Tan Tianzheng wakes up every morning at around 5am to knead dough with her daughter-in-law Wang Fang in the darkness before dawn. Once ready, the two peddle their steamed buns to workers repairing the road on their doorstep.

Children Wang Dan(second from left), Luo Xingyang(third from left) and Mi Xinyi, all aged five,play near prefabricated homes in Yanmen resettlement center in Weizhou town, home to the Wenchuan county government, on April 5. [China Daily]

At 58, she is finding it hard running her own business, especially as she has spent most of her life as a farmer growing corn.

But she has had little choice but to adapt since her family's home and plots on the mountain slope and riverbank of Yinxing town, Wenchuan County, were destroyed in last year's May 12 earthquake.

After living on the government's disaster relief subsidies for six months, Tan, along with her husband Shang Depei, son Shang Jun and Wang, must now sell buns to survive.

"We cannot count on help from others all the time," said Tan. "There will always be a way for us to live on."

Tan's is one of Yinxing's 712 families still struggling to pick up the pieces after the 8.0-magnitude tremor in Sichuan Province 12 months ago today that devastated their homes, which stood just 10 km from the quake epicenter in Yingxiu town.

Local villagers say the mountainous Yinxing is "the last isolated island" in the disaster zone. Its only major, two-lane road, which has been vital for the transporting of much-needed reconstruction aid and supplies, had not been repaired to a usable condition until last September, while its power supply was only restored in December.

Telephone connections and mobile phone signals remain unstable as workers find it impossible to avoid severing underground cables damaged in the quake as they carry out road repairs. And only in recent weeks have laborers finished removing boulders from the road and spreading steel netting across unstable mountain slopes to prevent loose rocks from crushing the traffic below.

But Yinxing, located in the county's south, faces an even more formidable task - building new homes for 90 percent of its 2,700-plus residents and finding new sources of income for those left without jobs by the quake.

When the earthquake hit, Tan was away in nearby city Dujiangyan to have treatment on a recurring leg ailment. But her 66-year-old husband Shang, who was in their hometown at the time, was badly injured and is now unable to work.

Their son Shang Jun, 39, was working in their corn plot but escaped injury, while Wang, 42, was caught up in the disaster and lost two fingers on her left hand and toes on her right foot.

The family now live together in a three-room shack, built using wood pillars and bamboo mats handed out by the local government along with 2,000 yuan (US$293) in relief subsidies. Their makeshift house stands about 150 m from a nearby mountain slope.

The two-story home they used to share, which was reduced to rubble in the quake, is now simply a place they visit to collect firewood to cook with, a source which proved invaluable during the harsh winter months.