Phnom Penh: When then-18-month-old Sok Ravuth was abandoned at a Cambodian rubbish dump in 2014 doctors said he would not survive and suggested Buddhist monks prepare his spirit for death.
Acutely malnourished, pale and suffering from a fever he could barely move, his muscles paralysed from damage to his central nervous system.
Four years later former Hollywood executive Scott Neeson stoops to squeeze the boy's arm as he lies unmoving and staring into space on a bed in a centre for special-needs children on the outskirts of Cambodia's capital.
"He can't even make eye contact. We don't know who his parents are or what his real name is," says Neeson, an Australian who a decade ago left behind his $1 million-a-year salary, Porsche, yacht and luxury home in the US to start the Cambodian Children's Fund (CCF), the largest Australian-run, non-government organisation in impoverished Cambodia.
"I don't know what you would do with kids like these if there was no residential care centres for them," Neeson says, adding that government centres that could take him are already full.
"A majority of families don't want their children back," he says.
"It's another mouth to feed when parents are struggling to look after other children they have, and just to survive themselves."
Cambodia's government has begun returning thousands of children from orphanages and residential care institutions to their communities amid a global push to shut them down.
The government acknowledges many of the country's 600 "orphanages" are shonky, unregistered money-making businesses where more than 16,000 children could be vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
And the Turnbull government is considering world-first legislation and policies aimed at stamping out Australian support for residential institutions for children in developing countries such as Cambodia, including making it an offence to support or donate to those not complying with UN conventions on the rights of the child.
Neeson's organisation has more than 100 residential children, putting it at the centre of a firestorm of global criticism of orphanages and child residential care institutions.
How 58-year-old Neeson went from an Adelaide school drop-out at 17 - who ran projectors at a night drive-in in Sydney, among other jobs - to being president of Twentieth Century Fox and head of Sony Pictures, and now spends much of his time tromping through ankle-deep trash at a Cambodian rubbish dump to help garbage-sorting children, is a story that could have been the plot of one of the movies he used to oversee.
Neeson says the moment he decided to quit Hollywood for Cambodia came 14 years ago when during a visit to a rubbish dump an 86-year-old grandmother led him to four gravely ill child scavengers suffering typhoid and other illnesses.
As Neeson looked at them amid toxic fumes and burning waste wondering what he could do to save their lives, his Los Angeles office patched through a call to his mobile from one of Sony Pictures' then star actors, who was about to fly from Tokyo to the US in a private plane.
Neeson says the actor, who he won't name, was "pissed off" because Sony's office in Tokyo had not put his favourite PlayStation games on the plane.
"The actor, who was commanding $20 million a picture at the time, was in a vile mood. He said to me, 'you should know Scott, my life wasn't meant to be this difficult'," Neeson says.
"If I ever wanted validation I was doing the right thing that was it," he says.
"It was a beautiful, crystal-clear moment. I lost all my anxiety and flew back to Hollywood to start a long process of resigning."
Neeson's organisation now employs 500 people and operates on a $A10 million-a-year budget, much of the money from wealthy individuals, and around 8 per cent from Hollywood.
In Cambodia, politically well-connected Neeson has plenty of supporters, as well as critics.
Some disgruntled ex-employees say he is a control freak and that his organisation has grown too fast and too big for its own good.
Others say he is an easy target in a rumour-mongering wild-west town home to 300 NGOs competing for donations and a mix of rogues, conmen, seedy characters and expatriate do-gooders.
Sydney filmmaker James Ricketson embarked on a five-year campaign against Neeson and some of his staff, writing 120 critical blogs, before he was arrested last June and accused of espionage, which he vigorously denies.
Diplomats say Ricketson has been caught up in a politically motivated crackdown by Cambodia's strongman Hun Sen.
Neeson says part of the animosity related to the conviction and jailing in Cambodia of British man David Fletcher on child-sex charges, who Ricketson has campaigned to be released, insisting he is innocent.
Neeson says he had registered concerns that one of the Cambodian Children's Fund's 16-year-old students had become "engaged" to the then 60-year-old Fletcher, who claimed to also be helping dump scavengers.
Squatting bare-footed on a seat in his office, Neeson says he doesn't hear from critics other than Ricketson, but would be happy to speak with them.
"In Hollywood there was a saying, the only thing better than a successful film was someone else's failure," he says.
"It's sort of like that in Phnom Penh - some people don't like seeing a successful, not-for-profit business."
As I arrive in Phnom Penh Neeson emails me saying, "I don't want a story that focuses on me. That has been done to death".
