PEOPLE LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS in Cambodia are often considered to have brought shame to themselves and to their families. Discrimination makes it difficult for them to obtain adequate health care and support services, and many people with HIV even refuse the visits of village home-care teams because they fear what the neighbors might say. In recent years, Buddhist monks have begun to break down these barriers of stigma and discrimination by helping people living with HIV/AIDS meet their basic needs. In doing so, the monks are also practicing the dharma, or the teachings of Buddha, of which service to the community is an important component. With funding from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief through USAID, one group is helping to bridge the gap between the religious and secular communities. In an effort to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic through faith-based initiatives, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance provides assistance to the Khmer HIV/AIDS NGO Alliance, which finances Buddhism for Development. Buddhism for Development provides home-based care to people living with HIV/AIDS and services to children who have lost parents to AIDS. Buddhism for Development also operates a six-week “Peace Development School” in which monks learn about health care and HIV/AIDS, and about community participation, vocational-building efforts, and agricultural extension methods. Monks are held in the highest regard in Cambodia. Most, however, have little formal education, and only rudimentary knowledge of how to provide health care, how to discuss HIV/AIDS, or how to encourage a community to strive for sustainable agricultural and economic development. Of the more than 1,100 monks who have gone through the Peace Development School so far, many have returned to their home villages and have established HIV/AIDS associations that now carry out HIV-prevention services and home-based care. Many of these monks have also established centers to provide direct care for children who have been affected by HIV/AIDS. They have also worked to find ways to keep children in school. Buddhism for Development’s primary project offers home-based palliative care and psychosocial support to persons living with HIV/AIDS in three communities in Battambang Province. It also sponsors self-help groups that incorporate Buddhist teaching, meditation, and prayer as a stress-relieving strategy. Training these caring, compassionate monks in practical health care and community development skills is a logical way to use existing cultural and religious structures to bring about a positive response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Cambodian society. Original in PDF

Cambodia: Beginning in the 1970s, the Library began to develop its Khmer collection, including a unique set of publications in Cambodian from refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. More recently the Library has acquired legal and general reference works, government documents and publications by international agencies and donors assisting the post-Khmer Rouge government. The Library also has reprints of hundreds of earlier works of literature and popular fiction that are now available to the significant Cambodian population in the United States.

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Fewer Cambodians want traditional protective tattoos.

Los Angeles Times

PHNOM SRUOCH, CAMBODIA — In a haze of incense, clients approach Kol Sambo and humbly request his help, sometimes seeking rush jobs for an imminent crisis. He listens and asks why they require added force. If he thinks they'll abuse the power, he turns them down "in a nice way."

Kol is a practitioner of magic tattoos, a 2,000-year-old tradition some call the "soul of the nation." They can make you invisible, divert bullets and boost your net worth, he says, but only if you believe.

The 50-year-old has traveled the Cambodian countryside for the better part of two decades decorating people's bodies with gods, geometric patterns, supernatural creatures and characters in Sanskrit and Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism.

Some images appear to move as the wearer's muscles ripple; on others, rounded Khmer script, softened by age, appears to melt as the lines grow fuzzier.

Kol says most clients prefer the more efficient made-in-China tattoo machine he bought a few years back, but, if asked, he still will use the traditional method to ink the skin: two or three sewing needles tied together.

Once applied, by whatever method, a tattoo must be blessed to activate its supernatural powers.

There are "fake" magic tattooists out there, Kol says disdainfully. He was born with the talent, he says, and honed it after becoming a monk and retreating into the mountains to meditate, ponder visions and study ancient texts under a spiritual master.

Grateful clients will periodically return, having survived a war or two, and offer thanks.

Chan Ngeuy, 60, a rail worker who was a soldier during the 1970s, took off his shirt to reveal a line of lacy symbols running the width of his chest, down the outside of his arms and the length of his back bracketing his spinal cord.

"I was shot at, but the bullet missed," he says. "My tattoo made all the difference."

Peace, however, as welcome as it may be to Cambodians after decades of bloodshed, is not a friend of the magic tattoo business.

