On June 8th, I traveled with a relief group called iboughtashelter up to a tiny village called Bandao Cun. It’s a farming town of about 2,000 residents spread out over a couple of kilometers. It was clearly once a beautiful place. The land was richly cultivated, filled with brilliant rice paddies, apricot, plum and apple orchards, pepper bushes, and corn stalks.

Most of the adult residents survived the quake because they were working in the fields at 2:28, but the children were at school at the time, and the majority of the children in the local school died when it collapsed.

Entering the village you are first struck by the totality of the devastation. I saw not even one structure that remained habitable. Most houses had not even one wall left standing.

A ruined house

A red cross relief tent set up on a collapsed house

A woman observes aid workers

I saw one or two red cross tents, but most of the villagers lived in makeshift tents they had constructed themselves from plastic tarp and broken wooden beams. Most of the tents were tiny because they didn’t have enough tarp to make larger tents, didn’t have money to buy more, and didn’t have structures on which to hang them.

Inside one of the bigger tents where survivors sleep. More than ten people shared this tent.

At first residents were confused when a bunch of foreigners piled out of trucks in their tiny town. They were not unfriendly, just a little confused as to our purpose. But when we began to hand out supplies and construct a tent they warmed to us and were eager to tell their stories, to take our hands, to thank us and offer us the little they had to offer.

An old woman in Bandao Cun

I came across three men sharing their lunch with two puppies curled at their feet. Of course they wanted to share their meal, but when I convinced them I had eaten, they toasted to us with tiny glasses of strong clear liquor they call baijiu.

Lunch

Ganbei!

We came across an old temple, utterly ruined by the earthquake. The caretaker of the temple was sitting by one of the crumbling walls, smoking a pipe. He said he had been sitting outside the entrance when the earthquake struck, not ten feet from where he stood now.

A temple in ruins

The temple’s caretaker