Founded in 2000, Brahmavihara/Cambodia AIDS Project is a small Buddhist chaplaincy program working with Cambodian AIDS patients too poor to access traditional resources. Cambodia has a tremendous vacuum in spiritual support for the destitute. Our primary intention is to address this problem, to allow people to realize that the Buddha's compassion is already fully present, even and especially in the midst of poverty, marginalization, deterioration and suffering.

Our staff of 10 people visit the sick in hospitals, hospices and their homes. We listen to their lives and stories, pray for the dead and dying and comfort the living as we can. We give Precepts to the living, the dying and newly dead. We chant, meditate, perform ceremonies and do massage, Reiki and Healing Touch. My staff studies smot, a traditional, unique and very moving form of Khmer chanting, and uses it, as well as regular chanting, with patients. We clean and chant at the Chea Chum Neas hospital mortuary, which we renovated in 2006, and observe major Precept Days in our meditation hall. We continually train ourselves through Dhamma study, meditation and retreats. We have also developed various social and material aid programs in response to needs.

Cambodia has long been considered a major success story in education, prevention and treatment of AIDS. Between 1997 and 2010, major international organizations developed programs of education, counseling, testing, providing medicines, especially antiretrovirals (ARVS), and prevention of mother-to-child transmission. Prevalence dropped; people began living successfully; and medical treatment became excellent. It was an extraordinary period of transformation.

In 2010 the government took over all the AIDS programs (except for Medicins sans Frontiere’s work in the prisons) from the organizations who built them. It has not proven itself successful in managing them. Free testing, counseling and access to ARV programs has disappeared; testing for AIDS-related conditions is no longer freely available; hospitals charge for admission and lack both basic medicines and such elementary equipment as IV fluids and sterile gloves for working with patients; hospital staff are demoralized; ‘informal’ charges are pervasive.

Increasingly, in the face of these changes, we have enlarged our material aid programs. We already provided monkey balm and candy for all patients; soymilk for patients who can’t eat; supplementary food and money for about 120 AIDS and tb patients in two prisons; food money for some 50 patients with multi-drug-resistant tb; transportation money to obtain medicines for over 200 people; twice yearly rice distributions to about 500 patients; and a very broad range of specific responses to needs.

When Maryknoll organization closed its hospice at the end of 2010 we explored the possibility of replacing it with what would have been the first Buddhist hospice in Cambodia. This proved to be too large a task for us. Instead, we began working with cryptococcyl meningitis, a major cause of AIDS death here. Initially we focused on providing. Amphotericin B, the expensive medicine essential for treatment. Now we also subsidize diagnostic spinal taps, and provide several kinds of IV fluid, pain medicine, injectors, and other necessities. All these activities are very small in the face of much huger needs.

And, as important as this material aid is, it remains at the periphery of what we are designed to do. The heart of our work remains the development of intimacy with patients in ways that allow respect both for their suffering and for the healing power of the Buddha’s teachings, intimacy that allows them either die or to live in whatever peace they are able to achieve.