A UN mission is not an easy one to fulfill. Before she went to Ethiopia in 2012, she and her team were vaccinated. Everybody else was fine, but she had severe adverse reactions and fell ill. All the schedule had been confirmed, so she proceeded with the trip.

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After the flight from Beijing to Ethiopia, the group traveled three hours on a UN charter plane and another three hours by jeep. On arrival at the camp, Yao felt as if her blood was boiling in the 48C air.

What she saw, however, was so harrowing that she forgot she was a patient herself. The camp was newly built, literally in the middle of nowhere. Gunshots had rattled the residents a week earlier. More refugees were arriving all the time, many forced to live in huts built from local brambles before tents could be provided.

Yao sat beside a mother, swarms of flies surrounding them. She was afraid to talk, fearing that the flies would rush into her mouth. The mother, however, was totally indifferent to the insects. Some flies stayed on her face and she had not the least intention to brush them off, talking on and on about her experiences like a machine.

"The scene was suffocating. For one minute I felt their lives were like those of the flies," Yao says of the people who are sometimes seen as an irritant by outsiders, but are most often ignored. "They lived in this world, or you can say they never did."

The scene also stunned Yi Lijing, a senior journalist who was covering the story. She spent the trip together with Yao's team. Most of the time, she observes, "Yao was trying to calm herself down."

"You can easily smell death there," Yi says. "It would be an emotional shock for anyone."

The shock might be especially devastating to Yao, who ended a seven-year marriage one year before that. But Yi says Yao did her best.

"The hygiene conditions were unpleasant, but she hugged kids and comforted them,"she says. "It would be understandable if she felt a bit scared or upset to touch or hug the kids - I saw flies lingering on a boy's wound and he did nothing about that - but she soon adjusted herself to the environment and seemed to have forgotten any hidden danger."

After the visit they became friends. Yi is a Buddhist and Yao is a Christian, but they found a lot of common ground in an experience they now cherish.

"We both found we had complained too much in the past.How stupid we were to complain that much when we actually lead such a better life than the people we met. She also better understands how to be a mom now."

Yao has a 6-month-old boy.

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