AP Photo/Xinhua, Liu YinghuaThis aerial photo released by China's Xinhua news agency shows 

destroyed houses after a powerful earthquake hit Taiping town of Lushan County in Ya'an City, 

southwest China's Sichuan Province, Saturday, April 20, 2013

"Everyone is on the streets now. We can't stay in our homes. Here it is relatively safe at least", said a 40-year-old woman whose house in Shengli, China's Sichuan province was destroyed. In Shengli, there is barely a building that has gone unscathed from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit the area, once again Most of the two thousand residents now have nothing left of their homes but shattered memories. They have set up camp wherever they can. Everything they were familiar with has been reduced to rubble.

CHINA OUT AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images  Residents help carry injured people to the hospital 

after an earthquake hit Ya'an City in Lushan County, southwest China's Sichuan province on 

April 20, 2013

This quake, not as severe as the one in 2008 that destroyed 70,000 lives has seen its fortified four-floor school that suffered major damage in the earlier quake, now with a huge gaping hole, destroyed for a second time.  It is now known that 15,000 people have been injured. There have been innumerable aftershocks, sending people already traumatized and then re-traumatized into an existential shock.

"No food No water. Nobody has asked about us." reads a sign scrawled on cardboard along a country road that links these remote villages.

"The whole family ran outside. We thought we were all safe. But then we couldn't find him. We tried to rescue him but we couldn't get in through the door. When we finally dragged him out, he was dead", said a mother of her 16-year-old missing son, his body crushed under the weight of their home as it crumbled with the force of the earthquake.

CHINA OUT AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images   Chinese rescuers walk through wreckage to 

reach isolated Baoxing country after the earthquake in Ya'an, southwest China's Sichuan province 

on April 21, 2013

What a dreadful catastrophe of nature's casual devising; another force of nature destroying life and forcing people into a state of utter despair. The brief initial moments of an earthquake provoke a feeling of disbelief in those who experience it, then fear, and panic as people react with the certain knowledge that something beyond the power of humans to hope to cope with is overtaking them. It is a feeling and a realization that once experienced will never be forgotten.

CHINA OUT AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images   Survivors make their way along a damaged road 

after an earthquake hit Lushan County in Ya'an City, southwest China's Sichuan province on 

April 21, 2013

Afterward you may debate with yourself whether it was the rising racket of unknown origins 
like a freight train making its puzzlingly inexorable way toward you or the stark utter fear that 
grips when the world that you know suddenly becomes threateningly unfamiliar, as you lose 
your moorings with reality, while the very stability of everything you take for granted, moves 
beneath your feet.