Eh Taw Bo’s Experience

Mooku Taw’s Experience

Yahoo

Yahoo is a dish that Karen Buddhists make in the spring time usually for New Year or birthday celebration. You need to make it in a time where cloves are in season. To cook yahoo you need sticky rice, coconut, garlic, ginger, cloves and they also put coin to bring good luck when you eat it.

Post written by Tu Tu Wah , Wah Poe

Suan In School Back Home

*Suan Pau is a Zomi refugee from Myanmar. Like the Karen, Zomi is an ethnic minority from this country.

2754 Karen New Year

 

Audience at Karen New Year Celebration at LHS

We celebrate Karen New Year to connect back to our roots. On the days we wear traditional clothes and outfits, we celebrate our tradition and express our culture. We tell Karen stories, eat foods, sing traditional songs, dance, and play games. Back in refugee camps, we used to have sports tournament. Such as soccer, volleyball, cane ball, and boxing. We celebrate for three days and nights, but the tournaments last like a month or two. On the new year day, every student from every school has to wear traditional shirts, and has to go to the celebration.

A Karen girl (Hay Paw) performing traditional dance.

Performing traditional Karen bamboo dance.

A dance group at Karen New Year.

Karen National Flag

 

Post written by:

Paw Spai Moo

Tu Tu Wah

Suan Pau

Karen National Anthem

The following video is the Karen National Anthem that is a song sang by grandma Stary Htoo. We filmed this video on 10/25/2014 in First Baptist Church. The woman that you see has a nice personality and has a kind heart. Starry Htoo is a great example of a grandma in our community, and we really thank her to be in our community.

April Paw, pt. 2

We later took off again, leaving South Korea and finally heading to the so called, “Land of the Free,” a.k.a. the United State of America. I spent most of my time playing one of those landmine games on the little screen behind the seat in front of us until we reached LAX. There, we opened our minds to new experiences and new people for the first time; people of all kind of ethnicities and minorities. Black, white, brown, red, yellow all kind of people like that of a rainbow. No wonder they call it the melting pot. It wasn’t like the typical movie we saw back in the camp where you had a group of pretty healthy rich white folks sitting around a huge dinner table eating a giant turkey. The most surprising thing to me was that there were fat people everywhere, which was rare back in the camp because we barely had anything to feed . Everyone looked like they were casts as zombies from The Walking Dead. I bet if they could turn those fat bellies into food, they could feed a whole nation of refugees and starving people. The lady servant in the airplanes were so thick it made me miss South Korea. The could barely squeeze through the isle of the airplane. Well, aybe I might’ve exagerated a little bit

We then took off again to Chicago and finally to Lincoln. It turned out the “land of the free” is more like the land of ownership, price tag and tax. Sure we weren’t shot at by machines guns and artillery and lived behind bared wired but, forgetting home was a bit hard. There’s no way you could survive here without working until you sweat from head to toe. However, with the help of our super kind Sponsor and the people from First Baptist church, we made it through day by day, little by little. We reached Lincoln on July 4th. We were told earlier before we came that we didn’t have to pay the Airplane fees for it was a national holiday. That was BS of course. Because it was a national holiday, we had to pay extra. Probably because the plane had to dodge all those fireworks shoot up at them. We ended up with a paper bill that had the weight of a ship anchor. It took us years to pay it off. Pop soon started working in a meat factory (Farmland), where he made enough to put food on the table and provide us with a roof. We also started going to school. That didn’t go as well as expected…

My Week

During the week days, I go to school, then I go home and do my homework.  I spend about 90% of my time in school during the week days, both inside and outside the classroom. On the weekend, I went grocery shopping with my family. The only time I am able to spend time with my family is during the weekends. This weekend, we prepared a special celebration in the Temple and celebrated with everyone.

-Paw Say

Lincoln High

Grocery shopping with family

Preparation for celebration

Paw Say

Tah Ka Pal

My name is Paw Say. I was born in Burma and my family came to the United States in 2008. Before we came to the US, we lived in Thailand. I go to Lincoln High School and I am now a junior. My goal for this project is to gain more knowledge and skills in writing and using computer. I want to show others about our Karen community in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Back in Burma, I used to live in a village called Tha Ya Kone. We lived a simple life with no electricity, no running water. We used fire to cook. We got food by hunting, farming, or finding it in the mountains. There was one school in our village. Children from my village and children from other villages also attended our school. It wasn’t a very big school, it was just a plain building with students of all grades tucked…

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My weekend

This weekend I went to church and took a picture of Sunday School class singing up on the stage. After that I went to a Birthday party. Then my mom friend’s invited us to eat dinner with them. Finally, after we ate dinner we went to Antelope Park where I took photos of my two beautiful sisters.

Post by: EhSer

During the Birthday party, the room was full of people coming to celebrate.

My sisters, Moo Htoo on the left and Shar Moo on the right. 

Pastor preaching at a Birthday Party

Dinner at my mom’s friend’s house, there is pork, fish paste, rice, and vegetables.

Sunday School sings during Karen Service at First Baptist Church.