The condom king of Thailand.

Mechai squats at the edge of his solid teak-wood coffee table--the surface a bright mosaic of red, green, blue, and yellow condoms. Nick-named "The Condom King of Thailand" (or Lord Condom, as Prince Philip once dubbed him), Mechai Viravaidya wears many caps, yet none are as colorful as his promotion of the mighty condom.

A portly, balding man, suave, charming, knowledgeable, once winner of the Magsaysay Award, Mechai Viravaidya is an interesting hybrid of Thai and Scottish ancestry: "My mother was a Robertson from Scotland. She and my father met at Edinburgh University in the 1930s, where they were both studying medicine. After they graduated, they married and came out to Thailand. This was prior to the war in 1936." These were difficult times and his mother had a tough time of it at first. Her own family had disowned her for marrying a Thai, and Thailand in those days had few of the West's creature comforts. Mechai was born in Thailand during the war in 1941.

The headquarters of Mechai's condom campaign is situated in several buildings grouped together down Soi 12, a narrow lane off Bangkok's Sukhumvit Road. The most impressive of these buildings is a restaurant neatly named Cabbages and Condoms. Set in a garden of trees strung with fairy fights, C&C is known for its excellent Thai cuisine as well as its unusual title. "Cabbages are very common in Thailand," Mechai explains, "and I wanted to make condoms as common in this country as cabbages." To this end, he has succeeded.

Beside the restaurant, a C&C shop sells the decorative handicrafts of the northern hill tribes. It also sells condoms in every shape and form and in all flavors and sizes. There is all manner of gimmicky condom gifts-from paperweights and ashtrays to condom T-shirts, condom flowers, and condom key rings. Most of this "condom memorabilia" comes decorated with cute little figures featuring the male member in various stages of condom coverup, with printed wording that conveys such messages as "I am safe now" or "A condom a day keeps the doctor away."

By creating these cartoonlike characters, Mechai's condom campaign has proven to be a clever marketing ploy in which he gets his "safe sex" message across to the population. As Mechai says, "We use our condom campaign as a means of desensitizing the issue. We make people laugh, we make people able to talk about family planning and not feel embarrassed about it." A sign across the doorway to the restaurant reads, "Sorry, we have no mints, take a condom instead." Such signs create a similar air of fun to what would once have been considered a taboo topic. Another sign states simply, "Welcome to C&C. All our profits go to charity. Thank you for your generosity."

Through the tremendous efforts and initiative of Thailand's "Condom King:" this country has achieved wonders where other Asian countries have failed. Mechai reminds us that in 1972 Thailand had the same population as the Philippines, "but whereas the Philippines now has a population of 72 million, Thailand's today is only 59 million " It is Mechai Viravaidya who has, in fact, been credited with Thailand's population being 20 million less than it would have been.

Four times appointed a cabinet minister in the Thai government, Mechai Viravaidya has been Minister of the Office of Prime Minister twice, Deputy Minister of Industry, and Government Spokesman. It was in his capacity as Minister of Industry that he first recognized that the population growth rate--particularly in the rural sector--was extremely high. "As a government employee I was sent up-country to report on a development program. I noticed that there seemed to be an enormous number of children everywhere, and I wondered what this must mean in the long term." Studies undertaken confirmed a population growth rate of 3.2 percent, or an average of seven children per family.

In response to this concern, in 1974 Mechai founded his now-famed nongovernmental organization, the Population and Community Development Association. In its initial stages, the PDA assisted the government as a community-based family, planning service operating throughout the towns and villages of Thailand. Now almost 20 years later, the population growth rate has come down to a 1.2 percent average, or two children per family, with a very high proportion of Thai couples--something in the vicinity of 75 percent--practicing contraception these days.

The secret of the PDA's success in family planning has been its unconventional approach in playing on the particular Thai sense of humor. Its volunteers handed out condom key rings at official dinners and functions. They held "vasectomy festivals" in honor of the king's birthday and armed the entire police force with condoms to distribute for a "cops and rubbers" project. They have been particularly active in promoting condom use in Patpong, Bangkok's red-light district, sponsoring "condom nights and festivals" and visits by Captain Condom, who hands out condoms and safety-tip cards to commercial sex workers. In the early days of the PDA, Mechai would turn up at village fairs in a minibus, organizing balloon-blowing contests with condoms and teaching youngsters his condom song: "Too Many Children make You Poor."

