Marija Ursula Rechbach from the Republic of Slovenia was one of the foreign experts honoured with this year's Friendship Awards.

With a passionate love for Chinese traditional medicine, the 55-year-old Rechbach has lived in Tibet for seven years and co-ordinated a project to help develop Tibetan traditional medicine.

"Our project aims to make Tibetan traditional medicine stronger,'' she explained.

Since the end of 2000, Rechbach and her Chinese colleagues, mostly local doctors, have spent 10 days each month living with villagers in two counties of Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

"We teach local villagers the proper way of collecting, storing and drying herbal medicines, otherwise the environment will be ruined and some spices will be in danger,'' she said.

Another major concern of the project is the health of Tibetan villagers.

In addition to providing regular free clinics for villagers, Rechbach and her colleagues have built greenhouses on the 4,600-metre plateau to grow vegetables.

"There has been this disease called Hashin-Beck among a number of local people there; they suffered swollen joints and remained small in stature,'' she said.

Though the cause of the disease is still unknown, the project involved adding selenium to the soil in order to grow more nutritious vegetables.

"At first nobody believed us, but soon people said `Come to our village to build greenhouses', '' she said.

"I thought we would have to push them to accept changes at the beginning of this project, but I found most local villagers actually want knowledge, they want changes and modernization,'' she said.

Rechbach is now planning to co-operate with Tibetan Agriculture and Animal Husbandry College to offer a four- to five-year training programme for local villagers.

They will be trained to be good practitioners, who can teach fellow villagers to be hygienic, collect herbs and make simple medicines without doing harm to the environment, she said.

"One day our project has to be handed over to local villagers and they have to be self-sustainable,'' she added.

In the future, Rechbach plans to go north on the plateau to continue her work.

"China is my love forever. It has given so much to me that I feel I have to pay it back,'' she said.

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