All ends well for man who finds the wells

Searching for nature's gift becomes a way of life

People think he's crazy. But for his part, Cheng Guonan thinks it's the world that's crazy.

"We cannot understand him sometimes. He lives life as an ascetic monk and dedicates his life to other people," says one of his neighbors.

Born into a farmer's family in 1934 in a mountain village in Yulin, in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, Chen studied geology at the Beijing-based China University of Geosciences for five years. After graduation, he was assigned to the geological inspection bureau in Jinan, Shandong province, in 1963. It was a posting that was to change his life.

After four years, he became a chief engineer at the bureau and was in charge of searching for some key minerals for China's national defense industry.

However, during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), the Red Guards accused him of using his field research as a way of spying for China's enemies and persecuted him as "a reactionary academic authority".

"They beat me with leather army belts and locked me up for days without giving me anything to eat," Chen recalls. "I was strong enough to see the end of the torture, because I was confident common sense would return one day. But some of my colleagues passed away."

Despite his ill treatment, he carried on with his work until 1975 when his health collapsed and he decided to return to his hometown.

After he recovered, he started helping his parents in the fields, and he cultivated dozens of hectares of barren mountain land into the most productive farmland in the village.

He also started looking for water for the local people. Familiar with the geological conditions of the Liuwanda mountain range in Yulin, Chen can tell whether there is water underground and how deep the well would be by testing the local soil.

Helping the villagers look for water has now become his main occupation. In the past 39 years, he has helped dig more than 40,000 wells for farmers in 80 counties in Guangxi and neighboring provinces - nearly three wells a day on average.

"Looking for water is the only thing that I can do for the people with my knowledge," Chen says.

He thinks that water is the public wealth and nature's gift to all life on Earth.

"It is really a pity that a lot of water is polluted in China now. The change is irreversible," he says sadly.

He has dug a well in his own yard and treats guests to the well water. "This is the best mineral water in China. You can taste how sweet it is," he says. "The water company's commercialization of good water is wrong. It's exploiting the people. Water is owned by everyone."

He refuses money and gifts from the beneficiaries of the water he finds.

"He could have been a millionaire," says the village head.

His pension, which has risen from 100 yuan ($16) a month in the early 1980s to current 3,000 yuan, makes him one of the richest people in the village, where the average income is less than $1 a day.

But after his parents died in 1990s, he started donating almost all his savings and monthly pension to the villagers, especially middle school and college students from the poor villages.

He remains single, plants his own grains and vegetables and lives on about 100 yuan a month.

His small bedroom is on the second floor of his building and is accessible only by means of a bamboo ladder. He takes the ladder into the bedroom after climbing up the ladder at night, so nobody can enter his room. The villagers says Chen started doing this after he came back from Shandong in 1975.

Huo Yan contributed to this story.

liyang@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 06/20/2014 page29)