Speech by the East China Sea Fleet and the Square Boat Hospital

Dear friends here, I am Sun Tao, the vice president of the Navy General Hospital. I am also an ordinary digestive doctor. I ask everyone, what are the ships generally used for? Transportation, right. We have a lot of ships carrying passengers and carrying goods. There are many guns on the battleships like the army, there are missiles, and even airplanes. But our ship is very special. It is a hospital ship. We call it and the square boat hospital ship. Its ship number is 866. The ship has been to the country five times, and its footprints are all over Asia and Africa. Among the 22 countries that have visited and conducted medical services, our medical vessels have more than 86,000 patients in foreign countries, and nearly 800 cases of large and small operations have been completed on this vessel. So this ship is a veritable "sea hospital."

I feel that I was born with a special relationship with the boat. Why? My father is also a navy, my mother is a hospital medical worker, and she is also in the Department of Gastroenterology. So I am a continuation of my father and mother's career. The Navy first gave me the impression that when I was out of the sea, I was only 27 years old. When I was on the boat, I was still very excited. Looking at the blue sky and the sea, I was excited. It might not be a few hours before I started to turn over the river. At the end, the boat was not open yet. When the machine rang, I would start to vomit. I was dizzy. What is the best time? When you are lying in bed, when you want to eat, you will have a rice bowl, close your eyes to the dining hall, put the rice in the basin, then put it on the edge of the bed, close your eyes. Eat again. So the first time I went out to the sea, the impression I left was rather painful. As I continue to participate in some missions in the Navy, I gradually become more and more passionate about the ocean and adapt to life at sea. Especially in the past few years, we have traveled along the square boat hospitals, and have traveled all over the country's large and small islands, and have been distributed around the world's large and small islands for medical services. For me, or for us and the square boat medical staff, including every officer, there are a lot of happiness and a lot of moving, of course, there are a lot of pain, a lot of tangles.

Today, I will introduce you to the joys that we and the boat have experienced through a story. When we were in the Philippines, the "Haiyan" typhoon struck. After the typhoon passed, the sea was about four or five meters high, and many houses on the shore were destroyed. In the rescue of the Philippines, we and the square boat hospital were born with four children. Two of the boys, two girls, the father of the first child, especially when he left, thanked us and the boat for the boat, but at the time he had no conditions to express his intentions. He finally took the children. A piece of diaper, written on it, thanked the Chinese Navy for saving their family. These are the things we often encounter when performing tasks overseas.

In Bangladesh, there was a patient who proposed that you and the boat in the square boat once gave me an eye cataract surgery in 2019, which made me see the light again. At that time, because the condition of the other eye was not very suitable, I did not have surgery. He said that this eye is not very good now. I hope that you can help me to do it again. We quickly treated him as a special patient, and later he was diagnosed and considered to be suitable for surgery. So we were on the boat with the square boat hospital and gave him another cataract in the eye. The same operation on our ship was done twice at different times. After the patient finished, he made a move that we couldn’t think of. He said, I am not leaving, I am on your boat, I will be a volunteer. Because he is very good at English, the local language is also very good, he has done a lot of work for us there. Therefore, in the inheritance of humanitarian care and the inheritance of friendship, we are passing on like a baton.

It was also when we were in the Philippines last year when we built a hospital on the shore. We used the waste site of an old provincial hospital because many of the roofs were gone and covered with a layer of cloth. There is water in this room, but we have set up a tent because we have no room to live. When our officers and soldiers rested at night, they always smelled an unusual smell when they were working there. Because we were mainly providing medical services at the time, when we left the Philippines, they sent a WeChat to the WeChat group, saying that you had gone through two days to dig up several bodies while cleaning up. So these require our medical staff to overcome many difficulties. We must now play the role of a responsible big country and play an image of our responsible big country. At the same time, we actually showed us China outside, showing us the Chinese People's Liberation Army and showing the image of our Chinese navy, especially our naval medical workers.