Hope in the Villages - Show on Wenchuan Earthquake

Filming in Wenchuan was a tiring, frustrating yet ultimately meaningful experience. First off the elements definitely acted as spokes in our wheel of progress. We soon learnt that Wenchuan town and the surrounding villages were all in different climatic zones. Our one float parade was rained and snowed upon more than a few times to be amusing. Then there were the mountain roads where I’m sure I slipped a few discs. But that’s to be expected when you’re doing a story up in the atmosphere. The worst part was the ubiquitous traffic. Every time we hit the narrow parts of the makeshift road between Wenchuan town and Yingxiu we got stuck in the most brutal traffic jams and I’m not talking stuck in one place for half an hour, I’m talking stuck in one place and then going for a three hour hike up the mountain and coming back only to find that the only thing that’s changed is the time and your never again take-for-granted appreciation of well-oiled infrastructure.

On site

Yes, I lost my cool a few times and always, I thought, rightfully so. But that’s when I learnt a valuable lesson in perspective. When you arrive at a village all hot, sweaty, bedraggled and fuming and then you start interviewing the locals about their experiences with the earthquake, how they lost a child, a parent, a friend, how they lost their home, their animals, their farmland, their livelihood, basically everything they once held dear you start to realize that you getting stuck in traffic for a few hours is rather insignificant. In fact it’s so small in the grand scheme of things when you consider how much emotion some people are forced to endure that I do believe my traffic trauma would be shadowed by the freckle on an amoeba’s elbow if scientists could actually prove they had one.

I’m grateful for the locals of Wenchuan, especially those living in the decimated village of Luobuzhai for instructing me in this way. Surely the best lessons are those not intended to be so. Apart from learning a bit about perspective, I gleaned something else from my time there. I learnt that no matter how hard you get monkey flipped by fate you can always get up again and walk out the ring. The people of Wenchuan are doing such that, not forgetting the past of course, but actively looking to the future and what meaning it may hold. Come what may, life can move on.

The Wenchuan group