On Saturday I went with Megan, Shirley (a Chinese coworker) and 闫小红, an ex-military friend of Shirley's, to volunteer in disaster relief. This isn't something special, by the way. Everyone in the city seems to want to volunteer. Of course, what the humanitarian agencies really want are volunteers with medical training, engineering expertise, or search and rescue experience. The high schools haven't resumed classes either, so a lot of older kids are volunteering to do whatever civilian work needs to be done. Anyway, 闫小红 being a former soldier, he took us to the airport, where Shirley knew there was help needed, and ask a police officer to drive us to the site, which he did cheerfully. We spent the rest of the day at a cargo bay, where we and a couple of hundred other volunteers were needed unloading incoming relief supplies shipments and packing them onto trucks bound for Wenchuan, Beichuan, Deyang, Dujiangyan, or other hard-hit towns.
It seemed as organized as you might expect, although we still ended up spending a lot of time waiting around between shipments. It was amazing to see the planes coming in close to us and know that many of them were loaded with supplies sent from all over China. Most of it was medicine, medical supplies and water, although one train of pallets was full of hurricane lanterns. Everyone was clearly happy to be helping, happy to be doing something small but concrete, making human conveyor belts just to get everything sent on its way as soon as possible. Together with the labels on the boxes showing they'd been sent with love from Tianjin or Shenzhen or Beijing (faraway cities) it all gave a really strong sense of solidarity and selflessness.
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