Wang Huiqiong and her husband were on the verge of opening a guesthouse when the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province ripped their lives apart. They had spent 60,000 yuan (US$8,800) to build it, borrowing the money from a bank and various relatives.

Today, the cleft-riddled structure stands waiting to be demolished, while 63-year-old Wang must now live in a shack her family fashioned from boards, logs and bricks. The roof is swathed with tarps weighed down by concrete hunks.

"An older couple should be able to enjoy some happiness," she said, sobbing. "The guesthouse was our dream. It was beautiful, and we could meet people from outside the village while earning good money. We had hoped we'd live a good life, but that's all shattered now."

Wang was among the few villagers who stayed in Qingping township of the city of Mianzhu following the quake, with recovery moving slowly in the more remote areas of the Longmen Mountains. Many rural residents have since relocated to cities.

Her husband suffered a broken leg in the disaster and, even after receiving free medical treatment in Hebei province, has been unable to restart work. The government still provides them with free rice.

"We have no way to make money," said Wang. "We need cash to live on, pay off our debts for the guesthouse and then tear it down."

The government had given them 22,000 yuan, but this is not enough to save them from their financial woes, she said.

Wang's son works as a safety monitor for the landslide-prone roads leading from Qingping, which groan with construction vehicles and usually end after several kilometers under tons of stone and mud.

Many buildings have disappeared without a trace in Qingping. Apart from an uprooted placard leaning against a folded power line, there is no evidence the Ginko Holiday Resort ever existed after it and its May 12 guests were completely buried by landslides, while nearby buildings were either flooded with earth or water, as landslides had affected the local waterways.

Waterfalls spewed from the ground-floor doorways of an apartment complex perched on a ridge, just downstream from the splinters of an ancient wooden dam.

A world away in downtown Shifang, the county-level city bears few visible scars from last May's seismic violence. However, nearby Yinhua township remains a scattering of ruins, a constellation of tents and temporary houses.

Yinhua in Shifang is located only 20km away from Wenchuan County, the epicenter. Both cities of Mianzhu and Shifang are under the jurisdiction of the city of Deyang, which borders Wenchuan.

Xie Zifa and his family of four live in one of the few houses still habitable. He runs a cookware shop from the ground floor.

"Actually, the quake was good for business. A lot of people have had to buy new household goods to replace what they lost," he said.

For all those families living in their partially destroyed old homes, the government will tear the building down and replace them with new 25-sq-m houses.

Xie's will be ready within a year, he said, while neighbor Cheng Weifu said his family expects to have theirs within two, but first they must clear the rubble of their old farmhouse.

"The temporary house is OK to live in for now but it isn't as convenient as our home before the quake," said Cheng, whose 12-year-old daughter died when the roof of Yinhua Middle School classroom collapsed. His three other girls survived.

The school still stands, barely. Zhang Yuyang, 15, a former classmate of Cheng's daughter, said: "I miss our old middle school. Our temporary school is just so-so."

Her friend, 14-year-old Sun Ying, added: "I hope we can go back to how it was before the earthquake. I want to live a peaceful life."

Students and teachers in Hongbai township in Shifang have also been grappling with the emotional upheaval caused by the quake.

"There's a lot of psychological trauma," said Zhang Yong, a teacher at Hongbai Middle School, who explained a sign of this was the growing number of discipline problems at the school. "Some of the students have started misbehaving in classes," he said. "Many of them don't like to talk and won't raise their hands to ask questions."

The teachers have now built a wooden room in their temporary school that serves as an escape and a place for them to discuss their problems with peers. Hongbai also has counselors, but Zhang said he is concerned about their qualifications.

Most were trained by volunteers for not even a month, he said. "But good psychological counseling requires longer training, and there just aren't enough people who can provide this."

He believes the emotional problems arising from the quake are not confined to those who lost loved ones.

"Even for those who haven't lost love ones, the destructive force of the quake has devastated their sense of security," said Zhang. "Only time can help heal the trauma."

(China Daily May 14, 2009)