A good man from the badlands lives his father's final words

We were groping in darkness.

Tseringben and I were floundering, flailing, grasping－doing what you do when you can't see what's in front of you. Gloom glues your eyes shut and paints your vision blank, if not black.

All you can do is blindly fumble forward. By chance, we stumbled into each other.

We had no idea we'd not only find light ourselves, but also bring it to thousands of nomadic children, together, in the following years, forging a future neither of us could imagine then.

That is, over the following decade, we'd install solar panels in all the primary schools in Qumarleb county in Qinghai province's Yushu, followed by computers, libraries, clothes, coal, food, medicine, surgeries, scholarships and even yaks.

I'd lost my sense of being during 15 journeys through the Wenchuan quake zone, where 90,000 people died and tens of millions were left homeless in 2008. I spent birthdays at a mass grave and learned hell is a very real place.

Tseringben had just lost his father.

"The spiritual peak on which I'd stood was suddenly gone," Tseringben told me.

His dad's final words instructed him to do good unto others.

We'd both recently felt how even mountains, physical and psychological, can fall away instantly and what this means for the people around them. He'd survived the 2011 Yushu quake soon after his father died and soon before we met in an isolated community on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Loss pervaded our waking moments. And our sleep. It became a passenger, yet we rode inside it like a vehicle we couldn't exit.

Tseringben's father wasn't educated but was wise. He didn't attend school, but taught himself to read Tibetan. His mother is illiterate, and neither of his parents learned Chinese.

"My mom and dad were the kindest, most compassionate people I've met," Tseringben recalls.

"Even when we were very poor, my family would share food and clothes with villagers who had even less. My father told me: 'Tsering, make the most of your chance to go to school and become educated. We'll do whatever it takes to get you through school. We'll even sell our house if we have to.

'But remember! Intelligence and wisdom aren't necessarily the same. Kindness is the most important thing.' These words transformed my young mind."

Tseringben's veneration of education compelled him to become a teacher, largely so he could provide other children the same precious opportunity his family gave him.

He was teaching a class in Yushu's remote Yege township when his brother called to tell him their father didn't have long to live.

His father saw him enter the room. "He tried to smile. He was so pale. He said, 'There's my son!'" His frail voice wafted as he presented his final wishes to Tseringben.

"There's a lot to do," he said.

He told his son to be wise and kind, and how. And then he was gone.

Upon graduating from university, Tseringben could have taken many comfy jobs throughout the region. But remembering his father's legacy, he volunteered for placement in the school with the harshest conditions authorities could find.

"Even the people who lived in Yege called it no man's land," he told me in 2011.

Tseringben has probably never thought of me as his student to this day.

But he has taught me many of the most important lessons I've learned about life－lessons he learned from his father.

He and I didn't just find light or create it together, or share it with others. Along the way we generated it in each other. And we still do.