$5,000 gift in 1999 turned China desert into 50,000-tree forest

Ronald Sakolsky, a 69-year-old retired teacher from Pennsylvania, recently returned to China for the first time in 26 years and was stunned to see what had become of the once-barren landscape he had helped support. A stretch of desert in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region has been transformed into a lush forest containing around 50,000 mature trees.Sakolsky was teaching English in China’s Henan province in 1999 when he came across a television report about Yin Yuzhen, a farmer and “sand-control worker” who had begun planting trees in the Mu Us Desert, also known as the Maowusu Desert.Yin had started planting trees more than a decade earlier after moving to the desert region following her marriage.