The Pwo Karen and Pwo Educational Scene in 1984

 

A couple moms and their kids in Huay Sai Yong 
Village in the mixed Pwo/Sgaw area

One of the advantages of moving to Mae Sariang was that it allowed Marcia to get involved with the Pwo Karen Hostel and Scholarship Program. But before talking about those programs and Marcia’s role in them, it would be useful to provide some background.

First of all, in reading about languages and accents in earlier posts, it might be recalled there are two main groups of the Karen people. The Sgaw Karen are the dominant group and we learned to speak (to some degree) the Sgaw Karen dialect. The Pwo Karen are the second largest group and like the Sgaw Karen are native to both Burma/Myanmar as well as Thailand. There are pockets of Pwo Karen found in the Chiang Rai area and in fact, the first Christians among the Karen in Thailand were Pwo Karen from a village outside Chiang Rai. Other pockets of Pwo Karen extend fairly far south in the western part of the country.

The Baptist Union of Sweden (BUS) joined forces with the American Baptists and Australian Baptists in 1976 by Joining the TBMF (Thailand Baptist Missionary Fellowship). The BUS recognized that most of the evangelistic work, church building, educational, developmental, medical, really all Karen work to date had been among the Sgaw Karen. So, the goal of the Swedish Baptists was to work with the Pwo Karen.

100% Pwo Karen young women from Mae
Phae Village near Mae Sariang dressed for
a holiday

The town of Mae Sariang and the surrounding area became a center of the Swedish work among the
Pwo. Mae Sariang town formed sort of a border between the Sgaw Karen and Pwo Karen. North of town were the Sgaw and south of town were the Pwo. However, it isn’t a clear-cut border because differentiating Pwo from the Sgaw isn’t always clear-cut. Many of the people south of Mae Sariang were seen as kind of a blend linguistically and culturally of both the Pwo and the Sgaw. Some of the blended Pwo/Sgaw were comfortable in both the Sgaw Karen language and a local Pwo dialect. At the same time, there were other villages that were most definitely Pwo and not Sgaw or vice versa. The main Karen church, dominated by the Sgaw, didn’t want to make a hard and fast distinction between the Pwo and Sgaw but the flaw in this thinking in mission eyes was that it forced the Pwo to become Sgaw culturally. The BUS for their part, needed to define just who they would work with and just where. Therefore, they needed to draw some lines and make some distinctions.  While there was some friction between the BUS and the Sgaw dominated church, after a number of years, it seems the situation was resolved and everyone are still friends.

Pwo Karen Young men, dressed to impress
at Mae Phae Village.

So, much of the area south of Mae Sariang was the “target area” for the Swedish work. It had largely been untouched by the Thai government and missionaries alike. OMF and New Tribes Missions were starting to work around some of the edges and now the Swedish Baptists were working out of Mae Sariang. There were few roads and hardly any schools. In fact, when we started our second term we surveyed this Pwo Karen area and even including many villages that could be accessed by road, we found only 25% had school buildings. Whether the schools had teachers that actually showed up to teach was another matter. So, 75% or more of the villages in this Pwo Karen area had no access to education.

With a lack of schools and teachers, there were many villages that literally had no one that could speak, let alone read, the national language of Thai. Further, as for their own language, it hadn’t really been put in writing as yet. Therefore, there were many villages that could not read their own language either.

To help provide an education for young people, and similar to many places and people groups, mission organizations had long backed the building, staffing and maintaining of student hostels. These hostels were built in towns like Mae Sariang, where there were good quality schools and teachers. They served as a “a home away from home” for young people. Hardly ideal, kids as young as 5 or 6 would leave home to go live in the dormitory style hostel, which could be a day’s journey or more from home. But the only other alternative would be to build and staff schools in each village which only governments have the budget to do on a large scale.

The situation for the Sgaw Karen was similar to that of the Pwo but there was already an active hostel in Mae Sariang serving mainly the Sgaw Karen. So, to provide an opportunity for education for young people in the Pwo Karen areas a hostel for Pwo students was being built in Mae Sariang by the BUS. Marcia was going to be looking after the program there.

Young men in the Pwo area prepping a
pig for a wedding feast.

There were a few Pwo villages that were closer to roads and more developed areas where young people
had access to schooling. For them, the Swedish Baptists had made scholarships available so they could continue study beyond what was available in the village. So there were a few Pwo Karen students studying in various levels of school in Chiang Mai. In the beginning, most students going to Chiang Mai had Sgaw Karen language ability and attended Karen language Bible school training. Eventually, Pwo students could attend technical/vocational schools, higher level Biblical training and even university studies taught in the Thai language. But it took many years before they could meet the entry requirements.

It might be mentioned that the BUS, (Baptist Union of Sweden) was a small group. In fact, today it has become a member of the Uniting Church in Sweden, joining forces with several other smaller church groups. In the 1980s however, the BUS was able to get funding through the Swedish government which enabled it to take on relatively large budget (at least large by Baptist standards) projects like the Irrigation Project and the Pwo Karen Hostel and Scholarship Project.