Gordon Fairclough covers the continuing challenges of the May 2008 earthquake survivors. From the Wall Street Journal:
As Tuesday’s first anniversary nears of the 7.9-magnitude quake, which killed almost 70,000 people and left more than 17,000 others missing, people in the hardest-hit areas of Sichuan province are struggling to piece together their lives and rebuild devastated communities.
Many still live in temporary housing — often metal-clad dwellings originally designed for migrant workers on construction sites — as the government tries to speed the building of permanent homes and replace destroyed schools, hospitals and other infrastructure.
The government estimates the massive rebuilding effort will cost 1.7 trillion yuan, or about $250 billion. By the start of May, more than one million rural homes had been rebuilt in Sichuan.
On his blog, Evan Osnos introduces a multimedia project set to open next week to honor the victims of the earthquake:
The most powerful memorial to the children killed last year in collapsing schools in the Sichuan earthquake is the testament they, themselves, produced.
“Ruins—The Memory of Youth” is a chilling new multimedia project that showcases writing recovered from the rubble of the Beichuan Middle School. Scheduled to open, in Beijing, on Sunday, May 12th, the one-year anniversary of the quake, it includes over a thousand photo-booth headshots, class notebooks, and, most affecting, diary entries. The diaries are inscribed on wrinkled onion-skin paper, plastered with pop-star clippings and illuminated with scribbles. They speak, achingly, for themselves. The exhibit is in Chinese; I’ve translated a few excerpts of some diaries.
