YAO JIN VILLAGE, China – I have just returned home after a month in China where we were able to accomplish a lot in that time. We secured the final building approvals from the ministry of foreign affairs and the local government and finalized the house designs which now, thanks to a government subsidy, will be two-story buildings.

The new village will occupy a large site of approximately 100,000 square feet. After the quake, each family erected a shelter on whatever flat ground they could find in the village.

Now, the villagers of Yao Jin have been busy dismantling and moving their temporary shelters to make way for the foundations that will be laid for their new homes. The speed in which they were able to dismantle the shelters was a frightening demonstration of just how flimsy they were! In just a few hours, most of the families had taken down their shacks and started to rebuild them on a temporary site up the mountainside.

Some families have chosen to live in tents until their house is ready and have stashed their wood in huge stacks. I watched Mr. Luo Sheng Wu carefully stack and bind all of the wood that he was able to salvage from his house. Like an old car compacted into a cube, these cubes of wood are all that remain of the villagers’ homes.

Last week, among all of the shuffling, the villagers took a break to celebrate the official start of the project; the groundbreaking ceremony. It was pouring down rain as the whole village assembled in the middle of the project site. I was asked to make a speech and first apologized for the miserable weather, but reminded the villagers that was the very reason we were there.

The rains mark the beginning of winter and our project aims to get the villagers into new homes before the deep midwinter cold sets in. Despite the dreary conditions the villagers were in good spirits.

They clapped and cheered from under their umbrellas as I sliced into a red ribbon alongside the local government leader, Mr. Han. As the ribbon fell, I was startled by the sound of thousands of exploding firecrackers, a tradition at any significant event in China.

As the smoke cleared from the firecrackers, one of the large front loaders began to shift a large pile of dirt in a symbolic gesture marking the start of the project. In reality, the project started several weeks back when we began to clear the village of debris. Since that time we have removed the devastated homes and began leveling the ground in preparation for the foundations to be laid. The groundbreaking ceremony marked the culmination of endless hours of negotiation and planning to secure the permission and designs needed for the project. Now we can get on with the easy job of actually constructing the homes!

The following day the sun came out. As the machines continued to excavate the site, the afternoon rays shone through the trees and and lit up insects and rice husks as the villagers threshed their winter store. Some of the women gathered pumpkins to be served alongside spicy pork. All of the villagers have volunteered to be involved in the construction project in some way. Some of the men are professional builders so their skills will come in very handy. Others will do what they can, from lifting to simply preparing meals for the workers. Whatever their skill, each villager is willing to work hard and take pride in the project that will soon have them living in new homes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Asia, China Disaster, David Darg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.