In his younger days Ma Fuxing suffered the insufferable. As a baby he narrowly survived a fire, but lost both hands; at school he took four years to learn how to use a pen with his arms.

Despite his hard work and high grades he was denied a chance even to sit the national college entrance exam in 1980. Back then, no college would have accepted a handicapped student.

The next year, the grief-stricken young man was offered a teaching job at a school in his home village locked in the plateaus of northwestern Qinghai Province, but was distrusted by the students and parents. "How can someone without a hand be a teacher?" they asked.

At one point, nearly half of the school's 100-odd pupils dropped out. When he visited their families to persuade them to send their children back to school, he was made to feel unwelcome and some even set their dogs on him.

After numerous visits and persuasive speeches - and above all after he saved a child from the jaws of a wild dog - the villagers relented.

"With no hands, I wasn't able to drive it away. I could only fall on top of the dog so it let go of the child and attacked me instead," he said.

Ma was badly injured and needed weeks to recover. But when he was back at work, he found most of the dropouts had come back too.

"The child has to go to school. That's the only way out," Ma would tell the villagers.

It was these simple words that had opened up his own world.

"A village official said those words to my parents when I was four. It impressed me and I managed to write down what I read from my brother's textbook by wedging a stick in between my toes," said Ma, now 48.

His perseverance moved more than the students and their parents, but also his colleague Zhao Yuhua. They got married in the mid 1980s and for two decades were the only teachers at the school.

Despite their low income - until 2002, Ma made only 200 yuan (US$25) a month, less than 20 percent of the average income level in the province - the couple helped innumerable children from poor families, paying their school fees and buying them pens and books, to keep them at school.

This often meant their own daughter had to do without a much-needed new exercise book. "I felt bitter when I was a child, but now I understand how badly my parents wanted all the other kids to get along, too," said Ma Hailei, Ma's daughter and the village's first ever college graduate.

With his daughter's help, Ma has learned to use a computer and cell phone. What he has gleaned from the Internet, in particular, has shown the rural children a world far beyond the confines of their village.

"He's so hard-working and optimistic that it never occurs to you he's handicapped," said Chen Weijun, headmaster of the school.

In China's vast countryside, particularly the underdeveloped western regions, hundreds of thousands of teachers like Ma are grappling with poverty and illness to do their jobs.

"China relies on them to eradicate illiteracy among the younger generation and we should all care for their well-being," said Yang Dongping, a specialist in education from the Beijing Institute of Technology, "particularly as the country marks Teacher's Day."

Monday is the 23rd Teacher's Day, officially created in 1985 to improve teachers' social status and call on the entire nation to respect teachers and to seek knowledge.

Rural teachers are still yet to share the festivities.

Two decades into her job as a temporary teacher at Hongxing Primary School in Lijun village, Haiyuan county, in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Guo Ming remains single. At 46, she stays in a small room that serves as her office, and home even on holidays, because she has nowhere else to go.

She suffers gastritis and diabetes, a result of hard work and an unbalanced diet.

Of the top 10 students in Lijun village last semester, eight were in Guo's class.

Yet she remains a temporary teacher and makes only 200 yuan a month, only one sixth of what her colleagues make, because she never received further schooling after she failed the college entrance exam in 1988.

New policies issued by the Ministry of Education indicate she might lose her job at any time, as the ministry is determined to replace all the 448,000 temporary teachers in nationwide schools with well-trained, permanent staff in the "shortest possible time".

"If I'm told to go home right now, I can still manage with the farm work. But what if I grow old and sick one day with no social security scheme to cover even my living expenses?" says Mu Haijun, 39.

He's been a temporary teacher for 20 years in Haiyuan County, making a meagre 22.5 yuan a month for the first 10 years, 40 yuan a month for the next six years and 200 yuan only in the recent four years.

His home is among the poorest in Hongxing Village. "Still, I trust the government will recognize our merits and do something for us."

(Xinhua News Agency September 11, 2007)