One-way phone calls

　　This is a small village on the Tibetan borderline with just 62 residents and a dozen wood houses. All the organizations and service facilities are gathered in a place about the size of two basketball courts surrounded by the wood houses. A concrete building with a satellite dish on the top of it situated in the center of the houses has the only ground satellite phone in local areas.

　　Making satellite phone calls here is very difficult because getting connected is a problem. For technical problems, even if calls are put through chances are callers can only listen instead of talk. This means that the phonecalls are only one-way communication.

　　However, soldiers stationing at the village still find great comfort in the one-way communication because they are very delighted at hearing the voices of their faraway families. Their wives at home are also accustomed to this rare way of communication and they know that their husbands are listening intently to their words.　

　　They always say sadly at the end of calls: "I know you're listening. See you next time when we can talk to each other."

　　By Hao Jianjun, Yan Libing and Li Siqi

　　Emergency phone

　　This phone was "invented" by Zhang Yu, a signalman. He carried a hard object in his bag when he joined a medical team to sentry poite. He told his comrades mysteriously that that was an emergency phone. They thought nothing of it. Indeed, in the frontier area where cellphone signals could not reach, all cellphones would be good for nothing.

　　At some 15km away from their company location, their medical vehicle was trapped into sand and could not be moved even by all the team. Zhang Yu saw a phone line post about 500m away and went to climb it. He took out his mysterious phone and connected it to the phone line. Half an hour later, a rescue team arrived.

　　Jin Ping, commander of the company, said that it was against related regulations to use phone that way. However, they had been granted permission to use it that way under special circumstances by the higher authonlty.

　　By Yu Huagang

　　(October 24, PLA Daily)