Last year, the staff of Peace Corps Thailand invited Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, the former Secretary General of ASEAN and student of Peace Corps volunteers, to come and speak at Group 124’s Mid-Service Conference (MSC). By all accounts, his contributions to their MSC were extremely enriching; the volunteers went on to nominate him for the Harris Wofford Global Citizen Award, which is given to someone who grew up in a country served by Peace Corps, was influenced by PCVs and made a contribution to their country and world, which he won and received this month in Nashville.
Having heard about this from my friend in group 124, I was looking forward to who would be invited to speak at our MSC, which took place at the beginning of April. In my conversations with staff before the event, they wouldn’t tell me who it was, but would say they were very excited for who they had invited. Turns out, we volunteers were as well; Khun Mechai Viravaidya is Thailand’s biggest name in development, starting with family planning, branching out into business development, HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness and now running a school that embodies the practices that he so deeply believes in. His life story is extraordinary.
Mechai’s Early Life
Khun Mechai was born to two doctors, Dr. Ella and Dr. Samak who met when they were both studying medicine in Edinburgh and moved to Thailand after they had graduated and been licensed. Mechai grew up in Bangkok during the ’40s, and later went to boarding school in Australia. He went on to study business at Melbourne University.
He returned to Thailand and took a position in a government agency that took him out to the rural areas of the country often, where he continually saw large numbers of children and began to make the connection that for Thailand to start any kind of development, the first thing that would need to be addressed would be family planning.
Starting the Population and Development Association
After some failed attempts at working within the government to bring such a project to fruition, he started his own non-profit, which is now the largest non-profit NGO in Thailand, Population and Development Association (PDA). Through this entity, he began to do some rather innovative birth-control and family planning education.
One project was to de-stigmatize the condom, which he did by holding condom blowing contests, using condoms to make other things and handing out condoms instead of business cards or tips, among other things. His association with condoms lead to his opponents trying to shame him by calling condoms “mechais,” to which he was delighted and encouraged the practice (to this day condoms are called mechai in Thai).
His encouragement lead to increased use, but also lead to the study that Western condoms were not appropriately sized for Asian men, and a smaller size was produced because of his work. He also worked to have birth control pills to be distributed by non-physician midwives, which was pretty revolutionary and lead to an increase in use of birth control. Later he, even went to have well known village members be trained to distribute birth control pills. He helped to education Thai women about the variety of birth control options available to them, such as the DepoProvera shot. Since the beginning of his work, Thailand’s birth rate dropped from 7 to 1.5.
From Family Planning to Water and Sanitation to Refugee Work
Once he had buy-in and credibility from his family planning work, Mechai expanded his development work to focus on water and sanitation. He integrated it with his family planning program by giving reduced rates on rain water collection system installation and other projects to people who had signed up for the family planning project.
During the reign of the Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia, Khmer refugees flooded across the border into Thailand. An assessment of the refugee camps showed that they were being run by all international organizations – no Thai organizations were reaching out to help their neighbors.
PDA was asked to come and step in to help. They helped to introduce water sanitation and family planning, as they had before. When the efficiency and efficacy of their work was seen, they were asked to step up to essentially run the camps, which included buying and supplying the food for the camps. Working in a partnership with the Thai villages that were reached by the family planning and other development projects, the camps were soon a major part of the work done by PDA.
The shipments of vegetables would sometimes pile up in the offices of the non-profit and the workers wanted to buy some of the vegetables as well. Which lead to a stall being set up outside that sold both vegetables and birth control methods and was given the name Cabbages and Condoms.
From Condoms to Cabbages, Sustainable Business Practices
Cabbages and Condoms is now an extremely success chain of restaurants and hotels that spread across the country, which are a part of a partner organization to PDA, that stipulates that all profits of the economic ventures made under that organization must be donated to PDA. I haven’t had a chance to go to one yet, but I certainly plan on it.
Mechai also forged other kinds of business partnerships that benefit rural Thailand and its communities. Industry and factories are a big part of the economy here and when they first started opening up, set the trend of operating in the bigger cities. This drew the rural people away from their communities to seek work in the cities, which Mechai saw as a force working against the fabric of Thai culture and society. Through PDA, he worked to bring some companies to establish their new factories in the rural areas, and when the companies saw that they had a dedicated and loyal workforce in the villages reversed their decisions to move operations out of Thailand and to other neighboring Southeast Asian countries.
Addressing the HIV/AIDS Epidemic
In the 80s, Mechai saw the looming AIDS epidemic as it began to spread throughout Thailand and tried to ring the warning bells. Many in the government, like in the US, were unwilling to face the facts regarding the disease and its spread. However, there was a coup, and the leader of the coup decided to install Mechai as one of the advisors to help form the new government. This gave him the ability to institute an HIV/AIDS initiative in Thailand that ultimately made it one of the first countries, along with Uganda, to have a decline in new infections.
Speaking at our Mid-Service Conference
When he came to speak to us in April, the topic of his talk was mostly about the school that he had established in Buriram, called the Bamboo School. It is a study in self-sufficiency and autonomy. The empowerment of the students he described is pretty much unheard of in Thailand – they are encouraged to question their teachers, take part in the hiring decisions of the faculty, forgo an evening meal once a week to experience hunger that much of the world experiences, spend an hour a week in a wheelchair to encourage empathy with those who are disabled and are required to write three letters a week (to family, to friends and to a famous person).
The school is open to the surrounding community, with swimming lessons open to people at the pool and other facilities. Students are encouraged to seek out higher education and think about how they will be able to bring back the benefits of that education to their villages, as Mechai’s enduring vision has been about helping those in the rural communities and not forcing them to the bigger cities. Hearing all the things about the school were especially inspiring to many of us, to know that the potential for big changes is here in Thailand.
Here’s a TED Talk by Khun Mechai from 2010: