Dujiangyan, China: May 13, 2008 – There is no hope for Hundreds of children buried in the rubble of the Earthquake. There is no hope of anyone’s being alive. Only some children could come out with broken bones or severed limbs. The school has turned into mud and heap of bricks and concrete. The parents are waiting to get the dead bodies of their children?

Little remained of the original structure of the school. No standing beams, no fragments of walls. The rubble lay low against the wet earth. Dozens of people gathered around in the schoolyard, clawing at the debris, kicking it, screaming at it. Soldiers kept others from entering.

A man and woman walked away from the rubble together. He sheltered her under an umbrella as she wailed, “My child is dead! Dead!”

As dawn crept across this shattered town on Tuesday, it illuminated rows and rows of apartment blocks collapsed into piles, bodies wedged among the debris, homeless families and their neighbors clustered on the roadside, shielding themselves from the downpour with plastic tarps.

The earthquake originated here in the lush farm fields and river valleys of Sichuan Province, killing almost 10,000 people and trapping thousands more.

One of the most jarring tragedies of the disaster was the school collapse in a suburb of Dujiangyan. At least several hundred children were killed, perhaps as many as 900. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew here on Monday to survey the destruction, but he was powerless to ease the suffering of the survivors.

In the center of town, a woman said she had called local government officials 10 times to plead for help in rescuing her son and mother, but no one had come.
So on Tuesday morning, she stood crying before the remains of her apartment building. Her 5-month-old son was still buried in there, as was her 56-year-old mother.

“I was outside when the earthquake hit,” said the woman, Wang Xiaoni, 26. “I ran back even while the ground was still shaking.”

She shook her head. “Who’s going to help them now?”

People wandered up and down the street taking photos with cell phones and digital cameras. “This isn’t even the worst-off area,” one man said.

One block over, the façade of a white six-story residential building had sheared off, leaving one side of the apartments open to the air. Each living room had a television set untouched by the earthquake. But in the cascade of rubble at the foot of the building, a lifeless head and arm stuck out of the debris, and another body could be seen on the other side of the mound of rubble.

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