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| 3D condom art |
Last week I went to dinner at a place called Cabbages &
Condoms. While some restaurants might give
you mints with the check, they gave us condoms.
I could just leave you with that odd fact, but as an NGO
worker I feel obligated to give you the full story because it is kinda
cool… The place is actually a long-standing fundraising arm of one of the biggest
domestic non-profits in Thailand. They
focus on family planning and AIDS prevention among rural low-income
populations. Cabbages refers to the
staple diet and condoms, well, I guess that’s self-explanatory.
The founder, a guy named Mechai Viravaidya and nick-named “Mr Condom" has been handing out
condoms (or mechais) with his business cards since the 70s. It didn’t matter who was in
attendance.
The meal was delicious and as the website proudly states: “Our food is guaranteed not to cause pregnancy.”
Enjoy.
The
Population and Community Development Association (PDA) was
founded in 1974 as a non-governmental organization with the initial aim to
complement the efforts of the Royal Thai Government in promoting family
planning in Thailand, especially in areas where knowledge and access to
services were scarce. Utilizing a participatory, community-based approach, PDA
recruited and trained residents of villages and urban neighborhoods to provide
information on family planning, including the supervised, non-medical
distribution of oral contraceptives. This distribution network covered more
than one-third of the country, thus contributing significantly to the decrease
in the annual population growth rate from 3.3% in the mid-1970s to 0.6% in
2005. During the same period, the number of children per family fell from 7 to
under two.
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