Backstory: To help Cambodians is Bernie's law

Decades later, as a Newsweek correspondent, his exploits included scheming his way into the only exclusive interview ever granted by Emperor Hirohito (1975), and sneaking past burly security guards into the antiques shop of a Tokyo hotel to catch Indonesian President Sukarno haggling for a discount (1963). Sukarno took to the plucky reporter and introduced him to Cambodia's King Norodom Sihanouk, who would become a close friend – but not before Krisher first got himself declared persona non grata by the mercurial "god king" after some unflattering reporting about the royal family. In 1993, when King Sihanouk returned home from decides-long exile in Beijing, he asked Krisher for his help in rebuilding war-torn Cambodia.

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So here he is today – Cambodia's most prominent philanthropist, grousing about being "a total amateur in this."

But he's not, says Walter Kotkowski, a representative of the American medical charity HOPE Worldwide. "Bernie is a class act. A one-man United Nations, I hear, they call him," saysMr. Kotkowski, who oversees procurement for the Sihanouk Hospital Center of HOPE, a state-of-the-art hospital for the poor launched by Krisher.

Krisher appreciates the compliment but even more so the T-shirt with a HOPE Worldwide logo he cadges off the charity's president, Robert Gempel, who's in town for the hospital's 10th anniversary. "The king might like one shirt, too," nudges Krisher, the indefatigable asker.

Asking for things – like money – is easy, because Krisher can, and does, boast that overhead for his many projects is just 5 percent of his annual $1 million budget, which he raises by relentlessly lobbying influential friends and strangers he meets while trolling hotel lobbies and airport lounges. He donates $30,000 himself (stock dividends). Meanwhile in Tokyo, where he lives, he drives a banged-up old jalopy. "I'm stingy," Krisher notes.

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Despite his missionary zeal for improving lives, Krisher remains emotionally detached, seeing lachrymose sentiment as a barrier to good old pragmatism. "I look at the big picture [of poverty], not individual stories of want and need," he says.

Still, his charity plays out in individual lives. Take Toun Phala, a 14-year-old AIDS orphan. The girl and her grandmother eke out a living tending others' rice paddies and orchards in the village of Kirivon 80 miles southwest of Phnom Penh. Along the highway to the village, cartoonish notices caution human traffickers against luring naive teens with false promises into indentured service as maids or sex workers.

Girls like Phala are prime targets of those traffickers – and, as such, are a target of Krisher's Girls Be Ambitious project, which pays parents $10 a month to allow their daughters to study. Thanks to the program Phala is now back in fourth grade.

As for the big picture, Krisher is busy soliciting enough $120 yearly sponsorships from individual foreign donors to send as many as 50,000 girls back to school across the countryside, where annual per capita income often remains under $40. The returning students will feed into 313 schools already built throughout Cambodia since 1999 by Krisher's Put a Roof Over Their Head initiative.

He launched that project on an impulse following an upcountry visit where he saw kids studying under a banyan tree in a town with no schoolhouse. To cover the building costs of individual schools, he's been enlisting donations of $14,000 from private Japanese and American benefactors, whose giving is matched by the Asian Development Bank. More than 80 former residents of yet another Krisher-sponsored project – the Future Light Orphanage – teach at the schools. "Once they graduate from the orphanage, we have jobs waiting for them," Krisher says.

Last year, a group of psychiatric caregivers from Hawaii approached Krisher asking him for help in building a new school in the ancestral village of one of their patients, a Cambodian refugee. The school was completed in October. During its ribbon-cutting ceremony, Krisher addressed hundreds of villagers gathered for the occasion: "This new school now belongs to you," he says through an interpreter. "Let your children study – the girls, too, don't send them into the fields all day to work."

Then, in his signature curmudgeonly way, he adds: "But tell them not to touch the [whitewashed] walls and leave handprints all over them."

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