It is not uncommon to find young children and teenagers sent into a monastic pagoda. The girl in the picture is 9. Another is 7. One nun at the same Pagoda is 28 and has been there since she was 14. The routine is consistent, the diet is vegetarian and nutritious and the moral standards are high.

There are many reasons why parents choose this lifestyle for their children. Religious endevour is sometimes overtaken by poverty and the promise of free bed and lodging. This means less mouths to feed at home. In a way, the pagoda acts as a social service somewhere between an orphanage and a boarding school.

Not all children that are sent into pagoda's are isolated from their family. The girl in the picture lives walking distance from her's. Others who live further from their homelands have opportunities to return and receive visitors.

Some may stay only a few years but this rigorous system of discipline and striving and striving and striving... for purity leaves an endelible mark on these children. Yet these kids are normal in many ways, they joke, play and fight each other. In some ways they can see clearly the raw humanity of failure and broken ideals which underlies all human built religious endeavors, clearer than any outsider.

Like all children who are born into a fallen world with an active instinct to sin and oppose their Creator these children will not make the perfection they are ushered towards. Grace is the only hope for these monastry kids as it is for me.