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KUNMING, Feb. 9-- Li Zhengxiang had not bathed for more than 15 years before meeting social worker Li Liping. The 72-year-old man has long been troubled by hemiplegia. With no wife or children, he lived with his mother in Zhazishu, a remote mountain village in Shidian county, southwest China's Yunnan Province. His mother and siblings passed away several years ago. When Li Liping lifted the old man out of bed carefully and washed him in a plastic bathtub with nine other volunteers, Li Zhengxiang laughed like a child. "If it were not for him, I may have never gotten up and would have spent the rest of my life in the dark," the old man said. Li Zhengxiang gets a government subsidy of 740 yuan (110 U.S. dollars) a month, about the same amount as the county's rural disposable income, but his days come and go with a sad monotony. He lives alone, lying in bed all day and relying on his nephew and neighbors for food and used a plastic basin beside his bed for excretion. "My spending is limited. I'm poor in spirit rather than materially," he said. Since 2017, the senior's life started to get better thanks to Li Liping, a selected volunteer by "caring rural left-behind elderly" program launched by the local government and a public welfare foundation Changjiang 265, which defines its mission as providing home-based services to help rural left-behind live happily in old age. To celebrate the Spring Festival which fell on Tuesday this year, Li Liping sent seniors in the village couplets and gifts, cleaned their houses and cooked them meals. | 
