JOHN WOOD: We are, you know, not a religious organization. Our religion is literacy, our religion is gender equality and education.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Here is John Wood spreading his religion in Vietnam, in Africa, in India. It was only 15 years ago that Wood took a hike that changed his life and impacted millions of others. He was a Microsoft executive trekking in Nepal when a headmaster invited him to visit his run-down, dilapidated, overcrowded school.

WOOD: And we went to this school’s library, and it was a library in name only. They didn’t have any books for the children. And I asked the headmaster why, and he said we’re too poor to afford books. And I said, well, that must make your job very difficult as a headmaster and he said well actually in Nepal we’re too poor to afford education for our children but until we have education we’re always going to remain poor.

SEVERSON: This came as a shock to Wood, who as a kid loved to read more than anything.

WOOD: I loved to read. I’ve loved to read from the day I could first decode words. And when I was growing up, if I did something well, you know, I surprised my mom by washing the dishes, and I was given anything I wanted as a reward, I would always say I want to stay up late and read tonight.

SEVERSON: Wood promised the headmaster that he would return with books for the school’s library. He asked his friends and his parents for help and they did, big time—more books than his yak could carry. But he kept his promise.

WOOD: I was just in awe of how excited those kids were when we delivered the books. And then to see the kids then running with the book, sitting under a tree, and you see three kids all with their eyes wide open looking at a picture of men walking on the moon, looking at photographs of African wild life, kids in a land-locked nation who had never seen sharks or whales.

SEVERSON: Wood says he’s inspired by Buddhism and had been reading the Dalai Lama’s teaching that the greatest happiness comes from giving something to someone in need.

WOOD: I thought, what am I doing patting myself on the back? That’s one library in a world that needs tens of thousands of libraries. That’s 450 children helped in a world where 800 million people are illiterate. That’s almost a billion people who can’t read or write, and then people remain, you know, confused about why do the poor remain poor. Well, if you don’t get an education, if you can’t read or write, the odds are stacked against you.

SEVERSON: So Wood decided to leave his lucrative job at Microsoft for the low-paying life of a book peddler, although that may be an oversimplification of what his nonprofit organization does. It’s called Room to Read and they now have libraries and schools and millions of books in 10 countries, including Cambodia.

(to Kahn Kall): Room to Read has been doing very well in Cambodia?

KAHN KALL: I would not hesitating to say yes.

SEVERSON: Kahn Kall is the head of Room to Read in Cambodia. He’s happy because the Cambodian government has given its rare blessing to the Room to Read mission. This is the country that barely survived the terror reign of the Khmer Rouge, in which education was completely obliterated. It was so bad even after the Khmer Rouge that the current provincial education minister says as a school teacher he had to scrounge for a piece of paper.

MR. UNG SIREIDY: No chair, no table, no clothes for children, no books. Sometimes I collect the paper from the road to make my lesson plan.

SEVERSON: Even today in many schools in Cambodia, reading, especially for pleasure is often frowned upon.

KAHN KALL: You only allowed to read the book which is related to what you learn. Any other books they always say it’s not useful. And you know what I did, I go to the bookstore and then I rented a book, I had to hide it behind my back, because otherwise my father when he saw I read the book that were different, I read the story, I read everything, he would spank.

SEVERSON: There are about 6,500 primary and secondary public schools in Cambodia. Until 10 years ago, about the only books found in these schools were official, authorized textbooks, one per grade. Now more 1,500 of these schools have their very own library, like the one behind me, provided by Room to Read with the blessings of the Cambodian government. Now, in Phnom Penh, hot off the press, books with pictures created and published by Room to Read.

WOOD: If you look around the developing world, when you bring bright, colorful children’s books into a child’s life, there’s just something instinctive, inherent inside them where they just get it immediately. Their faces light up.

SEVERSON: (speaking to young girl through interpreter) How many books have you read?

INTERPRETER: Around 30 books.

SEVERSON: How about your girlfriend?

INTERPRETER: She reads five books a day.

SEVERSON: Five books a day?

INTERPRETER: Yeah, yeah.

SEVERSON: These bright, colorful books were commissioned by Room to Read and created by local Cambodian artists, always with a message.

RATANA: Yes, very popular among the children.

SEVERSON: Ratana says this one is meant to discourage young girls from leaping into marriage.

RATANA: The message is that she is too young. She needs to learn more, so she cannot get married when she is very young.

SEVERSON: The story lines always treat boys and girls as equals.

WOOD: If you’re working with boys and girls you want to make sure you don’t have gender stereotypes, right? So sometimes in books you’ll see the boys are out playing soccer while the girl is inside, you know, washing the dishes. Well, is that really the lesson we want to teach to kids or do you want to reverse that and make sure that you’re having good gender roles in the books.

SEVERSON: Room to Read pays special attention to young girls because, Wood says, that’s where the need is the greatest.

WOOD: You know, two-thirds of those who are illiterate, two-thirds of those who are out of school are girls and women. And this is basically nothing less than planned poverty, that if you have a woman not get educated, of course the next generation does not get educated.

SEVERSON: Now Room to Read has a program that guarantees girls an education all the way through high school, including, when necessary, room and board. Borin is one of the organization’s few full-time employees in Cambodia.

SREY BORIN: We provide the girls with something like school uniforms, the shoes. And we provide them with transportation, let’s say, bicycle for those who live far away from the school.

SEVERSON: So far 20,000 girls worldwide have enrolled. These girls are old enough to be in college, but this was their first opportunity to go to high school.

FIRST STUDENT: My father and my mother, when I study, know what,he very happy.

SEVERSON: With you?

FIRST STUDENT: Yeah, with you, with me.

SEVERSON: And what about your parents, are they happy?

SECOND STUDENT: Ah, the same, too.

SEVERSON: Room to Read now has an annual budget of $44 million, funding that comes from individuals, foundations, and corporations. Wood says one reason Room to Read has been so successful in the 12 years since it was founded is because local communities are also required to contribute.

WOOD: In Room to Read we honor the communities we work with by requiring them to co-invest, right? They can give land, they can give labor. You know, I’ve had parents who will point out, they’ll point to the building and they’ll say I painted that building. You know, there’s an old adage you can’t help people if they don’t want to help themselves.

SEVERSON: As philanthropic organizations go, few have grown as big and fast as Room To Read.

WOOD: Somebody once just said to me you’re no longer going to be rich monetarily but you’ll be rich in books, you’ll be rich in experiences and you’ll be rich in just absolute happiness. In a certain sense it’s like being a millionaire but you’re counting your millions in terms of the number of kids and books.

SEVERSON: Room to Read has now constructed 15,000 libraries, over 1,500 schools and distributed over 12 million books in 10 countries.

(to Wood): I’m about done here.

WOOD: I’m not. I got a lot more to say.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: For some months, Pooja, a 22 year old mother of three, has been coming to this crisis counseling center in a lower middle class neighborhood of Delhi.

Pooja is trying to keep her family together. Her husband and in-laws—with whom she lived in the common tradition here—threw her out of the house. The problem: all three of her children are girls.

POOJA: The family says they need sons to carry on their name and since I have only three daughters, they tried to trick me into signing divorce papers so that their son could marry again. That led to some violence when I refused and I had to run away to my mother’s house for our safety.

DE SAM LAZARO: The preference for boy children dates back centuries—driven by religious custom.

RANJANA KUMARI (Center for Social Research): Only boys can look after the parents, they are the only ones who can perform the last rites. They are the only ones who will continue the family lineage. If all that is there then why will anybody wants to have a girl child? And also on the top of that you have to pay a dowry.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ranjani Kumari has studied the dowry system, which she says is mistakenly believed to have roots in Hindu scriptures.

