Missions of mercy

Duan Weiyu, the captain of the medical team, still remembers the scene clearly and mentioned it in an interview with a Hubei newspaper in 2013.

"I did not expect this mild, gentle doctor to be so brave," Duan says.

After 14 months, the team was ordered to withdraw due to the deterioration of the situation.

But Xu was sorry to leave.

"There were no doctors in local hospitals when we left. I had never seen patients who had such longing eyes as those there," Xu says.

Her brush with death gave Xu a feel for the cruelty of the war, and some of her teammates have endured post-traumatic stress for years. But Xu did not say a word to her family. And when China resumed sending medical teams to Algeria in 2000, Xu applied again.

Xu was born into a doctor's family in Changchun in 1952. She started her career as a doctor at a hospital in Huanggang, Hubei province.

When she went on her last mission, she was already retired. Xu celebrated her 60th birthday in Saida, a city in Algeria on the edge of the Sahara Desert, which was also where the first medical team dispatched to Africa by the Chinese government landed.

Though she was the oldest doctor in the hospital, Xu worked not only on night shift with the younger ones but also on the most difficult cases.

Once, a patient with HIV needed a C-section. The procedure was put off to the end of the day due to concerns over infection. Despite this, Xu, quietly came in to help, though she was not on duty.

Explaining why, she says: "There was no Algerian obstetrician in the operating room. The patient was very young, weak and pale. She was lying on the bed and longing for help.

"There was a Chinese obstetrician. But she was much younger than me. So, I felt it was better for me to do the job."

The surgery went smoothly, but she found her clothes soaked through after it.

Doctors on medical missions in Africa, where HIV was then prevalent, used to undergo blood tests whenever they returned home.

Xu has visited Algeria four times on medical-aid missions.