Seven-year-old Zhou Linlin helped her mother to carry rice seedlings, while her father ploughed the paddy fields along the Yudai River.
She had a thermos bottle in her right hand and several plastic cups in the left hand, ready to serve hot water to the tillers in the fields when they got thirsty.
However, the nuclear family is not busy farming its own paddy fields.
"The planting in my family's rice paddy has finished. We are helping our neighbor," Zhou, who lives in the village of Bailinyi in Ningqiang county, Shaanxi province, said.
She is out of school as classes have been suspended since the Wenchuan earthquake.
Bordering Qingchuan county in Sichuan, Ningqiang is the province's worst-hit area, and on May 27, it was the epicenter of a 5.7 magnitude aftershock.
The quake on May 12 and the unceasing aftershocks have made 5,000 houses collapse in the county and more than 70,000 buildings have had to be pulled down.
Despite the pain and tears, the disaster cannot block off the steps of local people to rebuild their hometown.
"After the quake, the relationship between the villagers has become more and more close," Du Fenyun, Zhou's neighbor, said.
"We live together in tents, we eat together, and now we are working hand in hand to plant the rice seedlings, not in our own fields, but for anybody who needs help.
"After the quake, the first task for our government was to resettle people. In our county, everyone has to live outside," Zhou Jingxiang, head of Ningqiang county, said.
"And after that, we'll start farming again, as people here live by their crops," Zhou said.
More than 90,000 mu (6,000 hectare) of rapeseed in Ningqiang have been harvested and more than 90 percent of rice seedlings have been planted, he said.
Source: China Daily
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