China quake aid struggles to reach remote villages

DA'AN, China (Reuters) - Aid has finally come to Da'an, a tiny village in China's earthquake-ravaged Sichuan province, but the help is at the bottom of the mountain and Zhao Mifang lives at the top.

"I can't go down there! If I go down the mountain, who will look after my pigs? They're worth a lot of money," she said, gesturing to a pair of hogs grunting and snorting nearby.

Nestled in the hills, Da'an is hard to reach at the best of times.

Since last month's quake, the village can only be accessed on foot, the mountain track leading there strewn with giant boulders that came crashing down in landslides triggered by the magnitude 7.9 tremor that killed more than 69,000 people.

So while most have moved to the bottom, where there is a camp of government tents squeezed into a narrow bit of flat land, a few holdouts remain in the village, living under makeshift tarps beside the piles of rubble that were once their homes.

Angry relatives say the local government has paid their village little attention.

"Our mother was up there for days. I called the local government to ask them to check on the situation, but nobody dealt with it," said a man surnamed Feng, who had earlier left the village to work in the city.

"It's only after we came back and began demanding things that they started to do things for the people left here," he said, adding that he thought the local officials were too afraid of more landslides to venture up.

Villagers said a bulldozer clearing rubble was being driven by a volunteer, not by a government team. Further up the track, a local man was fiddling with a stick of dynamite, preparing to blow up the boulders himself.

The nearby county seat of Anxian is a world apart.

Nearly three weeks after the quake, the tent city there is well-established, with rows of numbered blue tents, toilets and shower facilities, and outdoor basins for washing clothes.

One tent has been transformed into a small pharmacy. Another is a "library", stacked with donated books and decorated with children's pictures. At another, a generator hums and tent-dwellers come to charge their mobile phones.

The residents, all from a nearby town whose houses have been uninhabitable since the quake, know they are doing relatively well in the aid game, but still there are grumbles.

"When we came here, we had nothing and now we have clothes to wear and food to eat," said Yin Xiaoli, 36, a basin of wet laundry under her arm.

"But nobody here is very happy. It's so hot here," she said, gesturing at the area that was once corn and watermelon fields, where there is not a tree for shade in sight.

Others say the problem is simply that there is nothing to do.

"We might go to the city to look for work," said Zhou Mengyu, 38.A lot of young people had already left, she added. "There's a lot of old people here now."

(Editing by Alex Richardson)