Zothansiami Ralte, (known to her friends and associates as Ajarn Tete) is a Mizo person, was born in 1959 in Mizoram, northeastern part of India. Her father, Saplawma Ralte, was a middle school teacher at a Christian tribal school and her mother, Kaphnuni Chhangte, was a baker and a weaver of Mizo cloth. The entire family, as well as the other 100 families from her village, were Christians. After graduating from Jorhat Theological College, Jorhat Assam, with a bachelor of theology degree, she took a job teaching for one year at a Christian mission middle school for Tuikuk tribal children on India's border with Bangladesh. The following year she came to Thailand as the first woman Mizo missionary to Thailand with the goal of assisting the Church of Christ in Thailand in Christian education and church development. To support herself, she took a job teaching English at Prince Royal College. She taught at Prince Royal College for one year and during this time she taught herself to speak the Thai language. After being convinced that as a tribal person teaching English, she could serve as a role model and offer something unique to the Thai tribal children. In 1986 she accepted a three-year English teaching position at the Friendship School located in the Karen tribal village of Tee Mae Ker Lah located the foothills of the Himalayas in northwestern Thailand. During the first year of her teaching at the Friendship School, she decided to start a girls hostel in Tee Mae Ker Lah because she realized that the Karen of Tee Mae Ker Lah were very much like her own Mizo people from Northeast India, and thought that they could benefit from a Christian tribal center similar to the one in which she had been raised. Like the Mizo women, the Karen women are very good weavers of cloth and they take pride in wearing their Karen costumes. Yet she observed that the Karen children at the Friendship School did not know much about their own traditional culture. She also realized that even though the Karen of Mae Chaem lived in a very remote area where the roads coming and going were not good and there was no electricity nor running water, this situation would not last long. Therefore, Zothansiami felt that it was important to try to save the Karen culture before the Thai development came to the village and further assimilated the Karen people into the larger Thai culture. At this time there were many newspaper articles in the Bangkok papers describing how tribal girls were being sold into prostitution. The mountains of northwestern Thailand had been visited by brothel owners and their agents in an attempt to get the beautiful young hill tribe girls to join the ranks of prostitutes. By 1985 some of the tribal girls had been tricked into leaving their Karen villages and come to the cities of Chiang Mai and Bangkok to work as commercial sex workers. With the epidemic of AIDS quickly spreading throughout Thailand, Ajarn Tete became convinced that prevention is better than cure. While in Tee Mae Ker Lah, Ms. Ralte also noticed that many of the young children who came to school were very poor because most of the parents of the did not have enough land to raise the rice necessary to feed their families. She wondered how she could help these children and their poor families. Ajarn Tete felt that the idea of a tribal vocational center might help to solve many of the problems faced by Karen tribal women and girls of Mae Chaem, Thailand. Ajarn Tete thought that she if she could work with Karen women weavers, she could help them preserve their Karen culture by continuing their weaving. At the same time these women could augment their family's income through the selling of their Karen products. She also thought that if she would start a girls' hostel, she could support orphan and poor girls by training the girls to do weaving, making use of Karen traditional designs, allowing the girls to be self-supporting from the sales of Karen hand work. This vocational training would also serve as a deterrent to prostitution. The center not only cares for girls providing them with education and vocational skills, but it also empowers women of 9 surrounding villages to become economically viable resources to their families in the production of tribal products. Through these endeavors, Ajarn Tete attempts to help the Karen people value their own culture. As a tribal person, she is very aware of how important it is to preserve the Karen culture, language, and songs. She believes the Karen are losing the battle in keeping culture because the younger people are increasingly unable to read and write their own language, the women are unable to weave their outfits, and the children are more reluctant to wear their costumes. All of the programs of the center combat these trends and there is no other program in the country of Thailand that systematically teaches as much Karen culture and provides economic viability, as does the work of the Hill-tribe Resources and Development Center. Presently there are more than 80 children (both boys and girls) in residence at the Hill-tribe Resources and Development Center. Many of the first young girls who came to the program in 1992 are now in high schools, Bible training centers, colleges, and vocational institutions supported by the work of Ajarn Tete. The Center also supports cooperative enterprises in the village for economic development (agriculture, productions of goods and services, and retail ventures). Of special interest to St. Olaf College, Ajarn Tete has hosted more that 200 of our international studies students since 1990. Every year one or more groups of St. Olaf students and alumni (Term in Asia and the interim course entitled "The Karen of Northern Thailand.") in order that they may understand the value of Christian and ethnic identity and in a global context. If it is true that the stature and integrity of a college can be, in part, measured by the quality of its degree recipients, then today St. Olaf honors itself when it honors an individual who represents the highest ideals of a church-related college with a global mission. Mr. President, it is now my privilege to present Zothansiami Ralte to you as a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

Presented by Michael R. Leming
Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies
September 12, 2000