‘I want to be a doctor’ says brave China quake boy

Li Ke is small and slight for his 13 years. His tiny build may be what helped him survive when his school crumpled on top of him in the massive earthquake that hit China last year.

He was pulled out of the rubble 48 hours after the tremor. Looking for signs of life at the Wudu Hanwang primary school, rescue workers heard Li Ke's cries. They clawed at the debris to give him water and then began the painstaking task of lifting the concrete blocks that had pinned him down in his second-floor classroom. The three-storey school in the city of Mianzhu, Sichuan province, was a pile of rubble. Suddenly soldiers cleared a path through the crowd and the little boy was carried out on a stretcher and into a waiting ambulance.

It has been a year since Li Ke was carried into the ambulance. Now he is back in class, in his first year at secondary school. He now walks with a shuffle, his right leg dragging behind him. When the rescue workers began to dig him out, he told them to take out his classmates first. "I didn't think I was in much trouble compared with them, he hold a correspondent for The Times newspaper. I just thought I had a stone on my leg." His school declared him a "Youth Hero". Pinned down for hours, he had suffered serious damage to the nerves in his legs. Doctors told his parents that they wanted to amputate both. "My father refused. He just refused. Whatever the doctors said, he told them that he wanted me to have a future." And so Li Ke kept his legs.

He doesn't remember much about the earthquake. “I remember that I was buried. I remember that I could hear my classmates crying,” Li Ke told the newspaper. “I didn't know what had happened.” One thing he does remember is the nightmares. "I dreamt that my whole class was going away and I was left alone, I was left behind." "I have been so lucky. I am a lucky person. I am one of the ones who got better the fastest." Of the 60 children in his class, 23 died. He is reluctant to speak much about that. They had been in school together for five years. "I miss them very much." But Li Ke is already looking ahead. The son of a construction worker and an ailing mother, he wants to be a doctor. "I want to go to university, I want to follow my ideals and I want to see my mother get better."

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children