It was around 2011 when we first arrived at the prison and it happened in an unusual way.
People have always been very thoughtful when bringing their offerings to us and since we are a temple for female monastics, we often receive sanitary napkins. Our monastic community is not to large and many members are past the fertile period of life, so the sanitary napkins began to pile up and take space.
When we have surplus of rice, we take it to elderly care facilities or to male juvenile detention centers, but neither of these have any need of sanitary napkins! That’s when we came up with the idea to bring them to the provincial prison.
At that time, the prison was still in Nakhon Pathom, near the famous stupa. The total inmates were 3500 and out of this number, 700 of them were women. We approached the officers at the prison and told them of our idea of sharing the napkins with their female inmates. They were very happy, as they had to set up annual budget to cover this cost but with our offering they could save on that.
As conversation continued, the officer asked if the bhikkhunis could also give dhamma talks to the female inmates. Of course, we said we would be happy to do it as it is our duty as monastics.
So that was how we began meeting the inmates. The Dhamma talks then developed into training programmes. Attending the training and obtaining a training certificate also helped to reduce their sentence.
We conduct 10 training sessions a month during the year and they focus on different practical topics, i.e. self-discipline, honesty, moral conduct, etc.. This training had become the main training course for the female inmates of the Nakhon Pathom provincial prison. We had to stop during the Covid pandemic but the plan is to renew this training very soon.