By Alison Klayman (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-21 09:19

A chance encounter on a mountain road outside Chengdu is the one defining moment radio producer Art Silverman will never forget.

Melissa Block (front, left) on location in Dujiangyan, Sichuan province, on Wednesday. Block spent a harrowing day with a couple Wang Wei (not pictured) and Fu Guanyu (front, third from left), as rescuers searched for their son. [NPR News]

His team was on the move looking for stories after the earthquake.

"We stopped and spoke with a beautiful woman," he said.

"She had walked 35 km from her village which had been destroyed."

He says the woman was with her baby and some older relatives. They had no contact with her migrant-worker husband.

"This was the one time I couldn't take a picture. I'm not that much of a journalist. I couldn't put a lens between me and her."

Silverman, and a team from America's National Public Radio (NPR), have been in the middle of the devastation and their reports are helping many Americans understand the full extent of the tragedy.

The hosts continue to post their experience on the Chengdu Diary blog, which was intended to provide an inside look on how NPR was preparing for their China series.

The blog has now become a global English dialogue and message board about the quake.

When NPR made the decision last winter to host a special week of programming from China, the American noncommercial news outlet knew they wanted to put the spotlight somewhere outside Beijing and Shanghai.

In February, NPR executive producer Chris Turpin and producer Andrea Hsu came to scout out a large city with a vibrant cultural scene, historical significance and a booming economy. A city that was well known in China, but relatively unknown to most of NPR's 26 million listeners.

That city was Chengdu.

Over the next few months, preparations were made for a variety of feature stories that would air in May to introduce NPR listeners to China and Chengdu.

Two of the hosts on NPR's flagship afternoon news program All Things Considered, Melissa Block and Robert Siegel, arrived before the scheduled week of programming to put together their stories.

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