Dujiangyan, Sichuan earthquake

Now that the enormous scale and loss of human life in the Sichuan earthquake has become clear, my earlier post about motion sickness and the swaying of our apartment building in Beijing seems incredibly trivial. I do remember though, in the hours immediately after we felt the earthquake, feeling this ominous sense of dread, because as much as our building was moving around here in Beijing, I knew that wherever the epicenter of the earthquake was located, it had to have been hit very, very badly. Slowly the news came out, first 4 confirmed dead, then more, and more, and more, along with horrific photos from Dujiangyan and elsewhere in the area that were absolutely heartbreaking. I felt a personal connection with Dujiangyan even though I had never been there, because one of my friends here in Beijing had recently completed a travel guide for foreigners that was all about Dujiangyan. There was a book launch party for the Dujiangyan book at the end of April here in Beijing, which I attended, and where I met the head of the Ministry of Tourism for the city of Dujiangyan. We had even put up a web page for the city in anticipation of offering tours to the area because it was a truly interesting place with thousands of years of history and tremendous strategic importance to the development of China over the millennia. Tragically, it is impossible to know what the future holds for this devastated city, but the people there are strong and they can and will recover from this terrible earthquake. Faced with a decision on what to do with the unfinished web page for tours of Dujiangyan after this disaster, I decided to put up a couple of links to trustworthy organizations on the web page for donations to the victims of the earthquake. I couldn’t stand to simply delete the page, as if the city had never existed. I just hope that anyone that comes across that web page on our website realizes that it was there before these tragic events unfolded. For now, we are left wondering if our friends in Dujiangyan survived, with the hope that they and all of the people affected will have the strength to get through this unimaginable tragedy.

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

World Vision

This entry was posted on May 14, 2008 at 15:57 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.