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.

　　What began with a handful of saplings had, in ways Sakolsky could never have known at the time, grown far beyond the desert.

　　Donation turns a desert into a forest

　　When Sakolsky returned to the Maowusu Desert in Uxin Banner, Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, Yin brought out an old photograph.

　　Together, they recreated it.

　　In the first photograph, taken 26 years ago, Yin, her husband and Sakolsky stood in a sea of sand. Between them was a sapling no thicker than a finger.

　　In the new photograph, the three stood in front of the same grove, now named after Sakolsky. The barren landscape had been replaced by green. The fragile sapling in the old photograph had become a tall, sturdy tree.

　　File photo: Yin Yuzhen (left), Ronald Sakolsky (center) and Yin"s husband pose for a photo when Sakolsky planted a tree 26 years ago. Photo: Courtesy of Bai Guocai

　　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.