The desert is my lifelong enemy

I grew up in the desert and I have been fighting it most of my life. The Babusha sand dune in my home, Gulang county in the northwestern province of Gansu, is my lifelong enemy.

Babusha sits on the southern edge of the Tengger Desert and covers about 5,000 hectares. In the 1970s, the sand dune gradually encroached south, threatening the county's social and economic development and people's livelihoods.

Sandstorms, which most people only know from books or movies, hit our village frequently, and people rarely ate fruit or vegetables due to the lack of water (to irrigate crops).