My mother told a story about a teacher who grabbed the nearest four students when the earthquake began. He stuffed them under his lectern, and covered it with his own body. He was crushed by falling debris, as were all the other students in the classroom, but the four children under the lectern lived.
My dad told me about a group of hourly workers. After hearing about the earthquake damage, they loaded up bike carts with blankets, food, and water. They biked for many hours into the earthquake region, and dispersed their much-needed supplies. They didn't have much money themselves, and were sorely feeling the bridge and road tolls extracted on the way over.
(Example of a bike cart below)
Quite a number of people have donated impressive amounts of money. This earthquake has revealed a lot of heroes.
Wow, that's a pretty amazing trek. Like biking from Portland, Oregon to Los Angeles Ca on a full cart. I'm not saying that didn't happen, because people have been doing amazing things for one another here since the quake, but that's 1000 miles (as the crow flies no less), over some very rough terrain. Pretty amazing if it did though.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt, you've read and heard stories about the earthquake yourself?
ReplyDeleteJust in case you haven't seen this:
Photographing a Wedding and then an Earthquake
http://tinyurl.com/4qznhw
NPR has been doing a great job of reporting on the Sichuan quake:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90430135
http://tinyurl.com/3tp7ss
Chengdu Diary
http://www.npr.org/blogs/chengdu/
The local Chinese Christian Church was gathering donations for the relief fund last week. My wife heard about it through a colleague at work. I had been looking for a way to help out without falling for the knee jerk "send your donation to the Red Cross" reaction - I wanted to make sure our donation was going where it could do a little help.
ReplyDeleteWe asked all our friends, family, neighbors and associates to donate with us and came up with a rather large amount. Last weekend, we got in the car to go to the church with our check, but the car wouldn't start. Luckily we have bikes, and it was only 30 miles to the Church and back. Arriving there, we met the Pastor and his wife who told us they were only accepting donations from Chinese people (my wife was born in China, but she's Korean and I am as white as a tube sock).
As we rode our bikes back home, we decided to donate the funds to the Red Cross after all.
re: anonymous. Hm, now that you bring it up, I am not sure it was from Beijing. I thought so, but I'm not certain. I removed that detail.
ReplyDeleteyou can check out what the local bay area Chinese community is doing to help at:
ReplyDeletewww.tsinghuafoundation.org.
and ways to help.
in the long term, there are much more needs to be done to help those kids lost their parents, and parents without their children's support. remember a lot of the victims are poor peasants.
I plan to get in touch with my college roommate who is in Chengdu to see whether we can support/sponsor a few poor kids.
Niniane,
thanks for sharing in your blog.
Hello
ReplyDeleteThe global Northern hemisphere temperature changes have great impact to the Earth quake frequency in Southern China area, but also in most of other Earthquake sensitive areas as well. In periods of 1900-1940, 1940-1970 and 1970-2000 and beyond the frequency is first seen to increase as temperature increases, then decrease between 1940 and 1970 and then again increase when anomaly of late 1900 takes place.
I have collected more relevant information and published DYI book, please check it in:
www.climatecompass.com
http://www.climatecompass.com/highlights.html