The girls at the Darling Massage Parlor in Bangkok, and many thousands of other prostitutes, may owe their lives to an unlikely true believer known as the ”Condom King.”
The Sept.-Oct. In Health, a fine magazine known as Hippocrates before a rather senseless name change, profiles Mechai Viravaidya, an economist and part-time actor who became a self-appointed public health czar for Thailand, a land with a public health mess.
His career change reflects an obsession with Thailand`s soaring birth rate and its 300,000 citizens, according to this article, infected with AIDS stemming from prostitution and intravenous drug use.
Mechai, 50, is the Australian-schooled son of a Thai father and Scottish mother. He says he was a ”lousy economist” with the Thai government before founding a private population and community development association.
He buttonholed big Western foundations and used their grants to help convince key constituencies that condoms were critical. Toughest to impress were Buddhist monks: He used a quotation in a Buddhist scripture that read,
”Many births cause suffering,” to cajole them into blessing condoms.
”They bless everything else-houses, motorcycles-why not condoms?” he asks. Later, he got the monks to bless men who had just undergone vasectomies. He even started a restaurant, Cabbages & Condoms, that offers diners a free vasectomy (at a clinic, folks, not in the kitchen). When AIDS became a major concern, his call for condom use intensified. He is now so associated with condoms that his first name is a synonym for the word in Thai
dictionaries.
There have been obstacles. Most of the condoms that Mechai got during the start of his crusade, in the 1970s, came from American distributors. Alas, the American varieties, due to their dimensions, ”were falling off these poor guys.” So he spent $200 and enlisted five ladies at a Bangkok massage parlor to do the sort of measuring they don`t teach in engineering schools, namely
”ascertaining the Thai national condom size.”
The magazine contends that he has made great strides in raising awareness. He boasts a higher platform after being named minister of mass communications and tourism following a military coup in February. Per his mandate, a minute of every hour on radio and TV is spent on AIDS education.
Still, an international AIDS workshop, under way this week in Jakarta, Indonesia, underscores that the Condom King will be sorely tested by his minions.
According to a wire service report, an official of Thailand`s Foundation for Children claimed Monday that AIDS threatens 800,000 child prostitutes in Thailand, many driven by rural poverty into selling themselves and into drug dependency. They are at higher risk for AIDS because they`re less inclined to object if a customer doesn`t use a condom.
The best effort in Sports Illustrated`s Aug. 26 college football issue inspects the team at Washington`s Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts college for the deaf. The players aren`t immune from competitive indignities, such as a Brooklyn College coach taunting them prior to a game: ”Lip-read!
You`re going down, baby!” … Sept. 9 New Republic chronicles how much-ballyhooed Wall Street convictions by New York`s Rudolph Giuliani, the 1980s` most famous federal prosecutor, have been overturned by appeals panels. The article says Giuliani existed close to a line ”that separates virtual zeal from recklessness.”
September Scientific American is a keeper for anyone looking to learn about the brave new world of communications, computers and networks. It devotes 11 articles to the topic, mixing fact with impressionistic looks into emerging technologies and related issues, including privacy. Its most fascinating vision may be from Mark Weiser, a computer scientist for Xerox, who has built with colleagues inch-high machines-the electronic equivalent of Post-it notes. Dozens could be placed in a room to, for example, open doors to badge wearers, forward telephone calls, or instantly call up files on a computer terminal.
Less thrilling is the belief of Michael Dertouzos, head of the Laboratory for Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that new technologies will widen the gap between rich and poor as the value of information increases dramatically.
