After years of doing business with our Karen friends, we have found that we can do much more to assist individual artisans and their families. As many of you know, Asia Charisma is not a large company and do not employ any Karen artisans. However, all of our hill tribe silver products are supplied to us by independent Karen artisan and their working families. All of our fabulous products are done in each artisan's village-home. In most cases, work is done underneath wooden homes set on stilts (see images below) using tools primitive to today's standards; hours of melting, shaping and hammering to supply us with some of the most brilliant and unique silver beads and jewelry components available on the market today. |
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In comparison to many modernized cultures, the Karens are quite poor but hard working people with limited education and knowledge of the world outside their domain. Most silversmiths and their family also tend to their subsidized goverment fruit plantation and rice fields through out the year to supplement income from creating silver jewelry components. The few villages that have created these astonishing silver products have slowly improved their standard of living; from wooden huts with grass shingles and open-air toilets to what we now see much of: brick with cement floor tiling-homes and an indoor-toilet. Needless to say, these homes are often shared by several generations of fathers, mothers and siblings that all have or eventually will take part in creating these wonderful silver components so long as there is demand for their unique products.
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Asia Charisma's Karen Artisan and Family Aid Program (KAFA) is designed to assist not the entire village but several families simultaneously. Please know that we would very much like to help everyone in the village, however, considering our own status and resources, we would be very ineffective attempting to complete such a goal all at once. For as long as we have known the Karens or any other ethnic hill tribe minority, we have always recognized them as being shy and with low self-confidence. KAFA program aims to help build confidence in each family's working habitat, particularly in the younger generation so that eventually each family is knowledgeable enough to sell their products directly to the demanding market.
As many of you are well aware, each Karen family creates a particular line of products. For instance, Lung Lisor and family (iMAGES 1 - 5) of Hauy Thom village are able to create small spacer beads of 2 millimeters to 5 millimeters in width. This is not because his family is unable to create any other hill tribe silver products, but rather, this is done so that each family will always have their own signature line and if so happens that their particular product line is in high demand, their family will surely be kept employed for as long as there is demand for that certain design. This of course creates a stumbling block for those families with products least sought after. KAFA program begins with selecting 6 families that has the least amount of products in high demand and with your help, Asia Charisma would like to keep these families employed. With hope, we can help assist improving the meaning of life for less fortunate hill tribe people and their families.
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