The New York Times - October 16, 2006
Seth Mydans

Orathai, a 44-year-old widow, said she was caught by surprise when love came to her instead of death.

"I have AIDS, but still I've found someone to love," she said as her husband took a clothespin from his mouth in greeting. "He's pretty strong. He exercises. He's got big muscles and no spots on his skin."

She and her husband had come to the hospice separately many months ago to die. But with inexpensive drug treatments provided by the government their thin bodies filled out again, their health returned and they found a future in each other.

"We are an AIDS family!" Orathai exclaimed happily. And theirs is not the only romance among the survivors who live here on the temple grounds.

It is not uncommon, said a nurse's aide, for patients to rise from what they had thought would be their deathbeds and walk from the critical ward virtually hand in hand to start new lives.

"They tell me, 'We are leaving to get married, goodbye,' " said the aide, Jamlong Thamboonsuk.

But these new lives are often constricted by the stigma that their illness carries in Thailand. Orathai, 44, a former clerk in an industrial fiber company, would not allow her full name to be used in this article, or her full face to be shown in a photograph.

And she and her husband, a 40-year-old tour bus driver whose first name is Piak, have not returned to their homes because of the discrimination they know they would face.

Like hundreds of other patients here at Thailand's leading AIDS hospice, they are victims of a prejudice that has lingered even as the government has put in place sophisticated programs of prevention and treatment.

"In Thailand people don't accept people like me yet," Orathai said. "They can't accept us, so I wouldn't dare go out."

Though they may find solace in attachments to one another, some of the people who live here said that a sense of disgrace had estranged them from their families, even in their own minds.

Somyot Lungwat, 40, a construction foreman, said he felt so ashamed and guilty when he became infected that he left his wife and 13-year-old stepson without telling them why.

"They don't know I am sick," he said. "I left them and never saw them again. I didn't say anything. I just disappeared."

Chamnong Sommana, 38, who worked on a Coca Cola delivery truck, said that when he learned of his infection, he felt immediately isolated from the world, and came alone to the hospice. "I felt strange around people," he said. "What would they do if they knew?"

Somphop Pruttisirikul, 51, a carpenter, said that when he became ill, his neighbors shunned him and his close friends became more distant.

"I keep a distance too," he said, "because I know I'm not the same any more."

Orathai's parents know that she is infected, but she has not told her 8-year-old daughter or 6-year-old son.

Her former husband killed himself when he learned that he was infected, and Orathai left her home and her parents and children to hide her illness from her neighbors.

She keeps an even greater secret from her daughter, she said: the girl is HIV positive as well.

But as far as the girl or her teachers or classmates know, she has some unnamed problem with her immune system that requires regular medication. "If I told the school, they would reject her, and we'd have to take her in here," Orathai said.

The children do sometimes visit Orathai at the hospice, as if she were simply at work in some distant place. This month, she said, her son was expected to to come and stay with her for the school holidays.

"I'll be a good mother to him, I'll be the best mother I can be," she said. "He doesn't know what happened to me. I don't want AIDS to separate the family, separate the mother from her children."

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