Compassion at the Thai–Myanmar Border: Sylvia Lin

Thailand’s Mae Sot District sits beside the Moei River, right on the Myan­mar border. Burmese refugees frequently cross the border here, seeking a temporary haven.

With a population of little more than 100,000, the district is relatively small, but it is served by several international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees and the Border Consortium. Volunteers from Taiwan are also active in the region, providing medical care and technical assistance. Even with the large number of aid workers, there’s one name that everyone knows. The international community calls her “Sylvia,” but she’s “Big Sister Liang-shu” (her given name in Chinese) to her Taiwanese friends. Having first arrived in Mae Sot in 1995, Sylvia Lin has become something of a local fixture over the last 20 years.

Jokingly said to have a “wanderer” in her stars, Lin has worn many hats over the years, first as a member of the Tai­pei Overseas Peace Service (TOPS) mission in Thailand and later as the founder of Borderline, a shop selling fair-trade goods. But throughout it all, she has remained on the front lines monitoring locals’ needs.

Lin works with several local women’s groups to run her fair-trade shop, Borderline. As its name suggests, the shop is located near the Thai–Myanmar border in Mae Sot.

An unexpected turn

Borderline’s sign can be seen in the distance from Mae Sot’s main street. Lin keeps traditional handicrafts made by Thailand’s various minority peoples, including the Karen and Lahu, on the counter. She also has a Burmese-style teahouse in the back of the store, and works by amateur Burmese painters on the second floor.

Social enterprises may have become globally trendy in recent years, but Borderline was well ahead of the curve. Established in 2004, the shop has always sought to combine public-spiritedness with profit. Lin never made a public pronouncement to that effect, or produced an awkward manifesto. She says instead that she founded Borderline for a very simple reason.

In 1997 TOPS assigned her to Mae Sot, where she began helping refugees at the Mae La Refugee Camp. Because the refugees living in what was, and still is, the largest such camp in Southeast Asia were not permitted to leave its grounds to work, Lin arranged with the camp’s Karen women’s governing committee to buy traditional handwoven fabrics from female residents as a means of increasing their incomes.

This simple sideline aimed at helping people became Borderline, and marked a turning point in Lin’s own life.

In 2003, the then 41-year-old Lin fell in love with Saoo, a Karen man ten years her junior. The two soon married and had a child. When Lin learned she was pregnant, she gave up her volunteer work to make more time for her child. She then created Borderline in partnership with two non-profits—the Karen Women's Organization (KWO) and Women’s Education for Advancement and Empowerment (WEAVE)—that she was familiar with through her work in the camp.

They created Borderline as a means of helping out local women’s groups, and took only a 5% commission on sales of items produced by group members. But by the time Borderline had covered its own operating expenses, they had virtually nothing left. Lin found herself paying nearly THB10,000 per month to meet rent and personnel costs.

After three or four difficult years, Borderline’s business began picking up. It also began operating a Burmese-style teahouse and offering cooking classes. Nowadays, Lonely Planet travel books describe the shop as a must-see for visitors to the area.

Lin’s partners in her Chimmuwa venture hand weave fabrics and hand make Karen-inspired dolls.

Helping Karen villages

Lin founded Chim­muwa at about the same time as Borderline, and tasked it with a similar mission.

When Lin started visiting mountain villages along the border in 1998, she learned that they were inhabited by Thailand’s own largely ignored Karen minority people. These Thais share the ethnicity of many of the Burmese refugees, but lived in even more dire circumstances, with the remoteness and isolation of their mountain villages hindering their access to educational and medical resources.

Lin sought information about them from a French missionary who had long run a school in a nearby village, hoping to better implement her plan to further the education of Karen women and children. She says that when she learned that Karen villagers leaving the mountains to visit government offices, seek medical care or pursue education suffered discrimination because of their lack of understanding of the Thai language, and were even referred to as “animals” by government officials, she really felt for them.

Lin’s efforts to implement her plan soon began taking her to these villages even more frequently. On several occasions, village councils pressed gifts of Karen bags and sarongs on her before her departure. Lin had first fallen in love with Karen culture when she was working at the refugee camp. That love and her experience in the villages prompted her to establish the Karen-inspired Chim­muwa brand, which uses traditional Karen fabrics to create bags, scarves and other products. A chim­muwa is a traditional dress for single Karen women.

In Chim­muwa’s early days, Lin and Naw Naw, her Karen housekeeper, handled the design and sewing of their products entirely by themselves. But the team has since undergone several iterations. Nowadays, everyone working in the studio, whether from Myan­mar or one of the mountain villages, is treated like a family member.

One time, a friend who had accompanied her into the mountains spotted a flaw in a piece of fabric and refused to buy it. He then urged Lin to do the same. Lin responded by explaining that she and the seller were partners rather than just buyers and sellers. Consequently, when Lin finds a problem, she doesn’t simply refuse to buy, but instead drives up into the mountains, spends a night in the village, and personally hashes out the problem with the women who make the fabric. 

