The film opens in the historic headquarters of Medici con l’Africa Cuamm (Doctors with Africa, University College of Aspiring and Medical Missionaries) in the center of Padua.
Don Dante Carraro is a priest. He is also a cardiologist and for the last four years has been the director of Cuamm. There is another, older priest with him: Don Luigi Mazzucato, director from 1955 to 2008 and by no means retired. Don Dante explains why they decided to call themselves Doctors WITH Africa: it is because they have always worked together with the African health institutions. They have two jobs: to run health structures throughout the immense sub-Saharan region and to hold courses—even up to university level—to train new generations of African doctors in the field. It is a huge undertaking, which this documentary portrays with an unsentimental reportage filmed in Africa, letting the doctors and patients, adults and children, speak. Various doctors talk about their experiences, their enthusiasm and their failures. We also meet some young Africans who trained in the medical faculties run by Cuamm.
One of them, about to graduate in Medicine, was brought up in an orphanage run by an incredible African nun, “mother” to hundreds of children abandoned to their fate.