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.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This ragtag parade in northwest Thailand, in the area known as the Golden Triangle, is a celebration of sorts, but it also has a very serious purpose, and one that has had dangerous consequences.

(speaking to Thai man): How was he killed?

PIPOB UDOMITTIPONG: He was stabbed to death.

SEVERSON: You think that he was killed because of his environmental work?

UDOMITTIPONG: Of course, definitely.

SEVERSON: Why?

UDOMITTIPONG: Because there was no other reason. He’s such a nice man. If you meet in person, he’s a very amicable man. He has no enemies whatsoever.

SEVERSON: What was so unusual about the killing was that the victim held a position of great respect in Thai society. The victim was a Buddhist monk, an environmental activist.

Susan Darlington is writing a book about Thailand’s environmental Buddhism.

PROFESSOR SUSAN DARLINGTON (Hampshire College): There were 18 human rights and environmental activists who were assassinated in Thailand in a three-year period, none of whose murders were solved. So somebody was feeling threatened and had the power to push back and try to send perhaps warnings or to stop these people altogether.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa is a noted Buddhist scholar who has written over a hundred books. He claims he knows who was pushing back against the monks who were trying to protect the forests: international corporations with financial ties to some corrupt generals in the Thai military.

SULAK SIVARAKSA (International Network of Engaged Buddhists): Unfortunately the big loggers, in cooperation with generals, they don’t care. They cut the trees, and the monks protested, and they even arrested monks. Not before in history that monks had been arrested.

SEVERSON: Darlington is a professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. She says it wasn’t until the late 1980s, after whole forests had vanished, that monks became activists.

(speaking to Professor Darlington): We’re talking about whole forests, clear cutting?

DARLINGTON: Clear cutting to either get the logs—the teak forests were going at a rapid rate, other hardwoods—or cutting down forest to make room for intensive agriculture.

SEVERSON: The forests went away, and the animals, too, and then in 1988 catastrophic floods caused people to reevaluate what they had been told was progress.

DARLINGTON: Up to three hundred people were killed from the floods, and most experts pointed to this and said the flooding would not have occurred if there hadn’t been such severe deforestation.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa founded the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. He says Buddhism’s views of the environment are both moral and spiritual.

SIVARAKSA: Buddhism believes that we are all interrelated, not only among human beings but to all sentient beings, including animals, nature, the river, the trees, the clouds, the sun, the moon, we all related. We are brothers and sisters. So if you harm any of these you harm yourself.

DARLINGTON: Buddhists’ primary motivation, primary goal is to end suffering, and destruction of the environment causes suffering on many levels. Therefore as monks it is part of our role to make people aware of this and to undertake actions to prevent this and to protect the forests that still exists.

SEVERSON: To protect to the forests, one monk did something radical, just as they are doing here now. He started tying orange robes around trees, in effect ordaining the trees.

DARLINGTON: He was called crazy, and a national newspapers called for him to disrobe from the sangha [community or order], that this was not appropriate behavior for a monk, he’s misusing the religion. But meanwhile other monks began to do tree ordinations as well. “You can’t ordain a tree. What does that mean?” So people started debating, what does it mean to ordain a tree?

SEVERSON: To the monks, it meant making the forests sacred, off limits to exploitation. The idea has caught on with some villagers, like these. The forests rangers with the guns are not official rangers. They’re volunteers who patrol the mountainside looking for timber poachers. Senior monk Anek took us to an area near his village that was clear-cut in the dark of the night. August 21st there was a forest here. August 22nd it was gone. Three acres of prized hardwood disappeared overnight. Anek says he doesn’t think monks’ robes wrapped around trees would have prevented this.

INTERPRETER (translating senior Buddhist monk Anek): He says it might not deter them because they are investors from outside, they have no respect for the culture, they have no respect for the tradition. He’s saying that he feels sad because it took them many years to preserve this.

SEVERSON: Anek says he still gets threats for ordaining trees but not as many as before and not as severe. He doesn’t think this area was clear cut for the trees, but instead for the land, which foreign companies are using for huge farming operations, like the tangerine plantations that stretch for miles along rolling hills that were once covered with pristine forests. Unfortunately for the locals, the companies are hiring cheap labor from nearby Burma. So they’re losing the land and their ability to live off it. In the middle of the plantations there is a Buddhist monastery that acts as a buffer against development. The senior monk here is also an environmental activist. His name is Abbot Kittisap.

(speaking to Buddhist abbot): But you’re not fearful?

