Images of Grief and Recovery in Sichuan

Ireland's national broadcaster RTE has just published an exit poll that suggests the votes currently being counted will add up to more than just a change of government in the country. As every opinion poll, and our own correspondent, predicted, Fianna Fail has been ousted and Fine Gael's Enda Kenny looks set to be the next Taoiseach, or premier. The poll suggests he'll have to form a coalition with Labour to reach the necessary majority, although the complexities of Ireland's system of proportional representation mean the final tally of seats for each party is still far from certain. But this much is clear: Fianna Fail's support has fallen off a cliff. The party that has retained the largest bloc of seats in the Irish parliament since 1932 has won less of the popular vote not only than Fine Gael but also than Labour, with both of those parties registering their best-ever results if the exit poll holds true. Many elections are described as "historic". This one really is. You might say "it's the economy, stupid," and here's the piece I wrote that sets out the tumultuous background to these elections. Yet even as the Irish vented anger about Fianna Fail's woeful mishandling of the economy, their electoral loyalties, passed on from parents to children over generations, often formed in the crucible of the Irish civil war, and reinforced at the grassroots levels of community life, seemed as if they might afford some protection to Fianna Fail. Many people I met directed their anger at the party leadership but insisted their local Fianna Fail representative was a good sort. Not voting Fianna Fail, one young Irish woman told me, would be unthinkable. "It's how my family has always voted," she said. Yesterday, it seems, many Irish did the unthinkable.

A gallery of photos by Ian Teh from the Sichuan disaster zone is now up here at time.com. It includes the above image of Zhang Kangqi, an official in Beichuan country who lost his wife and daughter in the May 12 earthquake. Here’s some more about Zhang from our six-month anniversary piece:

Zhang Kangqi lives in his office. Five feet from his desk sits a single bed, a small table and a television. The focal point of the room is a pencil drawing of the family he lost on May 12. An art student drew it from the ID cards of his wife, Wu Shanshan, 33, and their daughter Zhang Duo, 6. All other photos were lost in the rubble of Beichuan, a mountain town where 15,000 perished. An 8-ft.-tall (2.4 m) fence topped with barbed wire now surrounds the town to keep people out, lest they be harmed by still frequent landslides. Former residents gather on the hills overlooking their destroyed homes, lighting incense and firecrackers for their kin entombed in the collapsed buildings and mud below.

Zhang, 36, has little time for such expressions of grief. As a Communist Party cadre from Beichuan, he was working in a village in nearby Xuanping prefecture when the tremors hit. The hamlet’s 2,000 survivors were cut off from the outside world. For days there was no news from Beichuan. Finally, Zhang learned that his hometown had been flattened. “Everybody cried, but I couldn’t cry,” he says. “What would people think?” The next day Zhang trekked six hours to a rescue command center to get help for the villagers. People’s Liberation Army helicopters arrived on May 18, bringing supplies and evacuating the injured. It would be more than a month until Zhang was able to visit the remains of his home back in Beichuan. His wife’s and daughter’s bodies were never found. “Now I put all of myself into my work,” he says. “The dead, there’s nothing you can do for them. All we can do is make Beichuan better.”