KUMARI: This was never a practice anywhere prescribed but certainly it was said that when the princess goes, she must carry a number of horses because she’s used to a certain level of comfort, and so it is the duty of the king to insure the daughter is…and that gets distorted so that even the poorest of the poor who cannot afford two square meals will also have to buy things for the wedding of the daughter.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dowries were outlawed half a century ago but the system remains pervasive and adds a huge commercial dimension to marriage in India. With rising aspirations in a rapidly growing economy, sociologist Ravinder Kaur says daughters have become a financial liability.

RAVINDER KAUR (Indian Institute of Technology): They don’t want to pay dowries. They want to receive dowries. They want to give more education to the boys than to the girls, because for them, the boys are still more important.

DE SAM LAZARO: India’s census starkly bears out that bias. For every 1,000 male babies born, there are just 914 females—far fewer in some regions. In nature, the numbers are about equal. The gap began to widen in the 1990s with the advent of ultrasonography, allowing early detection of a fetus’ sex. That’s been blamed for the widespread abortion of female fetuses.

(from 2001 footage): So this is your clinic?

Dr. Kakodkar: (from 2001 footage) Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: Abortion is legal in India but it is illegal when done for sex selection. However, tracking the intent is almost impossible as gynecologist Prakash Kakodkar admitted with startling candor in a story I reported in 2001. He does them routinely.

(to Dr. Kakodkar): So you freely admit that you do, basically, contravene the law. I mean…

DR. PRAKASH KAKODKAR: Yes, most of us do, I would say. I wouldn’t deny that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Do you face any legal sanctions?

DR. PRAKASH KAKODKAR: No, that’s what I said: there is no legal sanction because there is nothing on paper. I mean, who can ask you?

DE SAM LAZARO: The lopsided sex ratio has only spread in recent years. Two decades ago it was mainly in the northern farm states, where many families were entering the middle class thanks to India’s green revolution. Now Kaur says it’s in areas where a new middle class is emerging.

KAUR: Places like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, which are becoming more prosperous where there will be greater availability of technology and more incomes in the hands of families, they will tend to shape the family and sex select.

DE SAM LAZARO: As these areas become more affluent, fertility rates—the number of children born per woman—are declining. That’s welcomed by people concerned about population growth. These are some of India’s most densely populated regions. But when it comes to gender balance, it’s not good news, Professor Kaur says.

KAUR: You know when you want a smaller family, then the squeeze is on the girls because interestingly, suppose you’re moving from a fertility rate of four, to three. Then you want two boys and one girl. So if a lot of families in populous states want two boys and one girl, then obviously there’s going to be a great excess of boys.

DE SAM LAZARO: She says the social consequences of this demographic shift are already visible in those northern farm states, where there’s a growing shortage of brides.

KAUR: And as a result, men in these states have been importing brides from let’s say the east of India, the south of India, they’re sort of going shopping for brides wherever they can and many people call it “bride trafficking.”

DE SAM LAZARO: These marriages across India’s diverse cultural landscape can be fraught with social complication. But at the same time, Kaur sees an ever so slight improvement in the gender ratio in those states that saw early prosperity.

KAUR: Once people reach the higher realms of the middle class, which are called the stable middle class, they don’t sex select. Then they tend to view girls and boys as being of equal value. So they don’t really care whether they have two girls, whether they have one girl, one boy, etcetera.

DE SAM LAZARO: But for many years, India will present a patchwork of progress—a worsening gender balance in many places, slight improvement in some. The Center for Social Research’s Kumari sees one more positive development that’s a consequence of India’s growing and urbanizing middle class: more girls are going to school.

RANJANA KUMARI: As I said, India is full of contradictions. On the one side you see women in the villages still very disempowered but on the other side there is a brighter picture. We have the largest number of doctors, lawyers, professionals, our education level is going up for the girls. When you look at the new economy girls have got lot of new opportunities, you know, media, IT industry banking, entertainment. Whichever sector you see, women are filling the ranks in a very major way.

DE SAM LAZARO: Counseling center client Pooja never set foot in a school but she wants an education for her daughters. And that’s why she says she needs her husband’s help to provide it.

POOJA: Women are progressing more in society and I need the support of their father so that they can grow up in a proper family, so that they can get a good education, so that they can grow up and have good marriages.

DE SAM LAZARO: She’ll have an uphill battle—socially if not legally—to provide daughters with the family structure she calls ideal. But she says the best dowry her daughters could have is an education.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in New Delhi.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: It’s lush, verdant fields are a food basket for the Philippines. But Mindanao is also a tense, highly militarized place. Tens of thousands of people across this Indiana-sized island have been forced to flee their homes for squalid camps.

On paper, there’s a ceasefire in the long-running insurgency in this most Muslim region of the Philippines, a predominantly Christian nation.

Nonviolent Peaceforce Monitor: “Died on the spot, the girl…”

DE SAM LAZARO: However, the threat of sporadic fighting is never far away. Two days before we got here, this six-year-old child was caught in a cross fire….

DE SAM LAZARO: Taking notes on incidents and conditions in the camps are unarmed observers—foreign and local—with a group called Nonviolent Peaceforce.

Monitor: How many families are still in Luanan?

Translator: There are still 104 families staying here. We go to our farms during the day but come back here at night.

DE SAM LAZARO: The presence of these monitors and their constant interaction deep inside communities is credited with helping prevent flareups, lower the number of skirmishes, and preserve the precarious ceasefire. They are praised both by the Philippine army, which patrols some areas of the island, and the main rebel group that covers the rest: the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The Front’s roots lie in a movement by ethnic Moros who are Muslim. It initially sought independence but over the years has moderated the demand to greater autonomy from Manila.

(to MILF member): Do you consider yourself Filipino?

RASHID LADIASAN (Secretary, MILF): No. No. By citizenship, yes; by nationality, no. I am a Moro by nationality.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mindanao has known conflict for centuries, beginning with resistance to the Spanish colonists and more recently, resistance to the incorporation of this island into the Philippine republic. That happened in 1946. And since then migrants from other islands have come here and today those mostly Christian settlers outnumber the mostly Muslim original islanders by better than two to one.

Journalist Glenda Gloria, who wrote a book about the Mindanao conflict, says its as much about economic inequality as religion. She says much today’s problems trace back to the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled from 1965 to 1986.

GLENDA GLORIA (Author of Under the Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao): The Marcos government instituted a lot of government policies that oppressed the minority Muslims, that took them away from the economic and political pie, and after that the abusive military really violated human rights just to run after these rebels who wanted to separate from the republic at that point.

DE SAM LAZARO: That sowed the seeds for radicalization among some rebel fighters, she says. By the 1990s, a regional Al Qaeda affiliate called Abu Sayyef began to thrive.

(to Philippine officers): Is Abu Sayyef growing?

Philippine Officers: As far as we are concerned, it’s not growing. They are still confined. Just one of the successes of our government security forces in that portion of Mindanao.

DE SAM LAZARO: Philippine officials say they’ve largely defeated Abu Sayyef as a military threat, helped by US advisors who remain in the region. And recent governments have made progress toward a peace treaty, offering greater autonomy and control over the island’s resources to the Moro people. And officially there’s a ceasefire. However, between splinter rebel factions and clashes among rival warlords the ground reality is still unsettled.

NP Monitors: The military has set up a camp. Does that still not give you enough confidence to be staying there at night?

DE SAM LAZARO: Back at the displaced persons camp, community leader Abdul Manan Ali said armed groups continue to pose a threat.

