“I’ve never met anyone who knows how to have as much fun with condoms (in public, anyway) as Mechai Viravaidya,” begins Bill Gates’s tribute to our very own “condom king.”
Writing in his personal blog, the American magnate and Microsoft founder last week named the 77-year-old Thai-Scottish activist and politician — renowned for improving the lives of millions with innovative family planning and HIV prevention programs — a “hero in the field.” A tribute to Mechai was also featured on Gates’s Youtube channel.
Read Gates’ “All Hail the Condom King” article.
Mechai’s work in family planning took off in 1974 when he founded a non-profit service organization called the Population and Community Development Association (PDA), which made contraceptives readily available all over Thailand, from the most remote provinces to the capital’s buzzing city centers.
He launched public information campaigns and famously opened a restaurant chain called Cabbages & Condoms, where condoms are given to customers with the bill and profits are channeled into the family planning cause.
But what earned him the playful nickname, often used by international media, including the BBC, were the “unorthodox approaches” that, according to Gates, started at the very beginning of his career.
“He won over his audiences with humor, using condoms as batons in school relay races and hosting vasectomy festivals where men were rewarded with a free hot dog for undergoing the procedure,” he writes in the blog.
“Mechai once gave my dad a baseball hat made from hundreds of condoms. He wore the cap at our foundation’s annual meeting, earning big laughs from the staff. He’s started school contests to see who could inflate a condom into the biggest balloon,” Gate continued.
Later in life, after he was appointed head of Thailand’s national HIV program, Mechai continued challenging taboos by persuading cabbies to hand out condoms to their passengers as part of a campaign for safe sex.
In 2003, Thailand became one of the first countries in the world to have a declination in HIV infections. From 1991 to 2003, new cases of HIV decreased by a whopping 90 percent.
Since Mechai began his work, Thailand’s annual population growth fell from 3.2 percent to less than 1 percent today.
This is not the first time Mechai has received public acknowledgement from Gates. In 2017, he was rewarded US$1 million (about THB33 million) by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in recognition for his pioneering efforts, according to the New York Times.
“When people in Thailand want a condom, they don’t call it a condom. Instead, they refer to it by the name of the man who taught them the importance of using one—they ask for a ‘Mechai,” writes Gates.
That’s sort of true. The term “Toong Mechai,” translated to “Mechai’s rubber,” was widely used in the 1970s, though has dropped out of the popular parlance.
Regardless, there’s little doubt that Mechai’s has helped improve the lives of millions of people in Thailand.
