Healing hands

For the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, the People's Liberation Army deployed a medical contingent including 70 members, of whom 12 were women.

At the request of the United Nations, the medical contingent was tasked with building a level-two hospital to provide medical treatment for more than 3,000 UN peacekeeping members in Gao.

Because another such hospital in Kidal, a city 400 kilometers from Gao, was not yetestablished, the Chinese medical contingent actually served 4,700 peacekeeping officials and soldiers in both Gao and Kidal.

"When we arrived at Gao, we found only a big open ground full of rubbish and sand," recalls Jiang Ying, a dermatologist.

"We cleared the rubbish and board rooms all by ourselves. In the first month, all of us had to live in tents where the temperature would rise to 50 C at noon. And because the water supply system hadn't been completed, none of us could take a shower for a month."

After four and a half months of hard work, the hospital was completed ahead of schedule and put into use on April 25.

In the five months after its opening, the hospital treated more than 800 patients and performed 2,100 examinations and 33 operations.

This was the third time that Xiao Gang, the head of the medical contingent, took part in a peacekeeping mission.

"The experience of peacekeeping missions in Congo and Lebanon helped me a lot," Xiao says. "We had made adequate preparations, from medical equipment to emergency plans."

When Mamadou Sambe, the commander of Sector East of the mission, visited the wounded soldiers in the hospital, he praised "the strict work style, the meticulous service and the strong medical treatment ability" of the medical contingent and called it "a magical medical team".

(China Daily Africa Weekly 11/21/2014 page24)