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,”