Karen ethnic people from Myanmar/Burma, now residing in South Korea as expatriates and refugees, today hold celebrations to mark their traditional New Year.
reported by Salai Kyaw Kyaw
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Karen New Year Celebration in Korea
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Merry Christma!
Christmas, also called Christmas Day, is an annual holiday that is celebrated as the birthday of Jesus Christ-the founder of Christianity. The Christmas day is chiefly marked every year on 25th December by the Christians but the festival of Christmas conveys the message of affection, peace, brotherhood and fraternity among all so it transcends the barricades of color, caste and creeds and celebrated by non-Christians as well, all over the world.
The fun, gaiety, joy and excitement associated with Christmas has made it a social-cultural festival which is observed with special prayers, Church celebrations, family get-together, gifts giving, adorning the homes with beautiful decoratives, lights, stars, Christmas Tree. Santa Claus, also called Father Christmas, is an integral part of Christmas celebrations who is loved by all, specially children, and brings gifts in his red sack on the day of Christmas.
History of Christmas
Historians claim that the first celebration of Christmas happened in Rome in 336 A.D. Early Romans, however, could not profess their religion openly as Christianity had grown up in blood and tears in Rome. It was only after the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 4th century A.D that the religion came to be followed by vast masses of humanity. This community then felt the need to celebrate the birth of Christ as a festival. But different groups had been celebrating Jesus's birth on different dates like 6th January, 19th April, 20th May, 17th November, 25th December. By the 5th century A.D. 25th December got accepted as the most suitable date in the Western World and gradually the Eastern Churches fell in line with the west.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Karen New Year 's Speech by Saw Aung Khin in 1998
Happy New Year to you all.
It is a great honor and pleasure for me to speak at our Karen New Year Day. This is the
second time I have celebrated Karen New Year with my brothers and sisters in Vancouver B C. First of all I thank the Karen community here for let me speak at this important occasion of our Karen New Year. Last year I shared about my experience how I celebrated Karen New Year in my boyhood till I have become grown up man. This time Iwould like to stress the importance of maintaining our Karen culture andheritage. As different ethnic people has their own culture and heritage, our Karen people are also unique and have our own culture and heritage. Had it not been for the Karen community in Vancouver B C, we will not be able to celebrate Karen New Year to day with Karen musics and dances which reflect our Karen culture and heritage.
Thank you so much for maintaining our Karen culture and heritage. To maintain our culture and heritage, we have to learn own language and literature. With out learning our written language and literature, we will not be able to maintain and up keep our culture and tradition. With out
knowing our written language, it will be very hard to learn our history. When I was in school we learn Burmese History from Middle School through High School and I have not come across the words " Karen or Kayin" in the text book although Karen people are the second largest minority in the country. From then I do believe that the word Karen was not included in the History text book, because we Karen people did not have written language of our own during the Burmese Monarchy days. Thank God , during the British colonial Rule The American Missionaries who came to Burma introduced Karen alphabet, probably borrowed from Burmese alphabets, and from then on we have our own written language and literature. In Burma, not long after the Military took over the country all schools were nationalized and all ethnic minority languages were not allowed to be taught in the school any more. Only minority people who live in resistant group areas have the opportunity to learn their own language. When the Mon resistant group signed cease fire agreement with the Military Regime, they were promised to established Mon National School, but later the Regime broke its promise and ordered all Mon National School to be closed. In Chin State in remote Chin hills where there is no school, villagers hire their own teachers and established primary School. Those schools were also closed by the Military Regime. So in Burma, ethnic minority people who live within the control of the Military Government do not have the chance for their children to learn their own language. Now let me share about my family and my children. My children were born in Burma during the Burma Military Regime and they do not have the chance to learn their own language. They can not read and write Karen. I also partly blame myself for not being so enthusiastic at that time as I am now. If you do not know Karen written language, how can you maintain Karen culture and heritage! At present we have small Karen community in Vancouver B C and it is not easy to build a school so that we can teach our children our culture and tradition. Never the less we can do so in Church and Monastery where we go for worshiping. I believe that if we set aside one hour or so a week and teach our children their written language and heritage, it will be wonderful to inherit our children with our precious Karen culture and heritage. Besides, Vancouver Karen community is blessed
with two wonderful teachers. One is Sgaw Karen teacher thramu Naw Loo Lu and the other is Pwo Karen teacher none other than Naw Loo Lu's beloved
husband thra Aung Mya Thein. There are only two major Karen languages and you have it all.
