Elyn’s Journal

I recently called a pastor friend in Sichuan whose church is a little distance from the earthquake zone to find out how things were going there. She told me that although other churches in the province had been allocated funds for the strengthening and rebuilding of their churches, she had received nothing as of yet.

Her church was old, and not strong to begin with. If they had been at the center of the quake, the building would have completely collapsed. Since they were farther away, the structure did not collapse, but it did form many cracks, lost many roof tiles, and now the building is unusable and condemned by the local government.

    

I told her I would see if I could find some funds to help them repair their building before the winter weather sets in. (If you are interested in sending a check, please send it to the Snyders - their address is on the home page of http://www.elynsjournal.com/ with a note that it should go to Rev. Ma’s church.) They need to have about 15,000 USD to repair and strengthen the structure so that they could use the building again and buy new roof tiles for the roof. 

This church is generous. When the earthquake came, the people in the taller buildings in the neighborhood were so afraid that their buildings would collapse that they spent all their time outside. Many of the church’s neighbors, as well as people fleeing from the quake zone, ended up at the church. There was no place to stay, so they lined up chairs outside in the church courtyard, and rested in the day and slept together at night. There were altogether about 100 people who took refuge in the church (not church members) during that period of about three weeks. 

There is an older member of the church named Old Brother Wu, in his 60s, who has no children, so he has no family members to take care of him. He also has a problem with his leg, making it hard for him to walk — he has a bad limp. But he still comes to church, making his way from his small plot of land for growing vegetables to the church on Sunday. He has only a small hut - no TV, no refrigerator, only cold water, one electric bulb, and a very difficult life in many ways.

When the earthquake hit, the church members didn’t even think about the fact that they would eventually need some money to repair their church. They just got together, pooled all their extra money and every cent they could get their hands on to send to the center of the quake area. They knew that the people there were in much worse shape than they were having lost family members and in some cases, lost everything. So the church sent all their money to the quake zone.

When Old Brother Wu heard about the death and destruction, he took his whole life savings out of the bank - 12,000 rmb (less than 2,000 dollars) and sent it to help the rescue efforts. He gave everything he had.

What he did touched everyone so much that the news spread and a newspaper reporter went to visit him. He told everyone he was a Christian, and Christians love people just like Jesus did, and that life is the most important thing. He hoped his small amount of money would help and encourage the people who were rescuing those trapped in buildings and schools.

Soon it will be All Saint’s Day. We actually had our All Saints Day service here in Shanghai today, and lit an entire table of candles commemorating Saints (capital S) and saints (small s, the ones who are not world famous but nevertheless are still saints) some passed away and some still here on the planet.

During the service I told everyone about Old Brother Wu. His story was my contribution to our time in the service for talking about the saints (living) we know. It was like someone had hit a tuning fork, and we all began to resonate. That kind of good, over-the-top generousity of spirit that Brother Wu radiates, is what changes the world for the better. His story is like a prayer that lifts us from despair into a timeless zone where we are all connected and shine with light. You can try telling someone else Old Brother Wu’s story yourself -

 

We arrived in An Xian just before noon. Rev. Luo Jian Ming was there to meet us, and we were delighted to discover that his churchyard was the new home for three beautifully patterned blue and white Mongolian yurts (round tents), donated by Christian friends in the northwest and trucked down to his church by a team of brothers and sisters who were busy putting them up. They will be “home” and “office” for the pastor and his family until something more permanent can be found. These were built for living – you can roll the sides up when it is hot to ventilate the space, and let the sides down again for cold or rain. The other regular tents have no way to do this, and were unbearably hot when the temperature rose.

Just as we were talking, the head of the Buddhist Association in the town and some other government people came to see if there were any extra tents at the church. Fortunately we did have a few, and could give them three big ones (for a family) and a small one. I think they might have heard about the yurts from someone and hoped that the church wasn’t interested in them, since they are traditionally Buddhist. Since they were already set up, it was easier to give them the regular ones. At least their folks near the temple will have a few extra tents. That particular area hadn’t received much aid yet. Everyone agreed that in times like these, the religions had to stick together and focus on the basic principles of compassion and sharing rather than on differences, and with great smiles and waves, the team went back to the temple area to share the tents with the older and smallest people in their neighborhood.

