The sky was hazy, and so were the fields. Sandy winds rolled like waves across the loess highlands in Gansu Province, China. No greenery was in sight. A few houses, sparsely strewn in the valleys and on the mountain slopes, looked lonely and lifeless.

Chiu Yu-fen, a Tzu Chi commissioner from Shanghai, asked the man curiously, "How are you going to take a bath with so little water?"

"I've never taken a bath in my life."

Chiu was surprised. "Didn't you take a bath when you got married?" she asked.

"No."

"And your wife?"

"She didn't, either."

This was a remote, backward village in Dongxiang County, four hours' drive from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province in northwest China. The local people take only two baths in their lifetime--when they are born and when they die. If there is any extra water beyond their basic needs, a lucky few might get to bathe before their weddings. Normally, they wash with only three cups of water: one is poured down on the top of their heads to wash their faces, the second on their bodies, and the last on their feet.

It is really hard to imagine the tough life they lead. People living in modern society bathe at least once a day, but this man had never taken a bath in his whole life. He said usually he and his family soaked a towel in water and then used the same towel to cleanse their bodies in turn. Chiu looked the man up and down and wondered why he did not emit any bad odor.

The origin

Surveying her surroundings, Chiu could not see any roads on the loess highlands. She wondered how local people kept in touch with the outside world. She suddenly felt sad when she realized how inconvenient and difficult their lives must be.

Back in 1991, Tzu Chi began implementing relief programs in China. Through contacts with Yen Ming-fu of the China Charity Federation, Tzu Chi learned that Gansu suffered from continuous droughts and people were badly in need of cisterns to store the precious rainwater.

In Gansu, those who were better off built their own cisterns. Families that were not so well-to-do dug cisterns in the earth, but these lasted only three years at most because the soil would permeate the water. As for the poor, they often had to trek three, seven, or even ten hours to fetch water. The amount of time and energy spent on obtaining water was tremendous. What's more, water fetched this way was not pure and clean because it often contained an overabundance of salt and minerals. Not even animals would touch this kind of water.

In 1997, with help from the China Charity Federation, Tzu Chi built 300 water cisterns in the two counties of Huining and Tongwei. The project was undertaken by Tzu Chi volunteers from Tainan, southern Taiwan. Two years later, Tzu Chi people from Shanghai took over and continued to build more cisterns in Dongxiang County. Chiu and several other volunteers from Shanghai visited the area for the first time in October 1999. Since then, she has formed an indissoluble bond with the place.

The Hui people in Dongxiang County

The residents of Dongxiang County are mostly Hui people, one of the minority ethnic groups in China. Because they only speak their own language and because transportation is inconvenient, they continue to lead a closed, simple life.

Lin Pi-yu, a Tzu Chi volunteer who has visited the area four times, described her impression: "It happened to be winter every time we went there. All that met our eyes were endless stretches of bare loess [a fine-grained yellowish brown deposit of soil left by the wind]. Not a single blade of green grass was in sight. Flocks of sheep had nothing to eat but sun-baked corn stalks and leaves. Almost every child had scabies on their heads, and their skin was covered with ringworm. Just looking at them made my heart ache."

Although the area is stricken with poverty--in a typical room, mud walls are pasted with newspapers, and the only furnishings are kangs (heatable brick beds), pots and pans--most houses are clean and tidy. In a place where the wind blows sand around all the time, how can all the tablecloths, bed sheets, and men's turbans stay as white as they are? We can only say it must be "a blessing from Allah."

Most families raise two or three sheep or grow potatoes to sustain their livelihood. Some men go a long way to Lanzhou to look for jobs, but they can only work at construction sites because they are illiterate and can only speak the Hui language. When they have work to do, they earn a mere 10 Renminbi (US$1.20) a day. Communications are poor, and when the men go out to work, their wives have no way of knowing when they will return home. The women have to take care of everything from fetching water and farming to raising children.

Lin, who had been to many places around the world, said, "Life is really hard in Gansu. Only one in ten families can afford to eat food made from wheat; the rest have only potatoes to eat." If there are pickled vegetables to go with the potatoes, it is deemed a good meal. Only when there are guests will the locals serve noodles, ground corn, or steamed buns. But though life is harsh, the local people bear it with fortitude.

Springs of life

Because there is almost no groundwater in the dry, barren land of Gansu, local people must depend on rainwater, which is collected and stored in cisterns and used sparingly. The cisterns are springs of life for these people.

Chiu talked about the construction financed by Tzu Chi. "We provide the building materials, including bricks, sand, cement, and water-collecting pipes. The households for which the cisterns are built undertake the construction themselves. If there are only widows, children, elderly or sick people in a family, other villagers help in the construction. Each cistern costs 1,000 Renminbi (US$121) and can last 20 to 25 years."

Rainwater is collected on the roofs and in the courtyards and then flows through a filtering pond into a bottle-shaped cistern for storage. For a family of five, the rain collected during the rainy season--from July to September--is enough to sustain them for half a year. A Tzu Chi volunteer said, full of hope, "With these cisterns, the villagers can use the time saved from fetching water to do other work that can improve their living conditions."

