Walking Into The Disaster

During my week in Sichuan after the quake one thing that I repeatedly encountered, especially once we began venturing towards the epicenter, were people that had covered incredible distances over mountains and shattered roads to find family members. Transportation in that region of China is difficult to begin with; landslides and bridge collapses made it near impossible after the quake. The military, whose arrival was delayed by poor weather, were focused on finding survivors trapped in buildings, meaning people who were healthy often ended going in and out on foot. Once we stopped to pick up a woman who walked over a mountain to find her daughter. One man walked in to Beichuan from Chengdu to find his mother, and recorded the experience on his blog, which the China Digital Times translates here. It's an amazing story, complete with several photos, that includes him building a raft.

While near Yingxiu we also encountered a mother and her son who had hiked out of Wenchuan. They were mentioned in the opening of our latest cover story on the quake, but it's worth adding a few details here. The mother's name was Yang Tongmei, and I met her while she rested underneath a tree with her 12-year-old son, Kangchun. The boy was attending school in Wenchuan, near the epicenter of last week's quake, while his family lived in a village down the mountains. After the quake struck, Tongmei left on foot to find her him. “It was uphill all the way,” she said. “People coming down said, ‘Wenchuan is flattened, you won't be able to get your boy out. I said, ‘My son is there. If he's alive I'm getting him out.'” She walked two days and found him alive. They then walked two days to get out. Kangchun's face was smeared with dirt and he carried a flashlight suspended from his neck with a piece of twine. “The walk from Yingxiu to Wenchuan was terrible. You can't see any houses standing and there were corpses all along the road,” Tongmei said. “It was worse when we came down. When I went up the bodies weren't smelling, but when we went down they were unbearable.” Kangchun, who is deaf and mute, couldn't say aloud what he thought about it all, but he didn't need to. His mother said he had been disturbed by what he saw. From the contorted look of anguish on his face, it was clear the boy had just walked through hell.