ABDUL MANON ALI: I think families are still insecure about the situation…

DE SAM LAZARO: A few minutes later, the monitors were relaying the citizens’ concerns to the Philippine military, which is in charge of security in this region.

LT. COL. BENJAMIN HAO (Philippine Army): Some of the members of community are suggesting to bring my platoons nearer. I have no problem with that. The problem is bringing military into the community might cause another problem, so we have to study this some more.

DE SAM LAZARO: Among the many shortages, trust is a major one, and that’s a void that both sides agree the foreign civilians are filling.

LADIASAN: Only unarmed civilian protection monitors would be effective, because our people have been traumatized. If they only see government and MILF working for civilian protection, there is no impartiality.

MAJ. CARLOS SOL (Philippine Army): Since they are foreigners the perception could be they are neutral compared to local organizations that are involved in the peace process.

DE SAM LAZARO: Regardless of their faith.

MAJ. SOL: Regardless of their faith. I think the Nonviolent Peaceforce is a mixture of Hindus, Christians, and Muslims.

DE SAM LAZARO: The group is now based in Belgium but was started in Minneapolis. Co-founder Mel Duncan, who was in Mindanao during our visit, says his earliest inkling that the concept might work came in the eighties. He was living in Nicaragua where he’d gone as a peace activist during the civil war there.

MEL DUNCAN (Founder, Nonviolent Peaceforce): What we found over a seven-year period was none of those villages were ever attacked when there was an international presence. This was at a period of a war where 50,000 people were being killed.

DE SAM LAZARO: Refining and putting the idea into practice took years of studying of similar attempts, he says, including an ill-fated one during Bosnia’s civil war.

DUNCAN: In the mid-90s, there was an effort fnear Sada in Sarajevo where people primarily from Europe had been recruited, many of them not trained, and they came into a situation where they in fact drew artillery into the areas where they were trying to protect and they made a lot of problems in terms of having to be taken out.

DE SAM LAZARO: In contrast, monitors hired by Nonviolent Peaceforce are full time and salaried—about $1500 per month. They come to stay, hire local staffers and work with local civic groups. Raghu Menon, trained as a lawyer in India, says it makes a big difference.

RAGHU MENON (Monitor): As you will see, there are no fences, no guards outside our office in spite of the fact that Pikit, where we are based, is considered a dangerous place by most Filipinos. But because we are living in the community, which supports our work, which understands our work, I think we draw a lot of our security from that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Long before they deploy, the group spends months studying the conflict, meeting the key players, and forging partnerships with citizen groups.

DUNCAN: We have to engage with local partners who can understand things in ways that internationals will never be able. War is complicated, and so is peace. And we’re always learning at this and that’s–we have to remain humble and this is not a tool that fits every situation and that will rid the world of war.

DE SAM LAZARO: The group’s first deployment was in Sri Lanka during its civil war, where Duncan says it was particularly effective in rescuing child soldiers. Besides Mindanao, monitors now serve in South Sudan and Georgia. And he hopes they can serve in more conflict zones soon.

DUNCAN: We certainly could provide effective protection in Myanmar. In Kyrgyzstan. Perhaps in Syria as the conflict unfolds.

DE SAM LAZARO: Nonviolent Peaceforce’s annual budget of $7.5 million comes from the UN and governments from several developed nations, though not the U.S.–Duncan says “not yet”–and among its merits could be the price tag. Duncan says an unarmed civilian costs about half what the UN pays to deploy a typical armed blue-helmeted soldier.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro on the Philippine island of Mindanao.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Father Basil Doan is the pastor of two Catholic churches in this rural stretch of western Missouri. Several times a week, he makes the 50-mile round trip between his parishes along these quiet country roads.

FATHER BASIL DOAN: No traffic. Peaceful, yeah.

VALENTE: To keep himself alert, he sometimes sings in his native language, Vietnamese. Foreign-born priests are becoming a familiar presence in many rural communities, and, increasingly, those priests are Vietnamese. Father Basil’s order, the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix, has 500 seminarians in Ho Chi Minh City, the kind of numbers American orders haven’t seen since the 1950s. Seminaries and convents there can’t accommodate all of the men and women who want to enter religious life, so many end up here in America. Carthage, Missouri, a small, largely Protestant town, may seem like an unlikely site for the order’s U.S. headquarters. The Vietnamese priests moved here beginning in the mid-1970s because an American religious order was moving out due to declining numbers. At the time, Catholics were under threat in Vietnam, and priests had to go into hiding or flee. But somehow this congregation managed to survive.

FATHER JOHN TRAN (Vocation Director, Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix): We were born in 1952, so we’re very young, and we’re proud to say our founder is a Vietnamese priest. You know how most religious communities enter into Vietnam from other country, but we proudly say we are the one that was founded by a Vietnamese priest for the Vietnamese people.

VALENTE: In recent years, as Vietnam has opened to the West, Vietnamese Catholics have regained a measure of religious freedom. Even so, the government still restricts church activities, and in some areas Catholics are barred from holding government jobs, which helps explain the deep devotion of Vietnamese Catholics living in the United States. Thousands journey to Carthage each year for the Marian Days Festival, a four-day pilgrimage to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for the safety and freedom they feel they enjoy in America.

FATHER TRAN: It’s like a divine providence that we happened to be right in the middle of the United States. Everybody can come over here, you know, just the whole family gathering. But the second part is just the spiritual side of things, because through the year there’s all this hardship, working, and it’s just a week to come here just to pray and listen to conferences to nourish their spiritual side.

VALENTE: About 500 people came in 1978, the first year of the festival. Today, between fifty- and sixty-thousand people attend, making it one of the largest ethnic festivals in the U.S. The centerpiece of the pilgrimage is this statue of the Virgin Mary, one of only six like it in the world. Vietnamese mothers usually take the lead in passing on the faith, and this has translated into a deep devotion within the community to the Blessed Mother. Sister Maria Nguyen, a Benedictine sister from Kansas, says many families also credit Mary with helping them escape communism.

SISTER MARIA NGUYEN: They thank for all things that Mary and God have done for them for the past year. And, then they ask Mary to continue to journey, to be with them for this coming year, for the future.

VALENTE: The Marian Days Festival allows Vietnamese priests and sisters serving in America to reconnect with their culture. Asians and Asian Americans make up only four percent of the American Catholic Church, but account for 10 percent of vocations, most of them Vietnamese, leading one observer to call Vietnamese priests “the new Irish.” Father Basil’s story is typical. He says he first began thinking about the priesthood while serving in the South Vietnamese army.

FATHER BASIL: When I was in army, I felt that I am going to die. And then in my heart, I just, you know, maybe the God’s Holy Spirit inspire me and I just raise up my heart, my mind to God, and I pray. I pray and then God protect me and I escape from mine explosion. I heard the explosion, and I fell down, and I didn’t get any injury. My friend behind me got hit, and the other one got hit, too. And I think that’s a sign of God’s providence, that he wanted me to be a future priest. He protect me from harm.

VALENTE: Father Basil remained in Vietnam for four years after the fall of Saigon, trying to keep out of the eye of communist officials.

FATHER BASIL: Some people say, “You’re a very good person, maybe you can become a priest.” But in that time, in communist rule, nobody have to, have had to fulfill that dream.

VALENTE: This is the first time Father Basil has been in charge of predominantly American parishes, ones where most of the members are farmers or retirees. He says he has struggled mightily to improve his English.

FATHER BASIL: My first two years I feel lonely because I don’t understand English much. But now after four years, I understand English more and people know me more, understand me more, and I express English easier. One person said, “You know, Father, maybe you can speak Vietnamese with an American accent.”