The PDA is now the largest nonprofit, nongovernmental organization in the country. What began ostensibly as a family-planning center has now branched out into everything from primary health care and AIDS prevention to income, generation schemes, rural development, sanitation, environmental, and reforestation projects. It has even begun an information hotline called the Telephone Project for Life and Health. Mechai likens this wide-ranging organization to a sort of mini-government that nowadays has 14 offices throughout the country, over 600 employees nationwide, and more than 13,000 volunteers involved in its various community, based projects.

But it is for its family-planning work that the PDA is best known. To this end, it offers counseling on abortion as well as the Non-scalpel Vasectomy Clinic. As Mechai explains, the non-scalpel procedure uses a puncture method instead of a scalpel; no incisions or stitching are required. As he notes, "This makes vasectomy a more minor procedure, faster and better' " The clinic offers free vasectomies to anyone turning up at its doors. One such clinic has been set up in the center of the Patpong district.

Mechai and the PDA have also been extremely active on the issue of AIDS. Mechai acknowledges that AIDS a rapidly growing problem throughout Asia and that "unfortunately most governments have denied the seriousness of the problem. As a result, they haven't given this question the kind of political and financial commitment that they should have" According to Mechai, this burying-one's-head-in-the-sand mentality used to be prevalent in Thailand, too. However, these days, thanks to Mechai and the PDA's efforts on the AIDS front, "although Asia as a whole is stiff going through a stage of denial, this is not the case in Thailand" As far back as 1987, the PDA was the first to raise the alarm in the country, establishing an AIDS Prevention and Information Bureau. Then in 1991, Mechai, as a member of the government, conferred with the prime minister, who agreed that AIDS "was not a small problem and . . . would not go away by ignoring it"

As a first step, the Thai government acknowledged that AIDS should be accepted as a behavioral problem rather than a health problem and that, as Mechai puts it, "Everyone needs to be involved in solving this problem--the government, the non-government sector, the business sector. We wanted rural commitment and we wanted financial commitment as well" In 1991, all Thai ministries of government made available a collective sum of $50 million. This financial commitment has continued each year since and is now $100 million.

This money was used to launch a huge AIDS education program in all primary schools throughout the country. Today, there are 30-second AIDS education advertisements on radio and television every half hour and on every network. The result of this massive campaign is a 77 percent decline jp new cases of AIDS in Thailand between 1991 and 1994--a fact that has been reported in Britain's medical journal, Lancet. "Yes," Mechai admits, "AIDS is still on the increase, but at a much lower rate than previously." In fact, Thailand is now regarded by the United Nations as having the best Aids-awareness program of all the developing countries.

If Mechai Viravaidya is mostly known in Thailand in association with AIDS and condoms, this does not minimize his many other areas of involvement. He is also the license holder and chair of the New International School of Thailand. He was invited to take this position--and gladly accepted it--because he believes "that education is the most important investment one could make with one's money or time" (In order for an international school to operate in Thailand, a permit or license is required, and this can only be obtained by a Thai national. In this case, Mechai holds the license on behalf of the schools Foundation of International Education.

As a graduate of Melbourne's Geelong Grammar School and Melbourne University, where he obtained a degree in commerce in 1962, Mechai Viravaidya has retained strong links with Australia, particularly within the field of education; he also holds honorary doctorates of law and medicine from Melbourne and Monash universities. These were conferred in recognition of his innovative family-planning programs. He has been named a Fellow of the Royal College of Australia Public Health and, in 1995, was awarded the Order of Australia for his efforts to foster friendship between Australia and Thailand.

One of Mechai's current projects is assisting in fulfilling the dream of the Thai king's mother. The princess mother, who died in July 1995, had always wanted to have an international school built in the northern mountain region of Chiang Rai. Mechai, acting upon her proposal, established the Geelong Grammar International Foundation, which plans to open the school in 1998. This will be a truly international school with a 25 percent Thai student component, 25 percent other Asians, 25 percent Australians, and 25 percent from the rest of the world.

The school is being built in an area that had long been one of the princess mother's special concerns, the Doi Tung project. This is an area of land, some 150 square kilometers, that had been totally destroyed by deforestation. The princess mother's foundation took over the area and replanted it, and it has now been changed to a national "green" area. The hill tribes of the area were encouraged to abandon their traditional crop--opium--in favor of other, better income-generating crops. As a result, their fife-style has changed, their income has greatly increased, and there has been a general improvement in the quality of life in this region.