At An Xian church, we stood outside and talked about the earthquake while a recently hatched swarm of dozens of bright red dragonflies flew around over the blue and white yurts in the sunlight. Pastor Luo’s wife told us about what she was doing the day of the earthquake. Her eyes opened a little wider in disbelief and she told us, “I had decided to take a nap, but I couldn’t sleep. I put the covers over my head and I still couldn’t sleep. All of a sudden I felt the earthquake, and before I knew it I was out the door and down the stairs and in the courtyard. It was very lucky that I had not taken my clothes off to take a nap that day, because it was as if two angels had me by the arms and swept me outside. I have no idea how I got there that fast. Then I thought of my son, and I raced off to see if he was okay. All along the street were downed trees and huge rocks, so cars couldn’t get through. I moved them with my bare hands, and no one could believe it.” Her son was fine, thank God, and gave us a big smile.

Pastor Luo’s wife and the church people made a big lunch for us, and we sat around the table eating and talking about the church. It was an Anglican church with British roots, first built in 1894 by a missionary whose Chinese name was Shen De Fu. The church had recovered the building in 1986 and began rebuilding the church in 2004. The church had been built in the old Chinese style, 100 years later it was in disrepair. When Pastor Luo arrived in the mid 1990s, his salary was $10 a month, and he could not really take care of his family, so his wife went to Shanghai to work to support the family. What she earned in a month was six times his salary. They slowly built up the church, and she could return to An Xian to join her family and their growing congregation.

The old church was taken down and the new church building was finished about two years ago. Their new church building was lovely, modern, spacious, and peaceful, but the earthquake had shaken it to the foundation, and at least part of it was going to have to be taken down and rebuilt, and the rest would at least have to be fortified. To me, having been in a few churches in the quake zone already, this one was quite affected at the front of the church, where there were huge gaping cracks in the building and many windows missing. When I stepped up into the altar area, I was suddenly extremely dizzy. Why? I have no idea. I stood there with the chancel area swimming around me and talked about rebuilding the church, but I have to say I was extremely glad to step down back into the main part of the church sanctuary and “onto dry land” and have the dizziness leave. This was one church that would have to be extensively rebuilt before it was safe to use.

Pastor Wang urged us to keep going – there were two more churches and a hospital to get to in our day, and it was already approaching mid-afternoon. Back in the car, this time traveling on the highway, we passed through more deep green rice fields, past water buffaloes, all the while keeping the spine of the Dragon Gate Mountains on our left. The spine of the dragon really looks like a spine, with many small peaks at the top, like vertebrae. There was no way to get a really good picture of it, because there was always a haze. After the earthquake there was not only a haze, but also steam coming from the mountain itself, almost like a fog. Knowing that, it was easy to think back a few weeks before the quake when all the toads in the area had come out of their usual habitat and covered the roads as they left the area. No doubt the heat that was building up inside the mountain range had sent them in search of cooler places.

We knew it would be a long day, so we left at 7:30 on our way to visit the churches north and east of Chengdu. The highway out of Chengdu passed through green rice paddies and fields of summer vegetables, through small towns that showed very little devastation because the geological foundation under them in the plains was more absorbent of the quake waves than what lay under the hard geological plate backbone of the Longmen Mountains where cities were severely damaged by the quakes. But by the time we got to our first stop, Mianzhu City, you could see more affected buildings.

Our driver, who was familiar with the area, commented that the day or so after the quake, the streets in Mianzhu had been completely empty of people, almost like a ghost town. Now a few of the stores in the less damaged buildings were open for business, and people were buying vegetables and meat from small stands and tarps on the ground at the edge of the street. There were fat pieces of pork hanging on hooks, water spinach in piles, ripe peaches stacked into a mound, and small mountains of watermelons. As we stopped near the church, neighbors squatted around the one working water tap in the neighborhood filling buckets with water to take back to their houses. Others had brought plastic basins to wash vegetables or laundry right there on the street.

