A couple of years ago I was catching up with a friend who had just returned from a trip to Cambodia. I was asking her what she thought about the historic Angkor Wat temple, when she told me about an amazing concert she attended in the nearby town of Siem Reap. She said that this Swiss doctor, Beat Richner, who has opened up all these childrens' hospitals in Cambodia, holds weekly cello recitals and asks his audience not just to give money, but to roll up their sleeves and donate blood. Her story stuck in my mind.

Dr. Beat Richner plays concerts on the cello in Siem Reap, Cambodia, to encourage blood donations. Photo by Jason Strother.

In the summer of 2008, I was headed to Cambodia to cover parliamentary elections and decided to take a detour from the capital Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to do a bit of sightseeing and check out Richner's concert. I spent several hours before his Saturday evening show walking around the expansive Angkor ruins. I hired a motorized rickshaw driver to take me to dozens of sites spread out across several miles. To my surprise, it was here that I had my first glimpse of what life is like for many of Cambodia's children. Upon climbing out of the rickshaw, I was greeted by throngs of children, some no more than five years old, begging for money or selling maps, water bottles and other trinkets. I have learned that many of these street children live in desperately poor conditions. The money they receive from tourists is often their family's main source of income. Some kids are forced into begging by human traffickers and others are sold into brothels.

As a tourist, you are faced with the dilemma of whether or not to buy something from these children. On the one hand, you give a child a dollar and maybe that will help feed their family for a day. But, by giving them money, you may be reinforcing a vicious circle that will only encourage more parents or traffickers to send children out into the streets to beg.

These images and thoughts stayed with me throughout Richner's hour-long cello recital later that evening. Between numbers, Beaton Cello, as he is known, explained that over the past few decades, Cambodia has suffered a variety of health epidemics, such as TB, meningitis and encephalitis. Living under such terrible conditions, Siem Reap’s street children are perhaps at the greatest risk of contracting and dying from these diseases.

This, in my mind, is what makes Dr. Richner's work so important for Cambodia’s children. With a multitude of hardships stacked up against them, having at least one place to go to receive proper medical treatment could mean the difference between life and death.

Listen to this story.