VALENTE: The parish bookkeeper, Susan Costello, helps correct his grammar when he writes his Sunday homilies, and parish council members presented him with a ping-pong table, so he could take up a pastime many Americans enjoy.

DONNA FOURMAN (Parishioner): His speech when he got here wasn’t really good, but every week it gets better, until he gets excited, and then he talks too fast. But we just love him. And he’s always happy and smiling, until he gets up on that altar. And then he’s all business.

VALENTE: Without Father Basil, parishioners say they would probably see a priest only once a week, for Mass on Sundays, and would have to wait longer to schedule baptisms, funerals, and marriages. As it is, Father Basil is on call 24 hours a day for the people at both his parishes.

(to Father Basil) What are the challenges you’ve faced in terms of your parishioners?

FATHER BASIL: First of all, because I’m not American pastor, I’m Asian pastor. They to have to train the ear to understand my accent. But I think they accept me. I ask one of them, “Did you accept me because I’m a Vietnamese, different from your culture?” He said, “I accept you because you’re a priest. We need priests no matter the nationality.” The United States, they need priests, but good priests. Because I have background of my faith, my experience about my faith so I can share with them. And they share their faith with me, too.

VALENTE: But preserving religious traditions from Vietnam is also important to these first- and second-generation immigrants. The Marian Days Festival draws thousands of teens. This drum group traveled to Carthage from San Jose, California. Many youngsters accompany their grandparents, though they admit they are more likely to speak to them in English than Vietnamese.

ALISON PHAM (Drummer): I just like the environment, like being all together, getting to praise God as a group, especially uniting with other Vietnamese people because I know a lot of times, you know, people don’t—they lose their culture, and they don’t join together.

VALENTE: The priests in Carthage worry that the rate of vocations eventually will decline among Vietnamese families, as it has among Americans. Boys used to enroll in the seminary here during high school. That’s no longer the case, and it’s becoming more difficult to attract college-age men.

FATHER TRAN: Last year I didn’t get any. But this year I’m blessed enough to have five. So it’s just give and take.

VALENTE: Still, the congregation currently has 150 men in the U.S. studying to be priests or brothers—a number that would thrill any other seminary. Father Tran says he hopes the example of men like Father Basil, who seem to thrive as priests, will inspire other young people to try religious life.

FATHER BASIL: I live in wartime in my country. Here I feel peace. I feel peace in my heart and my mind.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente, in Carthage, Missouri.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Minutes after delivering a slightly premature infant by C section, Dr. Nayna Patel was back in her office and on the phone to the parents.

Dr. Nayna Patel: Congratulations, it’s a baby girl. Where are you, in Mumbai right now?

DE SAM LAZARO: They were en route from their home in England and didn’t reach the small town of Anand, India in time to watch a surrogate mother give birth to their child.

Dr. Patel: Surrogate is also fine. The baby is also fine. We have taken the picture.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel has delivered some 400 surrogate babies since 2004. Her clinic implants embryos in surrogates she recruits from the area and pays around $7,000 for a pregnancy carried to term. Biological parents come from across India and around the world. Kirshner Ross-Vaden came here from Colorado to pick up her baby girl named Serenity. She was born four weeks premature, but after a week in neonatal intensive care she was ready to be discharged. Serenity’s 46-year-old mother traveled here with her nine-year-old son. She had tried unsuccessfully in recent years to conceive. Surrogacy was her last hope and India her first choice. The cost—$10,000 to $15,000 all told—is a fraction of what it is in the United States, and in America, she added, surrogacy contracts are not always air-tight.

KIRSHNER ROSS-VADEN: You can sign a hundred documents. It doesn’t matter. If that surrogate changes her mind she can sue you for that child, and oftentimes she will win, and coming here to India, these women, they don’t want my child. It’s very cut and dry. They do not want my child. They want my money, and that is just fine with me.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s not fine with everyone.

DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN (University of Pennsylvania): The contracts usually are written, to be blunt, to protect the wealthy people who are commissioning the baby, so that if the woman suffers an injury, if the woman has a health problem due to childbirth, if there’s a long-term chronic condition, then what?

DE SAM LAZARO: University of Pennsylvania ethicist Arthur Caplan worries the relationship is inherently lopsided between poor, minimally literate women and well-heeled couples who commission them to have their children. For example, surrogates in India are routinely implanted with up to five embryos to improve the chances of a pregnancy. In the US, clinics usually implant no more than two, sometimes three.

DR. CAPLAN: Why would you use three, four, five embryos in India? Because you don’t want the couple to have to come back. It’s expensive, even for a rich person so you’re trying to maximize the chance of pregnancy, even if it might compromise the interests of the babies.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel concedes that implanting five embryos heightens the risk for infants and mother and says she is now lowering the number to three or four. But she says the downside of fewer embryos is a lower pregnancy success rate. When multiple embryos develop into viable pregnancies, Dr. Patel’s policy is to reduce them by selective abortion. Aside from possible religious concerns, this process could present medical risk to the surviving fetuses.

DR. PATEL: Parents—yes, there are some who say right from the beginning, “Doctor, put less embryos because we are not for reduction, and we don’t this to happen.” So in those cases we definitely never transfer more than two. But there are certain parents who don’t have any objection to this, and surrogates—we don’t allow them to carry more than two.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel insists that her facility protects the interests of surrogates as much as the clients of her commercial surrogacy program and the infants she delivers.

DR. PATEL: We do a lot of psychological counseling for the surrogate and the family before we recruit them. We explain to them the procedure of IVF, what all they’ll have to undergo. If she has had any complications during her previous pregnancy, we will ask her not to become a surrogate, because the same can repeat this time, to make it very sure and safe for her.

DE SAM LAZARO: The moment their pregnancies are confirmed, surrogates are required to move into this home run by Dr. Patel. They’re offered skills training in things like tailoring, but mostly it’s a quiet, sedentary life. The women who spend nine months in this surrogate hostel have all experienced childbirth with their own biological children. It’s a prerequisite for becoming a surrogate. What very few of them have experienced with those previous pregnancies is any kind of prenatal care. That’s in sharp contrast to the pampering they get here: meals provided and medical attention, should they need it, round the clock. Dr. Patel acknowledges the irony but says it is part of a thorough surveillance to ensure smooth pregnancies, for both surrogate and parents’ sake.

DR. PATEL: We have a fetal medicine specialist who checks all the surrogates every three weeks. We have been able to detect minor congenital malformations which we inform the couple can be treated post-delivery without any impact on the baby. We have had patients whose surrogates had babies with Down syndrome, which was detected, which was confirmed with amniocentesis, and we have aborted those babies after the consent of the couple.

DE SAM LAZARO: Well in advance, she says, parents are consulted on decisions like pregnancy termination. Similarly, parents must accept their babies, once born, whether healthy or not. Surrogates we spoke to talked about building a new home and using their money for their children’s education. The money—$7,000-$8000—would otherwise take them decades to earn. Most say they were happy to have helped infertile couples. The woman who bore baby Serenity who we met earlier, admitted to some sorrow at her separation.

DHANA: You can’t help it when you’ve carried a baby for nine months. I’d like to see how she does in the future.

ROSS-VADEN: I do have her address, so I can get a hold of her. And I hopefully will be able to maintain some kind of a relationship with her.

DE SAM LAZARO: We caught up with Serenity’s mother in Mumbai, about 500 miles from Dr. Patel’s clinic. She and son Brandon were holed up in a hotel awaiting DNA test results and myriad documents to satisfy the Indian and US governments that the infant could leave the country.