Because of his activism, and because he is testifying in the trial of the murdered monk who was his friend, Abbot Kittsop has 24-hour-a-day police protection, the gentlemen you see here. The abbot says he is still fearful for his safety, but his conscience keeps him going. Even though it’s been four years since the controversial killing, no one has been convicted of the crime, and recently the chief investigator confirmed many people’s suspicions when he accused the police of tampering with the evidence. Many here don’t think justice will ever be served, but Susan Darlington says that doesn’t mean the monks have not made progress. The Thai government, for instance, has cracked down on illegal logging.

DARLINGTON: I think the role of Buddhism in protecting the environment has come a long way. These monks really do, they put a moral standard into the environmental movement that makes people really stop and think. It brings a spiritual element to it.

SEVERSON: Others like Sulak say spirituality also requires action.

SIVARAKSA: Spirituality is not merely personal contemplation, not only meditation, that you feel peaceful and then you feel “I’m alright, Jack.” I think that’s is dangerous. It’s escapism.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa, who received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize, says many Westerners and many Buddhists alike do not understand the meaning of engaged Buddhism.

SIVARAKSA: In fact, meditation only helps you to be peaceful. But you must also confront social suffering as well as your own personal suffering, and people suffer now because of the environment.

SEVERSON: The generals and the developers still have the upper hand, but the battle for the land, and the hearts and mind of the people is not over. Ordinary people are now beating a drum for the monks.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson north of Chang Mai, Thailand.

I traveled recently to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to visit the New Life Center, a faith-based group working to help young women escape or avoid victimization.

This dress rehearsal for a soap opera is full of drama: drug abuse, rape, guns, and prostitution. But for the performers acting out the scenes, this stuff is not necessarily fiction.

These performers reside in a shelter for girls in northern Thailand. Most are at risk for, or actual victims of, human trafficking. The skit is aimed at tribal communities in the surrounding mountains. That message will come in one of six languages spoken by different hill tribes that inhabit the vast region where Burma, China, Laos, and Thailand converge. This shelter was founded in 1987 to serve as a safe haven for tribal girls who’d been exploited. Since then, the New Life Center has housed about 1,500 girls.

Karen Smith

KAREN SMITH (Director, New Life Center): The New Life Center was opened by missionaries who were also anthropologists — Paul and Elaine Lewis. They saw countless women coming down out of their villages into the cities and being stuck in exploitative labor, and the needs were so great for education, for training, for knowledge for these tribal women, and they saw such great suffering. They saw women working in fish factories for 18 hours a day, and they saw the women who were getting forced into prostitution.

DE SAM LAZARO: The trouble for hill tribe communities begins with their isolation. Faye Wimon, a member of the Lahu community, works at the New Life Center.

Faye Wimon

FAYE WIMON (New Life Center): The road is not developed yet. That’s why there’s no school. So many of the hill tribe people — and also they didn’t get put into good schools and also the young people, especially the young women. So they have to stay home. They have to help their parents to take care of their younger brother and sister when their parents work in the field. And also the other problem is about citizenship.

DE SAM LAZARO: In Thailand, which has seen impressive economic growth in recent decades, half of the three million hill tribe people are not recognized as full citizens. That means many cannot buy land, vote, travel freely, or work legally.

Ms. SMITH: The citizenship issue in Thailand is a complicated one. If you are a tribal mother for whom the nearest hospital is five hours away, you are not able to go down to that hospital to give birth, and when a child doesn’t have birth registration, that starts the cycle.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many young women fall prey to traffickers and the underground economy.

Ms. SMITH: They might find a situation where they’re promised a particular job, and they end up moving to a particular place, and the job they end up with is not what they were promised, and they end up being a victim of human trafficking.

Girls at New Life Center

DE SAM LAZARO: That’s what happened to Mali who left her village and by age 13 began working in one of Bangkok’s notorious sex trades.

MALI (Former Victim, through translator): I didn’t know what kind of work it was, but she said it was a good salary, and I didn’t have to work too hard. I went to work in the show bar, and they wouldn’t let me leave. They beat me. It was very hard work. One day the owners forced me to go with a guest. The guests were usually foreigners, and I usually went with two or three guests a night.

DE SAM LAZARO: After five years in prostitution at the bar, Mali was approached by a faith-based anti-trafficking group that offers to help women who work in the sex industry.

MALI: They came like regular customers. They watched my dance show, and when my dance was finished they came up and started talking to me. I told them that I didn’t want to be here, that some people did want to be here, but I didn’t. I felt that it was shameful. Even though I made a lot of money, I thought there were other things I could do.

DE SAM LAZARO: Each day the young women spend time with activities like music lessons and homework. There’s also training in cooking, sewing, and cosmetology, skills that could land them a job when they leave the center.

MALI (through translator): When I was at the New Life Center I studied, I went to school, I learned a lot of things: how to sew, read, and write. I became a different person, and I have a new future.

