Family planning services including vasectomy are crucial for families to better plan for the number of children they want to have.
Many men who want vasectomies live in remote areas where it is difficult to access health services. When an outreach team arrives in a village, men and women from neighboring villages will walk long distances to access family planning services.
Teams set up their mobile sterilized rooms and start the day by providing education and peer counseling sessions with clients before assisting couples with their family planning needs.
The following is a story of one such outreach conducted by Marie Stopes PNG.
As the last couple leaves the room, Joseph Mondo stands at the corner of the makeshift outreach site. Joseph stays for a good 10 minutes, then sees a group of men approaching as silhouettes against the fading rays of the sun.
“Mipla laikim vasectomy but planti manmeri stap na mipla no kam,” (We want vasectomies but there were too many people around, so we did not come).
As Joseph has done many times before, he tells the group he will attend to them after his other team members have left, so he can maintain the men’s privacy.
After everyone has left, Joseph sits down with the men to talk to them about family planning, sexual reproductive health, and vasectomies – the procedure, the expected effects, and the benefits – so they understand what is involved before making their decisions.
Joseph Mondo – or Joe as he is known by locals across the Highlands region – is an outreach nurse and a trusted vasectomy provider. Joe has been serving Highlands communities as an outreach officer with Marie Stopes PNG since 2009.
A vasectomy is a permanent male contraceptive method to help couples plan their future when they are sure they do not want any more children. Vasectomies are safe, have no known health risks, and are 99.95 percent effective in preventing unwanted pregnancies.
“I am a non-scalpel vasectomy provider and I provide this service to men who do not want to have any more children,” says Joe.
“One by one they would come in. I work into the night until the last person leaves. Then I wait around until there was no one else and then I would pack up for the night,” he says.
Joe and the team provide these vital services to their clients in each community they visit, as it might be several months before they visit each village again.
Joe has many happy clients who are assisting him and the outreach team members to spread the word to men in their communities.
“I get phone calls from men in every part of the Highlands where there is a need for this vasectomy service, but I am only one man and can only go one village at a time,” he says.
In the last twelve months, Marie Stopes PNG has implemented 1,684 mobile outreach clinics reaching 125,184 people and delivering over 2,123 vasectomies across Western Highlands, Morobe, Central, Madang, Simbu, NCD, Eastern Highlands, and East New Britain provinces.
With funding support from the Australian Government, Marie Stopes has been implementing family planning and sexual reproductive health services under the Partnering for Strong Families project in Papua New Guinea.