One of the first medical teams, Kibungo Hospital fourty years ago; Dr Gao Yuan Lie far right; Dr Gao Yuan Lie at her desk, Kibungo hospital. File Photo.
As Rwanda’s investment in the nation’s health continues apace, the potential for one of the best healthcare systems on the continent, moves ever closer to reality. And when that reality dawns, a group of doctors and nurses, in far away Inner Mongolia, will celebrate an achievement in which they will have played an important part.
It is now forty-years since China began to send medical teams to Rwanda. The individual doctors and nurses are rotated every year, although some have stayed longer, or keep returning. One has spent eleven years serving in Rwanda. Rwanda is not the only African country to which China sends such support. Currently China has fifty-seven medical teams, throughout the continent.
In line with the way the teams are chosen, Rwanda got Inner Mongolia, all to itself. The competition for Rwanda is tough. Applicants submit their Curricula Vitae (CVs), and only the brightest are selected. They then undergo an interview process, before those who are chosen, spend six months learning all they can about the country and the society to which they are to be posted.
Huang Yan Chun’s daughter with school children
And it does not end there. Once in Rwanda, the days are full. As well as treating patients, there are English classes, and studying tropical diseases that may be unfamiliar.
Inner Mongolia is one of China’s more economically advanced provinces, with a per capita GDP of just over $14,000. The volunteers are bound to miss the creature comforts of home. Add missing loved ones to that, and it would be understandable if most were straining at the leash to complete their terms and return home.
Instead, it is difficult to find a single departing doctor or nurse, who does not wish to return, or if it were possible to extend their stay. They invariably leave a part of themselves in Rwanda, not least in the minds of the patients they treated, and take a part of Rwanda with them.
This is particularly true of those arriving in the new, post liberation Rwanda. Their enthusiasm finds a nation with a vision and ambition, that is an encouragement to their own commitment. It is a Rwanda, that their predecessors would not recognise, knowing only, as they did, a Rwanda, that the current cohort can only imagine.
For one volunteer, the Rwanda-Inner Mongolia connection has become a family affair. When operating nurse Huang Yan Chun applied to work in Rwanda, it was in large part to follow in the footsteps of her mother, Dr Gao Yuan Lie.
Operating nurse Huang Yuan Chun (centre) flanked by her daughter and young patient.
An anesthetist, Yuan Lie, was director of the Inner Mongolia People’s Hospital, one of the most prestigious hospitals in China. Her decision to volunteer in Rwanda, meant being away from her three children, a disruption the young Huang Yan Chun, about to start university, felt quite keenly.
“I could not understand how she could think of going to Africa, leaving us for two years” Huang Yan Chun recalls, as her mother informed the family of the decision to volunteer, “I was getting ready to go to University, everything was going well, it was a shock. Although I could understand that it was a great mission, it was difficult to accept.”
Like all her colleagues at the time, Gao Yuan Lie, headed to Kibungo hospital, in Rwanda’s Eastern province. Today, the China Medical Team maintains a strong presence in both Kibungo, and Masaka hospitals.
Just as younger Rwandans, born after liberation day, 4th July 1994, know only the best of Rwanda, where their parents lived through the worst, the same is true of Gao Yuan Lie, and her daughter, Huang Yan Chun.
It may not have been obvious to her, but even as she was working to heal people, Gao Yuan Lie was in Rwanda, at a time when the state was planning the extermination of a section of its population. The 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, was started only two months before the completion of her term in Rwanda. She and her colleagues were the last foreigners in the country, and their journey to return home to China became an odyssey that must have been terrifying.
Huang Yan Chun in operating room.
With Kanombe airport closed, Gao Yuan Lie, and her colleagues had little option than to drive to neighbouring Tanzania, from where they would take a flight home. Today, such a journey would be long, and busy, but divertingly scenic. At the time however, the last thing on Yuan Lie and her colleagues’ minds, would have been the scenery.
They were too busy bribing their way through road blocks, to notice the beauty of the landscape. By the time they reached their destination, almost all their belongings had been bartered away, in exchange for safe passage. They will not have known it at the time, but they were being relieved of their belongings, by the Interahamwe, the murderous militia which spearheaded the genocide.