DE SAM LAZARO: In the evening they’re off to night school, a program set up by the government to teach young adults with little formal education. Along with education and job skills, some 20 to 40 percent of residents here also acquire a new faith, converting to Christianity from traditional tribal religions in which they were raised.

Ms. SMITH: Every other year we have a baptism ceremony for the girls who do become followers of Jesus, and this past November there were 24 girls who were part of that baptism ceremony.

DE SAM LAZARO: But she and the resident chaplain insist the young women reach that decision on their own.

Rev. Kit Ripley

Reverend KIT RIPLEY (Resident Chaplain, New Life Center): Our residents have come from situations where they have experienced — many of them have experienced tremendous coercion and manipulation. So they know what that’s like, and they can put their finger on it pretty quickly. They’re very savvy when someone is trying to manipulate or force them to make a decision or to do anything with their life and often very resistant to that. So I feel like it’s just important be open to where they are spiritually, and a lot of that is waiting until they ask questions. I pray for residents at home and pray for their healing and their growth, and at that point I believe it’s up to God to work in their lives throughout their spiritual development.

DE SAM LAZARO: Spiritual development, sexual abuse counseling, education and job training are all part of the healing process, but so is legal advocacy. The center employs a full-time staff member to work on obtaining citizenship for the girls. That process takes between two and 10 years.

MALI (through translator): I’ve had lots of job offers, people asking me to work in different places, but I don’t have citizenship, so I can’t work anywhere legally.

Ms. SMITH: The situation if very, very complicated. In fact, right now in Thailand the Thai government has 23 different levels of status for its ethnic minorities.

DE SAM LAZARO: One major complication is the widely disparate economic and human rights conditions between Thailand and less prosperous neighbors like Burma and Laos. It prompts tribes’ people from those nations to travel across the mountain borders into Thailand. Long term, things could get even more complicated in the larger region.

Ms. SMITH: Just recently, new roads were opened between China, Laos, and Thailand, and they are huge eight-lane highways, and we know that whenever new roads are built that opens up an opportunity for business and the exchange of goods, but it also opens up the opportunity for the exchange of humans, and so I think there are still lots of risks for ethnic minorities.

DE SAM LAZARO: But for a hundred or so of these vulnerable young women, the New Life Center will continue to be a refuge.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Four years ago our correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro visited an AIDS hospice in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. This year he went back and discovered that low-cost new drugs are keeping many patients alive, and the hospice is also a museum, teaching visitors, especially young people, about AIDS causes and consequences. Nevertheless, AIDS education still has a long way to go.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Thailand’s Prabhat Namphu Buddhist monastery is an unlikely combination of two things: AIDS hospice and tourist attraction. Amid a display of cadavers, visitors — including many school kids — observe what HIV does to the human body. Beyond hospice care, the temple’s goal is to educate the public.

Abbot PHRA ALONGKOT DIKKAPANYO: I hope that this year maybe more than 300,000 people come to our temple.

DE SAM LAZARO: When we last visited in 2002, dozens were dying each month, abandoned as they were in life by families who did not even collect their remains. But that same year, Thailand began to make available the once prohibitively expensive antiretroviral or ARV drugs for AIDS.

Abbot DIKKAPANYO: It has changed the whole understanding of the place. I would say it’s the “temple of life.”

DE SAM LAZARO: Michael Bassano, an American Catholic priest, is among several foreign volunteers.

Reverend MICHAEL BASSANO (Volunteer): People come here with HIV, and they sense that here they find family, acceptance, nourishment, and a willingness to keep living, and that changes the whole reality here — that it’s not just a place of people in their last days.

DE SAM LAZARO: A few patients still succumb to daunting infections, but more and more are surviving.

Some have even formed a dance troupe — testament to how ARV drugs can restore life to normal — normal, that is, as long as they stay inside the walls of the temple, which is in central Thailand city of Lopburi.

One thing has not changed.

Rev. BASSANO: This is a new man. He just came.

DE SAM LAZARO: That’s the stigma faced by AIDS patients.

Rev. BASSANO: He’s 50-years-old. His family just left him, and they came over and just dropped him off and left him here with us. When he came he was all scaly, all full of scales this morning. So now we put Vaseline all over his body, and it’s cleared up pretty well. So I wonder — we wonder why at home they didn’t take care of him.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many like this man are dropped off, their disease untended, many with tuberculosis, an infection they must survive before they are physically fit to go on to the AIDS medicines.

NOK ENG (Temple Resident, through translator): The only time I go out of here is to get my medicine. If I put a long sleeve shirt on my arms are covered and people won’t notice my scars. I’d be very uncomfortable if I wore a shirt like this one.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thirty-two-year-old Nok Eng left the temple when her health improved. But she came right back in a few months. Health care was harder to find for her and her HIV-positive husband, and it was especially tough at her factory job, where people knew she was HIV-positive.

