HILL TRIBE PEOPLE AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY:

Thailand is home to numerous ethnic peoples. Increasingly, over the last 100 years, the Thai government has taken official steps to create a Thai national identity. This includes the use of Thai as the official language instead of the local languages. Many of the Thai are people of Chinese Heritage. They are called Sino-Thai. Others come from groups that are also found in bordering states like Cambodia, such as the khmer people. Other, indigenous Thai people speak their own languages, such as the Lawa people with whom we had our home stays. There are Hill Tribe peoples who come in from neighboring countries like Burma. They speak their own indigenous languages, tend to be Christian, retain many of their animist practices, such as the sacrifice of the water buffalo, and, in the area of the Golden Triangle, were involved in the growing of opium or, now, in the use of heroine. Each of the Hill Tribe peoples has their own distinctive dress. Many of the girls are most susceptible to the prostitution industry as the women are known for their beauty and, as Thailand makes feeble efforts to eliminate prostitution (it is technically illegal and people can be fined), people traffic in Hill Tribe women instead of utilizing Thai women in the trade. The people in southern Thailand, next to the Malaysian border tend to be ethnic Malay people and observe Muslim practices instead of Buddhism. Indian immigrants to the country practice Hinduism. And Christians, the smallest group in the region, are made up of a few Thai converts (mostly Roman Catholic with the rest divided among the Christian Church of Thailand that has Presbyterian and Methodist roots, and more evangelical denominations that are the result of Asian Christian missionary movements, often from Korea) and whole villages of Hill Tribe peoples.

When I was in Thailand the first time, I had the chance to visit the Karen peoples and a project in Northern Thailand to help them to rehabilitate from heroine addiction and to find alternative crops to replace opium, i.e. strawberries and coffee. I also had a very brief visit to a Mong village were 80% of the people were heroine addicts and a majority were HIV positive. This was some of the greatest poverty I've seen, in Thailand or anywhere in the world. It also felt very inhuman, the way our very large group was herded through the village just to take pictures and leave. During the second experience in Thailand, our group spent the day in another Mong village as they celebrated the New Year.