Thai AIDS patients spend final days in temple of death

Thai AIDS patients spend final days in temple of death

First posted 00:02am (Mla time) June 02, 2006
By Melinda Quintos de Jesus
Philippine News Online


LOPBURI, Thailand -- If you look deep enough, you can see how beautiful Patcharee once was. Her high cheek bones, small nose and deep brown eyes are all still there, but they've become lost in a face rotted by AIDS.
Some would quickly judge her a hooker or heroin addict who gambled with life and lost. But 25 years since the world's first documented cases, Patcharee has become Thailand's new face of the disease: a faithful wife and mother whose only mistake was trusting a cheating husband who brought the disease home.

"I never thought in my life that I would get AIDS," said Patcharee, who gave only one name. "I kept thinking, 'This should not have happened to me.' I could not get it out of my head."

At 34, Patcharee is a withered ghost, abandoned and waiting to die alone at a Buddhist temple that cares for terminal AIDS patients about 150 kilometers (95 miles) north of Bangkok and has become known as a temple of doom, with macabre exhibits of the disease's ravages.

The agency UNAIDS estimates some 570,000 people are living with the virus in Thailand, about a third of them women. Once an HIV hot spot, the country has made great gains in reducing the number of new infections through strongly promoting condom use among prostitutes in its rampant sex industry.

But the epidemic has started to shift. Men who have sex with men; unmarried young people having casual sex; injecting drug users; and monogamous housewives -- like Patcharee -- are among today's most vulnerable.

Patcharee's sunken face is splotchy from a rash that also peppers her tiny arms and hands. Wine-colored lesions cover legs that no longer want to move. Tuberculosis gnaws at her lungs and another disease she can't remember is attacking her liver.

All of this from sleeping with one man in her lifetime. He disappeared years ago and was never heard from again.

From her wheelchair, she stares at thousands of white sandbags stacked around a giant Buddha. They hold the ashes of Thailand's unwanted who end up here because even in death, they are shunned and feared.

Patcharee's family dumped her here at Wat Pra Baht Nam Phu last year after she tested positive for HIV, fearing they would catch the disease. She's hoping she can live long enough to see her uninfected children, 9 and 15, one last time, but she knows most patients at the terminal AIDS ward in Lopburi are in the final days of life -- a graveyard of breathing corpses begging for the torture to end.

Every bed is filled with a skeleton in an oversized diaper. All have shaved heads, making it hard to tell women from men. Flies swarm as the afternoon humidity thickens. One man lifts arms that seem almost chopstick thin toward the sky, as if praying to be taken. Another woman bellows in agony as a worker pulls an emaciated arm through a well-worn smock. Others lie stiff as if already entombed, their eyes rolled back. And some frail bodies appear to nearly shatter from the force of their own coughs, most of which are the result of tuberculosis.

Thousands have died here since AIDS peaked in Thailand in 1991 with about 143,000 new annual cases, a figure that has since dropped more than 80 percent. But even now with the government making AIDS drugs available to all, every bed at the temple's hospice ward remains full and about a dozen people continue to die here each month. Thousands are on a waiting list to take the next open bed in a country where about 58,000 people die nationally each year.

But some families don't wait for an opening. Just last month, a man near death was left in the sun at the temple's front gate with a bottle of water and a pillow.

"They're left like a cat or a dog," said Sumontip Sriket, who has worked at the AIDS hospice for three years. "We cannot take everybody. There's no nurses, no doctors. There's not enough beds for patients."

The wat, which is well-known in Thailand, is also used to engender fears of AIDS. Preserved naked bodies of dead AIDS patients encased in glass are on display along with a baby floating in formaldehyde. Sculptures made of bone fragments fill a garden and lopped off body parts -- hands, feet, penises -- are seen floating in glass jars.

School children in matching uniforms arrive in bus loads to be scared into being safe. Looks of horror wash over their faces as hundreds of teenagers file through the ward for a close-up look at the ugly reality of AIDS and what it means to waste away.

"I'm terrified," said Pawita Sri-u-Tid, 15, after touring the temple. "I'm afraid of having sex."

But fear is the one thing Patcharee no longer feels. She says she has accepted her fate and found inner peace through meditation. She smiles at the thought, and her eyes flicker briefly with life.

And just for an instant, she is beautiful again.