One can't see. The other has no arms. Together they made what seemed impossible grow.
Jia Haixia and Jia Wenqi are known as children, in Yeli, in the northeast of China.
Life had forced both huge obstacles. Wenqi lost both arms only three years after contacting a high voltage cable. Haixia, on the other hand, lost sight completely after an accident at work in 2000.
Then there came another problem: finding a job.
Tired of being judged only for what they could not do, they decided to build themselves an opportunity. They leased a barren land from the local government and put themselves in the head of transforming it, planting trees.
Since 2001, their day begins at seven o'clock in the morning.
Every gesture requires collaboration.
Wenqi knows the path and guides the friend with the voice. Haixia digs and plant. When they cross the river, Haixia climbs to the back of Wenqi. When it is necessary to reach the highest branches, the two find the way to help one another.
They meet obvious limits on their own. Together, each makes up what is missing to the other.
Haixia summarized it with a few words: he is the hands of his friend, while Wenqi are his eyes.
Year after year, tree after tree, that soil changed face.
Over two decades, the two friends have helped grow more than 10,000 trees. Where before there was an arid expanse, an environment was born that attracts birds and contributes to the protection of the area from floods.
But the meaning of their history is not only in the number of trees.
It is the way they have transformed two individual fragilities into an extraordinary form of collaboration.
They didn't erase their limits. They learned to organize life around them, entrusting to others what they could not do on their own.
And perhaps this is the most powerful detail of their history: the wood has not grown in a day.
He grew up one morning at a time.