One Man and his Cello

Our apartment in Siem Reap is a place to live over a place to holiday, so it does not include such luxuries as a swimming pool. However, this morning we fancied doing a few lengths, so we ambled over to the cutely named Smiling Hotel to buy our way into their facilities.

The Smiling Hotel is an upmarket outfit, which I first took to be a temple. After the swim, we returned to our more humble lodgings for some fruit - a glorious combination of banana and mango, both of which taste much sweeter and more full of sun than the pale imitations I am used to in England.

In the afternoon, we made our way to the hub of many activities in town, the Peace Café, and joined a small class on the Khmer language. The group was small - only five people including the native-speaker, Noung, who led an improvised lesson based around our varying levels of competency (two words in our case). We learned the numbers, which will be useful at the market. It seems that Cambodians count only the fingers of one hand and then start again. The word for six is 'five one', while seven is 'five two', and so on. We also managed to cover a few basic phrases, which I will attempt to deploy when next in a restaurant, although none of us mastered the correct pronunciation of the word for delicious (chhnganh). In fact, we all marvelled at the opaque transliteration of Khmer into the Latin alphabet. 'Ph' is pronounced 'p', but when you see 'p', it sounds more like a 'b'. I found my own way to notate the way that Noung pronounced the words, but must admit that some unfamiliar sounds defied transcription.

As we finished the lesson, a young man dressed I orange robes walked in. He was a Buddhist monk from a pagoda 3km away, who gives up his time on the weekends to talk to those wanting to know more about Buddhism. We joined the 'monk chat' and heard about the daily life at the monastery, the eightfold path to enlightenment, and meditation.

It was interesting to talk to a practising monk and especially one who had chosen the path for himself as opposed to those that are sent to the monastery by families too poor to look after them.

The schedule seems to involve a gruelling 4am reveille, followed by a combination of chanting, meditation, and study throughout the day. Breakfast is taken at 6am, when the monks leave the pagoda to collect alms. What food is not eaten in the morning is saved for lunch, but the monks cannot eat again in the evening. It seems that they fuel their way through this fast using Coca-Cola, coffee and Red Bull, but no alcohol is allowed.

Being vegetarian and at a vegetarian café, I asked the question that had puzzled me: do Buddhists eat meat and fish? This monk answered that it is forbidden to eat any meat from the tiger, horse, snake, dog, elephant, or human being, but that all other animals are permitted. However, a monk cannot eat meat if they see or hear it killed, or know that it has been killed for them.

We dined at the Peace Café too, enjoying its excellent selection of vegetarian and vegan food. K ordered the lemongrass tofu, which blew us away with the citrus scent and taste. I had a rich and aromatic Khmer red curry with tofu, pumpkin and carrot. I find carrot in stews and curries a little one-dimensional in flavour, but the thick and tasty sauce added some needed depth.

Later in the evening, we took a tuk-tuk to the Jayavarman VII hospital for a concert by one-man fundraising campaign and all-round inspiration, Dr Beat Richner.

Swiss-born Dr Richner has dedicated his life to returning Cambodia to the state of healthcare that it enjoyed prior to the events of the 1970s. The name of the venue is fitting, as King Jayavarman VII in the 12th century transformed healthcare by opening 120 hospitals across his kingdom. King Sihanouk continued these efforts in the mid-20th century and, in the 1960s, the country enjoyed a system envied by the likes of Singapore and Bangkok at that time. However, the infrastructure was destroyed as collateral of the US air strikes on Vietnam and the situation worsened by the concentration camps of the Khmer Regime, in which tuberculosis was rife, not to mention the annihilation of the country's educated medical practitioners. Now, 65% of children in Cambodia are infected with tuberculosis.

As a young man, Dr Richner was practising in Cambodia at the time the Khmer Rouge seized power. Since Richner returned in the 1990s, five hospitals have been opened - several in Phnom Penh and one in Siem Reap, and each dedicated to King Sihanouk's daughter, Kantha Bopha. These provide genuinely free treatment and treat the vast majority of seriously sick children in Cambodia. Each hospital is, in Richner's words, "an island of justice and peace", in which patients are treated equally, not according to their means (typically minimal), and staff are paid a fair wage. In a country plagued by corruption, in which patients often anticipate having to bribe their way to treatment they rightly deserve, this is unusual indeed.

The spearhead of these remarkable efforts is a Swiss-German paediatrician and cellist, previously known as an entertainer in his home country under the name Beatocello (pronounced in the German way to sound like Bertocello). He has a dry wit and a passionate heart and, when subject to the strictures of diplomacy, he lets his cello speak for him.

Stuck between domestic corruption and the lack of a public health service, Richner and the hospitals he has opened are in dire need of funding. International health policies frustrate him by seeming to accept poor care for poor people in poor countries. Foreign governments (even those that were instrumental in bringing about the current poor health and healthcare in Cambodia) refuse to give funding until patients pay for their own treatment, which they can ill afford (pardon the pun). And so, private donations make up 80% of the funding the hospitals require, which have one of the best ratios of cost to patient recovery in the world (the average cost of patient stay is less than the price of a single night's stay at the modern hotel next to the hospital). Money isn't the only thing they need. As children arrive in shock from the effects of tuberculosis, they require immediate transfusion. Blood is short and so donations are necessary. We plan to go tomorrow and give what we can.

In readiness for our blood donation, we opened an Angkor Extra Stout (8%) when we got home - for the extra iron it provides, and not because the fruity, molasses-rich ale makes the perfect nightcap.