He donated $5,000 to fight a desert. 26 years later, he returned to find a forest
By: moneycontrolcom (Moneycontrol)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
He donated $5,000 to fight a desert. 26 years later, he returned to find a forest
Retired US teacher Ronald Sakolsky returned to China to reunite with Yin Yuzhen and see how a donation he helped raise in 1999 contributed to a forest of more than 50,000 trees.
Yin used the money to buy saplings and continued the gruelling work she had already been doing for years. Over time, those efforts helped create a forest containing more than 50,000 trees.
More than two decades ago, American teacher Ronald Sakolsky saw a television report about a Chinese woman trying to stop a desert from swallowing the land around her home. Moved by what he saw, he raised USD5,000 to help her.
Twenty-six years after they first met, Sakolsky has returned to China's Inner Mongolia and discovered just how far that money went.
Where there were once barren dunes, he found thousands of trees.
Sakolsky's connection with Yin Yuzhen began in 1999, when he was teaching English in Luoyang in China's Henan province as part of an educational exchange programme. One evening, he saw a television report about Yin and her husband planting trees in the Mu Us sandy region to fight desertification.
The story moved him to tears. Sakolsky spent about two months raising USD5,000 through a US organisation to support Yin's work. He later travelled to Inner Mongolia and met her in person in 2000.
Yin used the money to buy saplings and continued the gruelling work she had already been doing for years. Over time, those efforts helped create a forest containing more than 50,000 trees.
Sakolsky and Yin eventually lost touch.
Earlier this year, however, Yin launched an online search for the American teacher who had helped her decades earlier. The appeal went viral in China and eventually reached Sakolsky in the US.
In May, the pair reconnected by video call. Then, on August 23, Sakolsky travelled to Ordos in Inner Mongolia to meet Yin again.
Their reunion was emotional. Xinhua reported that Sakolsky wiped away tears as he descended an airport escalator carrying flowers before embracing Yin for the first time in 26 years.
The following day, they returned together to the land where they had once planted a sapling.
The transformation stunned him.
"I never thought that it was going to be a 50,000-tree forest," Sakolsky told Xinhua before the trip, describing what Yin had achieved as a "miracle."
The wider landscape has changed dramatically too. South China Morning Post reported that vegetation now covers more than 80 per cent of the Mu Us sandy region, although that transformation is the result of decades of large-scale government and community desert-control efforts, not Yin's project alone.
Sakolsky himself has resisted taking credit for the forest, insisting that Yin deserves it.
His USD5,000 may have helped buy thousands of saplings, but it was Yin's decades of work that kept them alive.
What began as a teacher watching a television report thousands of kilometres from home ultimately became something neither of them could have imagined: a friendship spanning 27 years and a patch of desert transformed into forest.
Moneycontrol News first published: Sep 1, 2026 06:58 pm
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When President Xi spoke at the banquet honouring him at The White House a few weeks ago, he spoke of this particular example of cooperation between the people of China and the people of the USA.
IMO SO much more can be accomplished to better the life of the peoples of both nations and in fact the whole world if the two nations were to COOPERATE and PARTNER rather than confront or even compete. But what the hell, you know who's just GOTTA be number one.
The desert before the planitings.
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Reunited at the "sapling" they originally planted together, now a tree 10 metres high, are from L to R Yin, Ronald, with Yin's husband looking on.
50,000 trees is a lot of good things
50.000 PLANTED trees are even better.
I helped plant 30 trees last week
Excellent.