Pwo Evangelism – It’s Complicated
Some of the evangelist team and agricultural workers heading off up the Mae Ngow River The first complication in working with Pwo Evangelism was language, which has already been touched on in previous posts. While the full Bible had long been translated into the Pwo language in Burma virtually no one within the Pwo population in Thailand could read it as the dialect was different. So, it was decided a new translation was needed in the Mae Sariang area. The local Sgaw population was familiar with their own written language which used Burmese script. That likely would have been fine with the local Pwo as well, but Thai government authorities did not want those “foreign” letters used in Thailand. Thai script had to be used. Since virtually none of the Pwo read Thai, that meant the Liljestroms who were carrying out the Literacy work for the Baptist Union of Sweden, had to develop a whole new system of reading and writing using Thai letters. So, while translating the Bible into the loc...