The Karen’s fabric-making process—from the picking of the cotton, to the twisting and dyeing of the yarn, and the weaving of the fabric—is an earth-friendly handicraft that has been passed down within the villages for generations. However, in recent years, some villages have gotten fed up with the complexity of the process. They’ve chosen to give up their traditional natural processes in favor of purchasing chemically dyed yarns and fabrics. Others have switched to growing corn in the mountains to make a living, saturating the earth with damaging agricultural­ chemicals to do so. “By continuing to buy from villagers, I can encourage them to hold onto their environmentally friendly fabric making tradition.”

Lately, Lin has been all over five border provinces, visiting 13 villages looking for traditional fabrics. She hasn’t given up on the fabrics, even though prices have risen from the THB250 she used to pay to THB700 nowadays, because she wants to encourage villagers to retain environmentally friendly growing practices. And she uses Chim­muwa sales revenues to aid in the education of women and children in villages along the Thai–Myanmar border.

Chimmuwa’s story began to spread in Taiwan when Lin held a charity bazaar here in 2006. As more people have become aware of the brand, attendance at these bazaars has exceeded expectations. Moreover, the nature of the visitors has begun to change. It used to be mostly friends and friends of friends, but in recent years the number of unfamiliar faces, perhaps drawn to the brand’s ideals, has grown. 

But Chim­muwa is just the start. Lin says, “I want to do so much more.” Her hope is that Chim­muwa will spread the idea of “conscious consumerism,” that is, thinking about the meaning of purchases and using consumption to connect people to other people, to the land, and to the environment. Everyone participating in such a system, whether consumers or villagers, gains by it and grows. “This kind of sharing is right at the heart of social entrepreneurship.”

Lin’s partners in her Chimmuwa venture hand weave fabrics and hand make Karen-inspired dolls.

Unfinished business

Unfortunately, Lin’s husband passed away while she was getting Borderline and Chim­muwa on track.

Their good times hadn’t lasted very long. Though still a young man, Saoo was diagnosed with cancer not long after their marriage. He passed away just a few months later, leaving Lin alone with their five-month-old daughter. Now a widow, Lin began dreaming of establishing a hospice to provide comfort to the suffering, disadvantaged people of the border region in their final days.

Broke and landless, she did nothing with what was then still a vague idea. Then, in 2011, she thought, “If I don’t move forward, I’ll never get where I want to be.” Lacking a reliable source of funds, she started by looking for a location. Her experiences with Borderline and Chim­muwa had reinforced something she liked to tell her friends: “When you really want to do something, opportunities will arise.” She quickly found the land she needed. When she then acquired the financial support she’d worried about from a Taiwanese businessperson, her plan for a hospice and an attached environmentally friendly farm began to take shape.

But Lin didn’t rush to break ground. Instead, she chose to let the land return to a natural state. Having had a terminal cancer patient in the family, Lin was keenly aware that more intensive medical care doesn’t help patients at that stage. She believes that experiencing Nature provides terminal patients with a more healing mental and physical peace. She therefore planned a hospice in close proximity to Nature that would allow patients to spend their final days in a quiet and tranquil environment. She described her vision to us while standing in front of a kam­pung house made of bamboo, surrounded by birdsong.

Lin left Taiwan at the age of 29 to help refugees in Africa. She later transferred to Cambodia, and finally ended up on the Thai–Myan­mar border, where she has lived, sometimes elated, sometimes self-sacrificing, sometimes gentle, sometimes solemn, for the last 20 years. Lin is fond of saying that to those around her, her “just do it” life looks like a collection of episodes from an adventure story. But to her each decision she’s made has grown out of a deep-seated intuition. “I’m not the type to overthink things. It’s really very simple: when I see a need, I address it.”

Standing next to a four-wheel-drive truck, the skinny Lin looks a bit frail, but nonetheless manages to radiate a sense of determination. Dressed in Karen-style clothing, and carrying a Karen-inspired bag and handkerchief, Lin smiles, waves farewell to a friend, and prepares to depart for the next village. 

Lin’s partners in her Chimmuwa venture hand weave fabrics and hand make Karen-inspired dolls.

The Chimmuwa team has been through several iterations over the years. Here, a young member of the team focuses on cutting out cloth to make a bag.

Sylvia Lin’s efforts to support villagers’ educations began taking her to Thailand’s mountain villages more than a decade ago. Now, her deep love of Karen traditions makes those villages feel like home.

The remoteness of Thailand’s Karen villages limits the villagers’ access to education, medical care and other resources.

“I had to move to the border before I could settle down and get on with my life,” says Lin, who remains devoted to helping Mae Sot.