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."
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.
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.
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. 
