Even the living weary become a happy dream when I’m with you”

*posted by Amy*

Taoping 10- July

Just to make sure everyone is clear on the following news, there has been a riot, and two earthquakes in China, and none of them have been close to our activities. We hear different things through the Chinese press, but we don’t really know what to believe, and we take it all with a grain of salt.

Today started out the same as most days, wake up, go to breakfast, have a meeting until lunch. But the meeting today fell into three parts; power point presentation, structured chaos, then reorganization of student groups. This is somewhat frustrating, since the groups we formed were only two to three days old. This is not to say I don’t think the new groups are better. I am in a group focusing on the environmental and ecological functions, or sometimes lack thereof. So after this meeting, and after lunch, we broke off and decided some topics to look into; hydrology, vegetation, building placement and ecological awareness, hardscape, wild life, river corridors, etc. We paired off and looked into these subjects as smaller teams. We did some research by informally interviewing locals in the street, and also by just rolling around and taking pictures. I have to say that there is one great way to get some good information by interviewing local people, especially the older folks in the town.

We walked all over town, and are starting to be seen as a presence, and I think the locals are just expecting to be bombarded with lowai asking questions about their town. I am in a group looking at the water and river corridors. One of the nifty things of Taoping is its series of channels that convey water and criss-cross all over the town. We did some exploring, and rolled around following channels and ended up at the top of the village, where the mountain and the buildings meet. From this vantage point you could see all the village. I should give a little context here. The town of Taoping is somewhat split into two towns, old and new. Old sits up on the hill, on a rock outcropping, just south of a mountain, and the new town sits to the east, on the lower area, that before the damming of the valley was a flood plain. I’m not trying to give you guys a detailed geography of Li County, it just helps to explain how different the two areas look. The new town is vacant because the buildings have been deemed unsafe by the government and are going to be torn down. The weird thing is the new town wasn’t even finished being built. So it becomes hard to tell what was earthquake damaged, and what hadn’t even been finished. Then to boot, the information we had before we came said the old town was relatively unharmed by the earthquake. Not true. A great majority of the buildings are damaged. It was amazing to see the damage; it seemed to contradict everything we had been told previously.

We met up a few times through the course of the day to see what is going on, and people keep coming to me, treating me like the group leader. I suppose it is good practice for the future, and I don’t know if it comes with my being older than everyone, but they look to me for answers to questions, next steps to follow, and projects for tomorrow. At dinner, Professor Dan said there would be a movie, and it was filmed in the area of China where we are. The movie’s plot was see through, but it did showcase the area, and was somewhat demeaning of the local Qiang people. It portrayed them as somewhat slow minded, and always dressing in their traditional garb. Tomorrow has more research in store, and hopefully, a little rest.