It is August 2001. It is the rainy season, when the Mekong swells, when the river swallows homes and yards, gardens and fields, as it does every year. When rice grows luminescent in thick wet paddies; when villages float and people move on water where, before, there had been land.

Jerry and I are in Kratie, a small town, ninety miles upriver from Phnom Penh. We have come to do a story on Cambodia’s endangered Irrawaddy dolphins, sleek shy things that once danced through these waters, hundreds at a time. Now only small pools of these snub-nosed creatures remain. But they still show their noses nearby and swoosh around fishermen’s boats.

We sit one afternoon in the doorway of a Chinese restaurant, drinking Angkor beer and eating salted peanuts. We gaze onto the sidewalk, watching the world scatter as rain comes, watching sheets unfurl from an endless bolt of wet fabric. Street kids gather and Jerry offers candy. One boy bawls and snorts and moans. What’s wrong with him? I ask, and Jerry responds with the obvious, “Well, he’s homeless, he has no food, he’s wet and his knee’s all fucked up.”

Cheth has no shoes, no parents, no hair on his head and a bloody, festering knee. He has a sister named Khet; we will later learn they live in a field. He is ten, she is twelve. Her hair is wild and stringy. She bandages Cheth’s owie, but he hugs his knee and cries, “I want to go home.”

We take him to the hospital. We coax the boy onto a moto, and he looks at us with wide eyes. The seat is wet. He is scared. He looks at Khet, and we tell them she can come, too. The kids ride on one moto, we take another, motoring through Kratie’s flooded terrain.

It’s 6:30 p.m., and we enter an empty hallway. Where is everyone? This is the provincial hospital, the only one, but it’s eerily quiet. We see a man with a white coat and nametag clipped to his breast pocket. He’s not a doctor. There is no doctor in sight. The man in the coat tells us to go right, to another building with a red cross on the wall. We do, and the kids follow with ginger steps behind us.

There are patients on slat beds with metal frames, no mattresses, only the rattan mats they bring from home. It is customary in Cambodia for families to nurse their own sick, at home or at the hospital. Blankets, toiletries, food — they come from home. The hospital provides only a bare bed frame upon which to lay one’s mat and the patient’s weary body. That bed becomes a camping ground, with entire families huddled together, fanning and feeding and tending the sick one. But of course, there are always patients alone — no one to help, no food to eat, no fan to deter the pestering flies.

The patients tell us the doctor has gone to eat dinner, maybe he’ll return at 7. We sit on an empty bed, and Cheth hops aboard. Khet stands in the doorway, shaking her head. The adults ask questions: Where did the kids come from? What do they do? The kids are scared, they tell us. We know.

It grows dark, and we wait. Evening evolves to night. Finally, the doctor arrives, and we explain the situation. He tells us Cheth needs to stay, perhaps five days. We tell him Cheth has no family, no home. The doctor says: Hmm, that is difficult. And who will pay for the treatment? He gets the point across that medicine is not free. Payment is always a problem in these cases of poor people with no homes, no families, no means.

Jerry and I look at each other and exchange a few sentences, wondering how much the bill could possibly be. We tell the doctor: We will pay.

The doctor says it will not be cheap, maybe 3,000 riel, 75 cents.

No problem, we say.

A nurse dons stark clean gloves and douses Cheth’s knee with alcohol from a plastic bottle. Then he pours iodine solution on the knee. The russet liquid stains his wounds. Next, the nurse pads pure-white gauze on open flesh. Cheth winces all the way, but never says much. Pigs squeal outside, in the hospital yard. We ask how this happened, and the nurse surmises Cheth has bug bites, scratched to infection.

When the cleaning is done and his knee is bandaged, the doctor tells Cheth he must return the next day, to the clinic across the street. We promise to help get him there. The doctor writes a prescription, and we head through the aisles, Cheth hopping on his newly wrapped leg. We reach the door and it’s wet outside, still drizzling. Jerry plops the boy onto his shoulder, carrying him across the flooded way.

We find a man in a closet of drugs, pouring pills into a bottle. I pay the 3,000 riel and hand the medicine to sister Khet, to distribute appropriately, one pill in the morning, one in the evening, and only to Cheth — no one else. She nods in quiet agreement.

Then we take them to the market, in the center of town, where they ask to go. They say they are not hungry. They both look shell-shocked. We tell them to find us the next day. But we wonder: Does our message get through? What’s in their minds? What is it like to be scared, with a hurt knee, no food, no money, no parents, no bed, and two foreigners who drag you to the hospital? So many questions — it’s that way in Cambodia. So many questions are never answered, only imagined.

The next morning, hot sun steams the town. We set out to find our friends. We pass a man roasting coffee beans until they smoke and burn. We pass teak homes on stilts as we walk toward the low tones of monks chanting mid-day prayers. We turn toward a field where cows graze and tin roofs flank the far side. Cheth is relieving himself in the weeds when he spots us, then he and Khet and all their friends come dashing. We follow them toward bleachers cast in concrete, stairs ending in sludge mixed with plastic bags and rot. We climb steps to a crowd of homeless squatters, living in the stands of this abandoned athletic field, surrounded by all they own: a pet monkey chained in the corner, some clothes, some krama scarves, rattan mats, rice pots, a few quilts, some stuff — but not much. Khet hurdles the bleachers with pills in hand. She has given Cheth two, precisely as told.

One young man speaks English. We tell him we want to take Cheth to the doctor; he asks when we will return, will we return? The adults want to know. “They worry about the children,” he says. They think we’ll steal the kids and sell them; we insist we will not.

Everyone has heard these rumors of baby-stealing and child trafficking; in the next two years, we will know the stories are rooted in truth.

We find motos and head across town, just as the rain arrives with a vengeance. We reach the clinic, but it’s noon, that hour when all of Southeast Asia bobs to sleep. We sit outside and two teenaged girls ask questions. Cheth remains silent, but Khet tells them she and Cheth are brother and sister. They have no parents. They come from a town called Chhlong. She says their parents died ten days ago, which doesn’t seem right, but that’s what she says. Cheth naps briefly while she talks. Then he wakes and counts his sores, stopping at eleven.

A man comes along and tells us the doctor works no more today, he “relaxes” until tomorrow. So we aim for the hospital again, hoping someone can help. The kids walk barefoot through the sodden streets and climb the hospital fence before we have a chance to open the gate. They’re so used to doing it — life — the hard way.

Inside, we meet a nurse wearing a white smock and hat, shiny gold bangles and high-heeled glittery sandals. She leads us to the same room we visited the previous night. Another nurse wakes from a nap, dresses and starts the same procedure. I notice this time, we are surrounded by posters with wide-ranging messages: eat well, breast-feed your baby, cover your water pot, wear a condom, go to the doctor.

It rains again, and birds fly through the room. Pigs, chickens and dogs galumph through the mud, while patients trundle outside to shower in the downpour.

When the nurse is done, Jerry pays and we wait for the rain to stop. We slush through puddles at the gate. We cross the street, wait for motos, hoist Cheth on the seat and return again to the market. The streets have sunk beneath the rain. We offer them lunch, and along the walk, Cheth steps in cow dung with his naked foot.

At the restaurant, we order pork fried rice, pickled vegetables and tea. The kids gobble, inhaling the food like little vacuum cleaners, and Cheth serves himself seconds. He doesn’t quite eat the plate. The bill comes to 10,000 riel, about $2.50. So much! Cheth exclaims.

Then we take the kids “home.”

Later that evening, we head to the riverfront and find the kids there. We have changed and cleaned, but the kids have not. Cheth wears his bandage, a little damp, a little soiled, but still clinging to his spindly leg.