Feisty Fighter

At the naming party, we met a feisty Karenni woman. She is from the Padaung (aka Kayan) tribe and she moved from Burma to a refugee camp with her family when she was seven. Her tribe is famous for their custom by which certain women decorate their bodies with brass rings and the ring around their neck pushes down their collar bone to give the illusion that their necks are elongated.

Her mother still wears the rings and lives in the tourist village just outside of the refugee camp. Her mother, she informed us, wears the rings our of respect for the tradition and not just because she is paid by the Thai authorities to do so.

This woman wore the rings when she was a child, but told her mother she would no longer wear the rings after arriving in Thailand because she wanted to go to school.

She attended a top secret training that lead her abroad to the UK for three months. Now she works for an international organization that assists refugees. She stated that she liked her work, but she and the other Burmese are not treated as equals to the rest of the staff. This seems ridiculous since without the Burmese workers, the organization would be useless. Sadly, she explained, that much of the discrepancies are because her and the other Burmese do not have the education credentials needed for higher positions. They have a lot of experience, but without a Thai ID card it is difficult to attend college in Thailand and without any documentation it is nearly impossible to travel abroad to get an education. Ironically, her situation is caused by the fact that she fled her homeland and it is precisely people like her that the organization she works for is assisting, yet they won't let her move up in the ranks.

In a statement not too uncommon in these parts, she announced that she does not want any children because there are so many things (such as go to college) that she wants to do. She does have one child, however, but she comically commented that it was her husband who "forced" her to have the child and as a consequence he spends more time raising the child that she does.

I hope to meet her and her husband again before we leave. She is an incredibly strong women who's not afraid to state her opinion and that's not a quality you find often in an Asian woman.