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AIDS orphans
Thailand/AIDS: the lost mothers
THAILAND/AIDS:
THE LOST MOTHERS
Children are orphaned by AIDS. Mothers are unable to take care of them because they are too sick themselves. Parents abandon their sick children because they are too scared or too ashamed of them. The population of Wat Pra Bat Nam Phu and its second foundation not only share the struggle against the virus. They also share the sorrow of abandon.
In Wat Prah Bat Nam Phu –shelter for the repudiated. Here you’ll find no doctor, no morphine, no equipment that could ease the pain. Instead, you will warily glance at the raw agony of patients through the terminal room.
Sick people end up there, orphaned by fear, and by the shame of their relatives. Often, the ashes sent to the relatives come back to the temple, piling up in a dedicated place: the unwanted remaining of a daughter or a son.
Too rarely, few parents would eventually witness and even more rarely accompany the suffer of their teenager or young adult child in their very last days. The temple also welcomes some lost mothers with their kids, wondering like lost souls in the compound, in transit... waiting to be sent to the “Second Foundation”, an environment said to be more ‘adequate to children’ according to volunteers.
The abbot of Wat Prah Bat Nam Phu actually has set up the “Second foundation”, dedicated to HIV positive children. Whether their parents are already dead, or whether they have been abandoned, 66 sick kids live in actual worse conditions than the adults of Wat Prah Bat Nam Phu. Only 6 young untrained staffs take care of the sick children, in the walls of dirty and gloomy huge dormitory rooms. The orphans unsurprisingly ignore the odd donated huge TV screens sitting in the middle of cold rooms.
Some infectious (TB) kids are put in individual morbid bedrooms. They awfully wait for death, with the unique comfort of the photo portrait of their dead mother. There, not only you will find no medical care either; but you won’t feel any sparkle of youth, laugh or hope at all.
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