A Little Compassion....

BEIJING — Chinese officials said Monday that the country's one-child policy exempts families with a child killed, severely injured or disabled in the country's devastating earthquake.



Those families can obtain a certificate to have another child, the Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee in the capital of hard-hit Sichuan province said.



The May 12 quake was particularly painful to many Chinese because it killed so many only children.



Chinese couples who have more than one child are commonly punished by fines.


The announcement says that if a child born illegally was killed in the quake, the parents will no longer have to pay fines for that child — but the previously paid fines won't be refunded.
If the couple's legally born child is killed and the couple is left with an illegally born child under the age of 18, that child can be registered as the legal child — an important move that gives the child previously denied rights, including free nine years of compulsory education.



In large parts of rural China, most families are allowed a second child, especially if the first was a girl.



Many Chinese have shown interest in adopting earthquake orphans, and Monday's announcement says there are no limits on the number of earthquake orphans a family can adopt.
The adoptions, or even a future birth to a family that adopts an orphan, will not face the limitations of the one-child policy.


Officials estimated last week that the quake left about 4,000 orphans, but they warned they would make every effort to connect children with other family members.

Excerpts were taken from this article.

Please Say a Prayer for China

There is so much heartache in the world...Burma...Tibet...China...Zimbabwe...the Sudan...the list could go on and on. My heart is more in China than the rest, though, so I'm asking you to pray for them today.

My heart breaks for those families who have only one child, or perhaps they were allowed two (in some rural areas, that is true). But imagine the grief when the only child is lost, the one on whom all the hopes of the mother and father were pinned. Heart-wrenching.

You can see Chengdu, which is near the epicenter, in this map--it is in the pink-colored area. Luci's province is the yellow one to the south, with Guiyang in the center.

The quake, 7.9 on the Richter Scale, swayed buildings as far away as Beijing and Hanoi, so you know it affected Luci's province of Guizhou. I am surprised and glad that China is letting so much news out about the quake. They are silent on most things.

Did You Feel It?

There was an earthquake in southern Illinois early this morning. It woke JT up! The rest of us slept through it. The quake was a fault line connected to the famous New Madrid fault (that's where the little square is, to the southwest of the big square measuring today's quake).

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Our family has a tale to tell about the New Madrid quakes of December, 1811, through February, 1812.

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"In 1811-12, a series of quakes along the New Madrid Fault in Missouri, near the border with Tennessee, measured 7.8, 8.0 and 8.1, which is 10 times more intense than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They devastated the sparsely populated area, and reportedly caused the Mississippi River to flow backward for a time." (quoted from this article.)

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A great-great ancestor of my family was traveling with a wagon train from east Tennessee to points west. When the wagon train got to central Tennessee, near the Lebanon area, one of my family members became ill. My family dropped out of the train and the others carried on, to end up in the Reelfoot Lake area. The quakes hit, and Reelfoot Lake was a central part of that disaster. My family never heard from those folks again, leading my ancestors to assume they had died in the quakes.

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So glad that someone got sick!

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In this article, there is lots of information on the New Madrid quakes of 1811-1812. One item quoted is a letter written in 1816 by a gentleman with the surname Bryan. Might be a relative! Dad says probably not...but maybe it is!

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Here's a fun site to check out...The Earthquake Map of the USA, by the US Geological Survey.