Brahmavihara/Cambodia AIDS Project is a small Buddhist chaplaincy organization working with Cambodian AIDS patients too poor to access traditional resources. When we began in 2000 antiretroviral medicines (ARVs) were not available in Cambodia. Our work then was directed towards helping people find as much peace as possible in the face of certain death. With the introduction of free ARVs and their current broad availability the situation and our work have changed dramatically. We still deal extensively with death and dying, but we have become involved extensively in social services, primarily as a link to other organizations with larger resources. We also try to find significant interstices where small help matters.

As traditional chaplains we listen. We visit the sick, pray for the dead and dying and comfort the living as we can. We give precepts to the dying and newly dead, along with others who want them. We chant, meditate, teach meditation, perform ceremonies and do massage, Reiki and Healing Touch. We also continually train ourselves through dharma study, chanting, meditation and retreats. Since 2003, when we were asked to put a Buddha in the national AIDS hospital mortuary, we clean, purify and chant in that space twice monthly on major precept days. We recently have been offered a donation to help restore the mortuary at Chea Chum Neas hospital in Takhmao, south of Phnom Penh, and expect to chant there also.

Reiki and Healing Touch provide a grounding for our spiritual work with patients. We call them ‘meditation with our hands.’ Most of our patients are too ill for formal meditation or training and welcome warmly the relief from suffering these skills provide.

While we are not primary providers of food, money or medicine we recognize that even small gifts can be transformative when given with care, attention and love. Regularly, we provide such items as small Buddhas, incense, candles, Khmer dharma books; small urns to hold bones; and small donations for services after deaths. We carry candy for children, soymilk for patients unable to eat, and monkey balm (a widely used menthol and eucalyptus combination) for all patients. We provide mosquito nets, emergency support and travel money for destitute patients at the national AIDS hospital; some emergency medicines; some housing and child support; and miscellaneous other things as needs emerge. But we do not disparage the essential nature of larger material assistance, especially among the destitute; we coordinate extensively with organizations able to provide more substantial assistance.

Within the past two years we have also begun providing substantial travel assistance for people to see their doctors and more material support under special circumstances. We provide transportation primarily at the Phum Andong resettlement site, where thousands of slum dwellers were relocated 22 km from the Phnom Penh; but we also try to help patients coming from the provinces. We recently received a grant to continue and expand this work.

Such things have become increasingly necessary because increased medical support in Cambodia has not been balanced by sufficiently increased social support. Patients continue to die from starvation, from lack of work, from lack of strength for work, or from lack of access to hospitals and medicines. They die from from ARV failures partly due to malnutrition. They die from tuberculosis, especially multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. Increasingly they die from cancers which remain undiagnosed until it is too late for help. While many organizations are doing their best to address these problems there is far more need than there are resources. We coordinate with a number of organizations in order to find help for these problems.

But the essential point of our work is chaplaincy: helping people realize that the Buddha's compassion is already fully present, even and especially in the midst of their suffering. All our work and training is directed towards learning to embody attentive and compassionate Buddhist presence, presence which will help people awaken their own capacities for meaningful and compassionate life and death.