Yi Jiefang

“As we approach Mother’s Day, we celebrate a Chinese mother who went on to fulfill her son’s wish of greening the desert.

Yi Jiefang lost her son a few days after her conversation with him during which he said, “I want to go back to China after graduation to reforest the area,” while watching on TV dust swirling up in the air in a Chinese desert. He loved trees and so she decided to plant them to push back the desert which covers almost a quarter of China.

She has planted over a million trees in over 10 years and says, “I want to prove that if a mother acts, the world can change,””