Chu Siyang said goodbye to her mother and familiar environment when she was 6 in the summer of 2017. She departed for Wangli Village, Yanghu Town, Yingshang County to live with her father Zheng Jiawei, more than 100 kilometers away from her hometown of Mengcheng County, East China's Anhui Province.

Zheng is a member of the poverty alleviation team of the China Railway No. 4 Group in Wangli Village, Yanghu Town. He took the initiative to help with poverty alleviation, and came to the village to work with the local officials to build infrastructure and develop poverty alleviation industries in April 2017.

After arriving at the village, Chu had to adapt to the new environment. The biggest challenge for her was that she couldn't help missing her mother every day. Chu's mother is also a poverty relief official, working in a town in Mengcheng.

"Her mother's work is even busier. Our poverty-alleviation team members in the village happened to be living in the teachers' dormitory in Yanhe Primary School in Yanghu Town. Considering children's schooling, we decided to let our daughter follow me to the village," Zheng explained.

Chu was able to go home with her father to visit her mother every half month in the past three years.

Many female teachers in the Yanhe Primary School knew that Chu's mother was not around and took initiative to offer a helping hand to take care of Chu. When her father Zheng is too busy at work or away on a business trip, Chu lives at the female teacher's home.

Wangli Village has shaken off poverty, and Chu has grown from a shy little girl to a graceful teenager. She wrote in a school composition that "when dad's poverty alleviation work is over, I can go home, stay with mom, and never separate from family again."

(Source: Xinhua/Translated and edited by Women of China)