When we arrived at the church, we could hear the church members reading the Bible together out loud and singing hymns. They had been doing that every day since the earthquake for most of the day. The church in Mianzhu is a small one, and could hold about 400 people until the quake. Now it has been declared unsafe to use. I don’t know how they could have used it, because the roof had lost many of its roof tiles and the sun was shining in through the holes in the roof. There were huge cracks in the wall above the altar area, and many other cracks in the side and back walls. The wall that used to surround the church at the back looked like it had been exploded and the ground was a huge pile of grey rubble. Their building was old, dating back to the early years of mission activity of the British Anglican church in the area, and was built in 1923. There were about 1,400 members in 1949, but by the time of the cultural revolution there were only a few hundred. The church was revived in 1996, and the old minister, Rev. Chen Fu Kuan, who passed away three years ago, helped bring the church back to life.

Mr. Shao, the lay leader in charge of the church while Gong Yu Mei, the minister, is away in Nanjing studying at the seminary there, told us about the situation. Two of the church members died in the quake; one was working at an electric power plant in a valley where the two peaks collapsed and buried everything in the valley. This is the one that people here call the “wrapped dumpling” town, because the two sides of neighboring mountains collapsed to cover over the middle, like wrapping a dumpling. The mountains which used to point up to the sky now point towards each other, with the buried village and electric station in the middle, now covered by landslides and an “earthquake lake”. The other person who died was hit by a collapsing metal beam in a local market. There were other injuries, and many, many of the church members’ homes had been rated by the government as too dangerous to use.

The people pointed out how the cracks in the building were neither horizontal nor vertical, but formed an “X”, which showed that the house was not safe to live in, and others had actually collapsed, with all their things buried in the rubble. The government has done such an amazing job taking care of the people in the town, as in others. Tent cities had sprouted up everywhere, and you could see new “white board houses” (stiff plastic sheets with pressed Styrofoam in the middle put together to make a house that can be used for several years) going up in parks and safe places.

On Pentecost Sunday, the Sunday before the quake, there were about 200 members in the congregation, but the Sunday after the earthquake they were down to about 100 in the congregation. The next week they had 200. The next Sunday, June 8th was the Duan Wu Jie holiday, and they gave out zhongzi and “Thousand-year eggs” to about 500 people who came. They have to meet outside because the building is unsafe, but they could see that this was an opportunity to rebuild the church and make it bigger.

Like the church in Du Jiang Yan, which was also extremely hard hit, relief supplies had been flowing in from government agencies and churches around the country. At first, the members had just handed things out to other church members, but they soon changed their thinking and began to hand them out to everyone in need. Handing out things to strangers is not so common in China, but the church members had really opened their hearts to everyone. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why church attendance swelled after the quake. Not that there was that much to hand out. In the beginning the most wonderful relief was bottled water and food. But now there are clothes, daily living needs like toothpaste and shampoo, and tents to keep out of the rain. In small ways things are returning to normal.

We had to go on, since we were delivering things that all the churches needed badly, but it was hard to leave. It was some solace to see that the people in charge of the church seemed quite strong and were already looking ahead to rebuilding their church.

We traveled further north along the side of the “dragon’s back” to Anxian. At one point in the road, we could see where a bridge had been declared unsafe except for light car traffic. So down the banks we went, two trucks and one van, to the side of the bridge. We all joked, “So will we have to wade across or have the trucks swim?” There at the bottom of the bridge was an ingenious bridge made of big stones packed in huge woven bamboo tubes laid across the river. They were piled up so the water could flow through, but with a packed surface on top, and trucks and cars alike were crossing with no problem. This is a really clever invention. I was completely impressed with the ingenuity.

Along this road you could see places where barely a house was left standing. If I close my eyes and think about it, the scenes all reappear in front of my eyes – house after house, either with its roof crashed down into the building (roof tiles weigh much more than asbestos shingles), sometimes with ribs of the roof left protruding, half-collapsed, or totally collapsed in a pile of rubble.

