Medical Alert

The patient, a Burmese farmer who was foraging for food in the jungle when he stepped on the mine, is one of thousands of villagers caught each year in the crossfire of the country's continuing civil war. His pregnant wife and friend carried him for two days across the border to Thailand, to a clinic that provides medical care for refugees. The farmer lies on a vinyl sheet draped over a wood table; his IV bag hangs from a bamboo pole. The room looks more like a storage shed than a trauma center: The floor is cement, the roof corrugated tin. There is only one surgical mask to go around.

But Hahn, who has performed thousands of life-saving surgeries during his 30-year career, is oblivious to the surroundings. He is focused on the patient's leg, and on the medics he has helped train. The head medic, 32-year-old Win Kyaw, wields the scalpel. The patient is awake, his pain dulled by anesthetic, and is surrounded by other medics-in-training: One unwraps the leg bandage, one puts his hand on the patient's chest to monitor breathing, another holds his head still as he moans softly.

Hahn watches as Win Kyaw removes bits of muscle and tissue. Hahn peers at the stump and smiles, nodding, light from the room's single lamp glinting off his large rectangular glasses. "That looks good. See the amount of pink?" Hahn says, pointing, as a translator repeats his words in Karen, an ethnic hill tribe language. "That's healthy tissue. The wound was infected when we first saw it. But today, as he was probing, he wasn't opening up pockets of pus. There's a good possibility that he might save the knee."