Temple provides sanctuary to AIDS victims

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Lopburi, Thailand

Her name was Jiraporn Jindathong. She was a 24-year-old singer and sex worker from Tak province in northern Thailand. Her photograph showed a sweet, round-faced young woman looking straight at the camera, as if challenging the world.

But all that's left of Jindathong now is a lifeless body in a glass coffin, shriveled up from the formaldehyde treatment necessary to preserve her.

Jindathong had agreed for her body to be preserved after death. She wasn't highly educated -- only finishing elementary school -- but she knew enough that the sight of her preserved body would help open the eyes of others to AIDS.

AIDS was the cause of her death three years ago. She was infected by one of her clients.

Jindathong now lies with the seven other preserved bodies of AIDS victims in the "Death Room" of Wat Phrapratan Nampu Buddhist temple in Lopburi, 115 kilometers north of Bangkok. In a way, it tries to educate visitors that AIDS shows no discrimination; women, men, transvestites and even babies can be infected.

Twenty years since the pandemic, AIDS has killed 25 million people. More than 40 million people in the world today are living with HIV or AIDS, with some 5 million infected in 2002 alone, according to the joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

In Thailand, the epidemic started in the mid-1980s, with a rapid growth in infections among injecting drug users, continuing into the 1990s among sex workers and their clients.

In 1994, the scourge entered the next wave, when women got infected; HIV-infected newborns quickly followed. These innocent babies often did not reach their fifth birthday.

UNAIDS 2002 Thailand Country Profile estimated that some 984,000 adults and children have been infected by HIV in Thailand since the start of the epidemic and 289,000 have subsequently died of AIDS-related diseases.

Today, it is estimated that 695,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS in the country, with a further 29,000 new infections estimated to take place this year, according to the country profile.

Yet, despite 20 years of experience, AIDS is still largely unfamiliar and misconceptions about the disease and how it is spread are rife.

People fear the syndrome; people with HIV are often shunned by their families, friends and the community. This is where Wat Phrapratan Nampu comes in.

Set up in 1992 by Buddhist monk Alongkot Dikkapanyo, the Wat Phrapratan Nampu hospice provides lodgings and care for people with AIDS at final stages of their illnesses.

"My job is to help AIDS patients die peacefully and in as little pain as possible," Dikkapanyo said on .aidstemple.th.org Website.

The idea to set up a hospice for people with AIDS came when he met a dying AIDS patient at a hospital in Lopburi.

"This man had nobody. His family and friends had shunned him. Society had shunned him. I held his hand, and he died then and there," Dikkapanyo said.

When he first set up the hospice on the grounds of the then run-down temple, Dikkapanyo met opposition, both from other monks who said that it was not the role of Buddhist monks to care for people with AIDS, and from local people who disliked the idea of people with AIDS living in their backyard.

But as the pandemic worsened the temple was more accepted, and although the prejudice toward people with AIDS is still prevalent, it has become known as a place of refuge for such people.

A new project, 80 kilometers away from the temple, was also built to provide housing for people with AIDS, as well as an orphanage and school for the children left behind.

Kongkiat Seweewunlop, a self-proclaimed, all-purpose worker at the hospice, said some 700 orphaned children were currently living in the newly built orphanage, while another 55 children living there have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.

The temple grounds have several buildings, housing for HIV/AIDS victims to share with their families, a hospital for those with AIDS, exhibition rooms to educate visitors about AIDS, and a room where healthier patients make and sell souvenirs.

The smell of death hung thick in the three-storey hospital when The Jakarta Post visited the hospital earlier this month.

Seweewunlop said that at present there were about 80 people living in the 200-bed hospital.

"We separate the patients with TB and those with other complications; it's dangerous when they cough, contagious," he said, explaining that healthier patients are located higher up in the hospital building.

Two foreign volunteers were seen working; one was patiently daubing alcohol on the skin of a very thin man, another was administering drugs.

"One doctor, one nurse, and eight nurse assistants volunteered to take care of the patients, but now the doctor had gone back to Belgium," Seweewunlop said.

Vacant eyes, over-large on gaunt faces, follow us as we make our way across the hospital. A man was lying prostrate, unmoving, on a cot, another scratched absentmindedly at the scabs on his mottled skin, his face rendered unrecognizable from the abscesses that skin cancer had induced.

"On average, three people die here every day, more when the weather turns cold," Seweewunlop said, adding that since it had been set up, more than 7,000 people had died at the hospice.

When people with AIDS die, their bodies are cremated and the bones ground to fine powder and sent to their families. But a majority were sent back to the temple: Less than 10 percent were well received, Seweewunlop said.

In the "Bone Room" of the hospice three stacks are discernible, one mound of bones in separate cloth bags, another mound of finely ground bones in plastic bags.

There is also another mound of small cardboard boxes, returned to sender after being rejected by receiving families.