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A year on, China quake survivors face uncertain future
Fri May 8, 2009 12:26am EDT
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By Chris Buckley
CHENJIABA, China (Reuters) - A massive earthquake toppled Huang Liangju's house a year ago, and she still winces when the hills shudder above her makeshift shelter of planks and plastic sheets.
But after one recent aftershock, one of the many that keep rattling China's southwest Sichuan province, Huang said she and other survivors could not dwell on the past as the anniversary of the May 12 calamity neared. Their uncertain future was enough to worry about.
She recalled her panic when the quake hit, flattening parts of Sichuan and killing more than 80,000 people.
"There was a roaring, whooshing sound, and the sky turned grey and the sound -- like you'd let off a million firecrackers," said Huang, a solidly built woman with two children.
"It's scary here, especially when it rains ... We must move, but I don't know how I'll build a new house. We just don't have the money."
In the weeks after the earthquake, the chronic strains in Chinese society dissolved in a surge of patriotic goodwill.
But the divisions between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, have returned, distilled into worries over homes, money and fairness felt sharply in Huang's village, Xihe, in Chenjiaba, a bamboo-lined valley close to the worst destruction.
About 40 of Xihe's 700 residents died in the quake and much of the hillside is too unstable to live on, said village Communist Party chief Chen Yong. But many villagers worry that new housing and more certain lives could lie beyond their grasp.
"We don't know what will happen, where we will move, how we will live," said Chen Shiyong, a middle-aged woman living down the road in another part of Xihe village. She said she lost a brother and his wife and a nephew in the disaster.
"It's better for people who didn't lose anyone," she said. "But there aren't many around here."
Across Beichuan, the county that includes Chenjiaba, 20,000 of the 160,000 people died in the quake or remain missing, and some families number their kin who died in the dozens.
The government has launched a rebuilding program but the destruction was vast, and in the wait for relief, some survivors have made angry claims about corruption, favoritism or delays.
"The officials give all the money to those they know and we're always left behind," said Chen Shiyong.
MILLIONS HOMELESS
Rebuilding the shattered homes and infrastructure left by the quake would be a test for any government. Officials have said 4.8 million people lost their homes because of the quake. Continued...
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