Firefighters at a Tibetan Earthquake Camp Have Become the Children's Heroes
A week after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck Baqing County in Tibet, the trending scenes from the resettlement camps are not rescue footage but firefighters crouching to play football, draw, and share candy with children.
On October 22 a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck Baqing County in Nagqu, Tibet — a plateau county sitting at roughly 4,800 meters, where October nights fall well below freezing. Sixteen people died and 76 were injured. The ground has kept moving: more than 68 aftershocks above magnitude 3.0 have been recorded since the main shock, and a magnitude-3.4 tremor was still being logged on Tuesday.
A week on, the scenes drawing China's attention are not the rescue footage but the camp routine that followed it. State media video shows firefighters — some units brought in from as far as Qamdo — putting their equipment aside to do morning exercises with children, kick a ball around, teach safety lessons and hand out White Rabbit candies. One trending post collects the moments: children stretching in unison with adults in orange uniforms, drawing at folding tables, running across the gravel of the resettlement ground.
"The word in the textbook finally has a face," one post put it — the textbook in question being the Chinese school reader, where heroes arrive as names and dates rather than people. The same post tallied the less photogenic facts alongside the candy: 16 dead, 76 injured, 68 aftershocks, prefab rooms going up one by one at 4,800 meters. Another commenter described being unable to answer when his own child asked what a hero is — "this time, it's the person in orange who crouches down to play football."
The most-quoted figure from the camps, though, is twelve years old. Deji Zhamu, a sixth-grade Tibetan girl, has been interpreting for a military medic — a PLA health worker named Deng Wenyu who speaks no Tibetan — as he goes door to door through the resettlement rows screening residents for high blood pressure and respiratory infections. More than 140 residents have been seen so far. "The PLA uncles are really kind," she told an interviewer. "This is my first time meeting them, and I'm happy."
At the camps, water, heating and electricity are running again and children's routines are back, the camp's daily reports say. Children have begun telling cameras they want to be soldiers when they grow up — a line state media has repeated without ceremony. With aftershocks still coming and the prefab rooms still standing in for homes, the morning exercises continue.