There is a nagging unseemliness about photographing suffering—the Vulture Effect—despite knowing your purpose is not to exploit, but to help. By showing suffering, by showing the compassionate action of individuals who work selflessly to help alleviate it, perhaps others will be moved to such action themselves.

I’m here at the Maryknoll hospice with Lok Yay, (‘revered grandmother’ in Khmer), a 75-year old wisp of a Buddhist nun who is well known around the AIDS wards of Phnom Penh. Just the sight of her brings a glimmer of life to the man’s eyes, and soon he is basking in her soothing words, her healing hands, and her simple, loving presence. 

Beth Goldring, an American Buddhist nun and founding director of Brahmavihara, began her AIDS project chaplainry in the years before the arrival of ARV’s, at the height of the crisis. Unique in Cambodia, Beth and her Khmer staff, very much like Mother Theresa in India, came into being solely to offer love, comfort, compassion and spiritual sustenance to the dying. As ARV’s began to become available and more people started surviving, Brahmavihara’s purview expanded to include a host of necessarily elastic social services and facilitations for AIDS patients and their families. 

There is a magic about Beth and her team unlike anything I have ever witnessed. When she walks into a suffering AIDS ward it transforms into a roomful of smiles and hugs. When she performs healing techniques on a patient, it is extraordinary to see the suffering fade, replaced by a deep peacefulness.

Lok Yay has a different style and uses different techniques, but she too carries the magic. Beth recounts occasions where Lok Yay has brought patients with insurvivable CD4 counts (immunity levels as low as 1 on a scale of 1500) back from the edge, and eventually back to levels strong enough to take ARV’s and survive. 

About 330,000-440,000 Cambodians, some 3-4% of the population, are infected with the HIV virus, the highest rate in South East Asia. Before the arrival of significant amounts of ARV’s only a few years ago, some 40,000 people a year were succumbing to the disease. Thanks to ARV’s and still less than adequate AIDS awareness programs, that number has been reduced to 10-12,000. AIDS orphans number in the hundreds of thousands. 

The great tragedy of Cambodia has been long and well documented, but sadly, is far from over. Genocides and the physical and psychological scars they leave behind take generations to overcome. Nearly 30 years after the end of Pol Pot’s murderous reign, even though a good measure of stability has returned, life is still cheap for too many. 

Too many doctors make a practice of extorting money from AIDS patients, leaving them to die if they cannot pay. Too many corrupt government officials make a practice of skimming relief money earmarked for AIDS victims, even going so far as to force long disbursement delays in order to cover their crimes in red tape. One is incredulous at how they can rationalize their actions, actions that leave people suffering and dying just so they can pad their bank accounts. Perhaps they point to what happens all too often on the streets. Some patients will gamble away their ARV’s. Some will sell them on the black market. Some HIV-positive sex workers will knowingly have sex without condoms.

But why? “Why” is what is willfully ignored by corrupt officials. A person gambles their ARV’s, their very lives, because they live in ignorance and desperation. A mother sells her ARV’s on the black market because she is desperate to feed her children. A low-end sex worker sells her diseased body for 1,500 riel (about 38 cents) because she is desperate to feed herself, or for a cheap high to dull the pain. The corrupt officials are apparently too busy looking down their noses at such acts of desperation to consider the fact that it is their own greed and blind cruelty that is a major contributor. 

More than two months have passed, and just as I’m getting some idea of what I’m doing, my work here is nearing its natural conclusion. Surviving patients receive copies of their photographs, still something of a rarity amongst Cambodia’s poor. They are as fascinated with their images—even in such dire straits—as I am with their warmth and courage in the face of it. The gratitude they express both surprises and humbles me. I try with words to express my own warmth towards them, my own gratitude, but it feels woefully inadequate. But I have learned here that cultural divides are most easily crossed, complex feelings more meaningfully expressed, with something as simple as a heartfelt gaze. 

It’s my last day, and in an unplanned bookend, I find myself again with Lok Yay standing in the same room in the same Maryknoll hospice with the same man from the first day. I should be surprised to see him still alive, but somehow I’m not. The eyes are still sunken from his long illness, but they know longer speak of death. One cannot help but think that this wisp of a nun with the healing hands and the loving presence might have had a little something to do with it.

—Bennett Stevens