Li Tangyun has trouble sleeping at night. She usually chats with other residents of the small refugee camp out in the open at night until 11 pm. Then she goes to bed but she wakes up at 1 in the morning. “I get up because I am afraid that another earthquake may strike,” says Ms. Li. She was out in her corn field when the tremors started in the early afternoon of May 12. She tried to grab some of the corn stalks in order not to fall to the ground, shouting madly for the others to run. “It was very frightening”, she remembered. Most likely, Ms. Li is suffering from post-traumatic disorder.

Ms. Li, who is now 52, sees her old life as a farmer and fruit grower vanish. Her house, fields and orchards are higher up in the mountains. The officials say it is highly unsafe for her to go home, which is probably true. Mudslides have already buried some of her fruit trees.

So, what lies ahead of her? She would like to earn some money but it is not easy to find work. She does not want to rely wholly on government support, the disaster is too big, she says. She might be able to cut grass for the people in her village but she has no land right now.

On our way to Xiyu Village we headed for the area where the Sichuan basin collides with the Tibetan Plateau, causing the Longmen Mountains to rise suddenly out of the plains.

The hilly area around us was beautiful and we were told that agritourism was a common source of income for farmers in the foothills of the mountain range. Some of the tourism activities had resumed two months after the quake.

Destruction of houses in this area was not as bad as in other places but farmers who lived high up in the mountains had to abandon their homes because landslides were threatening to wash away their homesteads. The village government told them to move to a small compound of prefabricated housing units at the foot of the mountain to stay save.

People in this area will be unable to return to their homes in the mountains for years to come. How they will support themselves is as yet unclear.

 

We came here to investigate the current living conditions of earthquake victims and to look into possible ways of helping them. Li Yang and Huang Qingrui were walking up and down the narrow alleys, knocking at the doors of all of the pre-fabricated homes in search of residents. The summer heat in the early afternoon was oppressive so almost anybody who did not have to work - children and old people - was napping. Others had gone up the mountain to tend to their fruit trees and crop fields. There were electric fans inside the living units but it was unbearably hot nevertheless. So people usually cooked outside at the edge of the compound, each family using their own wok.

People who lived in the compound had come down from the mountains to stay out of the range of possible landslides after the quake. Each unit consisted of one room of 8 - 10 square meters. Up to four family members of three generations lived here, and often a dog too.

 

Eleven-year-old Liu Tangjinhua (below left) sat alone in her family unit playing a card game by herself when we asked her to chat with us for a while. Her playmate had gone up the mountain to collect cucumbers and her parents were off to work. Tangjinhua attends fourth grade in primary school. When the earthquake struck, she was in school but she was able to get out unharmed because, as she told us, the teacher led them safely out of the building. Since that time, there had been no school. She is still afraid of a possible strong earthquake in the future but she feels much safer in the compound now. Later she wants to become a relief volunteer because she saw many of them help injured children. None of them came to her village, though. She saw it all on TV ...

 

Tangjinhua seemed subdued. She was not interested in any activities we suggested for the weeks to come. But she hoped that in the future her family will be able to move to a bigger home. The current one was awfully small. There was only one bed for the whole family. A few pieces of clothes were hung up over the bed. Firewood was stored under the bed and a great part of the room was taken up by a motor cycle and sacks of rice.

Before the earthquake, farmers profited from their idyllic surroundings. Many tourists came to the area to spend their holidays on local farms. The authorities want to redevelop tourism as quickly as possible. A beginning has been made: some trees have been planted already.

Ms. Li’s son Hu Lixiong (right) might be able to help out. Usually, he is not in the village but earns money as a migrant worker. He did not get a chance to go to school. After he had finished junior high-school, his father died, so he left school. Hu Lixiong is now 21 years old and has a girlfriend in a village nearby. As soon as he reaches marriage age he wants to marry her but, he says, there might be a problem with this after the earthquake. He says that his home did not collapse. There are only some cracks in the wall. But nobody knows how long it will stay like this. Two month after the event there are still strong aftershocks, which send people running for safety.

Some moved their beds out in the open, worrying that cracked walls will collapse after the next aftershock.