1 Sitting on a thin mattress with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Mitsue Takami, 74, says life isn't bad in a chilly elementary school classroom. Volunteers fetch her medicine at a nearby hospital, and a fellow quake survivor brings her box lunches.
2 Since the earthquake that devastated Kobe threw her from her bed Jan. 17 and destroyed her house, Takami has been living at the Motoyama No. 3 Elementary School, sharing a room with a handful of elderly evacuees.
3 A childless widow who suffers from hardening of the arteries, Takami is one of the thousands of seniors living in drafty shelters, depending on volunteers and makeshift clinics to help with their aches and pains.
4 Like many, she is waiting for her name to come up in the lottery for government-built housing. The elderly, sick and families with children are being given priority, but applications far outnumber available units.
5 Seven survivors are crowded into her small classroom. There's no heating or running water. Portable bathrooms are lined up outside in the school yard. But she's not complaining.
6 'I'm very happy here, everyone's been very nice,' she said Sunday, praising the warm clothes and bedding given to her by volunteers.
7 Indeed, Takami is one of the lucky ones. Many older people who slept on the first floor of their homes to avoid arduous trips upstairs were crushed when the second floor crashed down in the quake.
8 Noboru Nakamura, 56, one of Takami's roommates, brings his older companions food and ferries their messages for them. His 86-year-old mother was killed while sleeping on the first floor when the 7.2-magnitude quake lifted her building off its foundation.
9 'I'm taking care of people, thinking I'm taking care of my mother,' he said. 'I feel it was her time -- even if she survived, she might have suffered.'
10 Nakamura, a toll collector with plenty of free time since the quake damaged area highways, said that despite the refusal of his roommates to complain, some of them grow testy under the stress of living in the shelter.
11 '`Just any little thing triggers a tense moment, and the blood pressure goes up,' he said, referring to one 90-year-old survivor who suffers from hypertension.
12 The quake and fires that followed killed at least 5,250 people and injured more than 26,800 in and around the western port city. As of Sunday, six people remained missing.
13 On Sunday, survivors rummaged through the remains of their houses in Higashinara, a demolished residential neighborhood on the eastern edge of Kobe. In many houses and shops, the first floors had collapsed, and the second stories stood crookedly at ground level.
14 Residents salvaged belongings from the rubble, and some prayed before improvised shrines of flowers and food set up in front of their houses for those who died. A pair of Buddhist priests went from house to house, punctuating their prayers for the dead with the ringing of a bell.

Since the earthquake that devastated Kobe threw her from her bed Jan . 17 and destroyed her house , Takami has been living at the Motoyama No . 3 Elementary School , sharing a room with a handful of elderly evacuees .
earthquake that devastated Kobe
How many people were injured or killed in this earthquake?