Page 116 - EarthHeroes

to drift into neighbouring countries like Japan and Korea, causing many deaths due to the pollution picked up along the way – a phenomenon called ‘Asian Dust’.
It was a lonely life for Yuzhen. Their nearest neighbours lived 10 kilometres away, so she might have no visitors for weeks. Wanxiang was often away during the day, travelling on foot to the next village to do labouring work. When Yuzhen travelled to see her parents, she found it terrifying because there was
no protection from the blistering sun and sandstorms. She wished that there were trees along the route where she could rest in the shade. When she returned home to Wanxiang, she worried constantly about the threat of the shifting dunes.
Yuzhen’s mother had taught her to be strong and to do what she could to help herself. She was determined to do something to stop the desert and make
a better environment to live in. As a way of overcoming her loneliness, and desperate to do her best to protect her home, Yuzhen decided to plant trees.
That first autumn, when she went to visit her parents, she returned with two saplings which she planted next to the well she and Wanxiang had dug. She tended them carefully every day and, when spring arrived, was delighted to
see that they had survived the winter. This made her determined to plant more. Wanxiang wanted to make his new wife happy, but they were very poor and had no money so he sold their goat to buy 600 saplings. Yuzhen planted these around their home, scrambling over the gleaming dunes carrying her spade and bundles of saplings. She would carefully dig holes for them in the sand, and then bring two buckets of water from the well, hanging them from a pole on her shoulders. As she dug, planted and watered, she sang songs about the desert and from her childhood in Shaanxi.
But Yuzhen and her husband knew nothing about growing trees, and of the first 600, only 10 saplings survived the brutal conditions of drought, heat, wind and frost. People laughed at them for their wasted efforts, but Yuzhen saw a reason to hope rather than despair – these 10 proved that trees could survive in the desert.
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