AS HELICOPTERS whirl overhead, groups of middle-aged women wearing blue smocks from local Buddhist groups hand out rice wrapped in banana leaves and lunch boxes to bedraggled survivors of typhoon Morakot arriving at the Cishan Junior School.
Most of the scores who perished in Morakot, which means “emerald” in Thai, were in Taiwan, and they came from the villages surrounding Cishan, in the southern Taiwanese county of Kaohsiung.
Cishan has been the main centre of relief operations since the disaster. Others who were brought to the centre told their rescuers how they were lucky to be alive before they were whisked away in ambulances to the various centres set up around Kaohsiung County for those displaced by the typhoon.
Ting-chun Wu, a psychologist from Cishan, was at hand to help with those suffering from trauma. She was in tears watching the helicopters arrive empty, and depart with boxes of supplies for the remote communities still isolated by the catastrophe.
“They are finding more and more people but there are a lot still who have yet to be found,” she said.
Chiao-ying Lin lost 12 members of her family in Sanmin township, and only she, her infant son, her 11-year-old brother and her unborn baby survived.
A resident of Pingtung, Ms Lin had gone to Sanmin to visit her parents for a family reunion, despite the bad weather.
“After a while I heard a loud sound. My mother asked me: ‘Is that an earthquake?’ Then, less than two seconds later, the mudslide came into our house. We simply did not have time to react. My youngest brother, Jordan, was scared and shouted for help. I held onto my son, held him tightly. But we still were washed away,” she told the United Daily News.
She climbed her way out and found a central spot in the village where others had gathered and they stayed there, in the mud and the rain, waiting to be rescued.
“In the past I was very rebellious, did not cherish my family. But now I can’t go back,” she said.
An elderly woman at Cishan was having her pulse taken in a tent and being kitted out with emergency equipment and supplies, and she thanked her rescuers profusely but also said she was worried that many more remained in her village, unaccounted for.
One young man described the mudslide as a sea that enveloped his village of Cishan, and said there was nothing to go back to. Footage released by the army showed what once was a town, buried in tonnes of mud, with only two buildings left standing.
Rescuers say they have found nearly 1,000 people alive in the area around some of the remote villages devastated by Morakot, which struck Taiwan at the weekend.
So far Morakot has killed at least 93 people – 22 in the Philippines, eight in China and 63 in Taiwan, where authorities say a further 61 are missing. However, these figures do not include people from Hsiao Lin and the surrounding area.
A woman became hysterical as another helicopter landed without her loved ones. “Where are they?” she asked, before she was surrounded by the Buddhist volunteers who tried to comfort her. She got on to her mobile phone to say the search so far had been fruitless.
In Cishan itself, large swathes of the town remained mired in the mud, with trees and roads signs littering the street and cars lying up against buildings and trees. Locals worked to salvage what they could from the wreckage of their homes and shops after Morakot unleashed the heaviest flooding Taiwan has seen in 50 years.
The villagers were helped by hundreds of soldiers wearing camouflage uniforms and orange Wellington boots who worked to scrape the sludge from the streets. Crops in the area around the town have been destroyed and it will take years to recover.
It’s still difficult to establish how many people remain buried under the rocks and mud, especially in places like Hsiao Lin, which remain very difficult to reach. Also, while 1,300 people are registered as living in the town, far fewer are believed to have been there during the mudslide.
President Ma Ying-jeou arrived by helicopter during the morning and was greeted by angry shouts from locals.
“We’re busy here. Go and help the people, don’t come here,” yelled one villager.
This part of southern Taiwan is densely forested and it has been difficult for rescue teams to get to the worst affected areas.
“The exact number of casualties is still very hard to say. We are still working on rescuing people, and clearing roads to get people out and relief supplies in. Our focused rescue points are Maolin, Liouguei, Sanmin and Jiasian, also Taoyuan and Baolai. There are tens of thousands of people in those four townships,” said a man named Li from the Kaohsiung Disaster Relief Centre.
It may be days before things become clearer. The helicopters still have their work cut out for them.