HUMANITARIAN: Dr. Sun Jingling with her many patients

Sun Jingling's granddaughter has just moved to Africa. Bidding her adieu has made Sun wistful for her own youth 40 years past. Sun, a doctor, now 80 years old, worked as a medical volunteer in Zanzibar, Tanzania throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. During her time in East Africa, she put in long hours and was deeply touched by the stories of the people around her.

For the patients

After graduating from midwifery school in the northeastern city of Changchun, Jilin Province, Sun moved west to begin work at a railway hospital in Lanzhou, Gansu Province. In 1962, she moved across the country again. Now back in the east in Jiangsu Province, she settled into a routine at Jingjiang People's Hospital.

In 1969, a medical team headed to Africa began recruiting volunteers in Jiangsu. Although by this point she had three children to take care of, Sun signed up without hesitation. "I did what a doctor should do for her patients," she says.

That April, Sun traveled with 20 other volunteers to Beijing where they attended a two-week-long language training course. And then, she left for Zanzibar. At the time, her children were small (her youngest was eight years old), and her husband was in poor health, recovering from a recent surgery. In spite of this and his busy work schedule, he took on the added responsibility of single parenthood. "It was a tough time," Sun recalls. "Whenever I think of it, I can't help shedding tears."