Grief in town of students missing in ferry sinking

SOUTH KOREA ANSAN, (AP):

The most poignant reminders of what's been lost here are the most ordinary.

Desks in the classrooms of Danwon High School in Ansan, where dozens of students were missing and feared dead yesterday after a ferry disaster, are cluttered with textbooks, gym clothes, empty water bottles, small bits of ordinary school life now infused with heartbreak.

There is fury as parents and students lash out at the swarming news media. Horror, too, as they picture loved ones trapped in the cold and dark of a flipped, submerged ferry. Most refuse to believe that, even after dozens of attempts, a friend, a child, a sibling won't answer their cellular phone. They keep calling.

They try to nourish any link, no matter how small, to the missing. Parents and school workers have locked up the missing students' belongings because their schoolmates were taking them home as keepsakes, mementos of friends they believe are dead.

One message on a blackboard reads: "Please, everyone return safely!" Another: "Jin-yong! Please come home alive."

More than 320 Danwon High School second-year students, mostly 16- and 17-year-olds, left Tuesday night for what was supposed to be one of the highlights of the year, a 14-hour overnight ferry trip to the southern resort island of Jeju for four days of fun. Now, as the hours stretch on since the ferry sank Wednesday with no word about more than 270 missing passengers among the 475 people on-board, Ansan fears the worst.

"Do you believe they're still alive?" Lee Mi-shim, a 48-year-old mother of a missing student, asked a reporter as tears streamed down her face. "I know the chances aren't good. ... No one in his class has been rescued."