By Kathleen Hawkins
BBC News, Ouch
18 April 2015
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Two disabled men, one blind, one a double amputee, have spent over ten years planting trees together in rural China.
Every day Jia Haixia and Jia Wenqi walk to work carrying a hammer and a metal rod. Work is an eight-hectare plot of land they lease from the local government.
The route is a well-trodden one for them now – they’ve been heading to the same place for 13 years, and always with the aim to plant as many trees as possible in the area, to prevent their village from flooding and improve the environmental surroundings.
The two went to school together as children in the small village of Yeli in northeastern China. Wenqi says they have always been like brothers, there is only a year between them, and they are very close.
To get to their plot, Wenqi, a double arm amputee, leads the way through a forest, guiding Haixia, his blind friend, who holds his empty jacket sleeve. When they reach the river, he gets on Wenqi’s back in order to cross the fast-moving water without falling.
“I am his hands, he is my eyes,” says Haixia. “We are good partners.”
Crossing the river
The elder of the two, Haixia, 54, was born blind in his left eye because of a cataract, and since a fragment of stone flew into his right eye during a factory accident in 2000, he has been totally blind.
Wenqi leading Haixia to the plot of land
His colleague and close friend, Wenqi, 53, has been a double arm amputee since the age of three when he touched an unprotected electric cable lying on the ground and received a high voltage shock.
When Haixia went blind he says it was very difficult to adjust to life without sight. “At first I felt very depressed,” he says, “and I just sunk to rock bottom.” At the time his son was four, his wife couldn’t work due to illness and, as Haixia could no longer work at the factory, their only source of income was lost. See More pictures and read more