Wrist Tying.

Yesterday our school celebrated the Karen Wrist-Tying Ceremony – an event dedicated to remembering and giving respect to the ancestors of the Karen people. The students at the school represent many different ethnicities from Burma, but yesterday all the students and staff wore traditional Karen clothing as we went to a monastery to celebrate with the Karen community. We all met at the school and piled into what looked like a prisoner transport bus and headed off to the monastery. Upon arriving I was overwhelmed by the amount of colours and the amount of people.

Almost as soon as we arrived people came up to us and began to tie pieces of thread around our wrists, say a blessing and then take the remaining thread from the piece and put it on our heads. I quickly realized that myself and the two other teachers from school were getting a lot more attention than the students...by the end of the day I think the three of us had more threads then all the students combined.

You could buy thread from vendors or there were people distributing it at the monastery, but my favourite thing to do was take a thread off my shirt and tie it on to friends I saw at the event. Karen shirts have a lot of loose threads dangling from them and traditionally this was the only thread used to tie wrists. You would take a thread from your shirt, break it off and tie another`s wrist in memory of lost ancestors, family and to embrace your heritage. Think of it as tying a thread around your finger to remember something important.

Now all the young generation wasn`t just wearing traditional clothes...they modernized them with bling like belts, jewellery, hats and...jeans. I was really only me and old men who were wearing the Karen longi. All the other dudes were wearing Karen shirts with tight jeans and hipster shoes.

Whatever. We looked great.

The other thing I soon realized is that this is a great event for the young generation to meet people. Students would joke about finding some attractive guys and girls and making sure that they tied their wrists...some things are universal!

After we celebrated we went to a local park and took lots of pictures of all the students looking Karen-trendy and made our way back to the school.

It was amazing to see people of different ethnicities embracing each other`s culture and celebrating together – something I also think Canada invests a lot of time in.