Monday, 2 January 2012

Lisu of Myanmar

Significant numbers of Lisu have migrated southward out of China during the last two centuries. Today, about 380,000 Lisu are found in Myanmar.

Language

Linguistically, the Lisu belong to the Lolo branch of the Tibeto-Burman family.
There are two scripts in use and the Chinese Department of Minorities published literature in both. The oldest and most widely used one is the Fraser script developed about 1920 by J.O. Fraser of the China Inland Mission and the Karen evangelist Ba Taw. Fraser`s published grammar of 1922 details the script which was finalized in the American Baptist compound in Bhamo, Burma. It could be described as an extended Roman alphabet of 50 symbols. The second script was developed by the Chinese government and is based on pinyin.

Livelihood

The Lisu people inhabit mountainous areas that are largely covered with dense forests. Agriculture and animal husbandry are their main economic activities. Crops grown include maize, rice, wheat, buckwheat, sorghum and beans. Many Lisu are expert hunters.

Religion

Within each Lisu house is an ancestral altar. And in each village, there is a "village guardian spirit shrine" which is located above the village, in a roofed pavilion which women are forbidden to enter. The Lisu also worship Wu Sa (the creator spirit), and a multitude of spirits of the forest, ancestors, trees, the sun, moon and everyday objects. During the religious activities, animals were slaughtered and a large sum of money spent.

Christianity

The first Lisu converts on record were in Burma around 19087 through the work among the Kachin by the American Baptist Mission. Christianity was introduced to the Lisu living in southwest China by CIM/OMF missionaries such as J.O. Fraser and John and Isobel Kuhn in the early 20th century. Translation of the entire Bible into Lisu was completed in 1968. Lisu Christian literature including Bibles, Sunday School materials, commentaries and hymn books are currently being printed in Myanmar for distribution to the churches. A committee of Lisu workers from all the Lisu denominations in Myanmar is currently working under the Bible Society of Myanmar to prepare a Lisu Study Bible.
Today there is a large church of five denominational groups among the Lisu of Myanmar. The exact number of Christians is not known. However, according to one source, about 40 to 50% of the Lisu of Myanmar (about 150,000) would count themselves as Christians.
Pray for harmony and mutual respect and cooperation between the Lisu denominations. Pray for the Lisu to reach out to the many other language groups among whom they live who don`t as yet have a Christian witness.

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လီဆူမီးအိမ္ (Lisu Lamp) ေလးကိုမၾကာခင္ စတင္သြားမည္ၿဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သို႔ပါေသာ္လည္း အေၾကာင္းအမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးေၾကာင့္ အၿပီး မသတ္နိုင္ ခဲ့ ေပ ။ အခုလို ဘာမွၿပင္ဆင္ထားၿခင္းမရွိေသးေသာ္လည္း လာေရာက္ အားေပးသူအားလံုးအေပၚ ဘုရားရွင္ေကာင္းခ်ီးေပးပါေစ