In 1992, Venerable Muny Van Saveth established Norea Peaceful Children (NPC) at Wat Norea, which has since cared for over 400 orphans and children in need. The Wat has also provided care to over 60 adults living with HIV/AIDS. Where possible, children living at NPC are reintegrated into their local community, whether through their immediate or extended family, or through other community members.

Early in the epidemic, NPC staff recognized that stigma and discrimination were contributing to the burden of suffering caused by HIV/AIDS. People known or suspected to have HIV/AIDS were often shunned, as were their families. Businesses collapsed where the proprietor or a family member was known or suspected to be living with HIV/AIDS. Other people lost their jobs, were refused health care, or were sometimes rejected by their own families. Where there was economic hardship, children might be removed from school in order to work and contribute to falling family income.

Venerable Muny Van Saveth saw the need not just to provide care and material support to people living with HIV/AIDS, but to tackle HIV/AIDS-related stigma and discrimination in order to help relieve the suffering caused by the epidemic. Beginning in 1998, he and the monks at Wat Norea, together with lay staff of NPC, began to educate people in their local community to accept and care for community members affected by the disease. Recognising the contribution of unequal gender relations to the HIV vulnerability of women, the staff of Wat Norea also began providing training on HIV/AIDS-related human rights issues, including gender, in the community.

Slowly, an advocacy strategy emerged. In 2002, a three-year strategic plan was adopted that lays the groundwork for a Buddhist-led response to HIV/AIDS. The POLICY Project provided technical and financial assistance for the strategic planning process; UNICEF funds the components of the plan related to service delivery.

The priority action areas for NPC were defined as:

Buddhist Leadership network

Building on their local community work, Wat Norea established a provincial Buddhist Leadership Network in 2002 to integrate human rights and gender issues into HIV/AIDS programming interventions. The network includes provincial and district level government authorities, NGOs, and leaders of Buddhist institutions, and 75% of network members are women. The aim of the network is to encourage support at senior levels of the provincial government for HIV/AIDS care and support and anti-stigma and discrimination initiatives. More specific goals include 1) questioning the gender inequalities in the Chhbap Srey in order to influence the content of school curriculum and 2) developing pagoda-level networks for fundraising and resource management activities.

The "Chhbab Srey" or Women's Code, which takes the form of a traditional story giving advice on appropriate behaviour by women, portrays women as subordinate to men and is used as an educational tool in schools. A "wisdom team" of 40 men and women, who are community elders and opinion leaders, was established to review the Chhbab Srey, in order to promote greater gender equity through school curriculum. The wisdom team has now completed its review, and has begun promoting a more gender equitable version of the Chhbab Srey for use in schools in Battambang Province. Eventually it is hoped that this version of the document will replace the traditional version in the school curriculum throughout Cambodia.

Community Mobilisation Teams of 12 people, both men and women, have been established in 18 villages, and their members trained in HIV/AIDS and financial management. Each team established a money box at their local pagoda to raise funding for material support to people affected by HIV/AIDS. Members of the team also conduct home visits to families affected by HIV/AIDS, as well as provide community education and referrals to treatment, care, and support services.

In these ways, Wat Norea hopes to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on women and girls which results from their subordinate position in society, and to promote the provision of care and support for people living with HIV/AIDS by members of their own communities. Further, NPC established 12-member Gender and HIV/AIDS Teams, also consisting of men and women, in five villages, and has provided training to these teams on HIV/AIDS-related human rights and gender issues including domestic violence. These teams have, in turn, trained a further 1,000 people. Since 2002, six districts (provincial administrative regions) and over 500 monks and community leaders have been involved in HIV/AIDS-related education and information dissemination.

Challenges

Some of the constraints that NPC had to overcome include the fact that, traditionally, monks are not permitted to discuss sex with or in front of women. However monks can discuss sex with men in the lay community using a specialized style of the Khmer language described as the "language of Buddha". A second constraint was that HIV/AIDS-related stigma and discrimination were found to create barriers both to generating support amongst community leaders for the monks' HIV/AIDS work, and to the level of support generally for monks within the community. The effectiveness of their own work, and their role as spiritual and moral guides in Cambodian society has enabled the monks to overcome this barrier. For example, a monk said about a woman with HIV who had left her home with her young child: "When people saw me visiting them, just staying near them the whole day, conversing and meditating, people started to approach. This was a way of showing the community not to be afraid of people living with HIV/AIDS."

Seeing the effectiveness of their work in parts of Battambang Province, NPC now wants to expand the project nationwide and, at the time of this writing, was organising a national conference scheduled for July 2004 to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS education and human rights issues with monks throughout Cambodia. It is anticipated that around 25 Cambodian Buddhist leaders will attend the conference.

As traditional spiritual and moral leaders in their communities, the monks have demonstrated that collaboration between religious and lay leaders in Cambodia can mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS on individuals, families, and communities through the application of Buddhist principles to contemporary social problems. Initially a small project with a local focus, NPC and Wat Norea have expanded their reach and impact to other parts of the province, and hope they will soon see their initiatives replicated in other provinces in Cambodia.

Chris Ward, Senior Technical Advisor, and Uy Chanthon, Senior Programme Officer, The POLICY Project Cambodia; e-mail: cward@online.com.kh and chanthon@online.com.kh