Today we travel to a HIV/AIDS hospice in Lopburi, Thailand.
Thai temple has 143 hospice patients as of right now. This was a very sad visit, but it was great to see that a Monk has opened up this temple to help people who were suffering from this disease.
This is a picture of the Monk that began the hospice program.
First we visited their museum. This was a bit shocking. 25 years ago when there was no anti-retroviral medication a lot of people were dying from HIV/AIDS. Many people decided to donate their bodies to be put in the museum to produce awareness about the disease. Also in the museum was many many bags of ashes. The Thai people believed that if they brought the ashes of the deceased into their homes they would get the disease as well.
In the case on the right of the pictures are ashes that are fully ground up. The sacks of ashes in the center are still in larger pieces.
This is another bin of ashes that was in the beginning of the museum. It was shocking how many bags of ashes were here.
This is a picture of two of the bodies that were donated to the museum. The strings you see are from the Monks. The strings are used for spiritual reasons to bless the deceased.
This is a picture of sculptures made by a famous artist in Thailand. They are made out of ashes. So many people were dying that they had an abundance of ashes so they started to make sculptures.
To put it in perspective, before the anti-retroviral medication 10-20 people were dying each day. Today there are only 2-3 deaths every couple of months.
At the temple they have many little bungalows for their patients to live in. Female and male patients live on separate sides of the temple. The temple also provided a shuttle for their patients to take to the hospital to get their medication. There is also a building for those who can not take care of
themselves. In this building there are 3 nurses that take care of all of them. There is also 1 doctor that comes once a week to check on the patients. Since these people are disabled they can not pick up their own medication, so
someone from the temple will go pick them up from the hospital and bring them back. All of the people at the temple are volunteers. The only money the temple receives
is donations from people.
As we were walking around the temple there were many many monkeys running around. We didn’t get too close because we heard they can be quite vicious.
The monkey were running after the food that feel from the tree above.
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