On a recent hot morning, Dr James Gollogly arrives for the daily clinic at the Surgical Rehabilitation Centre at Kien Khleang, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The centre is run by Rehabilitation Oriented Surgical Enablement (Rose), the charity of which Gollogly is the chief executive officer. The organisation's mandate is to provide surgical assistance for disabled people and to train Khmer surgeons. In contemporary Cambodia, recent history has ensured there is plenty of the former and a scarcity of the latter.
Near a notice which forbids the carrying of guns and explosives, a crowd is waiting in rows in the compound's dusty heat. The clinic, which happens to be situated just past a large land-development sign announcing 'Happiness City - 50 per cent downpayment', is free and many of the patients travel long distances to avail themselves of its services.
There is a bus station nearby where some of the poor and the disabled arrive, after hours of journeying, and take a moto - the Cambodian motorcycle taxi - for the last kilometre, in their search for medical help.
Inside, Dr Gollogly kicks off his shoes. He was born in England 60 years ago, of Irish parents, and spent 20 years being a well-off orthopaedic surgeon in Alaska, flying planes in his spare time. He arrived in Cambodia for six months in 1992 and returned, full-time, in 1998. He's funny, contrary, opinionated and passionate: the sort of unsaintly maverick who infuriates officials, hectors his staff, badgers his friends and gets things done. A typical Gollogly statement is: 'We're here to do surgery, we're not doing this to go to meetings.'
Barefoot and perched on a tiny chair with several of his Khmer staff next to him, he begins to work his way through the patients. On a nearby wipe-board, there's a list of the day's operations: soft palate, petrol burns, gangrene (as a result of a snake bite), tumour. On the other side of the room, the eye clinic is working through a separate line of patients. Today, there is one blind, intensely shrivelled woman of 85 in the queue. Her presence and her age are noteworthy miracles: the average life expectancy in Cambodia is about 55. To even the most casual observer, there's a strange demographic in this country where even the word for 'beautiful' (saad in Khmer) sounds like a lament.