Lydia Wallace was interning at Danwei when the Sichuan earthquake struck. She is now working for a disaster relief organization in Sichuan and will be publishing stories and photographs about the people she meets. She is also blogging at www.fiferis.com.

I met the Mi sisters, Mi Zhouxiu and Mi Zhongying, strolling down one of the streets in the tent camp in Loushui. They invited me to sit with under the tarp them outside their tent, out of the rain. Like almost everyone I met, I spent the few minutes convincing them I had eaten already: I wasn’t hungry, I’ve eaten lunch, I’m full, thank you. Mi Zhongying is 66, she tells me, and her sister is 63. Now she live in the tent behind her with her sisterm her son, his wife, and her grandson. “But my son and his family are leaving to work in another province soon,” Zhongying tells me, “so we will have more space soon.”

She volunteers her May 12th story without prompting. “I was visiting the dentist when the earthquake happened. I was in the dentist chair and when the earth began to shake, the dentist scooped me up and carried me outside.” She laughed at this and surprised me with a full mouth of white teeth – most rural Chinese her age have terrible teeth. “He put me next to a tree and told me to hold on. He said he had to go back inside because his daughter was on the third floor, then he ran back into the building.” She stood there with her arms hugging the trunk of the big tree until a young man on the road shouted at her. “‘Come away from the building, auntie’ he shouted. ‘It isn’t safe.’ I tried to walk, but it was difficult to stand up. I only got three steps – at most five steps – and then the building totally collapsed behind me.” She seemed proud of these exploits. I asked about the dentist and his daughter, were they alright? Zhongxiu consulted her sister. “They are alright now,” she says, “but they were still in the building when it collapsed.”

She tells me that like many of the older residents she has lived in Loushui all her life. Neither she or her sister went to school when they were children. “There was an earthquake here before, in 1976,” she notes, “but it wasn’t like this. My house didn’t fall down. I lived in the same house since I married at 18.” I asked if she’d been to Chengdu – only two hours away by car - and she said that she and her sister had gone together when they were in their forties. “We went into the city together and we saw a banana for the first time. We asked what it was, and they told us it was a fruit. It was 2 mao (less than 5 cents today) so we only bought one to shared it. But when we tasted it we found it too strange.” They smile at this; in the years since, bananas have become commonplace in Loushui. “We couldn’t eat it. We both spit out the banana and the Chengdu residents all laughed at us.” The memory of the trip delights them both.