ROSS-VADEN: Am I living happily ever after now? I certainly hope so. I hope that I can get her home, and I hope that she is a happy, healthy little baby, and that is what I will have—a healthy, happy little girl.

DE SAM LAZARO: But will every surrogacy story end happily? Right now, India has only voluntary guidelines, and it’s not clear whether future laws would be adequately enforced, and standards vary widely. For example, Dr. Patel says she only serves infertile patients. But some clinics offer surrogates to healthy parents who, for career or convenience, want to avoid pregnancy. Ethicist Caplan worries about where all this is leading.

DR. CAPLAN: We may get into situations where people start to say, as genetic knowledge improves, you know, I’m not infertile but I’d like to make a baby with traits or properties that I want to avoid or that I desire. That day is coming. I think it’s important to keep in mind, as we watch the evolution of surrogacy as an international activity, what is really something that a tiny handful of people use who suffer from infertility tomorrow can be what more people are interested in because they have a more eugenic, more perfectionist interest in making their children.

DE SAM LAZARO: For her part, Dr. Patel plans a major expansion of her one-stop surrogacy shop, a leader in what’s now a half-billion-dollar industry in India. She makes no apologies for making a lucrative living and insists that she, the surrogates, and the new parents all come out winners.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Anand, India.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: There are big churches, and then there’s the Yoido Full Gospel Church here in Seoul, South Korea. It’s the mother of megachurches, with the largest congregation in the world. On a typical day 200,000 will attend one of seven services along with another two or three hundred thousand watching them on TV in adjoining buildings or satellite branches. While some other churches may be losing members, this one just keeps growing. The main sanctuary here holds 21,000 worshipers packed to the rafters seven times every Sunday. Each service has its own orchestra, its own choir, its own pastor. There are hundreds of assistants. There need to be. Each service is translated into 16 different languages for visitors. Karen Kim is a pastor with the church’s international  division. She says she was shocked when she first moved here from Australia.

KAREN KIM: I think when you’ve got people this size, like you have to have structure, and you have to have organization, because otherwise people would be getting killed. Like you can’t just let it all just take care of itself. Like there has to be like organized rosters of volunteers and things like that to get people in and out of the service, or these people will literally die and get crushed.

SEVERSON: The level of organization here is striking. Senior pastor Reverend Young Hoon Lee explains it this way.

REVEREND YOUNG HOON LEE: Our church operates like orchestra. Every day we make perfect harmony and fantastic symphony.

SEVERSON: Even though the first Christian missionaries arrived in Korea in 1784, the so-called Hermit Kingdom continued to be Buddhist until about 60 years ago. That was about the time Pastor David Cho founded what became the Yoido Full Gospel Church, which now has missionaries of its own in 67 countries.

REVEREND DAVID YONGGI CHO: People don’t come to our church because I’m holy person, I’m spectacular Christian. No. They come because I supply their need. I meet their need through the word of God.

SEVERSON: Actually, Pastor Cho is one of the most revered evangelists in Korea. He was a Buddhist until he rejected his religion when he was near death from tuberculosis. He says that’s when Jesus Christ appeared to him in the middle of the night and told him to preach the gospel. So he did. When the country was suffering in poverty and desperation after the Korean War, he preached the gospel of hope through prayer.

REVEREND CHO: Every morning at 4:30 people come to church, and they pray for one or two hours, and all-night prayer meeting on Friday evening.

SEVERSON: Prayer seems especially important to this congregation. Each day buses leave the big church for the ride up to Prayer Mountain, which includes a sacred cemetery on a hillside. It overlooks a complex of buildings with a church, a hotel, and tiny, individual prayer rooms barely big enough to kneel and pray, which some do for hours. From a distance you can hear the sound of wailing coming from  the top of the cemetery and people speaking in tongues.

KAREN KIM: It’s very important to their faith, and speaking in tongues is a way that they communicate with God and that they allow God to communicate through them, and it’s evidence of the Spirit working in them and then being filled with the Spirit.

SEVERSON: From only five members in 1958, Yoido Full Gospel, which is affiliated with the Pentecostal movement, grew to be the largest congregation in the world with over 800,000 members. Some satellite congregations have been released to become independent branches, although they’re still connected to the big church. There is more than one reason Yoido grew so big and so fast, but Pastor Cho believes women have a lot to do with it.

PASTOR DAVID CHO: God gave me the idea because until that time women were despised, actually, in society. They were not given any important position, and the Spirit of the Lord said why don’t you use women? So I announced that I would start cell ministry and use women as the leader, and many men protested. They felt very bad about that, but I forced my idea. The women were so very happy,  and they dedicated—they were excellent workers.

KAREN KIM: They make up the majority of the membership in the church, and they really like to do a lot of volunteering. Historically, in church history Pentecostalism has been one of those areas and those branches of Christianity that has been more open to women pastors.

SEVERSON: One reason Yoido has grown so big is because of its fundamental message, that if members give to God, he’ll give them prosperity, the same message found in numerous megachurches in the U.S.

REVEREND CHO: Many people are accusing me that I’m preaching the gospel of prosperity, but I’m not afraid of being accused, because if gospel could not bring prosperity to other people, suffering people, what can you do for them? Because gospel must bring prosperity in our spirit, soul and body and lives. If gospel bring destruction to us, why should we believe in prosperity?

SEVERSON: But Pastor Cho says personal prosperity is good only if people become rich as well in their spirit and soul.

REVEREND CHO: People try to bring happiness from their circumstances by being rich, by arriving their position in society. But those things soon pass away. They need eternal hope that is coming from inside out, not from outside in.

SEVERSON: Tithing is a fundamental part of church doctrine.

REVEREND LEE: Most members give tithes to the church—10 percent. With that money we help all the poor people in our society.

SEVERSON: With so many members and so much in tithes, the church could be a powerful political influence in South Korea. But Pastor Lee says the church does not want to become politically active and instead puts more emphasis on the social gospel—helping the poor, like this project outside the church where  volunteers collect and dispense clothing for those in need.

KAREN KIM: They have a lot of those projects. I think not just in our church, but I think churches around the world are starting realize that the debate between, you know, the social gospel-just the gospel—you can’t have one without the other, because you both, and they need to work hand-in-hand if you’re going to make a difference in our world.

SEVERSON: In the 1960s, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, with an annual per capita income of about $60. Today it’s around $30,000. South Korea is prospering. Pastor Cho says he knows one reason why.

REVEREND CHO: Jesus Christ. That is the only answer we can give. You come and try to study the reason of prosperity. You can’t find out any reason, because we don’t have a good politician so far. We don’t have great business people.

SEVERSON: And if Christianity is a factor in the prosperity of South Korea, Yoido is a significant contributor. Sixty years ago there were about 50,000 Christians in South Korea. Today it’s more than 10 million, and almost one-in-ten were baptized  in the Yoido Full Gospel Church.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Seoul, South Korea.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Back in the 1990s, Cambodia, impoverished and rebuilding after its genocidal Khmer Rouge years, took steps to give its new garment industry a competitive leg up. It agreed to a system of fair labor standards with a minimum wage rule, a limit to working hours, unions to represent workers, and freedom of expression. All would be open to international inspection. Today, there are perhaps 400,000 garment workers in more than 300 factories in and near the capital, Phnom Penh. They are subcontractors to brand names and retailers in Europe and America.

Beginning from scratch less than two decades ago, Cambodia’s garment industry has grown into the largest export earner for this country. Three out of four dollars that come into Cambodia come from the garment factories.

