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By Root 1100 0

the hotel, I was more or less talked out of my naive rescue plan. But rage still roiled inside of me. As I had so many times in my life, I escaped into my imagination. Soaking in the bath, I wrote the avenging angel script in my head. In the satisfying climax, God would descend on those streets of Pattaya and with a great wind of loving rage wipe out the despicable, heinous practice of humans selling humans. Those plastic chairs, charming icons of front porch America, on which hundreds of poor, uneducated, exploited women sit waiting for strange men to defile them, would be picked up and churned through the air, their ugly stories turned into mere songs on a distant wind. The men who trawl, the men who rape, the men who believe they have a gross entitlement to women’s sexuality, who privilege their interests and violate over and over our bodily integrity and sexual autonomy, would be washed into the indigo gulf to have their violence and their lust and their hate and their ignorance beaten out of them by turbulent waves. Then they will be left back on shore, desperate not to make the same mistakes again, and again, and again.

What remained would be joyous and at peace, a gentle mirth in the universe.

I toweled myself off and called Dario. I think I talked the entire time. Later, I would realize he had done all sorts of interesting things while I was away, but I never asked.

The next day, I met another sister when we were joined by Coco Lee, a young pop superstar from Hong Kong. Kate Roberts had scored a major coup by signing up Coco to join the YouthAIDS campaign. That was her genius: Instead of imposing an American idea of what was hip and sexy, and presuming how people would respond to healthy products and messages, YouthAIDS analyzed what worked in each culture and designed the campaign around it. Coco and I hit it off right away. She was sunny and open, and she was traveling with her sister, something that certainly resonated with me.

We drove a few hours north of Bangkok into some low, verdant mountains to reach our first destination, Wat Phra Bat Nam Phu, an AIDS hospice run by Buddhist monks in the village of Lopburi. As we arrived, I saw a Buddha rising through the trees above a hillside monastery, radiant in his loving, benevolent smile. I figured he must be delighted with the monks who lived and worked in the whitewashed buildings below, because they were the embodiment of kindness, compassion, sympathy, and equanimity—the four tenets of Therevada Buddhism.

We entered through a spired archway and were greeted by the abbot, an energetic, round-faced, middle-aged man in saffron robes whose ordained name is Alongkot Dikkapanyo. His warm, scholarly manner made me think of him as “Professor Monk,” and indeed, he was highly educated, with a master’s in engineering. Along with him was Father Michael Bassano, a Maryknoll priest from upstate New York who volunteered at the hospice. In 1992, while visiting a local hospital to comfort the sick, the abbot met a man in the last stages of AIDS who had been abandoned by his family. He held the man’s hand as he died and in that moment decided to establish a hospice for AIDS victims at his monastery. There was so much need. In Thailand, the stigma of the virus was so great that as soon as a person was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, he or she was shunned by the whole family and cast into the street. Many made arduous treks across Thailand, hoping to arrive in time not to die alone. Some were so frail and exhausted from the journey, they literally crawled the final mile up the hill to the temple.

The original hospice had eight beds for full-blown AIDS patients. Now it was a four-hundred-bed complex with four floors of patients and a waiting list thousands of names long. The hospice had never received funding from the government. It relied on donations from tourists, corporations, and NGOs like PSI. By 2004, the understanding of AIDS had improved, but the stigma had not abated. Father Michael presided over the cremations of those who died in their care. Afterward, the ashes were