Wang Yucheng teaches young quake survivors to open their hearts to others.	Volunteers teaching children to sing A Better Tomorrow in sign language.	Painting is an effective way for earthquake victims to vent their fear and pain.

WANG Yucheng, a volunteer psychologist, encouraged a newcomer to join the crowd of children around him. “Louder, louder, please. Tell us your name,” he said to the shy little boy hovering at the edge of the group. His gentle, fatherly tone quickly dispelled the child’s unease, and before long he was just another ordinary eight-year-old, laughing merrily and joining in the games his new friends were playing. The sound of laughter and fun that erupted from time to time outside the Jiuzhou Gymnasium, in Mianyang, Sichuan Province, was in stark contrast to the desperate cries for help these same children heard in the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake that destroyed their town and killed many of their friends and family.

Wang is a childhood development specialist in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, and after the Sichuan earthquake he was sent to Mianyang as a volunteer aid worker for Yellow Ribbon Action, a local group set up to deliver disaster relief to the stricken province. The Jiuzhou Gymnasium, where Wang now spends most of his time, was converted into a makeshift shelter for the thousands of homeless earthquake victims who had nowhere else to go, and the team’s mission has been to offer psychological counseling to the quake’s youngest survivors. With time and patience, Wang said, he can help them overcome the dark images that continue to haunt the victims of the horrible disaster, especially the children.

“Take a deep breath, smile and shake hands with the people around you,” Wang told his attentive charges. “You have a lot to do now: Eat regular meals and drink plenty of water, exercise, resume your studies, try to help others and share your thoughts with friends when you feel bad,” Wang told them. Such measures, he later explained, could help these young quake survivors regain some of their lost self-confidence and sense of security. “The most important thing for them at the moment is to re-establish goals in life.”

Recently, each member of Wang’s team was required to daily admit three additional children into the groups they shepherded. In order to keep track of how they do over the long term, the volunteers exchanged telephone numbers with the children, and they all signed one another’s T-shirts and wrote down words of encouragement. “As the children begin to return home, I worry how difficult it will be for them to find people in whom they can confide their feelings,” one volunteer at the site said. “Their material needs can be met easily and quickly, but it will be a long and meticulous process to restore them to psychological normality,” he said.