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While SQR was delivering the school supplies to the children of Yanyan Village (岩堰村), we were able to get an overview of how to reconstruction of housing is going, eighteen months after the quake.
Yanyan is just one of over 270 villages in the county of Qingchuan. The county has a population of 250,000, around 220,000 of whom are in rural areas, and almost half lost their homes in the quake. The steep mountainsides on which three-quarters of the villages are located has made reconstruction particularly slow in this region.
Before the quake struck, the few hundred households that comprised the village were well spaced-out in the surroundings, with each family having an area of land around their house in which to keep animals or store food and possessions. Homes were often close to the land on which the villagers farmed.
Post-quake, housing in Yanyan has been centralised and rebuilt in two terraced rows either side of the very muddy through-road. Timber has been used for the two-storey frames, with un-reinforced bricks and mortar filling the wallspace. Neither level has insulation, due to the added expense this would bring to each family. The terraced construction has drastically reduced the personal outdoor storage space for each house, and means some villagers must travel greater distances to their farmland. However, it can be argued that there are greater security and social-community benefits to this type of layout.
As is generally the case in rural communities such as this, families are rebuilding their own houses, but the construction of the framework was completed by a professional contractor from Mianyang, paid for collectively by the villagers.
Government grants for home-rebuilding are dependent on the number of people in the house; in this village, grants range from 16,000—22,000 RMB. The grants are given out in installments according to the progress of construction, with the final 5,000 RMB only being delivered upon completion. The actual cost of rebuilding one family house here is in the region of 40,000 RMB, leaving the villagers no choice but to seek bank loans of amounts in excess of 20,000 RMB. Although from the exterior, the lower levels of some of the houses appear to be near completion, a look inside reveals cold, unplastered concrete walls and floors, starkly lit by bare bulbs hanging from ad hoc wiring.
Winter is almost upon them, temperatures are dropping considerably, but the houses are not yet completed and the through-road is still nothing but a muddy track. The temporary village school we visited has now closed due to having neither any form of heating nor any qualified teachers. The pre-school, Grade One and Grade Two children we provided with textbooks and other supplies have no choice but to study at home, their parents unable to afford to send them to the central school in Qima Town on top of their home-rebuilding costs.