Dr. Joseph Kwong-Leung Yu has awakened at five o’clock on this Monday morning to prepare for what is slated to be an all-day trip to Tai­pei. Though it is only early June, Ping­tung is already scorching hot.

On arriving in Tai­pei, Yu visits Good TV to tape an interview, then shoots off to a noon meeting at the National Taiwan University Alumni Center. He tapes a radio segment in the afternoon, then moves on to an evening interview with a magazine. The sleepy-eyed doctor eventually wraps up his busy day and climbs aboard the high-speed train that will deliver him back to Pingtung at nearly midnight.

Malawi has suffered greatly from AIDS, prompting Yu to establish the Rainbow Clinic at Mzuzu’s Central Hospital and promote the use of drug-cocktail therapy.

Why does Yu push himself so hard?

When Taiwan and Malawi broke off formal diplomatic relations in 2008, the Taiwanese medical mission at Central Hospital in Mzuzu, the largest city in the northern part of the nation, had no choice but to return home.

Yu, who led the mission, hated to go. Resolving to someday return, he kept the organization the mission had built going for another six months by personally paying team members’ salaries­. He remained very active on behalf of the Malawi mission after returning to Taiwan and eventually decided that NGOs were the best means for providing international aid in such diplomatically difficult circumstances.

The Ping­tung Christian Hospital (PCH) where Yu works established the Bjør­gaas Foundation in March 2013 and began raising funds from the public in July. In recent months, the usually low-key Yu has begun appearing in all the major media, sharing his personal experience with medical relief work in an effort to raise the foundation’s profile.

AIDS patients are opening their own soy-milk stands to lift themselves out of poverty.

Yu was born in Hong Kong in 1958, just as Hong Kong’s economy was revving up, the wealth gap emerging as an issue, greater attention being paid to disadvantaged groups, and the notion of serving the public taking flight. Yu absorbed the zeitgeist. He joined a secondary-school club that served the physically disabled, then came to Taiwan in 1980 to study medicine at Kao­hsiung Medical University, having resolved to help people by becoming a doctor.

After graduating, he took a job with the medical school, where he focused on anesthesiology and pain medicine, and undertook long-term research on hospice care. He also became involved with a number of medical relief efforts, making frequent trips to Puli in Nan­tou County to provide medical care to those affected by the 1999 Jiji earthquake and also delivering care to people in Wa State in northern Thailand. Yu became head of Taiwan’s medical mission to Malawi when it was established in 2003, and planned all of its local operations.

According to the World Health Organization, in those days roughly 15% of Malawians were infected with AIDS. In fact, the disease was the country’s leading cause of death. The mission found the infection rate to be far higher among its patients, recording rates of 35% for surgical patients, 60% for internal medicine patients, and 25% for pediatric patients. Simply put, AIDS cast its shadow over everyone in Malawi.

One of Yu’s patients on his first day with the mission was an AIDS victim who died during his examination. And he hadn’t been there long when a mother brought in a severely underweight four-year-old AIDS victim who also passed away in the examining room.

Tormented by AIDS for the entirety of his brief life, his mother held him as his death approached, letting him suckle her juice-dipped thumb so he could pass away having known a bit of sweetness. Yu was shaken to his core by the poignancy of the scene.

Recognizing that AIDS was Malawi’s core medical problem and unwilling to wait passively for Death to bear away one after another of his patients, he resolved to find some kind of solution.

Yu is devoted to children, and sick kids become supremely cooperative the moment they meet him.

While Yu was agonizing over how to raise the money to pay for the expensive drug cocktails used to treat the disease in 2004, there was a dramatic international breakthrough.

After repeatedly railing at American and European pharmaceuticals manufacturers for refusing to cut their prices and ignoring the lives of those in need in Africa, Kofi Annan, then the secretary general of the United Nations, ordered WHO to prepare to have generic versions of the patented drugs produced in India. He also ordered WHO to establish a global fund to raise money to buy the medicines. His objective was to reduce the cost of the drugs required to treat AIDS from US$120 per month to US$20 per month for patients in developing countries.

