CHINA:WANG QIANG and Yang Zhihua lost their homes, their livelihoods and any prospects of a stable future in this week's devastating earthquake in Sichuan. They still insist though that the visitors come and eat some of the rice and vegetables they have finally had delivered after two days without food and fresh water, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Sichuan province.
There is an amazing sense of community in Bayi village, one of thousands of similar villages in Mianyang, which has been among the worst affected by the quake.
"Everyone knows everyone here. It's like a big family and we all help each other," says Yang Zhenmu (56). "I was picking vegetables when it happened. I ran to the house because I thought it would collapse, but luckily it was empty. My son is in the city, but I've no way of reaching him.
"My home was only built a year ago. What am I going to do?"
Bayi is called a village but it's really just a street, a row of houses fronting on some fields of wheat and rapeseeds with a couple of hundred residents. Every house has been badly damaged, three of the villagers are dead and no one wants to spend any time in the wreckage of their houses. Most of the village business is carried out on the narrow walkway between the village houses and the fields.
Zhu Guihua makes occasional forays back into his house to check on the pigs, which survived. He can't get at his grain stock, but he had pumped fresh water from the tank on the roof a couple of days before the quake and has enough for himself and his neighbours. A bunch of flowers in a vase has survived the tumult.
The villagers are still waiting for relief workers, but they know they are down the list of priorities and will have to exploit their family connections in Chengdu and beyond to secure food and water for the next few days. Many villagers are in tears as they tell of their plight, but all follow up their testimony with an offer to share what little food they have.
Liu Xinyong (26) buried her father, Liu Hengchong (52), in the fields near the village yesterday, after he was killed by the quake.
"He was in the house, it collapsed and he died. We buried him over there," she says, pointing to the area beside where the school used to be, where her son, Zhu Xiaoyang, was studying.
The boy greets me in traditional Chinese style as "uncle", Xiaoyang, who is 10 - "and a half" - shows me the cuts on his leg from when he fled his school as the quake hit at 2.30pm.
"We ran out of the school when it happened. I was pretty scared, but luckily my friends are all OK," says Xiaoyang, a plucky character who is loved by the whole street.
This includes his best friend and neighbour, Yang Junjie, also 10. "I was in the loo when it happened, I was scared. I had to crawl out of the school," she says.
They stand side by side, like brother and sister even though the one child policy means they have neither and have adopted each other as unofficial siblings.
Xiaoyang takes me to see the wreckage of his school, past the wrecked police station, then disappears off cheerfully with some local pals to play in the wreckage.
The people are worried about aftershocks and they are also looking over their shoulders at the dams built behind their road. They could burst and everyone wants out. The area is home to thousands of dams, ranging from small local ones to the world's biggest, the Three Gorges Dam, which officials said was not damaged by the quake. Nearly 400 such structures have been damaged.
People also want permission to go to Chengdu, where most of them have relatives, but the authorities have forbidden anyone to leave the place where their hukou, or residence permits, are issued. They do not want hundreds of thousands of refugees descending on Chengdu - trucks packed with survivors yesterday were being stopped at the city limits.
We discovered Bayi when we stopped to give a lift to Zhang Zhiming, who was waiting by the roadside for someone to help him bring supplies back to the village.
He says it was mostly the old and the young who were hit by the quake, because the adults were all out working, in the fields or in the factory across the road.
"Look at these houses," he says, pointing at the wrecked buildings which was once Bayi. "No building certifications here."
Mr Zhang comes with us to show us around the devastated areas and to hitch a lift. He is looking for his aunt and happily he finds her in the 2nd People's Hospital of Deyang City later in the day.