Today we also didn’t go to the hard-hit areas. Instead we went to a church called Ganentang (Thanksgiving Church). We took part in their afternoon program there. About 36 Christians were present for the sunday activity.  We were told that usually there are about 50 worshippers. Due to the damages from the earthquake, the pastor has temporarily rented a classroom from Huamei Training Institute. Some of the members doesn’t know the new place. During program, the pastor spend a bit of time explaining the necessity for all the people alive to pray for those who died during earthquake. Towards the end of the program, the church called every believers to donate for the dead. To our surprise, the 36 people there donated 16,930 yuan in total. We were told this is their second donation. Their first donations were used for purchasing water and food while this donation will mainly be used to buy medicines and medical instruments for the disaster hit-areas.

Below are some news reported today. I kept their original Chinese text as reference

1. 国务院今天发布公告宣布，为表达全国各族人民对四川汶川大地震遇难同胞的深切哀悼，国务院决定，2008年5月19日至21日为全国哀悼日。
The State Council of China issued a notice stating that May 19 to 21 will be designated as national mourning days for all to express their deep condolences for our countrymen who died during the Wenchuan Earthquake.

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<From Philip on May 17th>

Today we didn’t go to the disaster-hit areas as we usually did. We took part in a press conference. I got some information released by the official channel. 

There are also some touching stories by Melissa and Andrea at http://www.npr.org/blogs/chengdu/2008/05/we_found_fu_guanyu_and.html#more

1. Number of rescue team from military: 140,000 (PLA and armed forces), 71 high-ranking officer (general).
2. President Hu Jintao paid a visit to Wenchuan this afternoon (which is the hard-hit area and also the epicenter of the earthquake)
3. Aftershocks: by May 16th, there were 5210 aftershocks altogether, but it is shrinking
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Today we went to Dujiangyan, the both sides of the streets are almost all occupied by tents of different shapes and from different material. Most people are still scared to go back to their apartment buildings. There are some better tents with big Chinese character 救灾 (Disaster-Relief), mostly they are only use for injured people or people who live in a big apartment building which have collapsed fully in the strong quake.

When we came to the Dujiangyan TCM Hospital (Traditional Chinese Medicine), we were shocked by large group of people standing outside with expecting eyes. Most of them have been waiting there since the happening of Earthquake, which make a big in-patient building collapsed and buried hundreds of people and patients. Soldiers and policemen are standing in lines outside by the side of the waiting people.

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