RTÉ Foreign Editor Margaret Ward reports from Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan, China (half way between the city of Chengdu and the epicentre of the quake at Wenchuan)
Rain pours down on the Juyuan middle school, turning the yard into a muddy swamp. At 2.30pm yesterday afternoon (Monday), 900 students and their teachers were in their classrooms here. 24 hours later, the schoolyard is one of the biggest mortuaries in China. 
The school building looks like it just sheared off the gable wall. Two huge cranes are working to lift the rubble. As we approach we can hear angry voices, desperate parents trying to force their way past the police and army who are guarding the perimeter of the search and recovery site.
'I want to find my child myself,' one woman shouts. Other are angry that they are not getting any information. Friends and relatives try to calm the parent down but the whole yard is a mass of grief.
We walk over to one of the makeshift tents, just pink and blue material on sticks. The floor is mud, the rain has soaked everything. 14-year-old Liu Qin is lying on a wooden board, her mother is tenderly cleaning her arm which sticks out from the cotton sheet that wraps her body. She has just been identified.
The family lets off fireworks to chase the evil spirits and light incense, trying to maintain dignity in the midst of chaos. 'We will take her body home soon', they say, 'because no one has told us what else to do'.
Behind them, the body of a teenage boy lies unclaimed on a piece of wood, his legs twisted, blood is seeping into the mud below. No one tends him so far, but he is probably also an only son.
With China’s one child policy, many of the parents who lost a child here today don’t have any other children. Of the 900 students believed to be buried, only 18 have been found alive.
A shout goes up, and three more bodies arrive into the tent, carried by soldiers and followed by parents desperate for news. When someone realises it is their child, the wailing begins.
When we first arrived the bodies were coming out in dribs and drabs, now there’s almost a queue to get into the tents.
We’re talking to a man who is waiting for news of his son when a shout goes up – 'there’s someone alive'.
The man starts to run toward the official with the megaphone and we race with him through the crowd. The official calls out the names of the two people they have managed to speak to in the rubble. They are stable, he reports.
'Not mine', the man says and turns away to resume his wait. 'I don’t have much hope left'.
A few minutes later there’s another drama. A body that was being brought to a tent for identification shows signs of life, and an ambulance is brought.
But these are tiny glimpses of hope. The reality is that the Juyuan schoolyard is now a mass morgue.
All across Sichuan, these scenes are being repeated. There will have to be questions about the quality of construction of some of these schools, which toppled while other buildings around are still standing.
But these are for another time. Today the parents are crying their hearts out. And this town’s teenagers are gone.
Margaret Ward
