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A small-town fundraiser, a free vasectomy and a box of beef - this next story contains all three. Earlier this year, a doctor in Vermont made a donation to a local civic organization. Vermont Public's Mikaela Lefrak reports on the ripple effects of this unusual gift.
MIKAELA LEFRAK, BYLINE: The Strafford Area Lions Club holds an annual raffle. The proceeds go towards things like cleaning the town pond and the citizen of the year award. Mike Curtis wanted to donate something this year.
MIKE CURTIS: I make maple syrup, but so does practically everybody else in Strafford. And so that wouldn't be much of an offering.
LEFRAK: Dr. Curtis is a urologist in private practice. Vasectomies are his bread and butter. So he's like, how about one of those?
CURTIS: I figure if I donated a circumcision or prostate surgery, there wouldn't be many takers for that.
LEFRAK: So a free vasectomy becomes one of five raffle prizes. Brooke Wilkinson, a local music teacher, buys a $5 ticket. She's hoping to win a monthly supply of flowers from a local flower farm. But alas, fate is fickle, as she learns when she sees the raffle results posted in the town's general store.
BROOKE WILKINSON: And at the very bottom, it said my name, and it said Dr. Curtis (laughter). So I said out loud, I think I just won a vasectomy.
LEFRAK: Wilkinson is a self-described perimenopausal divorcee. She does not need a vasectomy. But a few days after the raffle, she's at the town's nursery school to teach music, and her co-worker there, Kimberly Lakin, sidles over.
KIMBERLY LAKIN: And so I was like, hey, what are you doing with that (laughter)?
LEFRAK: That being the free vasectomy. Lakin and her husband, Asa Manning, a farmer, have three kids and no health insurance. The kids are covered through a state program, but Lakin and Manning go without.
ASA MANNING: It's, like, the same as, like, a mortgage payment to get a family plan here.
LAKIN: Yeah. Yeah, no, health care in Vermont's a really tricky thing.
LEFRAK: They offer Wilkinson some money for the vasectomy. She asked Manning to trade her something else.
MANNING: We raise, like, a beef a year for ourselves and a pig, and we do a bunch of meat birds. And so we have, like, three or four freezers full of meat.
LAKIN: And she's like, would you trade, like, a box of meat for it? And I was like, do you want two?
LEFRAK: They just need the OK from Dr. Curtis to transfer the prize. Their request doesn't really surprise him. He says women are always hatching plans about vasectomies.
CURTIS: They are done. They are done with birth control. They are ready to have him step up to the plate.
LEFRAK: The surgery gets scheduled for March. Wilkinson gets her box of farm-raised local beef. They all make plans to grill burgers together at the farm this summer. Everything goes smoothly, except for one thing. The surgery happened right in the middle of maple sugaring season, when sap flows from the maple trees. After just a couple hours of rest, Asa Manning was back outside boiling down sap. Like Dr. Curtis said, everyone in Strafford makes maple syrup.
For NPR News, I'm Mikaela Lefrak.
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