Our story in Cambodia began with Médecins Du Monde, in a country marked by a civil war that had destroyed everything, not only infrastructure but also medical expertise.

 

The healthcare system needed rebuilding, and access to care was virtually nonexistent. We arrived with limited resources, our plastic surgery kits rudimentary, and performed as many procedures as possible in a very short time. Our missions were essentially based on simple surgical procedures. A team of four people—two surgeons, an anesthesiologist, and a nurse—would operate and then leave. But very quickly, we became dissatisfied with this approach.

 

Operating on patients and letting them leave without follow-up gave us the feeling of abandoning them; leaving others without care because they seemed more complicated was not ethically acceptable.

 

We then realized that this model amounted to a substitute humanitarian approach: a team arrives, operates, then disappears, leaving behind patients without the follow-up essential for serious pathologies such as clefts or burns.

 

This model, widely adopted by all major NGOs, struck us as profoundly unsuitable, not to say inhumane.

 

Consequences: a large number of children, whether operated on or not, are left behind.