Buddhist wats in Cambodia and the neighboring Theravada lands have traditionally served as safety nets for the poor, destitute, sick, mentally ill, orphans, and the elderly. Some wats have monks who also serve as traditional healers. Even injured animals were alsot sanctioned to receive care in the wat. Long before income re-distribution was introduced in western countries, Cambodians gained merit through offerings to the temple that in turn benefited the neediest members of the extended wat community, which in Cambodia consists of clusters of three to five villages.

      Today, Cambodia is beset with enormous health and social problems that cannot be met by state delivery services even with assistance from the international community. One of the most pressing health problems today is the HIV/AIDS crisis. By the late 1990s, Cambodia hade the highest rate of HIV-AIDS infection in Asia. According to a July 1999 report of the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of AIDS cases between 1994 and 1997 increased by 400 percent in Cambodia. AIDS prevention programs sponsored by the international donor community has succeeded in reducing the infection rate since 2000, but AIDS deaths continued to climb until 2005, when international NGOS began to introduce retroviral drugs. In that year, some 250,000 children were reported by WHO to have lost one or both parents A larger number of children are living with HIV/AIDS infected parents. With the state unable to provide adequate public health services, the Buddhist wats have begun to a play a role. In Thailand, monks have played key roles in getting across the AIDS message and in providing palliatory and spiritual care, at times with local NGOs equipped to provide clinical assistance. This process received a later start in Cambodia due in part to limited capacities and in part to a conservative social attitude on this issue (i.e., discussing the merits of condoms, blaming the victim's karma).
 

A Buddhist lay couple founded Amnoy Tean, or Dana Offering, as an informal, wat-linked community-based assocation in Siemreap province. During the 90s, Phat Kim Kin and her husband Nou Seng, a retired teacher, had on their own fed and provided lessons to street children in various wats in and around Siemreap, home to the famed Angkor temples.Amnoy Tean is a merit-making association that provides instruction for 30 vulnerable children, most of whose parents are living or have died of AIDS. The children's families or relations are unable pay for daily costs of sending their children to the public school. The school, for which KEAP raised the funds (nearly $15,000) to build, is on land donated by a local temple, Wat Thmey. Working in collaboration with the headmonk and wat committee, Amnoy Tean provides clothing, learning materials, and a lunch with the view of preparing the children to attend the local schools near the wat. The teachers, which has included a monk at Wat Thmey, provide instructionin literacy, numeracy, English, physical education, and Buddhist morality to help the children, divded equally between young boys and girls, to acculturate into their own religious and cultural heritage. For KEAP, this has been a pilot project that hopes to be able to replicate itself it other wat communities in Cambodia where there is a critical mass of, in particular, AIDS orphans. The agreement is for the wat to assume full responsibility for the school after a five-year period of gradually decreasing outside support.

It costs nearly $1.50 a day to sponsor a child at the school, the major part of the expense being the meal offered for lunch before instruction, which takes place from one to five p.m. six days a week (Mon-Sat). There are also monthly running expenses such as drinking water, electricity, and learning supplies (notebooks, pencils, chalk/markers). There are yearly expenses for learning materials such as books and visual aids as well as a set of new school clothes. Click here to sponsor or co-sponsor a child or to learn more about how to help this culturally-sensitive and much needed project