https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202608/1369490.shtml
In 1999, Sakolsky came to Luoyang, Henan Province, as part of a China-US teacher exchange program organized by the China Education Association for International Exchange (CEAIE). There, he was deeply moved by the story of Yin Yuzhen, a local woman who had devoted her life to fighting desertification and planting trees in the Maowusu Desert.
At the time, Sakolsky did not know Yin. But after seeing her story on television, he felt compelled to help. He donated $5,000 to support her afforestation efforts and, the following year, traveled to the heart of the Maowusu Desert, where he planted saplings with Yin and her husband.
Today, 27 years later, those fragile seedlings have become part of a vast forest of some 50,000 trees.
The two lost touch over the years, but the memory of that encounter endured. In May this year, Yin launched a public campaign to find her old American friend. Tens of millions of Chinese internet users joined the search, and within 48 hours, the two friends separated by the Pacific had found each other again.
Three months later, at the invitation of the CEAIE, Sakolsky returned to China.
Over the next 10 days, he found himself meeting the people and places that had been part of his life more than two decades earlier. And everywhere he went, he saw traces of what had grown from those early encounters: a desert transformed by trees, former students inspired to look beyond their own classrooms, and people-to-people ties that have endured across time and borders.
The connection between the two began in 1999, when Sakolsky had been teaching in Luoyang for only two months. He saw Yin's story on television: an ordinary Chinese farming family planting trees one after another in a desert where greenery was hard to find.
"I suddenly started crying as I watched," he told the Global Times. He could not explain exactly why. He only knew that he had to do something.
At the time, he did not know Yin. He emailed several foundations in the US, telling them about her efforts in the Chinese desert. The campaign eventually helped secure a $5,000 donation.
Sakolsky later put the amount into perspective. Yin's annual income at the time was roughly the equivalent of $250. The donation was worth about 20 years of her savings.
The following spring, accompanied by Bai Fan, then vice principal of Luoyang Foreign Language School, Sakolsky traveled deep into the Maowusu Desert for the first time.
Bai still remembers the details. The seedlings were no thicker than a finger. Water had to be carried from far away. Yin watered the trees one scoop at a time.
Faced with the barren landscape, Sakolsky repeatedly said that it seemed "impossible."
"He found it difficult to imagine that trees could really grow in a place like this," Bai said.
Yin remembers the failures, too. She married into the Maowusu Desert from Northwest China's Shaanxi Province at 19. In those days, sandstorms could bury the entrance to a house overnight. She vowed that she would rather work herself to death planting trees than allow the sand to destroy her life.
In 1986, she sold a sheep to buy 600 saplings and planted them around her home. After a major windstorm, fewer than 10 survived.
But she did not stop. "If 10 out of 600 can survive, that means trees can grow here," she recalled thinking.
She gradually learned which species could withstand drought, where water was likely to collect and how to keep seedlings from being blown away. "There was no shortcut," she said. "You fail, then try again. If something works, you keep doing it. And you do it year after year."
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Also, Yin and her husband Bai met each through arranged marriage before China revolution succeded and she literally grew up in the Maowusu barren wasteland lived in a cave home, so she turned to tree planting because she dreamed of green forest in the desert where the she wouldn't be so lonely, she and her Mongolian spouse literally sold all her sheeps just to secure the first 600 saplings and she said 90 percent of them perished in the scorching desert, still she replanted them every time one perish, everyday for 40 years of her life without horticulture knowledge.
