Bettering Lives in Vietnam

Dang Thi Dung

Farmer, Trung Dao, Vietnam

It is a clear, windy day in rural northern Vietnam, the height of the rice season. Standing by stalks of rice awaiting threshing and her favorite sow, 200-pound Mama Pig, Dang Thi Dung tells how DKT's contraceptive social marketing changed her life a few years ago.

After she married at the age of 19, she had her first child at 20. By age 25, Dung had three children to feed and a husband who was away from home much of the time as an army employee.

After her third child, Dung decided to control the size of her family. The rhythm method had failed, there were no condoms and pills in her rural community, and she did not want to get sterilized. She had tried an IUD through her local government health clinic, but it had side effects that interfered with her field work.

Dung was unsure how to avoid having more children. She remembered the penury of growing up in a large household. She remembered walking to school dizzy and disoriented while she dreamed about eating just one bowl of rice. Dung did not want her own children to go hungry.

One day she went into her local health clinic to get medicine for her youngest child's sore throat. In the lobby, there was a television program that had attracted a crowd of people. On the screen was a DKT advertisement for Trust condoms.

At first Dung laughed, but then she realized that inexpensive, dependable, and easy-to-purchase condoms had finally come to Vietnam. Within weeks, the clinic began selling Trust for just three cents a condom. Soon afterwards, Trust went on sale at a kiosk so close to her house that Dung could see it from her front door.

She and her husband were the first couple in their commune to use Trust condoms. Afterwards, three neighboring women who'd had multiple abortions followed her example by purchasing them.

Now Dung concentrates on the important things in life, like taking care of her three children, harvesting this year's bumper rice harvest, and fattening up Mama Pig.

"She can have all the babies she wants," Dung says of her beloved sow, which has 10 piglets. "But me, I'm happy the way I am."