LOP BURI, Thailand, July 6 (AFP) - Ravaged by AIDS and weighing only 35 kgs (22 pounds), Sakchai Boonma has too little strength even to flick the flies off his face or wipe the tears that run down his cheeks as he tells how he was infected by his girlfriend.
Sakchai was taken by his brother to Phra Baht Nam Phu, the first and the biggest Buddhist temple in Thailand to welcome AIDS sufferers, many of them from poor backgrounds.
Like most of them, Sakchai, 33, will end his life at the temple far from his family who cannot take care of him any more. As he waits for death, he spends most of his time lying on a bed wearing nothing but a pathetic nappy.
"Here it's better than at the hospital where nobody takes care of us," said the one-time driver whose tattoo of a powerful Batman figure on his shoulder mocks his skeletal appearance.
The temple, a huge complex sited in lush rolling hillside near the city of Lop Buri, about 150 kilometers (95 miles) north of Bangkok, takes in more than 1,000 patients every year for free. The waiting list is several thousand names long.
Not far from the room where the terminally ill patients lie, a pile of small cotton sacks inscribed with just a name and a date hold the remains of dead patients whose ashes were not reclaimed by their families.
"About 90 percent of the ashes are not reclaimed," said the temple's abbot, Alongkat Dikkapanyo.
"The main reason is most of the AIDS patients come from poor families, so it is difficult for them to come here and collect the ashes," he said.
Slowly, the figure of a sitting Buddha is being blocked from view by the relentlessly mounting pile of some 10,000 bags that started at its feet and is rising up its body.
The temple has eight crematoria and with 500 people a year dying, "it is very rare that on one single day none of them is being used," said an employee.
Dr Yves Wery, 47, a Belgian, has been the only doctor at the hospice over the last six years and has taken care of thousands of patients. An American doctor just has arrived to help him.
He works for free, with no nursing staff, only unpaid foreign orderlies. The only people who are paid are the Thai orderlies.
"No doctor wants to come here. It's appalling," said Dr Wery, who has suffered from tuberculosis and a nervous breakdown at the temple and is publishing a book about his experiences.
"There is only one doctor here, one stupid idiot from Belgium who even has to pay for his own visa."
Still Thailand has become "a model country", he said. "It produces the main antiretroviral (ARV) medicine at the best world price."
Thais can get hold of the drugs for 30 baht (75 cents) under Thailand's much-vaunted health scheme and the kingdom has followed it up by organising the upcoming 15th international Aids conference.
"But 50 percent of Thai doctors don't take AIDS seriously," said a frustrated Dr Wery. "The incompetence and nastiness of some hospital doctors who refuse to treat the patients is the raison d'etre of this temple."
"It's not up to the monk to take things in hand instead of the state," said the western doctor.
Abbot Alongkat opened the temple to the sick in the early 1990s. He appears draped in his saffron robe on the slick prospectus of the temple and is shown speaking to one patient and taking care of another.
But his speciality is to attract generous donations. He has nothing to do with medicine and rarely visits the treatment rooms.
He gets about 2.44 million dollars a year from private donors, some of them foreigners, one thousand times more than the modest funds allocated by the state.
The monk's critics say he is just using the publicity for raising money and point to the new buildings that have grown up in the complex, in striking contrast to the medical means of the temple.
"One doctor is not enough", concedes abbott Alongkat laughing. "But we have to accept it. There are no other volunteer doctors, we have to do as best we can.
"Here the patients have friends, they are not lonely. They can finish their lives peacefully."
Inside the temple complex, a "museum" makes clear the reason why people come to Phra Baht Nam Phu. A transsexual, a prostitute and a five-year-old boy, their mummified bodies exposed in transparent cases, crudely show that AIDS here means death.
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