When 19-year-old Yin Yuzhen got married, she never thought she would settle down in a desert. Almost three decades have passed, she is still there.
Yin, a native of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, married Bai Wanxiang in 1985, and followed him to his hometown of Jingbeitang, a remote county in Mu Us desert, one of the biggest sandy land in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
For local villagers, Yin’s arrival was a surprise. “It was strange that she agreed to come because here’s nothing but desert,” said Cao Zhanyong, secretary of the county committee of the Communist Party of China. “It was like a miracle.”
For Yin, however, the hostile environment was beyond her imagination.”It was such a blow to me when I saw the environment. I couldn’t accept it at first,” Yin recalled.
Her bridal chamber was a basement dug into the sand and seemed so vulnerable that even a random sandstorm could destroy it. Every time the sandstorm came, Yin and her husband had to clear the sand immediately, otherwise their house would be buried.
The difficulties of the environment were nothing in front of the loneliness that swallowed her every day.
She saw no one but her husband in the first 40 days after her arrival. When the first person passed by her door, she rushed out but the person was already disappearing into the haze. Disappointed, she went back home and put a basin on the footprint, so that she could come to see it every day.
Stubborn as she was, she wanted change. A small tree beside the county’s well gave her inspiration. “If this tree can live, I might plant more trees here,” Yin said.
In 1986, she decided to start planting trees in the desert. “I would rather die planting trees than be buried in the sand,” she said.
She had few resources to help her on the way. The only property Yin’s family had were a lamb and a three-legged sheep. Yin sold the sheep and bought 600 saplings. In this way, she started her fight against the desert. Yin’s husband Bai toiled endlessly outdoors, accepting no money but saplings so that he and his wife could plant them in the desert.
Over the past 28 years, Yin and her husband have planted over 600,000 trees, covering an area totaling 1,620 acres. In 2005, the couple established their own tree-planting company, which also offers organic vegetables. Their next aim is to help local villagers to get rich. Enditem
Source: youtube.com
An Inner Mongolian Farmer plants trees in the desert of Inner Mongolia.
by Jonah Kessle