COVERITLIVE.COM

11:00

Charles Holmes - Hello from NPR and welcome to a live chat with All Things Considered Host Melissa Block and producer Andrea Hsu from Chengdu, China. They look forward to your questions, though Andrea is dealing with preparing a radio piece right now, so she may not able to join us until later.

Let's get started .... And I'll ask the first question.

It's been a year since you visited the earthquake zone. What's the most surprising thing you've encountered? Anything you didn't expect?

11:02

Melissa Block -

Hi, everybody, and thanks for joining us.

I'm certainly surprised by the pace of rebuilding. The message from the top ranks of government on down is 'speed it up!' and that's what many people are doing, reconstructing their homes. I'm also jolted by the sheer numbers of people affected. you see it most vividly when you drive around Sichuan and everywhere you go you see acres and acres of prefab barracks for people left homeless. This earthquake covered such a huge zone; the full scope is really hard to take in.

11:04

Charles Holmes - I'm sure it is both fascinating and difficult to witness. That leads us to a good question from a Facebook user. Gabrielle Ferreira askes:

What were your first thoughts after the earthquake hit? Also how are the conditions there. How "normal" is it? Are schools and town buildings up and running?

11:06

Melissa Block - I'm not sure my brain was fully functioning when the earthquake hit. I've never been in an earthquake before, and I think the mind naturally wants to steer clear of assuming the worst. So my first thoughts were, "gosh the building is shaking. That must be a very big truck going by." Then as we ran outside and I realized the ground was heaving and buildings were shaking and debris was falling and everyone was running into the street, it dawned on me pretty quickly what was going on. If you've heard our audio from the earthquake, you'll hear me say "oh my goodness" (an understatement if I've ever uttered one) - "is this an earthquake? we're in an earthquake?"

11:07

Charles Holmes -

I can't imagine. Is there a sense of normalcy there now?

11:08

Melissa Block - Normal is hard to define right now. Schools got going pretty quickly, first in tent cities, then in the prefab barracks I described earlier. But there's so much dislocation: a lot of kids have been sent to "relocation schools", often many miles and many hours away from their families. A lot of what's functional depends on where you are: cities and towns may be fairly close together, but a town up in the mountains will be way worse off than a town 10 miles away on flat ground.

11:08

[Comment From Rob Sheridan]
Hi Ms. Block and Ms. Hsu, i would like to know whether you have seen much charitable activity from religious groups in the region, or whether all of the response to the calamity and the subsequent reconstruction were handles exclusively by the government?

11:11

Melissa Block - There is a fair amount of charitable work in the region, though I couldn't quantify that for you. Some groups were here more for immediate assistance right after the quake. Others are here for the long term. Yesterday on ATC I profiled a small US nonprofit group called Build Change, that's here helping people build earthquake-resistant homes. They're not paying for the reconstruction, though; those subsidies are comng from the government, and people have to get loans and use savings to cover the rest. I know Chinese charitable groups organized right away and sent a lot of aid to the region. I'm not sure how much of that is still ongoing.

11:11

Charles Holmes -

Ben Tsai asks an interesting follow-up: What needs are not being met?

11:11

[Comment From Ben Tsai]
How much of the aid has come from the government vs "grassroots" efforts by locals vs outside aid? What needs are not being met?

11:13

Melissa Block -

I get the sense that one fairly gaping need is psychological counseling. There are groups such as Doctors Without Borders who are here offering training and counseling, but you can imagine how huge the need must be, with so many people affected. I talked about this with a psychiatrist at a respected hospital here i Chengdu, and he sighed when I asked him if they have enough counselors to meet the need.

11:14

Charles Holmes - From the comments page on our Web site, Ian von Thaden asks: I would like to ask if you have experienced anything in the last few days that you just found impossible to explain or recreate on the radio.

I am also interested in knowing if there has been anything cultural differences in the way China and the Chinese people have reacted to this event. With a specific emphasis on the difference between the American governments handling of the Katrina disaster.

11:17

Melissa Block - Let me take a stab at the first part of the question first. I think it's hard to get across the wide swath of destruction. It's simply on a scale that I don't think we Americans are used to. And frankly, I'm continually getting tangled in questions of language; there are many times when I've gone back and forth with our interpreters trying to figure out what a word or phrase means, without any real resolution. I don't speak Chinese, unfortunately, and the language barrier can be really frustrating as I try to understand this story.

11:22

Melissa Block -

as for part two of Ian's question: The Chinese government was widely praised for its initial response to the earthquake. Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao were both in the earthquake zone very quickly, visiting victims, holding babies, giving inspirational messages that are still quoted on banners and billboards today. Contrast that with the massively flawed US response right after Katrina. I think some big unanswered questions now are, will the Chinese government's rebuilding and recovery plan be adequate? Will there be huge discrepancies in who gets aid and how much? How soon will people be out of those barracks and into homes? And if it's not soon, will their patience boil over? The last thing the Chinese government wants is millions of displaced people creating that dreaded instability here in southwest China.

11:22

[Comment From Sam Clark]
Do the mountain villages/towns have adequate food, clean water, and medical attention?

11:24

Melissa Block - That's a good question, Sam. I didn't have time while I was here to get to the outer fringes of the earthquake zone - the parts that haven't gotten the media attention of Beichuan, say, or Yingxiu. I wish I could have gone - I do wonder if it's a very different picture there. The places I've seen do seem to have adequate food, water, etc. But I have no doubt there are many people who are falling through the cracks in places that haven't gotten as much attention.

11:24

[Comment From Vivian Ling]
Are you finding earthquake-affected families who are living in tent cities now fairly content with their temporary housing, and of course looking forward to the new permanent housing. Have you heard any of them compare the temporary housing and anticipated future housing with their former homes? And if so, how would they make the comparison?

11:28

Melissa Block - The people were moved out of tents and into prefab barracks last year. They're cramped and crowded and people are anxious to move out. They're also very hot in the summer, and people are dreading the summer months to come. It's hard to generalize about housing past and future: I've seen some people who were moved into a kind of show village that looks like a mountain resort, with indoor plumbing and a sewage system and all sorts of things they didn't have before. But that's by no means the rule. What I have seen is a reorganization of the countryside: houses that were randomly scattered across the landscape are being replaced by houses perfectly aligned across a grid. I have a mental image of what used to be a kind of tessellated mosaic turning into a piece of graph paper!

11:28

Charles Holmes - From Facebook, Allie Zaroor asks: It would be great to know what type of coping mechanisms the families have been using. Also, how do the families envision the future for their country and their families in the aftermath.

11:32

Melissa Block - I'm sure every family is processing this in its own unique way. I've met several famiies whose children were killed in the earthquake who have decided to have another child; many are pregnant or have already given birth. (As you know, with China's one-child policy, many of these families lost their only child in the earthquake. ) Some widows and widowers have found new partners and remarried. I wouldn't begin to try to characterize how so many millions of people are coping, though... there are millions of different stories out there.

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