First of all, let me say that the earthquake lake was successfully drained.  I think the whole nation was riveted to the television that night, and it was extremely nerve wracking to watch what was happening as the water drained out and swelled the river downstream to its maximun as the water poured out of the lake.  You could see the height of the water on the railway bridge just downstream from the lake, and watch as the roiling muddy water poured through past the bridge in an angry flow.   Since this is a major bridge in the railway system, had it collapsed it would have been another devastation to the economy, since it is one of the most important rail links in the country.  We watched the foaming water rise and the trains pass over the bridge going slower and slower as if they were on tiptoe.  It was such a blessing to have the water pass through and see the bridge remain standing.  Not only that, it remained within its banks, so the devastated cities in the downstream path missed a further blow.

I am writing some of this in a very backwards manner - the last is coming first in my thoughts, so the very last church we visited in our tour of the churches in northern Sichuan yesterday is coming first.

We pulled into the last church on our northern circuit towards evening when the light just began its shift to the deep blue of evening. How to find the church? We found a policeman on motorcycle and asked him for help. With a curt “follow me!” he turned right around and led us through the maze of streets in the town. This town was not decimated like Du Jiang Yan - but you could see big cracks in the buildings and some damage in the older buildings. It is a mystery to me how some of the oldest buildings were left standing, but others much newer ended up as a pile of rubble. It did seem that the oldest buildings built with wood frames were often some of the buildings left standing.

Most everyone I talked to had a new way of looking at a city. The thought that enters your mind when you look at buildings is: “Would that building be left standing after a big earthquake?”

The city center church in Guangyuan looks like a wedding cake. It is behind a big building which also belongs to the church and is used for offices and shops. There were some very big cracks in the structure, and major cracks where all the beams join. The church can’t be used for now, but with some structural reinforcement, there is hope that the church will be back in use soon.

Guangyuan has 20 church meeting points, and of those, four collapsed and others are in dangerous condition. Two Jian Ge County churches, about 2 and ½ hours away were completely destroyed; Long Shan County’s church was totally destroyed and will have to be completely rebuilt. There are more than 200 members there. Shan Dui church, about an hour away, can’t be used because it is in such dangerous condition. The brothers and sisters can’t meet for services, but they visit each other and meet outside or in homes. Fortunately, there were only a few injuries, and no deaths.

These are not nearby churches - some are as far away as 200 km, and visiting them to find out about their condition has been a big stress on the minister, who looked exhausted. His wife’s face betrayed the stress the earthquake had brought to everyone here. I brought aconite, a homeopathic remedy used for deep fright. She couldn’t wait to try it. I left her the whole bottle to use with the church members in the countryside, some of whom were also still suffering psychologically from the shock of it all.

The minister’s mother told me about what it had been like. She demonstrated with her hands a movement akin to an eggbeater, whirled around, and looking me straight in the eye said, “I asked God to help the building to keep standing, and I told God if he wanted me in heaven I could go!” Then she chuckled, I think appreciating her good fortune at still being alive. Her grandson, about 10 or so, came over and told me what it was like at his school. He said it came in slow waves, moving his hands left to right and all of a sudden he grabbed the door and with all his strength shook and flapped it until he had exhausted himself. “That’s what it was like!” His school was closed for now because it had been declared unsafe. Then they told me how the church at White Dragon River had collapsed one story at a time, “bang bang bang!”

We unloaded the last of what we had brought, huge tents for families, electric fans to take the edge off the wet summer heat, and boxes of Bibles. While the big cities near Chengdu had all received help and had complete cities of tents and temporary housing made of boards of white plastic with Styrofoam in the middle set up in open spaces where the local people were now living, this city had not received much assistance to that point.

Our truckload was the first load of disaster supplies they had received since the earthquake a month ago. While other churches closer to Chengdu had quite a number of visits from Christians and others to deliver supplies and inquire about what they needed, Guangyuan’s churches had received no visitors and were feeling very weary and discouraged. While telephone service had been restored in the worst hit areas almost right away, telephone service in Guangyuan had not been restored until three weeks after the quake, so they had no way of letting anyone know how they were doing. In the city, the destruction level was not exceedingly high, but in the countryside attached to the city which was closer to the mountain range that “showed its fury”, it was another story. Most important, what was needed here even more than tents, was concern for the people there, and a sense of being cared for. At least by our visit, that attention and nurturing had begun.