"During wartime, everyone wants one," says Kong Taing Im, 38, a store owner visiting Kol hoping to safeguard her grandchildren's future. "Without war, mostly gangsters want them."

Nowadays, a tradition that migrated from India centuries ago and endured through numerous Cambodian wars and rulers is being chipped away by technology and an education system that encourages people to be literal-minded, says Miech Ponn, advisor on mores and customs at Phnom Penh's Buddhist Institute.

BY Caitlyn Emmett, Columbia Missourian, March 29, 2010

HALLSVILLE, MO (USA) -- A haze of sunlight streams in through the trailer temple’s window, illuminating the peaceful quiet that envelops Mey Savann as he begins to close his eyes and chant.

Savann is a Cambodian Buddhist monk and the spiritual leader at the Wat Angkor Cambodian Buddhist Temple in Hallsville. He is the only Cambodian Buddhist monk who lives and practices in Missouri.

Savann immigrated to the United States from Cambodia in 2001. In October 2005, he moved to Hallsville to become the spiritual leader for the Cambodian community in mid-Missouri.

“The reason I like to reside here in Hallsville is because of spreading the religion of Buddhism, which is my main object," Savann, who only speaks Cambodian, said through a translator. "I moved from California [to Missouri] because there was no Buddhist monk who resides here.”

As a Cambodian Buddhist monk, Savann’s day-to-day activities include five main things: searching for donations, meditation, thinking about the life of Buddha, trying to figure out the life beyond ours and trying to understand what the future will hold.

Savann said he became a Buddhist in 1980 when he was just 18-years-old. He said he became a monk because “to become a monk is to represent the culture, the tradition, of the Cambodian family.”

According to Buddhist tradition, monks rely on lay people to provide them with their basic needs.

“In our community, we have maybe more than 300 or 400, but it’s throughout the state – it’s not just from Columbia," said member Phillip Path. "We have people from St. Louis, Kansas City, and other surrounding areas from here, and it’s not just Cambodian, we have many other nationalities too that become Buddhist members."

Different families within the local Cambodian community provide Savann with food on different days. “Sometimes I like all the food, but sometimes I have to watch for my health too, and so some food I cannot eat as much of,” Savann said.

Being surrounded by community is a comfort to Savann. He said he feels that being the only monk and living alone can become a bit lonely sometimes. Savann does not like to focus on the future and instead pays attention to the present, but he said he hopes that someday another monk may join him and help in his work.
 

Theravada Buddhism is the religion of virtually all of the ethnic Khmer, who constitute about 90 percent or more of the Cambodian population. Buddhism originated in what are now north India and Nepal during the sixth century B.C. It was founded by a Sakya prince, Siddhartha Gautama (563-483 B.C.; his traditional dates are 623-543 B.C., also called the Gautama Buddha), who, at the age of twenty-nine, after witnessing old age, sickness, death, and meditation, renounced his high status and left his wife and infant son for a life of asceticism. After years of seeking truth, he is said to have attained enlightenment while sitting alone under a bo tree. He became the Buddha--"the enlightened"--and formed an order of monks, the sangha, and later an order of nuns. He spent the remainder of his life as a wandering preacher, dying at the age of eighty.

Buddhism began as a reaction to Hindu doctrines and as an effort to reform them. Nevertheless, the two faiths share many basic assumptions. Both view the universe and all life therein as parts of a cycle of eternal flux. In each religion, the present life of an individual is a phase in an endless chain of events. Life and death are merely alternate aspects of individual existence marked by the transition points of birth and death. An individual is thus continually reborn, perhaps in human form, perhaps in some non-human form, depending upon his or her actions in the previous life. The endless cycle of rebirth is known as samsara (wheel of life). Theravada Buddhism is a tolerant, non prescriptive religion that does not require belief in a supreme being. Its precepts require that each individual take full responsibility for his own actions and omissions. Buddhism is based on three concepts: dharma (the doctrine of the Buddha, his guide to right actions and belief); karma (the belief that one's life now and in future lives depends upon one's own deeds and misdeeds and that as an individual one is responsible for, and rewarded on the basis of, the sum total of one's acts and omissions in all one's incarnations past and present); and sangha (see Glossary), the ascetic community within which man can improve his karma.

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