Luis Hong-Sanchez still remembers the excitement he felt when he was selected from a field of 261 candidates to be one of the just eight expatriate Olympic torchbearers.
But when he carried the torch in Jinggangshan, the second leg of the torch relay in Jiangxi Province, three days after the deadly Sichuan earthquake, his elation was tempered by the magnitude of the disaster.
"It is hard to describe my feelings," said the multilingual 15-year-old.
"I had been looking forward to the moment holding the torch. But it is always really sad to know that people are dying."
Born to a Chinese father and a Colombian mother in Evanston in the US state of Illinois, Hong-Sanchez moved to China with his parents when he was three months old.
He is now in the 8th grade at a high school in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province.
Fluent in Chinese, English and Spanish, Hong-Sanchez hoped to translate for Colombian athletes during the upcoming Olympics but didn't meet the minimum age requirement of 18.
"Being chosen as a torchbearer helped fulfill my wish," he said. "But there have been so many sad things happening recently, the train crash (on March 14 in Shandong Province), the cyclone in Myanmar and now the earthquake."
Hong-Sanchez said he had learned about earthquakes' destructive power, particularly the one that in hit Tangshan, Hubei Province, some 30 years ago.
"That's all very sad," he said. "But it is even more heart-breaking when we see how people die and suffer during disasters on television."
Soon after his arrival in Jinggangshan, Hong-Sanchez joined other torchbearers in donating money.
"It is not a big sum, but after that I feel a little bit better," he said.
(China Daily May 17, 2008)