LOP BURI, Thailand, Aug 16, 2006 (AFP) - Pu, a 29-year-old Thai woman with AIDS, is all skin and bone. She is so weak that she cannot even brush away flies off her face.
When Pu learned she had contracted the disease through her job as a sex worker, she was abandoned by everyone around her.
But a month ago Pu, who uses only her nickname, found one glimmer of hope -- a Buddhist temple for people with AIDS.
"She once said to me: 'Everybody has abandoned me. Would you be my father now?'" says Michael Bassano, a 57-year-old American Catholic priest who has been volunteering at the temple since 2004.
The temple, which is built at the foot of a small mountain in Lop Buri, 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Bangkok, is home to 550 AIDS patients, including 140 children.
Its founder is Alongkot Dikkapanyo, a 53-year-old Buddhist monk, who left a promising career in engineering at the ministry of agriculture at the age of 26 to become a monk.
The idea of turning a temple into an AIDS hospice started in 1990 when two young HIV-positive men came to Wat Phra Baht Nam Phu, which means "the temple of Buddha's footprints" in Thai, and asked Alongkot if they could stay.
"Nobody wanted to look after them," Alongkot recalls.
Two years later, he took in eight more HIV-positive Thais -- seven men and a woman in their 20s and 30s -- who had been rejected by their families, and turned his temple into an eight-bed AIDS hospice.
"I cannot control the world, but I can help and protect AIDS patients. That's my work," the round-faced monk says.
But after opening the hospice, people refused to offer him alms and stopped visiting the temple.
"In the first three years, nobody came to my temple. I received threats. I understood that people were afraid of infection. Even other monks said a temple should be a place for monks, not for AIDS patients," he says.
But Alongkot refused to give up.
"Some families dropped off patients at the temple and never saw them again. But many patients came here by themselves, even with their children, saying they had no other places to go. No place, no money, no work, no food," he says.
Some 20 nurses help care for patients at the temple, which has a full stock of anti-retroviral AIDS drugs that are widely available in Thailand at minimum costs under its health program.
But the temple still has no doctor and receives "very little" money from the Thai government, depending almost entirely on funds from the Thai royal family and private donations, Alongkot says.
Except for Alongkot, the 11 other monks at the temple all have HIV.
-- 'I wanna die. I wanna die' --
Since Thailand reported its first case of AIDS in 1984, about half a million Thais have died of the disease, although the United Nations has praised the kingdom as one of the world's most successful nations in preventing HIV.
But patients keep coming to Alongkot's hospice, proving that the stigma and discrimination against people with AIDS still remain strong in Thailand.
"If you have HIV/AIDS, you disgrace your family by contracting HIV/AIDS," says Bassano, who speaks fluent Thai.
"So because of that, you make all of us lose face as a family, our reputation and our life. So we don't want you anymore. That's what it comes down to," he says.
At the hospice, another 29-year-old, Surirat Brown, begs Bassano to let her go.
Surirat is divorced from a British husband but stills calls herself Mrs. Brown. She remarried a Thai who gave her AIDS.
"I wanna die. I wanna die," Surirat says in English in a very thin voice to the gray-haired priest, who gently wipes her tears away.
"You are not alone," Bassano whispers in her ear, while holding her hand.
Alongkot, a Buddhist monk, is forbidden from touching women. But he massages the emaciated bodies of male patients during his daily chats with them.
One gaunt man kneels on the floor and quietly sobs as Alongkot touches his bony arm.
At the hospice, men and women are in equal number, the monk says. Most men got HIV from prostitutes, while many women were infected from their boyfriends and husbands.
Jamong Somana, a 38-year-old who used to drive a Coca-Cola delivery truck, came to the temple four months ago after his parents told him they could no longer care for him. Jamong has not heard from them since.
"If you have sex, please protect yourself from AIDS. If you don't, you will live your life in sadness," says Jamong, who got HIV from a prostitute.
Next to Jamong, Sam Nian, a 49-year-old housewife, says her daughter brought her here three weeks ago. Sam, blind due to the disease, says her daughter and other family members have never visited her at the hospice.
"I got AIDS from my husband, but I am not angry at him," she says with a smile. Her husband died of AIDS three years ago.
Alongkot says around 10 to 15 patients die each month, and the temple, which has its own incinerator, has cremated more than 10,000 bodies since 1992.
"But even after death, most families don't come here to pick up bones," he says. Alongkot has put thousands of white cotton bags containing bones and ashes of AIDS patients around a brown Buddha statue at the temple.
"I tell my patients not to worry about anything and not to feel sad because I don't want them to die in loneliness. I want them to die peacefully," Alongkot says.
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