Transplanting Traditions Community Farm is helping Burmese farmers create new community. The farmers’ market in Carrboro, North Carolina is filled with local staples like lettuce, tomatoes, and eggs. But if you turn left after the welcome booth, you’ll find a table that offers less common crops like pennywort, lime leaves, and kermit eggplant. That table belongs to Tri Sa, a Karen refugee farmer from Burma, present-day Myanmar. Her stand is called “Mu Tar K’Paw Gardens,” a Karen saying which translates to “everything comes from sunlight.” Tri Sa grows many traditional herbs and vegetables at Transplanting Traditions Community Farm, with 27 other Karen refugee families. The farm started as a community garden for low-income families in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area, and it attracted many Karen farmers who asked for more space. Thanks to land donated by the Triangle Land Conservancy, the farm expanded into a five-acre operation. The Karen are a Burmese ethnic minority group, many of whom fled agriculture-centered communities Burma to escape violence and persecution by the Burmese military regime in the mid-2000s. Thousands of the refugees went to camps in Thailand before ending up in the United States. There are now nearly 70,000 Karen living in the U.S., […]