Healing touch

My China Dream | Diarra Boubacar

A Malian doctor combines modern and traditional medicine to ease the suffering of leprosy and AIDS patients in Southwest China, Hu Yongqi reports from Kunming, Yunnan province.

For many parents, collecting your children after school is an everyday chore. For Dr Diarra Boubacar, it was recently a rare treat.

At 3 on a recent afternoon in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, the children were peacefully slumbering on the back seat after a half-hour of joyous chatter with their father. Driving along in the January sunshine, Diarra was whistling, clearly exhilarated at the chance to accompany the children.

The 49-year-old doctor is stationed in Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous prefecture, nearly 300 kilometers southeast of Kunming, during the week. For more than 15 years, he has worked with a nonprofit enterprise there to help leprosy and AIDS patients.

"The service for the nonprofit treatment of leprosy and AIDS consumed most of my time, and I owe too much to my wife and children," says Diarra. His 6-year-old daughter Jehovah Nissi says her father is often not at home, and she always misses him during the parents' meetings at her school.

Born in the African country of Mali, Diarra continued a family tradition of training to be a doctor at Malian Medical College, earning his degree in 1984. He was granted a full scholarship in the former Soviet Union for further study, but instead he turned to a government-sponsored program to study in China.

In his freshman year, Diarra was the only one in his class to score a grade as low as 40 percent. The frustrated man did not buckle under the hardship of learning the ancient Chinese language to read traditional Chinese medicine classics, and he developed an obsession with TCM. In 1994, he became the first foreigner to get a PhD in acupuncture at the Chengdu Traditional Chinese Medicine College.

After obtaining his medical degree in Sichuan province, he joined Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) to help patients in remote villages in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.