We had left at 7:30 am, and had spent a day on the road checking in on the churches. When we left our last church it was about 8:30. Pastor Wang and I sat in the front seat of one of the trucks with Brother Yuan, the heroic driver who has been driving his truck loaded with supplies in and out of the earthquake zone as fast as the Chong Qing church could collect money to buy a new round of supplies. We drove through the night back to Chong Qing with our empty truck, and arrived at 5:40 in the morning. Almost 24 hours on the road. 

The Tangjiangshan earthquake lake formed when mountains collapsed and formed a basin where the waters have collected up to 750 meters deep. The lake is in danger of bursting its banks and flooding several cities down the valley. In order to let the waters out slowly, the army built a dam from which they planned to slowly let the water out. This morning the dam cracked, and now people from three big cities are all evacuating to the mountains to keep out of harms way. This is hundreds of thousands of people.

I am in Chengdu now, and was hoping to go into the quake zone tomorrow to deliver tents and medicine with the Chong Qing church and their friends from Hong Kong. Looks like we may not be able to go if there is extreme danger of flooding. No one is allowed in those towns now, and the roads are all blocked off to cars. We’ll see what the morning brings.

In a county near here, (Mao Xian) it snowed, and there have been more avalanches - stones and dirt from the mountainside are now blocking the roads again.

I hope we can go tomorrow and that the situation will be safe.

Elyn

I have finally mastered the simple slideshow, and have these ones posted online for you to see. There is a slideshow of the general situation, and then smaller ones of some of the churches in the earthquake zone. Please double-click on the link or copy the link address and paste it in your browser window.

General photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/elynmac/EarthquakeGeneralPhotos

The state of churches in the earthquake zone:
Jiang You Church
http://picasaweb.google.com/elynmac/JiangYou

An Xian Church
http://picasaweb.google.com/elynmac/AnXianChurch

De Yang Church
http://picasaweb.google.com/elynmac/DeYang

Du Jiang Yan Church
http://picasaweb.google.com/elynmac/DuJiangYan

The genius musician who is in charge of all the music for the Olympics Closing Ceremony, Bian Liu Nian, works almost 24 hours a day at the moment. But he added hours to his day to help pull together some music for the survivors in the hospitals around the quake area. He and Xiao Lu, a young woman from his studio team are creating the music. I have been studying brainwave frequencies for healing, and am adding what are called “isochronic tones” to the music track. Mr. Yuan from Bian’s studio is translating the English explanatinons into Chinese, and the Roland Company, which makes keyboards, speakers, etc., will help with a website and donate the publishing of the CDs to give to hospitals and clinics in the quake zone. They will also make them available for downloading from the internet. There are dozens of small projects like this going on at the moment.

At the Roland Company office yesterday we talked about the effect of the earthquake on China. Everyone was speculating on how long it would take China to recover from the disaster. Some said 3 years, some 5, some 8. At any rate, just rebuilding enough simple houses for people who have lost homes in the quake will take a long time.

For now, many are in hospitals. But where will they go when they are released? And what will happen to the children who were saved, but are so handicapped that their families feel they cannot cope. I mean kids who lost both arms, or both legs. And what of the children who are now handicapped and have no family left? It will be interesting to see what happens, but for now one of the churches in Chong Qing is thinking of applying to the government to start an orphanage for the children who have no family left and are handicapped. It is a big job.

Back to the music - we have to finish before Thursday when I go back to Shanghai.

With love,
Elyn

I have to say I am happy to be in Beijing for a few days - I came to see Char’s husband Josh in the musical Oliver playing the bad guy Bill Sykes. It was done so well, I was amazed. It is nice to have a break from the intensity of earthquakes and recover a little equilibrium, and especially to be in a place where there are not so many aftershocks. I have never liked earthquakes since I experienced my first in Tokyo (5.8) some years ago and decided I never wanted to be in another one.