The key question is how much all this has benefited workers, almost all of whom are female. Many factories have been plagued by labor unrest. Occasionally, it’s been violent. There have been frequent reports of faintings on factory floors. The unions cite unhealthy conditions and workers weak from malnourishment.

CHEA MONY (Trade Union Leader): Workers have very low salaries, only $61US per month. You cannot afford to live on that day to day. It’s legalized slavery.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chea introduced us to these workers. Like most of their colleagues, they are young, rural migrants living in tight, shared quarters, supporting extended families back home.

SOY NAKRY (Garment Worker): We have to pay for the room, electricity, water.

VONG SOPHAL (Garment Worker): In the evening, we just buy some fish and make some soup. Sometimes we have to keep part of it for breakfast.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chem Savet supports a farm family in a rural province 60 miles away, including her husband, her parents, and two-year-old daughter.

CHEM SAVET (Garment Worker): I can only see her once a month. When I go home she really misses me, so she hugs me, especially when I must leave one day later. One time she put some of her clothes in when I was packing. She wanted to come with me.

DE SAM LAZARO: The standard six-day, 48-hour week plus overtime leaves little time for travel to see family. Factory managers aren’t sympathetic during family emergencies, they complained, and many employees are on temporary instead of permanent employment contracts.

FEMALE GARMENT WORKER: Previously, we saw a lot of strikes, but those haven’t happened recently in our factory because there are a lot of newcomers.

DAVID SCHILLING (Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility): The minimum wage clearly is not sufficient for workers to meet their basic needs. We’re talking food. We’re talking clothing.

DE SAM LAZARO: David Schilling is with the New York-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. It’s a shareholder activist group that wants to add a moral voice in global economic matters.

SCHILLING: Whether you’re talking about all the Abrahamic traditions, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, at the core is that concept of the human dignity of the person. So you’re taking that and then you’re moving into the realities.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo represents Cambodia’s garment factory owners. He sees a very different reality for workers.

KEN LOO (Cambodia Garment Manufacturing Association): They’re not whipped, you know. They’re not chained. They come to work willingly.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says most garment workers make more than the $61 minimum wage; closer to $90 dollars a month, he says, higher with overtime. That’s more than policemen, teachers, or most civil servants, he adds.

LOO: We have to put things in context. The per capita GDP of Cambodia for last year as announced by the World Bank was $908. The average common factory worker earns 40 percent more than national per capita GDP. If you use that as a gauge, I think any worker in America would be glad to get 40 percent more than national per capita GDP.

DE SAM LAZARO: Cambodia’s minister of commerce says factory owners have little wiggle room because they are no more than contract tailors.

CHAM PRASIDH (Cambodian Minister of Commerce): They do not own the fabric. They do not own the brand. They just import the fabric, cut, sew, pack, and then sell.

DE SAM LAZARO: Prasidh could impose higher wages in the factories, most of which are owned by investors from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Malaysia. But he says that would be suicidal.

PRASIDH: There is a lot of demonstration to ask for living condition, ask to increase the minimum wage, and what happen? The investor just packed their sewing machine, and they go home!

DE SAM LAZARO: Or they go to another country?

PRASIDH: They go to another country so we have to compare that, our price with Bangladesh. We have to compare our price with Pakistan or India, yeah, or even with China.

DE SAM LAZARO: San Francisco-based Gap is the largest buyer of garments made in Cambodia. It also buys from dozens of other developing nations. Spokeswoman Bobbi Silten says Gap, which owns the Old Navy and Banana Republic chains as well, has no plans to leave Cambodia.

BOBBI SILTEN (Gap Foundation): We have very longstanding relationships with many of the vendors in Cambodia. It’s been one of our top ten sourcing countries for the last ten years. So we are very committed to being there, and we think that the labor standards that they have put in place is one of the reasons why we continue to stay.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo says buyers may talk up the labor standards. But in 2008, when the global recession began, many, including Gap, cut back in Cambodia. At the same time, he says, Bangladesh—with lower pay and labor standards—saw no drop in business.

LOO: It just confirms our knowledge that, indeed, compliance of labor standards is the icing on the cake. Price is the cake.

PRASIDH: It is a race to the bottom, and Cambodia—to survive we have to create something special.

DE SAM LAZARO: Jill Tucker says Cambodia does have a special competitive advantage since buyers want to be associated with ethical labor standards. Tucker heads an agency supported by the UN and the US government that conducts factory inspections for compliance with the labor standards.

JILL TUCKER (Better Factories Initiative): In the olden days, by that I mean maybe ten years ago, it was more of a cat-and-mouse game than it is now, and the really smart producers, I think, realize that, you know, you need to treat your workers well to retain your workers, and that it’s just not worth it to not treat your workers well.

DE SAM LAZARO: She cites this factory, run by a Taiwan-based company, QMI, as a good example. There’s plenty of air and light and, managers say, good labor relations. All ten thousand of QMI’s workers are on permanent contracts, and wages here range from $90 to as much as $150 a month. That’s still below what unions say is adequate. But Tucker says demands for higher wages, however justified, are a tough sell given realities in the US, the biggest market.

TUCKER: I really wonder if American consumers are willing to pay significantly more for their apparel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Really?

TUCKER: Yeah. The cost of apparel has only dropped over the past decade. None of us are paying more for our garments than we were 10 years ago.

SILTEN: We do need to think about what consumers are willing to pay, where we can source these goods to achieve, you know, get the math to work for everyone. From a macro standpoint I think it’s a very complex issue.

DE SAM LAZARO: Gap’s Silten isn’t sure if consumers would pay more for ethically produced garments. The Interfaith Center’s Schilling says retailers like Gap, pressured by competitors and Wall Street investors, aren’t likely to ask them to do so. More likely, he says, campaigns by activist groups should bring a greater awareness of worker rights issues as they are now on environmental ones.

SCHILLING: There’s more and more advertising around, you know, sort of ecologically sound products. I think more and more that’s going to happen within the social space as well.

DE SAM LAZARO: That would bring greater awareness of the plight of workers in Cambodia and more urgently other nations that don’t subscribe to fair labor standards, and Schilling says it could not happen fast enough.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: It looks more like a theme park than a school, and it’s not just the location. In one of Thailand’s most impoverished regions that’s unusual. The buildings are built of bamboo, a fast-growing, renewable resource, including a geodesic dome.

MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: Well, just to show that you can do things people don’t normally think can be done, such as getting underprivileged kids to be at the top of the scale of many, many things, of being good, being decent.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Mechai Pattana School is the cornerstone of an idea to attack rural poverty and stereotypes and to instill a new kind of learning.

MECHAI: This is our sex education wheel.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Wheel of Fortune game teaches about various sexually transmitted diseases.

MECHAI (spinning the wheel): Green is a safe color, of course. Aha! Oh, aha! HIV, oh boy, just missed that. Then they have a good laugh, because HIV is explained up there.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai has long relied on good laughs to explain HIV and sex education in this conservative Southeast Asian nation. He comes from a prominent family and was trained as an economist. But Mechai became a TV personality who spearheaded family planning campaigns in the seventies and, two decades later, condom use to prevent HIV. In this predominantly Buddhist nation, he invited monks to bless the efforts.

MECHAI: And in the Buddhist scriptures it said many births cause suffering, so Buddhism is not against family planning. And we even ended up with monks sprinkling holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family before shipments went out into the villages.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai is credited with bringing down Thailand’s soaring HIV infection rate and its high birth rate, work that won him numerous international awards, including the $1 million Gates Foundation prize for global health.

