Migrant Worker

The power was out in a large area surrounding my office on Thursday and Friday. This was not the first time that my office’s electricity was off for entire business days with little or no notice, but I’ve never really had much cause to complain about it, since it generally means I get to “work at home.” This time, however, I was feeling responsible, and ended up putting in most of a day on Friday to tie up some computerless odds and ends. It was a pretty lax day, and as usual my coworkers and I ended up talking politics over our extended lunch. There was a lot of speculation about the rolling blackouts, including that Yunnan province (which has an overall electricity surplus on the grid) sells more power than it should to the eastern seaboard where the price per watt may be twice as high.

My curiosity piqued, I decided to do some fact checking on Yunnan province and power generation, but instead I came across this in the China Daily:

At least two person (sic) is dead and 31 others injured, including 10 seriously, after an earthquake measuring 5.1 degrees on the Richter scale jolted Yanjin County, Zhaotong City, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, at 1:51 p.m Friday.

A couple of things occur to me. First off, this area is, perhaps, a 6-hour drive from Kunming, and yet I managed to go two days without hearing a thing about this. I can’t blame it on the language barrier, I could understand TV, radio, or newspaper reports on this issue without any effort at all. I could hardly imagine an earthquake hitting Des Moines, Iowa and not hearing about it for two days, even when I was firmly ensconced in the Carleton bubble. I hate all the hackneyed government-run news sources, but I need to find some palatable way of staying up to date.

Second, I had no freaking idea where this area is until I looked it up. I know the counties and even some towns and villages in the geopolitically interesting southern border region and the bio and culturally diverse northwest, but there is a huge patch of northeastern Yunnan province that is off the radar of most NGOs, expats, tourists, and probably even local Chinese. I’m sure these people had little going for them before the quake. It is a harsh reminder not to rest on my laurels of geographic awareness and social consciousness if I have only focused on “interesting” or shall we say “sexy” areas of the province.

The article goes on to include this little gem:

Earlier reports said the death toll was two proved erroneous when it was discovered that the same victim had been counted twice, a spokesman with the Zhaotong municipal government told Xinhua.

Ahh, rural areas. This sounds like something straight out of my childhood in South Dakota. If there is only one dead person, how in the hell do you count it twice?