The sounds during earthquakes are so unusual. In the Tokyo earthquakes I encountered, the steel girders in the building rubbed against each other making a sound, much like a bow rubbing back and forth against violin strings, only ever so much louder and scarier, since we were riding the bow - and the whole building was the sound box, like a gigantuan violin — it made a sound almost like the sound of a saw cutting wood, only incredible vastly louder.

Here people who are sleeping on the ground can hear the sound - almost like a moaning, or a train coming, or a great cracking, when an aftershock happens. I take our sweet world for granted - and at times like these develop a new respect for the earth itself.

I wanted to add just a bit before I have to go work on the music we are preparing - and that is that I am so impressed and touched by the response of the Chinese government to this disaster. Wen Jia Bao and Hu Jin Tao, the top two Chinese leaders, spent a total of eight days in the earthquake zone just after the disaster happened. Chinese soldiers, government personnel, and scores of doctors and nurses have been risking their lives in all sorts of efforts since then. The intensity of the response is as beyond proportion as the quake itself. Incredibly devestating disaster, incredibly kind, generous, deep from the heart response. This is what I want to write more on when I get a moment. Meanwhile, time for more work.
With love,
Elyn

Wang Xue Jie Mushi and her team from the West Liberation Road church are home again. They left on Sunday in a huge truck full of medicine, tents and supplies for the hospitals and clinics in the quake zone. The roads were better this time. Road crews have been working feverishly to fill all the cracks in the roads, some huge, and progress has been made. The trouble is that the area keeps having aftershocks and fresh cracks form or old cracks act up. We have had some really major aftershocks here, as big as the earthquake in California that brought down elevated highways.

Their trip went smoothly - they managed to get deep into the zone, and deliver their medicine to a clinic that hadn’t had any fresh supplies in 15 days and urgently needed everything they had brought. They visited with Pastors and their congregations, and made hospital visits. There is a homeopathic medicine, Aconite, which helps with people who have a sudden fright and the patient is filled with fear. I had a supply which I sent in with Pastor Wang. It is amazing what homeopathic medicines can do. One boy who was in a clinic with some serious injuries was screaming each time an aftershock hit. He was not the only one - there are many survivors who are in deep shock and fright. But the aconite brought him around, and now he is much better. It is a good thing - there are so many aftershocks.

I will go to Beijing tonight, and have more time to write on the blog and make an update to the conditions of the churches and pastors. The level of fear/ fright here is very deep. My biggest prayer today is for peace and calm for the survivor’s hearts.

Elyn

I don’t have much time in the day. Here it is almost 11 and I am just done with work for the day. Today was EXHAUSTING. I didn’t even make it to the hospital - just worked with a consellor who is trying to find more relaxation - healing - antistress music to work with the people he is counseling. It took a long time. We are lacking some basic things for even something like listening to music - without speakers you can’t hear the music well because the noise of the city from the church windows is extremely loud. So we had to hook the computer up to their loudspeakers for services (nearly blew my head off when we first turned it on…) and cope with the connection in to the computer that kept giving static and feedback.

Around 4 we had some major aftershocks, not too bad on the second floor. I find I get very dizzy from them. Everyone else seems to get dizzy too. Somewhere in there I gave out - too tired. But the counselors I work with need a little summary of disaster psychology points for the returning army - police - and rescue workers. So I have stayed up doing just that - and hopefully my dear translator friends will get it finished by Thursday morning when we go over to the Police offices. It is only three pages…

Tension here is high over the weakened dams and lakes that have built up from landslides. There are many flooding dangers now. How do you ask people to evacuate and leave an area when they may not even have found their loved ones, buried them, or found a way to take their livestock with them. How do you leave everything behind? How do you even conceive of the idea that your whole village may soon be under meters of water. It’s too much.

Tomorrow is a new day - more training and more healing music consultations. I am off to bed before midnight tonight, so that is progress.
Much love to you all -
Grace and peace,
Elyn