It was like old home week when I arrived in Yao Jin on Wednesday afternoon. The mayor and dust-covered Yao Jin villagers stopped working and crowded around shaking my hand, laughing, and greeting me.

The sweet smell of honest sweat and cement dust perfumed the warm mountain air. A team of workers wearing face masks was unloading a truckload of bagged cement, and three local craftsmen were bending, forming and fabricating lengths of steel bars into shapes of columns and beams that will be soon be covered with wet concrete.

Many of the older villagers were stacking piles of freshly delivered red bricks and everyone was smiling.

Mr. Xu, our Chinese project superintendent, took me by the hand and led me to the concrete foundation recently built for the self-erecting crane that will be delivered tonight and erected tomorrow. He explained that the crane’s foundation contained over 140 tons of steel reinforced concrete, and that the crane’s long boom will have adequate reach to swing over most of the entire building site.

I heard singing, and looked out into the rice paddy where village women wearing long-billed sun hats were singing and bent to the age-old task of harvesting the fall rice crop. I am just amazed at the cheerful and tenacious attitude of these warm and wonderful people. It is such an honor to be able to help them rebuild their lives. When we headed for the hotel at the end of the day I was not feeling jet-lagged at all. The energy of the villagers had my internal batteries on “full charge.”

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