DR. MALCOLM POTTS: In 1960, Thailand and the Philippines had about the same population, about 60 million people, 50 million people. Today, the Philippines has 94 million people, and there’s a lot of poverty. Thailand has 1.8 children per family, it’s got about 68 million people, and it’s making progress.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Malcolm Potts, former head of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, was an early collaborator with Mechai. He says population stability has yielded many economic benefits.

POTTS: I think it’s a seamless evolution. Mechai, at least in the past, used to talk about fertility-led development, and once we had these contraceptive distributors in most villages, you know, after 3 or 5 years they were the people who had intensive chicken rearing, or who had a sewing machine, or had a microloan.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thailand is no longer considered a less developed country, but there’s a growing gap between the Bangkok area, where the factories are, and rural farming regions whose young people have to migrate to the city for work. Mechai has tried to develop sustainable ideas that would be accessible in rural settings. On a beach resort once owned by Mechai’s family—it’s now run by a nonprofit group he founded—is a garden of so-called intensive agriculture.

MECHAI: This is the new style condom. This is the poverty eradication condom!

DE SAM LAZARO: The unusual metaphor aside, he says these recycled bags of potting soil can grow produce, in this case, cantaloupes with a minimum of water and space and maximum profit.

MECHAI: You’d grow it four times a year, so that’s 24,000 baht. That’s just under a thousand dollars for this much space. Nearly as good as marijuana. Might be even better. Don’t have to share with the police, either.

DE SAM LAZARO: Joking aside, he says Thai staples like mushrooms, limes, poultry, and hydroponic produce could be grown in rural enterprises. To demonstrate, he took us to Buriram Province, about four hours from Bangkok. He’s worked here for two decades, introducing new ideas like intensive agriculture. Several older initiatives have taken off independently.

MECHAI: You have a factory in the middle of nowhere here.

DE SAM LAZARO: This shoe factory was started with international grants. It now provides work for 140 to 200 people, producing mostly for the multinational Bata shoe company.

MECHAI: We helped, from Canadian money again, to provide a loan for them to establish a factory building, and then helped to get Bata to come in, rented the machinery and then bought the machinery, and they’ve been on their own for about 15 years.

DE SAM LAZARO: A short distance away are buildings that were once used to train people to raise livestock. Those activities have since shifted to people’s backyards and, in the buildings they vacated, more factories making brassieres in this building, ice skates in the next.

MECHAI: How could you imagine an old chicken pen and an old pig pen making this stuff, or brassieres?

DE SAM LAZARO: Was it really a tough sell at first?

MECHAI: Oh, yes, took seven visits. They did it out of pity at first. Then they realized that it worked. And when we bring someone new down they can’t quite fathom it how it can be done because they’re so used to the perception that you do everything like this in Bangkok, in the city.

DE SAM LAZARO: These factories provide livable if not lucrative wages and social benefits. But to truly transform rural communities, Mechai says it will take new approaches in education, which is where the Bamboo School fits in. It is now three years old and serves grades seven through ten. Building funds came from profits from Mechai’s resort, the Gates prize money, and corporate donations. Longer term, the school is developing its own vegetable farm, a key part of the business strategy.

(speaking to Mechai): So when this is up and running and flourishing, the cantaloupes and the limes will be paying the teacher salaries here?

MECHAI: Amongst other things, yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: The motto here is “The more you give, the more you get.” Quite apart from academics, for every student there are strict work requirements.

MECHAI: The parents do community service, and the kids do community service, and for every lunch time or meal time you have to do one hour’s community service, so that payment is in providing help to other people, plus their school fees.

DE SAM LAZARO: As part of their service, these students were preparing lesson plans to teach younger children in a nearby government school. It’s part of their training in leadership and critical thinking and a departure from the rote learning standard in most Thai public schools.

RUTHAICHANOK JUNPENG (Student): The teachers are here to teach us, but they’re also like friends, like an older friend that you can go to for advice, not just about what you’re learning.

PIMPAKAIN SIRI (Student): My parents are rice farmers, and I expect my future to be quite different, because I want to become a doctor, and I believe I can do that. I’ve learned new ways to help my parents, who are used to doing agriculture the traditional ways and I can help raise their income.

DE SAM LAZARO: And because students at this school regularly volunteer, they feel connected to their rural communities, says teacher Nantina Saninchai. She says two-thirds of them will be able to create or find jobs here.

NANTINA SANINCHAI: So a number will stay here. They have computers, etc., similar to what they would in the city.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ideas from the Mechai school are catching on. On weekends here, children collect litter in exchange for spending time online in a new community center or in a toy and book library. Parents and elders prepare food for the children. The village chief says one reason this community thrives is that parents are around for their children.

CHAMLEUNG PANRIN: Eight years ago, migration was rampant. Everybody would leave, and you only had children being brought up by the grandparents. Now it has very greatly improved.

MECHAI: The only road out of poverty is through business enterprise, and this is what we’re doing. Teach them, train them, lend them the money—not give them the money —and the business skills. But probably very, very important to go with it too is community empowerment.

DE SAM LAZARO: And you need to start it young?

MECHAI: Yes. Yes, start them young. When you start learning how to give when you’re young, when you get older it is second nature. Just like stealing. Start young and you keep on stealing forever. Ask my politicians.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai says he won’t mind if more people steal his self-help model of building community and nation.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Buriram province, Thailand.

JAMES ULAK (Senior Curator of Japanese Art, Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler Galleries): These are the designated closest disciples of the living Buddha in the time in the fifth century before the Christian era when he preached his message in what is now northeast India.

These close followers who later received the canonical number of five hundred became known as “the worthy ones.” In Sanskrit, the language of the day in India, Sanskrit calls these people arhats. You hear different names applied to these five hundred. The point of Buddhist fascination with these five hundred followers is that they take the role of intercessors and messengers from the Buddha, teaching compassion, showing that the Buddha’s life can be lived on earth, and they take on the role of supermen. The idea was that they were enlightened but yet living among us. And so they were able to show us how to live but yet also conduct these intercessory miraculous acts to save us from our sufferings.

Kazunobo created this ensemble of one hundred paintings between 1854 and 1863. The ancient purpose of painting these one hundred paintings of the five hundred followers was to give a kind of approachable, easy to see Buddhist catechism. Now I use that phrase very loosely, but it became a vehicle to show to people the basic modes for living a good Buddhist life.

The Buddha’s message, of course, was that to achieve enlightenment one has to tear away from the bonds of any attachment to essential experience. The notion in Buddhism is that everything is changing, everything is in transition, nothing is permanent, and everything we see, everything we grasp for in the material world is ultimately deceptive.

The primary question at least for the general population of his day who were viewing them was that in the midst of all of this we can have hope that there is, that the Buddha dwells among us and in us. You see that in all of the paintings.

He attempts to show you how these five hundred worthies lived their life in a monastery. There’s a wonderful pair of paintings that shows the masters of mercy as they take part in the daily communal bath. It was not just a question of hygiene, but a question of gathering together in a communal way to underscore the idea of the Buddhist community. My guess is that Kazunobu actually went down the street to his local public bath, looked at different people doing different things—a man shaving, a man clipping his toenails.

You get a real sense of compassion extended to all living things. There’s a great painting done of the arhats interacting with the animal world, the natural animal as we know it and the mythical animal world, and they’re at comfort with these creatures. There’s a painting where a unicorn-like animal is crouching in front of a seated arhat, and the arhat is cleaning his ear. Next to him is a little, another monk, and on his shoulder perched like a house cat is what seems to be an ocelot.