"After 13 years the CCF has evolved to be a great success with results that are remarkable - kids in school, university rates, maternal care, housing - and the future goal is to have the CCF model replicated in other post-conflict areas," he wrote.
"You need to see what is going on at ground level."
The first stop in a tour of what Neeson calls his "hood" in a slum south of Phnom Penh is the Sumner M. Redstone Child Rescue Centre, named after the billionaire US businessman and media magnate.
As dusk falls dozens of children run to Neeson, laughing and hugging him. He knows all their names and their histories, telling most how proud he is of them.
He affectionately pats the head of twin nine-year-old girls, who were abandoned on a building site when they were five or six.
"We came to be able to tell them apart before their mother could," Neeson says.
Here is a girl whose father raped her, along with two sisters, after their mother died. "She has come a long way with us," he says.
The sisters now live with a foster grandmother.
"We find that only eight to 10 per cent of households we deal with in a former garbage dump area have a father working to provide money to care for the children," he says.
"The men go missing."
We walk through slums where the CCF has built houses on stilts.
Neeson leads me to a multi-storey building called the Neeson-Cripps Academy, named after Robert Cripps, former Velcro Companies chairman, where students are in night classes, some sitting in front of computers while others prepare leadership lectures.
The CCF operates 64 inter-connected education, childcare, community outreach and healthcare programs and has almost 2000 enrolled students.
Neeson says of the first 200 children he rescued from rubbish dumps 70 per cent have made it to universities and some have now graduated and won leadership scholarships.
Cambodia's ministry of social affairs sees the CCF as a model for child NGOs amid the crackdown on orphanages.
Neeson says he "absolutely agrees" with experts citing multiple studies showing that children living in institutions should be returned where possible to their communities, and that closing hundreds of Cambodia's shonky orphanages is an "absolute necessity".
But he warns that Cambodia has scant resources or the social welfare officers required to evaluate whether it is safe for the children to return.
About 700 children have already been reunited with their families and about 300 others are being processed to leave orphanages.
In a submission to an Australian parliamentary inquiry last year Neeson warned the "notion that children will be welcomed home is dangerous" and that "returning a child to a safe and loving family environment does not automatically initiate a pattern of behaviour that includes access to education or even more basic fundamental resources such as access to food, clean water or healthcare".
"Once these fake orphanages are closed there will be a large number of children who will not be able to be sent back to their parents," Neeson told Australian MPs sitting on a committee who have made sweeping recommendations, including that Australia establish a register of overseas residential institutions.
"There are a multitude of risk factors of exploitation and abuse involved in returning children to their families without proper procedure," Neeson said, adding targets for the returns "cannot be set arbitrarily without risking further exploitation and abuse".
Neeson says many children miss out on an education because of their parents' inability, incapacity or unwillingness to provide a safe and secure home environment.
"Residential care in these cases not only provides critical support to the child's human development with food, nutrition, water, sanitation and healthcare it also provides the vital - and only - gateway to education, without which these children would be condemned to repeat the cycle of poverty as illiterate and uneducated citizens."
Neeson says it is a "huge undertaking" to ensure children are safely returned and doubts the government can meet a target to return 3500 children by the end of this year.
The United Nations' children's agency UNICEF also warns a severe lack of social workers in Cambodia poses a challenge to the government meeting the target, and more should be urgently trained.
Iman Morooka, chief of communication for UNICEF in Cambodia, says the children's reintegration will have to be a "slow and long-term process and must be conducted very carefully".
"Even after returning home the child will be reunited but not yet fully integrated," she says, adding that they will require continued monitoring.
Morooka says UNICEF also recognises there are circumstances and special cases when there is no option but for children to stay at residential care institutions.
Neeson says the CCF has 18 such cases.
"UNICEF believes a child's most appropriate line of defence is her or his family and that children should be placed in alternative care only when it is necessary," Morooka says.
Neeson says it takes one of his staff members three work-days to talk to family members, neighbours, police, village chiefs and others to evaluate whether the child can return safely.
There are particular concerns children above 12 will be vulnerable to sexual abuse.
Two sets of supposed parents arrived at a CCF centre to demand back a five-day-old girl who had been found on the streets.
"They told nonsense stories and we found out through DNA checks that they were not the real parents," Neeson says.
"A good healthy baby is more of a commodity than a child."
A few months ago Neeson was sitting on the top floor of a swank hotel in the US meeting a donor when, he says, it "sunk in just how much I had given up".
"I had never really taken the time since arriving in Cambodia to think about the beautiful house, boat on the harbour and my really good mates over there," he says.
"But I have no regrets."
