Artisans

Karen Hill Tribe

The Karen form a large tribal community in Thailand. The majority of the Karen people live in refugee camps in the mountains in the northwest of Thailand. They originate from Myanmar but had to flee from the military junta.

Karen women are notorious weavers. They cultivate and spin their own cotton, from which they weave shawls and sarongs. They weave on wooden looms.

Counting Flowers offers both soft cotton scarves and traditional sarongs from Karen women.

The sarongs are handwoven by Pong-oy Jaroonchampee and Kanjana Tanomkeeree. The women wear this type of sarongs themselves. The patterns and use of bright colours are common for the area the ladies are coming from.

We were able to get in touch with Pong-oy and Kanjana via Heifer, a humanitarian organisation that supports several Karen villages by donating piglets and coffee tree saplings and providing the villagers with different types of trainings ('capacity building') to structurally improve the quality of their food and their income.

The cotton scarves from the Karen women were bought via WEAVE (Women's Education for Advancement and Empowerment), a Fairtrade organisation in Thailand that supports indigenous Burmese women (Karen and Karenni) living in the nine refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border.

WEAVE was founded in 1990. The Foundation strives to create a world where empowered women and their children are free to exercise their rights and live peacefully in a just, humane and equitable society. WEAVE's work includes the India-China-Burma border, but mainly concentrates along the Thai-Burma border.

Take a look at the scarves and sarongs from Karen women.

Pong-Oy and Kanjana at work [Credits: Bjorn Slis]