Wat Opot is a community for children and parents affected by HIV and AIDS in Cambodia. Not every child is HIV positive, but all have been impacted, whether being orphaned after losing their parents to the disease, or forced to seek assistance because their sick parents cannot support them. Wat Opot provides a place to live and learn, food to eat, and health care and medicine to grow up healthy. In a country were HIV and AIDS still carries a stigma and people can be ostracized, Wat Opot is a safe haven where kids can just be kids.
It's easy to forget when you're with these fantastic, energetic kids what a long and deadly journey it's been. When Wat Opot began, HIV was a death sentence in Cambodia. Drugs to keep the disease at bay were too rare or expensive to be readily available. And the stigma associated with HIV and AIDS was such that families would kick their own sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, out of the house when they were sick and most in need of help. Crematoriums would refuse the bodies. Wat Opot was forced to build its own crematorium to dispose of its dead. Of the 1,500 children and parents Wat Opot has helped over the last ten years, 500 ended up here. Thankfully, medicine has turned that tide and this year this awful oven has only been used twice.
