Teaching the Chin refugees to make a living

PETALING JAYA: The best gift is sometimes not given, but taught, as a group of volunteers will vouch.

Led by Dr Tan Mei Yin, they are helping to share their knowledge in aid of Chin refugees by making and selling handcrafted Christmas decorations.

Dr Tan used to work as a doctor, but she now spends her time teaching Chin women, aged between nine and 30, how to make crochet decorations and homeware for sale.

Chin refugees are the second largest group of refugees from Myanmar, after the Rohingya.

When Dr Tan first started, she thought it would be a good way of teaching her teenage students at the St Mary’s Agape Mission School a skill.

“When we first started in 2014, all I wanted to do was to teach the women the skill of crocheting cute little keychain dolls.

“I figured that even if they don’t get really good at it, the discipline of learning a new skill will be good for them,” said the 43-year-old.

However, Dr Tan found it mostly challenging to sell the items and often had to “beg” others to buy the refugees’ handcrafted items.

That was the case until another volunteer Vincent Lim came on board to impart more entrepreneurial skills to the young women, teaching the refugees how to make their products commercially viable.

Lim rebranded the initiative as the Lametna Project, which means “hope” in the ethnic Chin language.

“We do not want them to rely on other people’s sympathy. We kept telling them, if you don’t want to be a refugee, don’t act like one,” said 31-year-old Lim, who runs his own intellectual property consultancy company.

Lim personally inspects the quality of the women’ work to see if their products are commercially viable.

Dr Tan said since then, the earnings of the refugees had increased.

“Our revenue in the last few months has matched the revenue we had in the past couple of years combined.

“It was a huge improvement in terms of the women’s confidence because they were making things that were desirable,” she said.

It was important for them to save up as well, she added, as UNHCR recently announced the end of the refugee protection afforded to Chin refugees by Dec 31, 2019.

Now one of the rooms at mission school looks like Santa’s toy factory as the young Chin women learned to crochet Christmas trees, snowmen ornaments, Santa Claus dolls, among others.

With the Christmas season, Lim said the Christmas decorations have especially been a hit.