Thailand International APPE 2017: Wat Phra Bat Nam Phu Visit

Hello all! Today our caravan was on the move again with a few pit stops for gas and the bathroom but our most important stop was at the Wat Phra Bat Nam Phu a temple and HIV/AIDS Hospice location.

Map of the facility

HIV AIDS Hospice Entrance

It was started by a monk 20-25 years ago to have these stigmatized infected patients come to his home to live out the rest of their lives in peace. The temple itself at the top of the mountain had been there prior to the hospice. There are many areas to the compound that includes the museum of those who have donated their bodies for future generations to learn from their life and to prevent transmission of the disease in the form of cremated ashes and mummified bodies.

Art replicas of patients

Buddha monuments and ashes of patients that had stayed at the facility

Many of the bodies are males, but there are females and children all around the room, and the piles of what look like rice sacks are ashes of bodies before they are ground to dust. The ashes are at this temple because it is believed by many that if the ashes of the family member is returned to the home the family will get infected. There are also strings connecting all of the body caskets, cases and ashes that the monks have strung to protect the soles of those who have passed. The facility also has a crematory that was used quite often before the existence of ARV (Anti-retro-viral therapy) where they would cremate 10-20 bodies a day and it would break down quite often, setting them behind to keep up. Since the creation, and government supported, implementation of ARV they maybe have one every 2 months at the facility. We learned that many of the patients that come here have been rejected by other programs and by their families and have not had the control to take their medications to prevent infections. On the grounds there are bungalows for males and females if the patient is able to take care of themselves and can contribute to work in the community or at the facility itself by assisting the monks, or the nurses in the hospital setting area. At the back of the grounds is the main building that houses patients that cannot take care of themselves and need observational assistance to control the disease. The building is staffed by 3 nurses, resident volunteers, and local and international volunteers to take care of the approximately 30 beds for male and female patients. Once a week a doctor visits from Bangkok, about 2 hours away, to assess any patients that need to be seen and patients can go to the local hospital to get their treatments that the temple offers a free shuttle service to. The temple has about 143 patients between the bungalows and the observed patients and the nurses determine if the patients are ready to move out of observation to the bungalows or vice versa. We also learned that many of the women that are housed here are only here because their husbands transmitted the disease to them and they have nowhere to go. After our tour of the facility some students walked to the top to see the temple and dodge the many monkeys that live in the trees on the grounds.