Wenchuan: from the ruins, a message of hope and love

Early one spring morning recently, Huang Li made a dash in a wheelchair, with the help of her husband, to a shop in Gaoqiao residential community, and was soon outside hawking its services.

"All service is free today, so please come and get your shoes polished," she shouted to passersby, raising her only hand in a gesture of welcome to the shop, which was celebrating its opening. "Please support disabled businesses."

Huang's legs and left arm were amputated after she was rescued from quake rubble, and now she runs a job training center for disabled people. The shoe-shop was the third of its kind that they have opened.

Huang Li finds a new path with the support of her husband, Deng Zeying. [CUI MENG / CHINA DAILY]

"All I want to do is to show disabled friends that they can stand on their own feet and make a difference," says Huang, president of Heart Starting Point, which she founded with her husband, Deng Zeying, after the earthquake. "This is our mission."

Since 2010, HSP has offered jobs to 32 disabled people and trained 700 more. In another area about 10-minute's walk away from the shoe-shine shop are another eight small businesses, including a beauty salon, restaurant and telephone card center, that are run by other quake victims, all of whom have received help from the job training center.

Huang says the big difference the earthquake and survival made to her and her husband is that they got to learn about the work of non-government organizations.

"It's a totally new world for us," says Huang, 39, holding the hand of her husband, standing quietly behind her. "We're doing things for other people, and now we're reaping happiness."

Before the earthquake, they were well off, they say, and ran a hotpot restaurant in picturesque Dujiangyan city. "We had money but we quarreled a lot and didn't feel happy," Huang says.

The happiness she says she now feels came at a huge cost. During the quake she was trapped in ruins for four days before being rescued.

Her husband, who was in another mountain town that day, could not get back home for several days, and later, under the burden of trauma, life seemed almost hopeless for her, she says. But her husband gave her courage.

"‘I will never abandon you,' he told me."

Huang has not only come through the pain of operations and recovery but has embarked on a new life, which, she says, is "a relay of love".

Two months after the quake, Huang and her husband were already sharing their experience with others as a way of offering help and hope to other disabled people, and in 2008-09, when Huang was in a hospital in Guangdong, she came up with the idea of setting up an NGO.

Then, with the support of Dujiangyan Disabled Persons' Federation and the civil affairs department, HSP was born.

It has established a growing network of people with disabilities in Dujiangyan － with almost 200 members, and a wealth of information about services and help available, mostly through home visits as part of the community outreach.

As Huang and Deng carry on their mission, he is constantly there to attend to her needs, and they call each other Brother Deng and Sister Huang.

"I've chosen the right guy, my Brother Deng," says Huang, smiling.