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Karen Hill Tribe Silversmiths
After years of business relations 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 artisans 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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Comparing 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 their income of creating silver jewelry components. The village of Prabhat Huyathom that creates these astonishing silver jewelry components have slowly improved their standard of living over the years we have closely worked with them; from wooden huts with grass shingles and open-air toilets to more modernized brick and wooden homes with tiles and indoor-toilets. 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.

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, particularly around modern Thai society. KAFA program aims to help build confidence in each Karen artisan and improve each family's working habitat so that we may conserve this art for the next generation of Karen silversmiths.

Each Karen family creates a particular line of product. For instance, Lung Lasor 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 not capable 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 aim to help families that have the least amount of work or orders by assisting with design strategies, work preparation and planning.

As we often receive requests from our customers to create or manufacture "custom designs", the first Karen artisans we ask to do new designs are the families that are not working or the families that have the least amount of work lined up. This helps balance out the work load around the community and also keep new design ideas well distributed throughout the village.

The Karens are hard working people and if there is not enough work readily available, they tend to move on to other things quickly. Not very patient in terms of waiting for orders to come in, however, with the recent introduction of subsidized farming by the Royal Project of Thailand, the Karen silversmith also cultivate their land throughout the year, a good supplemental source of income. But then again, this too is subject price fluctuation, abusive and dwindling government assistance and a strenuous life style.

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