Nyima Pantok takes in Nyidrol, an abandoned girl, as her own daughter. [Photo by Palden Nyima/China Daily] 

Some young people refuse to take in their own elderly parents today, but Nyima Pantok chose to foster a helpless older woman for 17 years, and 10 years ago took in an abandoned girl as her own.

Nyima Pantok works as a sanitation worker in Lhasa, capital city of the Tibet autonomous region.

Her name in the Tibetan language means being beneficial and helpful like the sun, and people around her say her name is fitting. They speak highly of her generous contributions, although her job is not a highly valued one in Lhasa.

"She is a kindhearted woman, and she always takes the interests of the whole into account",says Basang, one of her colleagues.

"Although she had an accident in the past, and she is afflicted with gallbladder and heart disease, she always helps others," he says.

In 1996, when Nyima Pantok was 26 and unemployed, she adopted a 62-year-old named Tsering, an orchard keeper in Tibet's Daktse county 30 kilometers away from Lhasa. Tsering was childless, and had been living alone in the orchard since the death of her husband, Nyima Pantok says.

"I consider meeting the lonely older woman to bean arrangement of fate. It is not fair to leave her alone after meeting her," says Nyima Pantok, now 43.

The older woman made a living by collecting fruits in the orchard and selling them in the market.

"Bad kids often came to steal her fruits, so there weren't many left," she says.

The hard situation made Nyima Pantok think of her deceased parents. She decided to adopt the old woman without any hesitation.

When her charge suffered from diarrhea, she often cleaned the bed without hesitation. When the weather became cold, she often rubbed and massaged Tsering's feet.

"What good deed had I done in my previous life so that I would spend my old age in such comfort and happiness?" Tsering was quoted often telling Nyima Pantok's neighbors.

The old woman passed away in 2012. "If Mola (title of respect to old grandma in Tibetan language) were alive, she would be 81 years old. We had been living together for almost 17 years", she says.

"I had promised her that when she reached the age of 80, all my family would celebrate her birthday. What a pity! I could not fulfill the wish".

Nyima fostered an abandoned baby in 2004, whom she found in a vegetable plot and took home without a second thought.

Nyima Pantok's family was not rich. She took odd jobs and her husband did not have a stable job. The arrival of an elderly woman and a baby girl imposed great burdens on her family.

Nyidrol, the abandoned baby, now attends the third grade in primary school.

Ami Dolkar, one of her colleagues at the sanitation department, says that Nyima Pantok once helped send another colleague's child with a birth defect to a hospital.

"She paid all the medical costs for the child, and she treated the child as her own," says Ami Dolkar.

Nyima Pantok was honored as a national model of filial piety and compassion in September 2013 by several government and semi-govermental institutions.

Editor:Mirenda Wu