These actions led to enormous changes to medical care in Africa. Governments and international medical groups began tackling AIDS head on, establishing cooperative platforms that promoted and distributed medications in each region. The Taiwanese medical mission responsible for Malawi’s northern region acted quickly, establishing its AIDS treatment center, known as the Rainbow Clinic, in July 2004.

Taking AIDS treatment as its starting point, the team extended its efforts into arenas such as finance, social work, early childhood education, and public health, developing targeted approaches to dealing with each thread in the knotty mass of social issues surrounding the disease.

One of their first problems involved identifying patients. Because Malawi has no national ID system, tracking patients’ pharmaceuticals usage was difficult. The team therefore used support from Taiwan’s Department of Health to build a fingerprint recognition system, and linked fingerprints to patients’ medical records.

The next problem involved inadequate nutrition, which became obvious when patients’ conditions improved and their appetites increased. Yu applied to the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for nutritional assistance, and received supplements containing carbohydrates, protein, and fat, which he distributed to his child patients. He then monitored their arm circumference to see whether they were gaining any weight.

When children didn’t put on weight, the mission investigated. It found that the supplements were often being taken home and shared by entire families. It also learned further that many AIDS-stricken families had been left in poverty by a lack of job opportunities. In keeping with Yu’s desire to address problems at their root, the mission sought to increase employment by offering microloans to locals to start their own businesses.

Still another issue was linked to gender: men who contracted AIDS felt they had lost face, decreasing their willingness to seek treatment and increasing their mortality rates. This led to the emergence of “widow villages” and resulted in large numbers of orphans. To give children a better chance of themselves reaching adulthood, the mission decided to give priority to getting widowed mothers back on their feet.

Yu is a devout Christian for whom compassion for others is a core value.

When examining the AIDS issue, the tendency has been to focus on numbers from individual nations while ignoring the reality of and risks associated with population movements. Conservative estimates from Malawi, for example, indicate that at least 3% of the population crosses the border illegally every year. This suggests that some 30,000 AIDS sufferers are discontinuing treatment and dropping out of monitoring programs every year simply as a result of this migration.

Taiwan’s medical mission therefore proposed holding an international conference in southern Africa on the issue of cross-border HIV patients. With public health officials from all the nations of the region attending, the conference discussed who should be responsible for monitoring the health of patients and for the costs of medications, and addressed the issue of anonymous acquisition of medications by immigrants. Held annually since 2009, the conference is now attended by 11 nations (up from the original seven). Yu also attends as a speaker and consultant.

“The governments attending the conference were more aware of the cross-border HIV problem than we had anticipated,” says Yu. “We were all quite excited by that.” Yu explains that the conference has replaced the old framework of international discussions led by the governments of individual nations with a new cross-border, trans-organizational model for cooperation on southern Africa’s cross-border issues. This enables the active participation of groups such as Ping­tung Christian Hospital, the Bjør­gaas Foundation, Taiwan’s DOH, the US’s Department of Health and Human Services, and NGOs from Norway and Ireland.

Under Yu’s leadership, Taiwan’s medical mission to Malawi laid a strong foundation for public-health infrastructure.

The involvement of greater numbers of organizations improved the flow of information. As a result, the international community became more aware of the Taiwanese medical mission to Malawi’s achievements and began to place more emphasis on its model. Meanwhile, Yu realized his dreams of establishing the Bjørgaas Foundation and returning to Malawi. And this time he carried with him the support and compassion of all of Taiwan.

As someone who was born in Hong Kong, put down roots in Taiwan, and developed a love of southern Africa, Yu says that his medical relief work perpetuates his “outsider” status. On the plus side, this status gives him a different perspective on issues and helps him set aside preconceived notions. He recognizes that as a foreigner his contributions are necessarily limited, and that in turn leads him to be very humble in dealing with others.

Yu’s favorite Biblical passage runs: “The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people.” Expanding on this, he argues that Taiwan’s small size doesn’t limit our compassion or creativity in the least. He says that when love chooses us, we should embrace it: Africa’s distance in no way prevents us from acting with compassion.