To pick up where I left off here a little bit, after trekking we went on some official Sapahn business to a village in the Chiang Mai area.  The highlight of this trip for me personally was getting the opportunity to wear a traditional Karen tribe dress.  Not something you really get to do everyday… 

Cather Circle is a women’s mentoring group at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Though I’ve only been a member for a year, in my opinion it’s a truly wonderful organization. I already held this opinion before it was reinforced when I received an internship scholarship. These scholarships are given so that students can take un-paid or low-paid internship opportunities that they might not have otherwise been able to. For anyone that’s traveled, it gets expensive, and a scholarship that will cover a trip abroad still seems too good to be true. But back to my story.

I met Brooke Mullen at my first Cather Circle meeting. She was a speaker in a panel discussion about making a difference where she explained a new social enterprise that she had recently founded. And that’s how I learned about Sapahn.

I’m a firm believer that God has a plan for us all, because my interest in such a social enterprise really stems from my trip to Peru last summer. After seeing that country I returned to the United States with a firm desire to get into the non-profit or NGO industry and go back. So even though Brooke’s enterprise was in Thailand and not Peru, it caught my attention.

During the spring semester of my senior year at UNL, we applied for and received a Cather Circle internship scholarship that would cover a trip to Thailand to work with Sapahn there. So what does this mean I’ll be doing while I’m here? I know the basics, but some of it we’ll figure out as we go.

In the U.S. you can think of Sapahn as a provider of high quality, unique fashion items from Southeast Asia. Sapahn has everything from scarves to silver jewelry to leather purses, all made by artisans in Southeast Asia. What makes these items really special is the impact this enterprise is making. 10% of every purchase goes directly to fund a scholarship for a Burmese woman’s education. The artisans gain through solidarity trade, not charity. So I’ll get to see what goes into this process firsthand.

Traveling with us is Dr. Kristen Lucas, a professor in the communications department at UNL.  So we’re quite the team of Huskers here in Thailand.

For more about Cather Circle and Sapahn, check out their websites at http://www.cathercircle.com and http://www.sapahn.com.