Determined man takes 24 years to repay neighbours for their charity

Twenty-four years ago, Mei Guanghan borrowed 67 million yuan (more than $11 million CAD) from hundreds of his neighbours to pay for his wife's medical bills after she was seriously injured in a tractor accident and ended up in a coma.

The poor farmer from Zhejiang Province, China, went door to door, begging for any money people could spare. He carefully noted the names and donation amounts in a little brown book, vowing to eventually repay every penny.

It took him 24 years, but he did it.

According to ChinaNews, Guanghan, now 66, finally cleared the last of his debt this week — save for four families that moved away. Guanghan plans to track them down, "even if it takes him the rest of his life to do it," Oddity Central reported.

Guanghan and his wife, who is still paralyzed from the waist down, live in an almost-empty one-bedroom home. Even though they struggle to make ends meet, Guanghan made paying back his neighbours a priority.

"I had no other option open to me,” he said, according to a translation. "Honour is honour and I don’t believe in taking something for nothing."

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"He is a good and honourable man," said his wife, Ren Chun’ai. "So many others would have taken the money and not thought twice about it. He went poor all his life to pay these people back."

Guanghan plans to leave the little brown record book to his children so that they never forget the kindness of the strangers who saved their mother's life.

He said that the book of now-repaid debts represents harder times and reminds him to be grateful.