By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 22, 2008
FEISHUI, China -- Clad in a candy-striped shirt and red hiking boots, Li Xiaotang sat cross-legged on a matching red yoga mat in the middle of a mountain village near the epicenter of last week's earthquake.
Moved by the images of devastation on state-run television and motivated by tales of heroic rescues, Li and 14 other young Shanghai professionals had traveled 2 1/2 hours by plane and five more by car, at their own expense, to volunteer in the relief effort.
Li and her friends, who met through the Internet, had heard there were places inaccessible by car that soldiers and other rescue workers had not yet reached. Given that their group -- all in their 20s -- included experienced mountaineers and people trained in emergency medical response, they felt they could make a difference.
The problem was that Feishui, where they had been assigned by China's Red Cross, was not one of those places.
Because none of the roads around Feishui had collapsed in the quake, help had arrived early. By the time Li and her friends arrived, the injured had been transported elsewhere and the area was overflowing with supplies and volunteers.
"They have everything they need here. We should go someplace else," Li, 25, who works in information technology, suggested to the other volunteers.
Dai Chongbo, 23, who works in the justice bureau of a neighborhood government in Shanghai, wasn't as diplomatic. "To tell you the truth, I feel a bit ashamed that we are not being used as much as we could be," Dai said.
The devastation in Sichuan province and surrounding areas has prompted an outpouring of goodwill from across China, resulting in $500 million in donations of cash and supplies and a mobilization of tens of thousands of volunteers.
Banners, seemingly plastered everywhere and printed in the bold red typically reserved for party slogans, call on people to "Fight the earthquake!" Car caravans on the road around the hardest-hit areas are bringing in supplies including cooking oil and cellphones donated by businesses.
The influx of so many young people to the areas devastated by the quake is reminiscent of Mao Zedong's "up to the mountains and down to the villages" campaign that started in 1968 and brought millions of urban youths to rural areas to be reeducated as "cultured peasants."
But as the number of quake volunteers has ballooned, the Communist Youth League, which initially put out the call through text messages and television advertisements, has become more ambivalent about the helpers, who now number about 54,000.
In recent days, the group cautioned that volunteers without proper training could encounter dangers -- becoming victims themselves -- or could consume precious water and food supplies in the affected region. Local officials have said volunteers could help by teaching children, donating supplies and providing informal counseling, rather than entering rescue sites.
This has led to disappointment among some volunteers who had hoped to help those in the worst-hit regions but were instead sent to locations where they could be assured of their own safety.
On computer bulletin boards popular with young people, there has been impassioned debate about whether some volunteers were just getting in the way.
"Some volunteers claim to be volunteers, but my friends and I call them 'tourists on a one-day tour to the quake-hit region,' " wrote one person on the Tianya forum. On a board run by China's Red Cross, another writer discouraged inexperienced volunteers: "We ordinary people have a loving heart but no sufficient skills. So do not go to the front of the disaster-hit region. If we get there, the local people have to feed us and provide accommodation for us."
Li and her friends didn't want to be that kind of volunteer.
As graduates of some of China's best colleges and with professional jobs, Li and her group are among China's emerging middle class. Most took a week off without pay to come to Sichuan and spent a month's pay or more on airfare and supplies for victims.
Li said she got the idea to organize a trip from a text message sent to her phone by the Communist Youth League the day after the quake hit. She wanted to spend a few days preparing, but "the longer I waited, the more anxious I was to go," she said.
Li gave herself and the other volunteers just two days, assembling donated supplies from Shanghai-based businesses and buying the rest with their own money. By the time they made it to the airport, their bags were bursting with new camping gear and supplies ranging from masks, antibiotics, disinfectant wipes and mosquito spray to packaged tofu and duck neck.
"We didn't want to burden anyone," explained Sun Qingfei, 25, an advertising sales executive who arrived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, wearing a hard hat.
The group hoped to get a quick start, but ran into the bureaucracy of the volunteer movement. When they couldn't get through to the Youth League by phone, they turned to China's Red Cross. They spent most of Sunday filling out forms and waiting for an assignment. After 24 hours, they got orders to head to Feishui.
The first day, Li and three other women were told to watch the group's supplies so they wouldn't be stolen, which she did patiently from her red yoga mat until the men returned.
Most of the men were assigned to help a village leader determine a way to hike up to some houses and help residents retrieve important items.
Dai, who had studied medical forensics in college, was assigned to the medical team. But there were about a dozen doctors and nurses for half a dozen patients, so he spent most of the day fetching bandages and pills.
He said he felt frustrated that volunteers' skills were not being matched better with needs, but understood the government's concerns about keeping volunteers safe. He said some of his fellow volunteers were "very passionate but also a little hot-headed," wanting to rush into dangerous areas without knowing the risks.
"Even young girls want to go to the frontiers," he said, reciting a Chinese proverb.
The group's third day out, Tuesday, was much like the second. They helped the villagers cook and ran errands for the medics. That night, the group was so frustrated that it voted to ask for a new assignment.
But by Wednesday, they had gotten used to their new surroundings and had made many friends among the villagers. School had just reopened and there was a lot to do. While the men continued to help villagers salvage items from their homes, the women now had a purpose too. They acted as surrogate big sisters to the children whose parents had been injured, playing with them and helping them with daily chores.
By then, Dai said, everyone's goals for their stay had become more modest. He said he had been moved by the stories of people who had lost their homes and realized that just talking with victims could be of great help. Even if the volunteers can't save lives, he said, "I hope we can comfort their hearts."
Researchers Wu Meng in Shanghai and Crissie Ding contributed to this report.
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