Anticipation and wonder
March 10 Monday 1:30pm: as I stood at the airport counter in Hong Kong preparing to leave home for a massive humanitarian aid distribution, I was filled with anticipation and wonder. Each emergency is unique. This time World Vision's mission was to distribute 860,000 kilogrammes of rice to 57,000 villagers suffering from a food shortage in Jiangxi, following a string of snowstorms that battered the country in early 2008.

'Brokenness was everywhere'
March 11 Tuesday after lunch: we embarked westbound to Tonggu where green forests began to replace concrete buildings that once dominated the skyline. Within no time I was surrounded by total devastation. Brokenness was everywhere, like a horror movie playing over and over again. Forests of wildly bent bamboo trees bowed their heads over rugged mountain tops, their branches jagged and pitiful looking.

The saddest realization for me was that area's economic backbone had been broken. Forestry and agriculture were severely affected by the heavy snow, hindering the income earning ability of tens of thousands of people who work in those industries.
 
Emergency relief - making a difference in Mr. Wang's life
March 12 Wednesday early afternoon: Armed with bags of food and burdened by fear that death may be widespread on the mountain's top, township heads and government officials told me they walked for miles up the snow-clad mountain roads, anxious to establish connection with the silence on the mountain summit. They spoke about their limited ability to reach the mountain village and how they had never encountered such a big disaster before.

Once in the Gangkou Township of Tonggu, I decided to follow the footstep of the officials who walked to snowed-in villages in Chizhou. When I arrived I met 72-year-old Wang Junjin and his 64-year-old wife, recipients of rice donated by World Vision. The snowstorm had destroyed much of Wang's house, his vegetables and rice crops.  Mr. Wang told me that without World Vision's rice donation, family of six would have faced shortage of food grains for the next three months.    

During my time as a relief aid worker, I've observed first hand that the poorest of the poor are among those most vulnerable to disasters. Mr. Wang's crop harvest has always been more susceptible to failure simply because the mountainous fields he farms are nowhere near as fertile as fields in low-lying areas. The family's total farm plot is some 1,000 square meters in size and is relied upon to feed all six of the family members. Mr. Wang says more often than not, his harvest is not enough to sustain the entire family.

Mr. Wang's story - a story of a small time farmer and woodcutter - echoes that of thousands of families around him. Losing everything to the snowstorms is not an anomaly. One by one, Mr. Wang told me about the difficulties he has faced in his life time: forests disappearing, food scarcity increasing, the roof of his house leaking, and finally his persisting illness, but he paused to reflect that as hard as life is today, the years of his youth were much more difficult. He told me he felt optimistic about the future. The reason why? Mr. Wang credits the absence of field tax and the quick response the government made to help villagers after the snowstorms. "Our life is much better now than when we were small.  Nowadays, we don't have to pay field tax,"he said with a smile.

According to Mr. Wang, the government responded with help soon after the roads became accessible. When disasters strike, families like Mr. Wang's find it difficult to recover on their own.  The assistance provided by the government and non-government organizations (NGOs) alike World Vision was clearly was appreciated. Many people told me that our sacks of rice and survival kits helped them know they had not been forgotten. Over the course of the snowstorm response, World Vision has donated 2.2 million Kilos of rice to some 142,000 people. The direct economic loss is estimated to be US $20 billion. We talked about the next steps forward - the government's plants to help replant the forest and the small compensation that was given to farmers who lost their crops. Tens of millions of dollars are planned for reforestation by the government but it will be at least one decade, possibly two before the forests will really grow up. Our conversation made me understand that communities are like forests - they are strong and rise up again after a storm but it can take a very long time to do so.