We spent the day with people from the Karen tribe. As with all the communities that we've met so far; language, nationality and ethnicity are completely separate ideas. In this case, the people were ethnically Karen, of Thai Nationality, but speaking Burmese or the Karen dialect.
Our day first started with church in JW, with children and families of the Mon Tribe (Burmese Nationality, speaking Mon/ Burmese). We then visited the home of one of the teachers (which was a raised room at one corner of the school compound) and sampled freshly-plucked red finger bananas.
After JW, we travelled to another church, which was actually the house of the local pastor, who himself is Karen. We were there not only to visit the church but also to provide health education and medical treatment.
After the service, we were asked to invited to stay for lunch. Much to our embarrassment, we were treated like royalty, given the biggest heaps of rice and seated in front of plates of dishes.
This hospitality extended as we travelled about 1/2 hour to a village to witness the removal of idols from the house of a family that had decided to become christians. The open and extremely hospitable manner of our hosts touched us, in the way they welcomed the whole bunch of us into the sleeping area of their home, and purposely walked out to buy 2 bottles of soft drink and ice to welcome their guests.
It was an internal dilemma as it was clear that these 2 bottles and ice was no small expense and would have meant their sacrificing something else. However, not taking the drinks offered would be even worse and we wanted to show how much we appreciated their hospitality.
In all, the day turned out to be much more packed than we expected, but also very, very meaningful.
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