When Diarra Boubacar started working with a private hospital in southwest China's Sichuan Province, the first week proved disconcerting for both the Malian doctor and his first patient.

For three days, not a single patient turned up. Then on the fourth, a stately matriarch opened the door, poked her head in, and "ran away" after one look at him.

"She went to the nurses to complain," Dr. Boubacar recalled laughingly. "'I came to look for a Chinese doctor and instead, found a black man sitting in the room,' she told the nurses. 'But that's our specialist,' the nurses told her, trying to calm her down. She was unconvinced and let me treat her only after I promised I would refund her money if she were dissatisfied with her treatment."

Nearly two decades after the incident, the 50-year-old still remembers the disease he diagnosed her with - cervical problems leading to cancer - and her reaction after the treatment: "She brought her mom and husband for me to have a look at their problems."

It's a trait inherited from his father, Dr. Thiemoko Diarra, who worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Segou, a town in south-central Mali where Boubacar grew up. "When my father saw patients at home, he never took any fee from them," Boubacar said. "He would tell me, a doctor's job is to love his patients and serve his community."

A passage to China

Boubacar brought the same commitment to China. As he sees it, there is no difference between a sick and penniless person in Mali and a sick and penniless person in China.

The China adventure started in 1984 when he came on a student exchange program to study the Chinese language and culture at the Beijing Language and Culture University. When the course was over two years later, he wanted to enroll at the Beijing Medical University for a medical degree but then had second thoughts.

"It would have meant starting with subjects like biology and anatomy, which I had already studied in Mali," he explained. "I thought, since I was in China, I'd better learn something that is typically Chinese, that is, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). I ran into a lot of opposition. People tried to dissuade me, saying TCM is a very difficult subject."

Despite the negative comments he gained admission to the Guangzhou University of TCM where, indeed, there were tough challenges awaiting him. "There's a big difference between Western medicine and TCM," he explained. "The approach to the human body and diseases is completely different from the Western approach. TCM is also related to Chinese history and culture and to study it, we had to study ancient Chinese as most of the medical texts are in ancient Chinese. Now, that's a subject even the Chinese find difficult; so think of me, a foreigner!"

But he persevered, helped by the similarities between TCM and traditional African medicine, which also uses many of the herbs TCM does to treat the same diseases. Many treatment methods are also similar, like letting out blood. Probably the hardest problem was people's mindset: "When I started practicing in 1991, people tended to associate TCM with white-haired venerable Chinese doctors with years of experience. They had serious misgivings about a young foreigner. How could a foreigner know anything about TCM? How would he understand us? Can he speak the local dialect?"

So it was difficult to get the first patient. But once the first one came, others would follow, on hearing their glowing recommendations.

Battling negative image

In 1997, Boubacar became the first foreigner to receive a doctoral degree in acupuncture from the Chengdu University of TCM and joined a private hospital. By his own admission, he was making good money, had a car and housing and yet, was not happy. He found doctors suffered from a bad public image: "They wanted to make money, money, money and didn't look at patients. I was upset and decided to quit. Healthcare professionals should focus on their patients, love them, and not think about money."

He joined Médecins Sans Frontières, the international medical humanitarian organization, his work taking him to underdeveloped villages where people battled diseases caused and compounded by poverty. There was a high incidence of tuberculosis and leprosy.

According to the UK-based medical charity, The Leprosy Mission, 14 countries reported more than 1,000 new cases of leprosy in 2013. The top three were Bangladesh, Brazil and China. In Yunnan Province alone, there are 400 to 500 new cases every year, according to Boubacar. What made the disease difficult to treat was people's fear of it and the stigma patients faced. "Leprosy patients face the same discrimination as people with HIV," he said.

In 1999, he began working on an HIV project in Sichuan, which was extended to Yunnan. "We taught health workers, community members and sex workers what AIDS was, how it spread," he said. "They were unaware of it at first. In the past few years, AIDS prevention and treatment has really improved in China and TCM is being used effectively to build up the immunity system."

His work in the community has earned him sobriquets like "China's barefooted doctor" and the "African Norman Bethune," after the Canadian frontline doctor who ran mobile hospitals in north China in the 1930s. It has brought him wide recognition, ranging from an award by the Yunnan Government in 2009, to being acknowledged as one of the top 10 humanitarian workers in China in a public vote organized by a major Chinese TV channel. In 2013, he received a national award from Premier Li Keqiang.

One of his most rewarding moments in China occurred in 1994 when he met a young Chinese woman, Yang Mei, in a Chengdu church. The two fell in love and married three years later. The couple has a 16-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter, both of whom speak Chinese, French - the mother tongue of their father, and the Yunnan dialect. The family lives in Kunming, though his work involves much travel to rural areas where he trains healthcare personnel and Chinese doctors, and speaks on major health issues at schools and other organizations.  

Healing Africa

When not working, Boubacar is engaged in postdoctoral research on finding an anti-viral herbal treatment. Once it is completed, he looks forward to a project close to his heart. Boubacar is working with a Gabonese peer, Dr. Jean Pierre Gomo, to build a hospital in Africa that will combine TCM and traditional African medicine.

"TCM and traditional African medicine can help us with many of Africa's healthcare programs, providing primary health care that is far cheaper than Western medicine," he said. "China has been doing it successfully with TCM."

The long sojourn in China is meant to gain experience in practicing TCM. He will then take the knowledge home to "help my country, my continent."

The two doctors have been talking with the authorities in their own countries, besides Ethiopia and Equatorial Guinea, and intend to resume the discussions in October. If the project takes off, it would be linked to Chinese TCM institutions for collaboration, taking medicine beyond borders.