Improved life

With the new cisterns, the water shortages that affected people and livestock in Dongxiang County have been greatly alleviated, and the local livestock and farming industries have been stimulated. The China Charity Federation said that since villagers no longer need to trek long distances to remote sources to fetch water, they can now go out to work and make some extra money. What's more, because most of the cisterns were constructed in the courtyard of each household, villagers have developed better sanitation practices, thus raising their health levels.

If the construction of 2,000 cisterns means that 2,000 more people can go out to work, and if every person who goes out to work makes 2,000 Renminbi (US$242) a year, then the area can rake in four million Renminbi (US$483,300) a year.

A local villager named Ma Mai-cai, whose house was being renovated, said, "Since Tzu Chi helped us build our cistern and solved the drinking water problem, my son has been able to go out of the village to work and our life has been getting better."

Back in the earlier days, when Tzu Chi financed the construction of 434 cisterns in Beiling and Gaoshan villages, that area had only 1,181 domestic animals, including 468 donkeys and 713 sheep. Each household had an average of only two sheep to help bring in money. But by the end of 2002, the number of sheep each household owned increased to 7.6. "Before, even people had no water to drink. How was it possible for us to provide water for the sheep?" remarked a villager. Because the cisterns have greatly improved their lives, local people dubbed them "Water of Happiness, Cisterns of Wealth."

A new school

Every time Tzu Chi volunteers visit the area, they always become the center of attention. One time when they were visiting again, almost all the children of the village--nearly 40 of them--followed them around. The children, whose cheeks were chapped and frostbitten, broke into smiles when they received candy from the volunteers.

It was not a holiday, so Chiu asked the village head, "Why aren't these children in school?"

"If they want to go to school, they have to go out at three in the morning and walk for five hours to reach the nearest elementary school," replied the village head. "Even my own children don't bother doing that."

Although the children could not attend formal schools established by the government, they could fortunately study at small religious schools in the village that taught reading and the Koran. (The Huis, descendants of ancient Arab and Persian traders in China, are mostly Muslim.)

Lin thought to herself, "We must find a way to help these children." Her only regret in life was that she herself did not have the chance to receive a complete formal education when she was young. She firmly believed that only with a good education could these children have any hope for the future.

Chiu held the same view. "When I was in junior high school, my family was so poor that we couldn't afford my school tuition. My mother had to go around borrowing money for me. So I made a vow: one day when I had the ability, I would support other children who wanted to go to school."

Chiu thus started a fundraising drive. With the support of Lin and many other Tzu Chi volunteers, they managed to raise enough money to build an elementary school in the local area.

In June 2004, ground was broken in Cheshuiwan Village for the elementary school. Five months later the school was completed, and it was inaugurated at the same time as the seventh batch of cisterns financed by Tzu Chi. The school had five classes, all in the first grade. Nearly 100 children, ages ranging from 7 to 13, could finally go to school. "If 100 children receive an education, 100 hopes will bloom in this land," observed Lin.

On-the-spot inspection

To attend the inauguration of a new batch of 519 cisterns in Dongling Village, Dongxiang County, 26 Tzu Chi volunteers, led by Chiu and Lin Zong-ming, flew from Shanghai to Lanzhou on November 19, 2004.

Amidst the applause and laughter of the local villagers, the volunteers performed a simple inauguration ceremony. In the afternoon, they split into six groups to inspect the newly built cisterns to see if the construction quality was up to standard. A Tzu Chi commissioner, Hsu Chuan-chuan, said, "We need to make sure that the cisterns meet the villagers' needs and that there is enough water for them to use. That has always been on our minds."

The entire trip took about four days. Because the volunteers had to pay for their own travel expenses, 3,000 Renminbi (US$362) each, they had arranged a tight schedule to save costs. In addition to attending the inauguration ceremony and inspecting the cisterns, they also visited local households to see which families needed to receive aid from Tzu Chi.

Since the area is located on high-altitude highlands characterized by undulating terrain, the volunteers had to walk to many places that could not be reached by car. The rarified mountain air and widely dispersed houses greatly challenged their physical strength, and they gasped for air as they trudged up and down hills.

Chiu, the group leader, was greatly admired by other volunteers for her undaunted spirit. Every time they came to Gansu, she always volunteered to visit the families that lived the farthest away. She seemed to have inexhaustible energy. When other volunteers were all out of breath as they plodded along the steep mountain trails, she still marched staunchly forward without showing the least sign of fatigue.

One time, a heavy snowfall made it even harder to travel the area. "I really wanted to give up and return home," Lin remembered. "I told myself that we could always come another time. But Chiu showed tremendous bravery and kept encouraging us. She said that since we were there, we should complete our mission. If we went home and came back another time, we would have to spend more money and time." Toiling up and down the slippery hills to visit one family after another was tremendous hard work, and sometimes it took more than an hour to walk from one house to another. But as soon as the volunteers saw the villagers and felt their gratitude and enthusiasm, they forgot all the toil and hardship.

In the past six years, Tzu Chi volunteers have repeatedly visited Gansu and helped construct over 3,300 cisterns in the area. As can be imagined, the whole process involved a lot of sweat and painstaking effort. But the volunteers never wavered in their determination to continue with the project. "We will go on building more cisterns for the needy," Chiu said with a firm voice.

What on earth motivates them to have such perseverance? "We are all touched by the compassion Master Cheng Yen shows for all living beings in the world," said Hsu Chuan-chuan.