Ms. ENG (through translator): Everyday at lunch I could hear people whispering next to me, gossiping about me, being sarcastic. I just couldn’t take the criticism.

DE SAM LAZARO: Most painful, Nok’s parents, who live in a rural community, wanted little to do with her.

Ms. ENG: I told my parents that I wanted to come and visit, and they said, “Just stay where you are.” They said that I would humiliate them.

DE SAM LAZARO: Abbot Alongcot hopes the temple visitors will help improve things in a few years.

Abbot DIKKAPANYO: They take their children to our temple and learn about this problem, because father, mother have not enough knowledge.

DE SAM LAZARO: Not everyone likes the temple’s approach. Mechai Viravaidya, Thailand’s best-known anti-AIDS campaigner, says it could actually promote discrimination against people with AIDS.

MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: People go in there, they get frightened: “I’m afraid of these people; I don’t want to see because they look terrible.” And I would say the last choice would be to have a community of those living with HIV, like a leper colony.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai is best known for quirky family planning and anti-HIV campaigns that tackled the stigma against using condoms. Now, to fight stigma against AIDS, he’s taken a different approach — a program that offers HIV-positive people loans to start small businesses. It’s called “Positive Partners.”

Mr. VIRAVAIDYA: We lend money to a pair of people, one infected, the other not infected. Together they must do business. The uninfected person encourages you and also creates, tries very hard to create understanding, compassion within the village so that people know who that this person is living with HIV, have a chance on a daily basis to communicate, to listen, and somebody explaining, “Look, that person is perfectly normal. You watch, I go with him. I let him ride on the back of my bike and all these things.”

DE SAM LAZARO: In the village of Banjan, Duang Deenok accepted an invitation from her HIV-positive aunt to start a food business. She admits she was nervous at first.

DUANG DEENOK (through translator): At first everyone was pretty scared. So we went to talk to the doctor, because my auntie was taking care of all these children, feeding them. The doctor said that if we’re afraid that the children were infected, we could bring them in to get checked.

DE SAM LAZARO: Both women say they’ve been open in the community about the aunt’s HIV status.

PLAK DAMLAKO (through translator): I go to hospital, and when I see people they ask me, “Where have you been?” I tell them I was at the hospital. They ask me, “Why?” And I tell them I have AIDS. They say, “No, no, you don’t have AIDS.” I have to convince them that I have it.

DE SAM LAZARO: Over time the two women say there have been few problems with social acceptance, possibly because Plak shows no outward signs of illness. The business — fried chicken and spicy vegetables — has been brisk, and there’s only the occasional snide comment at the food stall, they say.

Ms. DEENOK (through translator): Some people say, “Hey, did you bring AIDS with you today?” When they act like this I say AIDS isn’t that easy to get. You can’t get it from the ticks on a dog. I tell them that you only get AIDS from needles and sex. Think about it. What I made here, you can eat. But if you do get AIDS, I’ll take you to where you can get medicine. Sometimes I’m just sarcastic because they’re not always nice to me.

DE SAM LAZARO: Because of awareness campaigns in the 1990s, most Thais learned how HIV is and isn’t transmitted. Thailand’s once-high HIV infection rate came down almost 90 percent through the decade. But complacency set in, and public education also tapered off, says Mechai.

Mr. VIRAVAIDYA: And because public education had died down, knowledge of HIV, to the extent to which it’s discussed, goes down and down and down. So stigma is still around and gets stronger because — for the lack of public education. So we just have to continue to do more, and that stigma with come down. But nothing works like actually seeing a person living with AIDS/HIV and getting them to have an experience with HIV people. That’s the best experience of changing attitudes.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai’s nongovernment agency is trying to bring that experience to schools. HIV-positive individuals spend time answering students’ questions.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN (through translator): People can tell that even though I have AIDS I’m still living my life, doing my work. I just want to tell you guys, “Don’t discriminate.”

DE SAM LAZARO: On the day we visited this rural school, the lectures were followed by frank sex education sessions for these high school students — a particularly critical group. After declining for years HIV infections among young Thais has gone upward again.

Abbot DIKKAPANYO: More than 50 percent of the new cases who are infected with HIV are the children — our children. Big problem for our country.

DE SAM LAZARO: Experts say the message [to] fear AIDS but not people with AIDS must be repeated again and again, in temples and schools, or it will get lost. Millions of Thais consume Coke and Pepsi everyday, Mechai says, but that doesn’t stop the soft drink companies from spending millions of dollars to remind them to do so.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro, in Lopburi, Thailand.