| The Relief Express | ||
| By Tsai Duei Translated by Tang Yau-yang Photo by Jiang Kun-lin | ||
Tsai Duei (蔡堆), former Minister of Transportation and Communications of the Taiwanese government and a Tzu Chi volunteer, recounts how people worked together to deliver relief goods to victims of the earthquake that struck Hualien on February 6. A phone call woke me in the small hours of February 7, 2018. It was from a provisional Tzu Chi disaster response center in Hualien, eastern Taiwan. The caller informed me that Tzu Chi had begun an emergency aid operation for victims of a severe earthquake that had hit Hualien just before midnight. The foundation needed to have some relief items rushed to Hualien. Only then did I realize how badly Hualien had been hit by the earthquake. Most of Taiwan was in the grip of a cold snap at the time, so people who had left everything they owned when they fled their houses needed things to help keep them warm, including hot food, blankets, scarves, and portable beds. However, Tzu Chi’s facilities in Hualien did not have enough of these supplies in storage to meet the demand. It was therefore urgent to gather the items from other locations and have them transported to Hualien quickly. There was no time to wait till a more decent hour, so I immediately sent a text message to a few senior officers of Taiwan Railway to request help. At the same time, I asked Tzu Chi volunteers to send blankets and scarves from a Tzu Chi facility in Neihu, Taipei, to Songshan Station, also in Taipei. The supplies, packed in more than a hundred cartons, were delivered soon after to the station platform. The train was a regularly-scheduled train, so it would stop at Songshan for a very short time before it pulled away for the next stop. There were not enough volunteers to load the goods onto the train quickly enough, but thankfully, many others—the train conductor, rail station staffers, and even passengers—joined in to help load the cartons. In no time, everything was loaded and the first train loaded with aid supplies departed smoothly. When the train reached Hualien Station, the reverse happened: Everyone pitched in to help and the cartons were quickly unloaded. Tzu Chi delivered aid supplies to Hualien in this way on at least two trains a day, from February 7 to February 9. Taiwan Railway provided these services free of charge. Express delivery When the second aid train arrived at Songshan Station on February 7, volunteers found themselves faced by a problem: There was no dedicated freight car in this train. They could not just stack the cartons in the aisles because they would block the entry and exit of passengers. But if not in the aisles, where could they leave the goods? The conductor had an idea: He told the volunteers to put the cartons on empty seats. It turned out that once the train left Songshan Station, it would go straight to Hualien. No more passengers would be picked up until the train reached Hualien. Most cartons thus ended up sitting on empty passenger seats on the train. Another problem solved. But as soon as the train arrived in Hualien, volunteers there would face yet another problem. The train would stop at Hualien for just a few minutes before it departed for its ultimate destination in Taitung. The volunteers had to offload the goods, which were placed on different seats instead of concentrated in one place, in a very big hurry so as not to delay the train’s departure too much. Everyone worked furiously and they managed to offload the boxes in good time. Two volunteers accompanied the goods on each train. They got the assignment on a moment’s notice, so they did not have time to purchase train tickets ahead of time. Once on board the train, they sought out the conductor to purchase their tickets. Knowing the circumstances of these volunteers, the conductor issued them a pass to exit Hualien Station, free of charge, courtesy of Taiwan Rail. When we had finished loading emergency goods onto a train and seeing it off in the morning of February 8, I thought I could take a break until the following morning. But at around noon, I received another urgent request to transport some folding beds from Yilan and Luodong to Hualien for quake victims placed in temporary emergency shelters. I checked with the head of the railway. He asked me whether those beds could wait till the next morning to go with the other goods. I told him that they could wait, but that meant that some victims in Hualien would need to sleep on cold, hard floors that night. He reconsidered and made arrangements for the beds to leave on a train for Hualien that afternoon instead of the next morning. I am deeply indebted to his kindness. Disasters no doubt bring suffering and despair, but as evidenced in the above stories, they also set the greatness of the human soul free.
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