Swiss doctor calls for more help to stay afloat
On vibrantly patterned straw mats, crowded around small plastic hampers of food, children – some with balloons, others with neon-coloured fans – huddle against their parents under the noon sun. But the parents are unblinking; some of the children barely have a pulse. Families have travelled up to 10 hours to this small square of dappled sunlight to wait in a crowd of thousands at one of the five Kantha Bopha Children’s Hospitals for free health care. The man behind the hospitals, Swiss doctor Beat Richner, said that unless the Cambodian government and the international community stepped up, the delivery of free, world-class medical care would disappear with him. “I am an old, old man, and when I am not here any more, well, who can play the cello?” 64-year-old Richner said yesterday in the canteen of Phnom Penh’s Kantha Bopha hospital complex. …
