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.