‘I saw the dreadful terror in the eyes of those students’

It was, 2:28 pm, and most students were sitting in their classrooms waiting for their lessons to begin. Then, on this gray May 12 day, the earthquake struck. Ma Liangxuan was having the afternoon off and was in her teachers’ apartment on campus. The refrigerator in her apartment began “walking around”, she says, and, half aware of what was happening, she raced downstairs.

“The walls were crumbling and chunks of plasters were tumbling down,” says Ma, who was five months pregnant. “I was sure the apartment building was about to collapse.”

However, both the apartment block and classroom building were largely spared, so it seemed that anyone inside them was safe and sound.

However, with the force of the quake a 5 cubic meter boulder was sent careening down a nearby mountain.

“After hitting a wall it ricocheted and crashed into the school building, hitting students who were fleeing from their classrooms,” Ma says. Thirteen of them were killed.

“I saw the dreadful terror in the eyes of those students,” she says.

Ma says she later learned that the earthquake had killed one of her students, Cao Wangyi, on campus, and orphaned two of her students and killed the mother and father of two more of her students

“Cao came from a small village. Academically he had a deprived background, but he was a very pleasant boy, and he worked extremely hard.”

In the week after the quake, Ma and faculty members stayed at the school around the clock caring for students.

“Roads were blocked and communications were cut off, so none of us teachers knew what had happened to our families.”

All kinds of rumors were swirling around, she says, but she maintained hope.

“I felt sure that my mother, brother and sister would be safe back in downtown Wenchuan.”

The week seemed incredibly long, anxiety about the fate of her students and relatives meaning she got very little sleep, and she could barely eat.

“It was agonizing, and a lot of the time I found myself suddenly bursting into tears.”

She eventually learned that her faith had been well placed, all of her relatives managing to survive unscathed.

Hu Zhengan, director of the Wenchuan county’s education bureau, says that 374 of the county’s 15,000 students and 28 of its 1,300 teachers died in the quake.

Ma says: “I realized how fragile life is and began to question the meaning of it all. I cried countless times, particularly when thinking about the quake and hearing any-