A Reunion 27 Years On: How One Donation Grew Into a Forest in Ordos

Twenty seven years after making a donation, American Ronald Sakolsky returned to Ordos, in China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, to reunite with Yin Yuzhen, the woman who turned his gift into a sprawling forest. Sharing fresh fruit and swapping memories, Sakolsky said China US friendship needs more people willing to take action, adding that even a small amount of money can grow into a forest.

From a sand pit to an oasis

Yin Yuzhen is one of the best known figures in the decades long effort to hold back the Mu Us Desert around Ordos. She married into a homestead nearly surrounded by dunes in the 1980s and began planting trees on the sand soon after, leading her family and neighbors over the following decades in turning stretches of shifting dunes into shelterbelts and farmland. Her work has drawn sustained attention from media at home and abroad and is often held up as an example of grassroots desert control in China.

A donation that crossed the Pacific

Sakolsky's tie to Yin dates back 27 years, when he donated money to her tree planting effort that was later used to buy saplings for the sand. Returning to the site now, he found a stretch of forest standing where he once remembered barren dunes. The two longtime friends marked the reunion by planting a new sapling together, a small gesture continuing a friendship that has spanned the Pacific.

What grassroots exchange means

Sakolsky said sustained person to person contact matters just as much to the China US relationship, and that individual acts of goodwill can add up to visible change over time. His visit is being cast as part of a broader pattern of grassroots exchange and environmental cooperation between the two countries in recent years, one that offers a different kind of warmth to the relationship even as official ties have had their ups and downs.