It was raining again on Wednesday. Shen Lanxiang stood in front
of her wrecked house in Gantang Village of Chenzhou, in central
China's Hunan Province, and could not help
sobbing.
"Now it is impossible to find my wooden box," said Shen, 62. The
box, in which she kept her treasured belongings, became wreckage
buried with the rice and the clothes after Typhoon Bilis came
ashore on July 15 and brought the flood that roared through her
house.
The village couldn't even take the time to recover from Bilis
when Typhoon Kaemi, China's fifth of this year, assailed east
China's Fujian Province on Tuesday and stomped farther
inland, turning northwest and bringing Chenzhou the one thing its
people did not want to see more rain.
The local government evacuated villagers to safety, so in one
way, lives were saved. But when they were allowed to return to
their homes, what, really, did they have?
"All belongings were lost," said Shen, who was born in Xinxing
in south China's Guangdong Province, another of Bilis' victims.
"We will not be able to do any farming in the second half of the
year because of the continuing rain. I have never seen such a big
flood in my life."
It wasn't just the lost treasures that caused Shen to be
immersed in tears; she had also received relief goods from the
China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA), a non-governmental
organization based in Beijing.
On Wednesday the CFPA launched a new relief project for
flood-stricken areas across the country. Each villager whose house
was destroyed received a bag of rice and clothes.
"Prior to the CFPA's project, I had also been given a bottle of
food oil and a bag of rice from the local charity organization,"
she said.
Shen and her 68-year-old husband have moved into their
daughter's home.
"People are desperately in need of food and shelter," said Wang
Xingzui, a CFPA official.
CFPA has donated 5 million yuan (US$625,000) worth of goods to
Hunan since the floods began. Shandong-based Xinlang-Sinoer Co Ltd
also donated clothes worth about 2.5 million yuan (US$312,500) to
the province on Wednesday.
Gantang, a mountainous village of 1,590 people, was devastated
by the typhoons and the floods they caused. Local officials said
1,083 houses were destroyed, resulting in direct losses estimated
at nearly 5 million yuan (US$625,000), and up to 130 tons of food
supplies and poultry in the village were lost.
The rice paddies, their livelihood, also took a beating: Of the
42 hectares of fields, 38.3 hectares (92 percent) were destroyed, a
loss estimated at 900,000 yuan (US$112,500).
In Chenzhou, the area in Hunan worst hit by the floods from
Bilis, more than 3 million people - about 70 percent of the
population - were affected. Civil Affairs Department officials
there estimated more than 105,000 homes and 137,000 hectares of
farmland were destroyed. No estimates were available yet on how
much more damage Kaemi may cause.
"They have become homeless, and without food and fields to farm,
it's very hard for them to recover from the disaster on their own,"
Wang said.
Since it was established in 1989, the CFPA said it has
distributed relief worth 1.5 billion yuan (US$187.5 million)
through more than 200 relief projects, benefiting more than 3
million people.
It started a separate urgency relief project in 2002, which has
raised more than 100 million yuan (US$12.5 million).
Besides the CFPA's assistance, Chenzhou had also received about
8.9 million yuan (US$1.1 million) donations on Wednesday through
other charity organizations, said Li Qingxi, director of the
Chenzhou city government's poverty relief agency. About 82 tons of
rice and other daily necessities are also arriving, he said.
What's more, the Asian Development Bank has granted a US$200
million loan to the province to help with flood relief, the Xinhua
News Agency reported on Thursday.
According to Li Zhuqi, an official with the Chenzhou city
government, the city needs at least 500 million yuan (US$62.5
million) to help people recover.
"Relief work is hard, and we are calling for more help from
other cities and enterprises," Li Zhuqi said.
As the city is situated in the mountainous areas, it lags behind
coastal areas in terms of economic strength. Moreover, more than
1,600 businesses have shut down, and a great number of factories
have been destroyed because of the storms.
Li Zhuqi said: "Enterprises and factories here would like to
help, but right now they can't do more than helping themselves
recover from the disaster."
The disasters are also an unfortunate lesson for local
governments in dealing with several aspects of serving their people
at the same time.
"We have to arrange people to move to safe places as rains have
continued these days, but at the same time, we are working on how
to help them recover," Li Zhuqi said.
The Chenzhou government is planning to allocate about 57.5
million yuan (US$7.2 million) to help people who lost their homes
to build new ones. And in the months ahead, it will raise and
appropriate 44.5 million yuan (US$5.6 million) to provide food for
residents in the flood-hit areas.
When Bilis struck Gantang, hundreds of people were evacuated to
a temporary shelter set up in a primary school, according to Peng
Shenggan, head of the village.
"But of course, it is not a long-term solution for them to
recover from the disaster," Peng said.
Ultimately, he added, the government can help the victims only
so far.
"Villagers will have to help each other after the flood for
better recovery," Peng said. "There have been some people who live
in other families' houses."
When a 92-year-old villager and his wife were forced to live in
a shelter that is only 5 square metres since their houses and those
of their relatives were all destroyed, neighbors came to the rescue
by helping the husband cook meals.
But as difficult as it is to get people victimized by these two
typhoons food and shelter, "the most difficult relief work is to
help villagers resume farming," Peng said.
"They used to be very busy in July; that's when they prepare to
harvest crops and get ready for the second farming season of the
year," he said. "But now they have nothing; they have no fields to
farm."
The local government has called for farmers to raise more
poultry after the flood. The hope is that, a year from now, the
victims who have no livelihood will have found a way to put roofs
over their heads and at least have something on the tables.
That's also what Shen Lanxiang hopes. "We will start raising a
chicken or a calf, then have more," she said, "and finally we will
have our own farmland to get back to the beginning."
(China Daily July 29, 2006)