You see, if you will, natural history borrowings from other information they have from outside, but you also see the Buddha through the vehicle of these masters of mercy embracing everything, telling everyone everything’s all right. We care for you. We’re like you, but we’re not like you. We have this toggle role within your universe.

There’s a wonderful painting where one sees in the pair of paintings in the foreground what was a dry stream bed or river bed, and you see in one painting water spurting out of the head of one of these monk-like characters, endless stream of water filling the dry stream bed. And in the other painting you see water pouring out of a pitcher that also seems to be an endless source of water.

When we look at the paintings we see a significant amount of narrative drama that involves murder, war, pillage, suicide, earthquakes, fires and these elements alone appearing in the five hundred worthies’ paintings I think is a bit unusual. And Kazunobu in his paintings was reflecting the tumult of the day. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that he was an eye witness to certainly physical catastrophe and tried to depict that and to let his audience know that the mercies of the Buddha were there even for the suffering.

You see interventions. There’s a wonderful pair of paintings showing the worthy ones descending on clouds and hovering over the pits of hell where flames are licking at the damned and demons are poking at those who are condemned, and they come down to give mercy and in essence rescue. You see people condemned in hell climbing out of their terrible pit of torture and reaching up to a staff which one of the worthy ones is extending to his hand.

These would not be paintings you would sit in front of and meditate on. These are paintings that entertain and engage the eye. The eye cannot stay still. Every square inch of these paintings shows color, activity, detail that leave you constantly searching.

These humble looking gentlemen, these gnarled and whimsied old monks are really the embodiment of layers and layers of power inside of them. So there’s no need to show a central or overall dominant Buddha figure. The message is that the Buddha is within and moving about in very mysterious ways.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Kashmir has long been known for its peaceful vistas but for the 13 million inhabitants this mountainous region has been anything but peaceful. It is one of the world’s most militarized places. India alone has an estimated 600,000 troops in the part it controls, four times the number of American soldiers who were in Iraq at the height of that war. Although it has a two-thirds Muslim majority, Kashmir as a whole is quite diverse, the southern region mostly Hindu, the northeast Buddhist. But for six decades this province with a land mass the size of Idaho has been bitterly fought over by India and Pakistan.

It all dates back to 1947, when the departing British decided to partition the newly independent India. Muslim majority areas were to form the new republic of Pakistan. But Kashmir had a Hindu ruler, and he opted under pressure to join India. That set off the first of three major wars between India and Pakistan, ending in a ceasefire with India controlling about two-thirds of Kashmir, Pakistan most of the rest. The so-called “line of control” that divided Kashmir has served as an international border for 65 years, but Kashmir has festered as a sore point between the Islamic republic of Pakistan and mostly Hindu India.

Although the conflict has long been cast in religious terms, Joseph Schwartzberg, a leading scholar on Kashmir, says it’s more complicated than that. And within Kashmir, he says, there’s a long tradition of tolerance.

PROFESSOR JOSEPH SCHWARTZBERG: The Hindus frequently attended religious ceremonies that were held by Muslims, and the converse was also true. In terms of actual day to day religious practices it was a fairly eclectic area, and the type of strident militaristic Islam that we think of when we think of, say, the Middle East—that was not present in Kashmir at all.

DE SAM LAZARO: That began to change in the 1980s in Indian-held Kashmir with more religious tension and extremism. Schwartzberg blames corruption, non-functioning local government, and meddling from India’s capital Delhi in local elections.

SCHWARTZBERG: India is a pretty good functioning democracy in most parts of the country, but with respect to Kashmir it was exceptional. They felt that they couldn’t afford to lose elections. They managed to rig election after election, and the people simply got fed up. In 1987—and it was a pretty corrupt administration, so the people just had it— they initiated a series of demonstrations which were put down with a heavy hand, and in 1989 it really got out of hand, and the Indian government moved in in force.

DE SAM LAZARO: The clampdown triggered a militant separatist insurgency—or vice versa, depending on who is telling the story. India has blamed Pakistan, especially its intelligence service, and Islamist extremist groups. Pakistan says it offers only moral support for the insurgents. Groups like Human Rights Watch blame militant groups, but they also finger Indian security forces for widespread abuses under the guise of rooting out militants. India insists that most are infiltrators from Pakistan-held regions and beyond. Tens of thousands of civilians have died or gone missing. Kashmir’s grand mufti, the top religious leader recognized by India’s government, also blames both sides for excesses, and his numbers are much higher.

BASHIR UDDIN AHMAD (Grand Mufti): Since 1989, when the situation became more critical, hundreds of thousands of people are missing and hundreds of thousands more have been killed. We have no knowledge of where they are. The killing continues unabated, and the situation is still simmering.

DE SAM LAZARO: In recent years, the Kashmir dispute has taken on a new dimension as India has announced plans to build several dams, seeking hydro-electric power for its fast-growing economy. But Kashmir’s rivers also irrigate the breadbaskets of both India and Pakistan. So far there have been no problems sharing the waters under an internationally brokered treaty in 1960. However, Pakistan says the Indian dams could affect seasonal water flows to its farmland.

KAMAL MAJIDULLA (Pakistan Presidential Advisor): It’s devastating, because if the waters are not available to me in the quantities that I need them at the time that I need them, then I’m looking at a very low productivity of my agricultural sector.

DE SAM LAZARO: Pakistan has taken its protest to arbitration provided for under the Indus water treaty. India insists it is in full compliance. However, the fact that India, being upstream, could in theory manipulate flows could be politically toxic, particularly after the severe floods Pakistan has endured in recent years.

Hafiz Saeed is a man the US government has branded a terrorist and for whose capture it has offered a $10 million bounty. Saeed has blamed India for worsening the flooding. Pakistani presidential advisor Kamal Majidulla says such rhetoric resonates among farmers who are hurting.

MAJIDULLA: The farming community, which otherwise could look after their children, are unable to do, so the children have been going off and staying in madrassas instead of going to the local school system, because the madrassas feed them. I’m not saying all madrassas are bad. They do perform a social function, and some of them perform a very good social function, but a fair number of them are not. And this is where the cannon fodder comes from. So there is a direct linkage between water availability, low agricultural productivity, and the rise of terrorism.

DE SAM LAZARO: Officials in India’s capital Delhi say the Pakistani fears of water treaty violations are overblown. Ashok Jaitly, a scholar at a Delhi-based think tank, says the bigger threat is poor conservation and water mismanagement on both sides.

ASHOK JAITLY (Energy Resource Institute): If you had a cooperation based on good scientific river basin management of the Indus basin, and that’s where the Indus water treaty does not provide for it, it only provides for sharing of water. It does not provide for scientific integrated river basin management. If you could have that, then I think a lot, I won’t say all the problems would be solved, but a lot of the problems between India and Pakistan would be resolved, or could be resolved.

DE SAM LAZARO: Back in Kashmir, long squeezed as its two nuclear armed neighbors fight over it, Mufti Bashar Uddin says growing numbers want no part of either.

MUFTI UDDIN: As a religious leader, I would tell the people that if the option of independence is offered, that would be the best bet for Kashmir.

DE SAM LAZARO: That seems highly unlikely—both India and Pakistan reject the idea. So, to most analysts, does any quick resolution of the Kashmir stalemate. In recent months, there’s been a thaw in relations between India and Pakistan, with proposals to vastly increase the amount of trade across the border. Coincidence or not, Kashmir has enjoyed one of its quietest periods in years. The natural beauty is once again luring tourists. In 2011, more than one million visitors came here, most of them Indian. It remains to be seen whether and how much more tourism and commerce can repair 65 years of suspicion and upheaval.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.