Now at the grand old age of eighty-six, Gao Yuan Lie, would find herself in conversation with her daughter, who wanted to follow in her footsteps. “Are you absolutely certain you want to do that?” was the somewhat understated response of mother to daughter. What anxiety did the sparse words hold? The octogenarian grandmother will almost certainly have been thinking of the Rwanda she knew. What thoughts went through her mind as her daughter announced that she too, wanted to go to such a place?
And why, having grown up with stories of the hardships her mother endured in the pre liberation Rwanda, would Huang Yan Chun, decide to go through a rigorous application process, to venture to such a place?
The answer may lie in the basis of the philosophy behind China’s decision to send the best and brightest among its young to bring medical support, to a continent many in China believe to be underprivileged beyond their imaginings.
Huang Yan Chun, bringing new Rwandan life into the world.
For most, if not all the volunteers, the stereotypes of Africa as a poor, disease ridden place, whose people are untamed, must run through their minds. It could not be otherwise, that being the most prevalent information that circulates about Africa and Africans. Yet, in spite of that, they volunteer, and in large numbers.
They are fulfilling a “noble mission,” a duty to come to the aid of less fortunate humanity. In the forty-two years, since the China medical team has been coming to Rwanda, some have ended their lives in the country. To paraphrase the poet Rupert Brooke, there is a piece of Rwanda, that is forever China, where the volunteers who did not return home are interned.
Among them is Dr Sai Yin, who led one of the first teams to Rwanda. He died of failure at the age of 53, a result, his colleagues believe, of a self imposed unrelenting work schedule.
Seen from that perspective, Huang Yan chun’s decision to follow in her mother’s footsteps seems logical. Not even a health condition that means she must be ever vigilant about her own health, would prevent. “I grew up with this idea in my mind, I felt that I needed to be part of the noble mission.”
A compelling image for her, was a story of a child with a tumour on the neck the size of the child’s head. The parents had expressed a wish to abandon the child to whoever would help. Gao Yuan Lie believed it would be worth trying to help. But there was a problem, she and her team did not have even the most basic equipment, like an oxygen tank. They nevertheless paservered, borrowing an oxygen tank from a hospital in Kigali. The child was saved.
Operating on a patient.
The stark difference of that noble mission between her and mother however, would strike Huang Yan Chun, almost almost immediately after the aeroplane carrying and her colleagues, landed on Rwandan soil. It would inform what would become a strong attachment to the country.
“Oh, I thought it looked beautiful” she now rhapsodises about her first impressions, “the sky, the weather, and so clean. The people are so wonderful, full of smiles…”
In an odd way, after a stint in the country, the doctors and nurses from Inner Mongolia, become firm ambassadors for Rwanda. What sudden changes of emotion must they experience, as they find that the Rwanda they had imagined, is thankfully, mercifully, as different as night and day, from the actual country.
What must people who embark on a journey, ready to make sacrifices for the greater good, feel when they find that yes, the work will be hard, and the need great, but that instead of harsh conditions, they arrive in an altogether more convivial place. Yes, the Rwanda they find is poorer than the land they leave behind, but with a level of comfort, ease and development, that erases the image they bring with them, replacing it with a more welcoming image.
For the new cohorts, the wish to volunteer is now no longer just to be part of a worthy cause, although remains the driving motivation, but to experience a different part of the world, while doing good.
For Huang Yan Chun, the stories she shares with her own daughter will be happier, easier stories than her own mother would have shared, if she had been more open about the hardships she faced. Such were the hardships that Gao Yuan Lie and colleagues kept them to themselves, never complaining, presumably in part not to worry the family back home, but also because they expected the conditions they found. They had after all volunteered for a laudable cause, ready to make the necessary sacrifice to achieve their aim.
Huang Yan Chun with Rwandan colleagues
Coincidentally, Huang Yan Chun’s daughter is also a doctor, and visited Rwanda, to see her mother. That would have been unimaginable for Gao Yuan Lie. In two years, she spoke to her daughter only once, at the Chinese spring festival, or Chinese New Year. The Spring festival is famously a time when Chinese families travel far and wide to be together, and it was arranged for the medical team to speak to their families back home.
The telephone call sticks in Huang Yan Chun’s mind. She had a million things to say to her mother, she recalls, but was so choked up with emotion, that she could only utter a few syllables.
What a difference with her own daughter. Should the daughter also volunteer to serve in Rwanda, she will be continuing what has become a family tradition, connecting Rwanda, and Inner Mongolia.
