When the Snows Came
When the snows came it brought the house down, literally. Mrs. Di seemed not to be fully aware of the reality as she brought us on a macabre tour of the house that was no longer there. Standing in the rubble of her home, she seemed bemused by the situation and had arranged a few pieces of salvaged crockery on a shelf in the outdoors, a pathetic caricature of the kitchen that had once stood on the site. Her home had not just been damaged by the unusual weather during the New Year Festival, it had been completely destroyed. With the house had gone the precarious security that she and her family had before the snows came. In January she and her unemployed husband had eked out a precarious livelihood in a tiny shop at the front of their home, her eldest, a daughter, had been recently married off and two younger ones were getting an education which gave hope of a brighter future. All of this disappeared when the snows came.
When the snows came, the drifts which accumulated on their roof were too much for its flimsy design. “If it happened at night, we would all be dead”, she said, “but thankfully the roof fell in during the day and the family were spared”. But if the fates spared their lives, the stresses on the family have not gone away and threaten to remain a burden that could last long into the future. The house has to be rebuilt; the rains will come in June and the uncomfortable outdoors living, bearable now in southern Hunan, will become impossible. The local welfare system is primitive and with the notion of organised help for the neighbour still in its infancy, they lack the resources to begin rebuilding their lives under their own steam. With no stable income, they are poor candidates for a loan and the government relief grant covers only a fraction of what they need. A married daughter is no help in traditional China and Mrs. Di sees no alternative but to send her two younger children to the join the army of migrant workers who are building the shiny new cities to the East. This solution may put a roof over their heads, but at the cost of her children’s future.
When the snows came they created havoc especially in the lives of the poor. Chatting awkwardly with the family in their new “kitchen” it was obvious that their home had been destroyed, not because of the snow, but because they are poor. Snow had fallen on other roofs, but they had remained intact because they were better built and more recently maintained. The burden of this disaster has especially caught the vulnerable and those without the personal resilience to recover easily. Government responses have to be on the on a broad scale and have been largely successful. “Can do” families get on with their own efforts, and use the government grants as supplements only. Without extra support the Di’s won’t recover so easily. The 50,000 RMB that would rebuild their home is an impossibility.
When the snows came, they created a news story which caught our attention for a few days only. The Di’s, don’t have that luxury. When the roof collapsed, it wasn’t only the house that caved in, they lost everything. Snows don’t last long in South China, but the world that disappeared under the snows did not remerge with the thaw. Instead a woman stands in the ruins of her future, with no idea of the way forward, Pray for her.