[glasscollector]

I found this on another site. Isn't this the monk that appears on TV regularly?


The Sunday Times featured a lengthy article on the well-known AIDS-hospice temple (Wat Phra Baht Nam Phu) in Lopburi. Excerts are below: The full article is on their website

Is the temple of Buddha's footprints the temple of doom?
Andrew Marshall

It's a Buddhist temple that cares for dying Aids patients. It's also a hugely successful money-making operation, attracting thousands of tourists with its displays of mummified corpses. So where does all that money go?

Thai monks generally prefer audiences to interviews. So, one Sunday morning, I join dozens of tourists at the temple kneeling before Alongkot in a room crowded with Buddha statues. (The ward is a stone's throw away.) Many people clutch photos or amulets of him to sign or bless. His words are sometimes lost in the crash of donation boxes being emptied in the room.

Alongkot says the temple has tried and failed to recruit medical staff. "Thai doctors prefer to work at private hospitals. Even the government ones don't have enough medical staff." It still seems inexplicable that, in a prospering country of 65m, there is not a single Thai doctor for hire.

Yet the temple hardly seems in dire financial straits. Pradit Yingyong, the temple's PR officer, says the abbot plans to build a sports centre (cost: the equivalent of £1.6m) and carve a meditation path through the hill above the temple (£8m).

"There's lots of money coming in," says Bassano. "But how it's distributed, who benefits, who gets what – I have no idea." Why, he asks, build the Aids Human Body Part Museum – a room in which hands, feet, hearts, kidneys and other organs are kept in perspiring jars of formaldehyde – when the temple has no ambulance? "And the neglect of the kids… Not just the kids, but the adult patients as well."

The last doctor to work here was a Belgian volunteer named Paul Yves Wery, who left in 2004. He wrote a parting account of his years at the temple, describing it as unsanitary, ill-equipped and mismanaged. Wery calls the staff "slaves" and the tourists "cannibals"; the abbot is an ambiguous figure who runs "what has become a death factory [like] a small family enterprise". After Wery's book was published, all foreign volunteers except Bassano were asked to leave.

It is hard to ask a celebrated monk about money without seeming to accuse him of dishonesty. But then this is one reason why the finances of Thai temples are traditionally so opaque and donations so easy to misappropriate. ("Half for the temple, half for the temple committee," goes an old Thai song.) It costs 4m to 5m baht (£64,000 to £80,000) a month to run the temple, excluding the second project, says Alongkot, and the temple receives "the same" in donations. The finances are not made public. "It's not our duty to make a public declaration," he insists, "but we have a good [accounting] system." Alongkot suggests I ask at the secretary's office to learn how much is spent on the temple. I am then shuttled between four offices before being given a print-out with a totally different figure from the abbot's. Pradit gives me another figure, a committee member yet another. Nobody can explain how the second project, which includes the orphanage, is funded, never mind the sports centre or meditation path.

When Alongkot took in his first HIV sufferers, it was an act of compassion before its time. Sixteen years later – with hundreds of thousands of Thais visiting, and the temple's coffers spilling over – the patients seem overlooked, even as their very public plight keeps the money rolling in.