Ｈｕｍａｎｉｔｙ　Ｐｒｅｖ　ａｉｌｓ　ｉｎ　Ｃａｌａｍｉｔｙ.docVIP

Ｈｕｍａｎｉｔｙ　Ｐｒｅｖ　ａｉｌｓ　ｉｎ　Ｃａｌａｍｉｔｙ 　　 　　Afarmer squatting amid the shambles that was once his home is philosophical. “I am not frightened,” he says. “I can rebuild the house later. As long as my family is alive, sufficiently fed and clothed, there is nothing more I aspire to.” 　　When the 8.0-magnitude Wenchuan earthquake struck on May 12, most of the village’s 2,100 residents were attending an outdoor wedding, miraculously escaping the disaster through sheer good fortune. “About 300 people in my village were killed. That was enough,” the farmer says. “But the rescuers were here in just five hours.” 　　One of his neighbors was not so lucky. He rushed to the school of his nine-year-old son as soon as the ground stopped shaking, only to discover to his horror that the schoolhouse, like so many others throughout the quake-affected region, had collapsed. He managed to dig several children out of the rubble with his bare hands, but rescuers who arrived a short while later found his boy, pale and cold. 　　Nor did the tragedy end there. His elder son, 15, was also killed in the collapse of the town’s middle school. In minutes, he had lost both his children. 　　 　　Praying for a Safe Return 　　 　　 　　Mianzhu, 30 kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter in Wenchuan, was one of the worst-hit areas. By 6:00 p.m. on May 15, the county’s death toll had reached 4,450, with more than 20,000 injured and 70 percent of the rural homes demolished. 　　The Mianzhu-based Dongfang Steam Turbine Plant is one of the three major manufacturers of electricity generating equipment in China. The earthquake brought down one-third of its buildings, and buried 4,000 of its 7,000 employees. 　　In the ruins of the demolished factory, I met an elderly woman searching for information about her son, who was believed to be somewhere beneath the debris. She pointed to a twisted bicycle, recognizing it as the one on which her son commuted daily between work and home, and tears welled up in her eyes as she