The Geelong Grammar International School win continue in this tradition and the philosophy of the Doi Tung project by putting a very strong emphasis on environmental protection. There will be a strong emphasis on community service, as the students go out and work with the villagers on various local projects.

Another of Mechai's current campaigns is the project known as T-BIRD: the Thai Business Initiative in Rural Development. The brainchild of Mechai, T-BIRD was launched by the PDA in 1988 with a grant from the Ford Foundation and aims to mobilize the corporate sector to take its business expertise to the poorer rural villages. Businesses can thus make a valuable contribution to Thailand's rural development. The main objective is to close the growing gap in income and standard of living between the city and the country areas, between the urban rich and the rural poor. In the north, for example, 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, with an annual per capita income in 1993 of one-seventh that of the capital, Bangkok.

In encouraging the business sector to help rectify this anomaly, Mechai has asked companies in Bangkok to "take some social responsibility, to not only profit from society but also to return something to society-" So far he has managed to involve over 80 companies in the T-BIRD scheme. The Bata Shoe Company, for instance, in conjunction with a village coop, has set up shoe factories in three villages which now produce three million pairs of shoes per year. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that 85 percent of the women employed by Bata returned from Bangkok especially to work in these factories. As Mechai points out, "Such enterprises help stop the problem of migration to the cities and, in turn, stem the tide of women being forced into prostitution" The village benefits all around, and in some cases the income levels have increased 24-fold in just three years.

As a firm advocate of corporate social responsibility, Mechai has so far managed to mobilize such businesses as American Express, Bank of Asia, Philip Morris, Nestle, Lever Brothers, Mobil Oil, and 3M Thailand Limited. In 1995, Australia's aid organization, AIDAB, provided a $125,000 grant to promote T-BIRD to Australian companies in Thailand.

So just who is Mechai Viravaidya and what makes him tick? The supersalesperson of family planning, also known as Mr. Contraception, has become a household word in Thailand. He has not been without his critics, though, some of whom have labeled him as brash and self-promoting. Others blame his anti-AIDS campaign and his attacks on the sex-tour industry for driving away foreign visitors. Unabashed, he answers his critics with cryptic comments like "Dead men don't buy." His sharp-shooting public statements aim to hit home. "I find it disturbing' " he says, "that men who are products of highly developed economies come to a developing nation solely to exploit its women and children"

Though his name has become synonymous with condoms and AIDS prevention, Mechai also has his fingers in many other pies. As an international personality, he flits around the globe spreading his charm and his expertise as a shrewd entrepreneur and skilled bureaucrat. Undoubtedly Thailand's greatest ambassador, Mechai Viravaidya sees his role in simple, straight, forward terms: "What is needed are individuals in every country who will take responsibility and try to change their communities."

How does someone such as Mechai manage time for family life or personal recreation? It seems that half his life is spent on planes traveling to cities around the world, attending meetings, organizing, and delivering speeches. Meanwhile, Mechai's wife works for the Thai king as the assistant secretary general. "This is similar to being assistant chief of staff to the White House," he claims. The Viravaidyas have one 18-year, old daughter who currently attends Trinity College in Melbourne. The family lives close to the PDA offices, which enables Mechai to commute between home and work with relative ease. He tries to keep his weekends free for family time, "at least one day anyway," he grins. His main hobbies are golf and gardening, but he regrets that he hasn't enough time to pursue these anymore.

How does such a man find time to sleep?. His reply is forth, right, brisk, and comes in the manner with which he approaches all his activities: "I just don't waste time. You see, a lot of people waste time and so they don't believe that others can do so much in the same amount of time. I don7t get much sleep because I'm so busy, but I get enough sleep. Put simply, I use my time efficiently."

Gloria Frydman was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1943. She has a B.A. in social sciences from Deakin University, has traveled extensively, and has worked in a variety of jobs both in Australia and abroad. Her first book, Poles Apart, was published in 1984 and was highly commended for the Wilke Literary Award. She is the author of What's Your Job Like?, Women of the Hills, Protesters, Mature Age Mothers, and most recently What a Life, a biography. F-rydman is married and has two sons.