In conclusion, I would like to thank Vancouver Karen community, visitors and friends alike who come and join us in celebration of our Karen New Year. My special thanks to those who worked very hard last night to prepare food and those who practice so hard for musics and dances to make our Karen New Year celebration possible.
Thank you very much again and God Bless you all.
Saw Aung Khin.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးဆုေတာင္း
ျပာသုိလမွာ ႏွင္းမွဳံျဖာဆင္း
လယ္ယာလုပ္ခြင္ ကင္းရွင္းစင္၍
ၾကယ္စင္လင္းလက္ အာကာထက္၊
ေစာင္းေကာက္ခတ္သံ မုိးထက္ယံၾကား
ဆုိဟန္ျမဴးလွ ကဟန္ၾကြသည့္
ခန္႔ထည္အစဥ္ ဇဲြကပင္။
ပိန္းဥမွ်စ္ခ်ဥ္ ခရုဖင္ခြ်န္
ဘုိးစဥ္ေဘာင္ဆက္ မူမပ်က္ေရး
လက္စုံေလြးၿမဲ ေကာက္သစ္ပဲြ။
ႏွင္းပန္းေမႊးႀကိဳင္ ႏွစ္သစ္တုိင္ေတာ့
ေခြယုိင္ညစ္ေထြး စိတ္ယုတ္ေဘးထုတ္
အေတြးႏုတ္ေတြ ေပ်ာက္ၾကေစ။
ျပာသုိလဆန္းတစ္ရက္ေန႕မွာ က်ေရာက္မည့္
၂၇၄၈-ခု ကရင္ႏွစ္သစ္ကူးအတြက္ ႀကိဳဆုိလွ်က္--
မင္းစိုးစံ(အေ၀းေရာက္ကရင္ဒုကၡသည္တဦး)
Minnesota, USA.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
သူကေနျပည္ေတာ္ကုိ ေရာက္ေနတယ္ဆုိပဲ
စိတ္၀င္စားစရာျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္၊ ေနာက္ဆက္တဲြသတင္းမ်ားကုိ ေစာင့္ေမွ်ာ္နားေထာင္ေနၾကပါတယ္
။
Saturday, December 13, 2008
ေမးခြန္း
သမုဒၵရာရဲ႕ ဟုိဘက္ကမ္း
ငါရည္မွန္းထားတဲ့တစ္စုံတစ္ရာ
အေသအခ်ာရိွေနတယ္။
သံလုိက္အိမ္ေျမာင္ကစုတ္ပဲ့
တက္မပါ ရြက္ဗလာ
ပဲ့ဆုိတာနတၳိ ေဆြးၿမိၿမိနံေဘး
စုတ္ျခာတဲ့ေလွေလးကုိအားျပဳ
ထုထည္ႀကီးမားတဲ့ သမုဒၵရာရဲ႕လွဳိင္းထုကုိ
ဇရာအုိစျပဳေနတဲ့ငါ အံတုနုိင္မွာတဲ့လား။
ကမ္းမျမင္လမ္းမျမင္ လႈိင္းၾကမ္းေလဆင္
မုန္တုိင္း၀င္ေနတဲ့ ပင္လယ္ျပင္ထဲ
ရဲရဲေတာက္ဇဲြသတၱိနဲ႕ မ်ိဳးဆက္သစ္တုိ႔ ခရီးဆက္နုိင္ဖုိ႔အေရး
အရည္ေသြးေကာင္းတဲ့ ေလွတစ္စင္းစာအတြက္-
ငါဘာလုပ္ခ့ဲသလဲ
ငါဘာလုပ္ေနလဲ
ငါဘာဆက္လုပ္မွာလဲ
မင္းစုိးစံ
အေ၀းေရာက္ ကရင္ဒုကၡသည္တစ္ဦး
Minnesota, USA
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