American Funds Forest In Mongolia Then Gets Invited To See It A Decade Later
In 1985, a 19-year-old woman named Yin Yuzhen moved from Shaanxi province in China to marry into a village deep inside the Maowusu Sandy Land in Inner Mongolia, where sand drifted so high against their door overnight that some mornings they could barely open it. She and her husband began planting trees to stop the desert from swallowing their home and kept planting, year after year, through drought and high winds and conditions that most people would have abandoned. In 1999, when she was still relatively unknown, state media CCTV ran a story about her work and an American teacher named Ronald Sakolsky, who was living in China at the time and teaching English in Henan Province, saw it and was moved. He donated $5,000 through a charitable foundation, and Yin used every cent on saplings, planting each one herself, and had his name engraved on a stone monument at the edge of the growing forest so she would never forget the person who helped her in the hardest years.
Sakolsky visited the sandy land in 2000, ate a bowl of handmade noodles at Yin's home, and eventually returned to the United States, and the two gradually lost contact over the decades that followed. This month, Yin, now 60 and a National Model Worker honored by China's State Council, stood at the edge of the forest that had grown where the sand once was, faced a camera, and recorded a message: "Mr. Sakolsky, if you ever see this video, I would like to invite you to China to see this forest planted with the $5,000 you donated." The video went viral across Chinese social media, reached former colleagues and students who knew how to contact Sakolsky, and on a Sunday in May the phone call that had been 27 years in the making finally happened. Sakolsky described what the trees had become as a miracle, said Yin was a truly amazing woman, and told her he planned to come back to China this summer or autumn to plant a tree with her, speaking slowly in Mandarin learned during his years in her country.
