Word: africas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...students boycotted classes. In Wuhan and Beijing, hundreds of Chinese students staged anti-African demonstrations. The Gambia government registered a formal protest, and diplomats from Ghana and Benin voiced displeasure over Chinese treatment of their nationals. But overall reaction from the continent was restrained, reflecting the conflicting nuances of Africa's dealings with China: gratitude for decades of Chinese support; familiarity with Chinese ; racism, which has been intensified by economic frustrations; and worries about how to protect existing links with Beijing...
...guerrillas. Thousands of miles away another medical corps travels with a caravan of packhorses through rugged terrain into Afghanistan. There its members will treat victims of the war between the Afghan resistance and the Soviet-backed government. At a headquarters building in Paris, shortwave-radio antennas turn toward Africa. A faraway voice reports that a cholera epidemic has struck refugees fleeing Mozambique's civil war. Within 48 hours, prepackaged containers filled with medical supplies...
...special breed of doctors and nurses are infusing the Hippocratic oath with new force, risking their lives out of a commitment to what Dr. Bernard Kouchner, one of the founders of the movement, calls "the duty to interfere." Volunteer medics are treating tribespeople for malaria and tuberculosis in East Africa, performing amputations on victims of land mines in Sri Lanka, building clean-water systems in El Salvador and operating surgical clinics, often under gunfire, in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon...
Some serve out of a sense of moral mission, much like that which inspired Dr. Albert Schweitzer to go to Africa in 1913 to open a hospital at the village of Lambarene in what is now Gabon. Others seek adventure, challenge, an opportunity to hone their skills in a real-life laboratory where nearly every case is an emergency. Many discover that much of what they learned in medical school is irrelevant to the life-and-death crises and health needs of the world's poor, and go on to make a career of volunteer medicine...
...heroics in Afghanistan have boosted their stature. Increasingly, international health organizations have sought them out for advice and assistance. The volunteers are well positioned, for example, to provide early-warning information on epidemics. M.S.F. is conducting AIDS research in Zaire and Rwanda, two of the most afflicted areas in Africa, while its clinics in the war-stricken zones along Sudan's southern borders are documenting the spread of the disease northward...