at
> 2:28, exactly
> one month after his world shattered, the boy and another
> child from the
> tent school placed their hands on their hearts, then bowed
> three times,
> saying goodbye to their friends who died at the Hongbaizhen
> Primary
> School. Finally these brave survivors vowed: “We will
> live our lives as
> best we can.”
>
> In Hongbaizhen, an isolated mountain town where it took
> three days for the
> Air Force to make it on foot past a collapsed bridge while
> the cries of
> children trapped under heavy rubble grew weaker and weaker
> and then
> stopped forever, the pain is palpable. But one month after
> the earthquake
> children and adults are also expressing their grief,
> working to find a way
> to cope with their pain, and taking the first steps to
> rebuilding lives.
>
> Sitting under a tree outside a tent school only 100 yards
> from the
> collapsed Hongbaizhen Middle School, it took only minutes
> before a group
> of middle school girls, two with their heads bent into
> their arms and one
> sitting up straight, weeping and sobbing, opened their
> hearts to Vancouver
> psychologist Dan Zhang and University of Minnesota
> psychologist Pinian
> Chang, both of whom were also once students in China.
>
> A 14-year-old twin, who aches for her one-minute-younger
> sister. She
> escaped the building, but her sister didn’t. Finally her
> sister was pulled
> out of the rubble, but with no medical care available, her
> family listened
> helpless as she spoke her last words: “I hurt. I hurt. I
> am so tired. I
> think I am dying.” Now her grieving sister refuses to go
> to any school
> with more than one storey—she tried a middle school with
> two stories and
> dropped out after two agonizing days. Still she is trying
> to take comfort
> from “Invisible Wings,” the song she and her sister
> loved and sang
> together. “I know I’ve always had a pair of invisible
> wings that take me
> flying and give me hope.”
>
> Two girls mourning their brother, a 10th grader, and a
> nimble athlete as
> well as a good student, who made it out of the building.
> But he went back
> to rescue three crying girls only to die when another piece
> of the
> building gave way. One of his sisters is tormented by
> regrets—why did she
> brush off her brother, who wanted to talk to her a few days
> before the
> earthquake when she wasn’t in the mood? Both sisters know
> that their
> brother died a hero, but they miss their older brother and
> cry for him as
> an adult volunteer encircles them in a hug to try to ease
> the pain.
>