NPR's coverage of the earthquake devastation in China

Anyone else listening to this?

NPR happened to have reporters there on the ground in China to cover another story (the developing Olympics preparation) and were able to give first hand accounts of the devastation - children buried under a collapsed school, parents waiting 4 hours before help came and digging through the rubble with their bare hands. It's heartbreaking.

I've found myself glued to the radio listening every morning and evening during my commute, hoping they found more survivors. The official death toll estimate is almost 14,500. There was one miracle - a woman uncovered after 50 hours was found alive, and she's 8 months pregnant. A glimmer of hope in so much sadness and despair.

This evening they featured the story of one family, whose son was dropped off at his grandparent's apartment on the 3rd floor shortly before the entire building collapsed. The parents were hoping and praying that somehow all 3 family members had survived. When the bulldozers and cranes came, and rescue workers with equipment to cut through the re barb - the mother ran through jagged metal to a newly dug hole in the rubble, without care for her own safety shouting her son's name and "Mommy's here! Mommy's coming!" And she kept shouting for her son to come out. Almost a half a day passed when they finally found the dead body of a neighbor woman. The neighbors began cutting up a white sheet into 3 pieces. This is the custom there, to cover the faces of the dead. The mother went limp with grief. She blamed herself - "Why didn't I take you to work with me today like you wanted? If only I had taken you and not dropped you off." The NPR reporter giving the report of what was happening - had such emotion in her voice - that by the end of the story I was sobbing. I felt like I was right there watching this grief stricken mother and I felt her pain and sorrow. I so hoped they would find her little boy alive.

A rescue worker emerges out of the debris and says he has found the body of a little boy. The mother asked if the boy looked to be 2 years old, and the worker confirmed that yes he appeared to be around 2. The mother cannot accept the fact that he is dead. She asks the worker if he shouted his name to make sure he isn't just unconscious. The mother and father hold each other and cry. Just listening was almost too much to bear.

They found that the boy was being held by his grandfather, and the grandmother was behind them, holding onto the grandfather. The mother stayed with her son's body and kept repeating, "Mommy's here. Mommy's here." Even just remembering the story and picturing that scene in my mind brings tears to my eyes.

As soon as I stopped the car, I held my 3 year old daughter tight and told her how much I loved her.

Two lives emerged from the ashes

Photo by: David McIntyre
Levi Bentley at age 4 in Langfang, China. He is standing in the field where he was found when he was about 6 weeks old, so badly burned that he wasn't expected to live.

Lisa Misraje Bentley was a bored U.S. homemaker when she reluctantly went to China with her family to open an orphanage. A charred baby boy would change everything.

By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, December 12, 2007

BEIJING -- Lisa Misraje Bentley watches the boy in the No. 8 jersey as he careens across the soccer field and she marvels. His lower face a mask of scar tissue, his left arm gone at the elbow, the toes on his left foot missing, he zigzags along the green grass in defiance of his disabilities.

"Isn't he happy?" she says. "Look at the joy coming out of him!"

Bentley knows the boy probably should not be alive. Five years ago, he was left for dead in a cornfield, his tiny body so ravaged by fire that the villagers who found him thought he looked more like a charred log than a 6-week-old baby.

Back then, Bentley was new to China. She had come begrudgingly with her four children, following her husband, John, from Washington state. Together, the couple founded a Christian orphanage for special-needs children -- those most at risk in the Chinese child welfare system, which often lacks the resources to meet the demands of the disabled.

They wanted to help the undesirables. And when Bentley first saw the abandoned baby, gasping for breath inside a hospital incubator, she knew she had found perhaps the most undesirable one of all.

What happened next would test the limits of modern medicine and put Bentley in conflict with local customs, laws, national bureaucracies and even her own family.Who could have predicted the impact of one small life in China on a bored suburban homemaker from the Pacific Northwest?

Six years ago, Bentley sat in her four-bedroom home in Vancouver, Wash., and felt like crying. As a stay-at-home mother, she lived the good life: Her husband was a successful lawyer. She was pregnant with her fourth child. There was the minivan and the sports car. Yet she was miserable.

"I thought, 'If this is my life, this stinks,' " she says.

Then came an opportunity. John always had a fascination with China, and had seen his brother start a Christian orphanage in Africa. He wanted to start one in Beijing.

Assured financial backing for one year by a Christian philanthropist, John quit his job and prepared for the journey. Suddenly, the support fell through, but John still wanted to go.Bentley wasn't so sure. She wanted adventure, but China was like another planet. She had no Chinese language skills, and had always had a Woody Allen-like obsession with hygiene. China was no place to take four young children.

"I thought John was insane," she says. "But I said, 'OK, three months.' Then I figured I'd raise hell and we'd come back."

The family's first image of China didn't help. As they landed in Beijing, Bentley's 8-year-old daughter, Emily, looked out the plane window and remarked, "It looks like a trash can."

The couple settled in Langfang, a rural town an hour outside Beijing, and rented a concrete-block home without heat. Bentley remained a mother on guard, listening for the rats that scampered inside the building walls. Both she and John took jobs at a foreign-run orphanage.

No matter how hard she tried to comprehend the culture, China remained mysterious. She had run-ins with local hospital staff and officials, who considered her another pushy American. Bentley didn't fit the image of a Christian aid worker. She's hip and outspoken, likes '60s clothing, and doesn't come on strong with Bible-speak. She didn't connect here, and she wanted to go home.

The ghastly discovery came on a dreary March day in 2002: A badly burned baby was found in a field. A cluster of curious villagers encircled the infant as he wailed in agony. The baby's bright yellow jumper was soaked with blood and body fluids. Someone had carefully tucked a 10-yuan note -- less than $2 -- into his pocket.

One by one, the crowd drifted away. What could be done? The baby was sure to die. Except one old man. He saw that the infant's head had been shaved and a bandage remained where an IV had been inserted.

To read the entire article click here.