Myitkyina Diocese in Myanmar is to establish a new parish in the far and remote Zang Yaw village on January 15, 2023.
The new parish will be composed of 10 villages, including Zang Yaw, with 90 catholic families and 450 people.
Zang Yaw village will be the parish center, while the nearby villages will be under the parish's care.
The new parish priest will be Father Peter Zang Yaw Hpung, currently serving as a Radio Veritas Asia Lisu service coordinator.
"I thank God for this post. Although it is hard, I have many dreams to fulfill. I am happy that I will be able to care for the poor villagers closely," Father Zang Yaw Hpung commented.
Zang Yaw village is more than (300) miles from Myitkyina city, the diocesan center.
"All the daily needs are transported from Myitkyina. One pack of rice is more than one lakh kyats (which is approximately equivalent to USD $47). The road is rugged and people are poor," Father Zang Yaw Hpung said.
Father Zang Yaw Hpung believed God would provide him with what he needed.
The village is one of the remotest places, so transportation is tough. It took four days to arrive at the village, both by car and on foot.
It is two days by car and two days on foot along the road.
"It is one of our dreams that we need a priest to be here because in some years we see no shadow of priests here. We are thirsty for sacraments and the word of God," confided the village catechist, Mark Wa Li Ha.
He added, "If a priest is with us, we feel warm even when we are in difficulties."
A villager, Mary Se Mi Ram, told RVA News that they had longed for the parish priest for a long time and were happy to hear the good news of the residing parish priest in their village.
Despite being a challenging place, the village is lovely, with ice-capped mountains, wild yellow flowers, lily flowers, uncontaminated streams, and rivers teeming with all kinds of fish.
Many local tourists are flocking there nowadays. It has become one of the tourist attractions.
Most of the villagers are living by cultivating paddies and yams. Most of the residents are Lisu and Rawang ethnic minorities.
Insightmyanmar.org reported that about 1.2 million Lisu people in the world live in western Yunnan Province in China, northern Myanmar, northeast India, and northern Thailand. The Lisu tribe is also counted among 135 ethnic groups in Myanmar.
According to frontiermyanmar.net, about 65,000 Rawang in Myanmar are one of the minor groups among the country's officially recognized 135 ethnic groups. - Chwar Thar
Radio Veritas Asia (RVA), a media platform of the Catholic Church, aims to share Christ. RVA started in 1969 as a continental Catholic radio station to serve Asian countries in their respective local language, thus earning the tag “the Voice of Asian Christianity.” Responding to the emerging context, RVA embraced media platforms to connect with the global Asian audience via its 21 language websites and various social media platforms.
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