Issues in the Mysql DB encoding

hello,

i have a chatbot application with two MySql DBs: 1. db for the django backend. 2. chatbot_brain for the chatbot background knowledge.

Basically, when the user start the conversation:

 1. the chatbot.py gets the input using model's value_list()
 2. stretch for a matching input in chatbot_brain 
 3. update with the replay using model.

i have two issues:

1. is when i try to find the matching string using LIKE query, it produce this EROR message: -- UnicodeEncodeError:'latin-1' codec can't encode character-- I have tried many solutions such ass using (charset='utf8') in the connection but it made the website very slow after i restart the server, and cursor.execute("set names 'utf8'")
2. when i try to write the conversation in CSV file i got these symbols "ØŸ ØŸ"

Also, i checked that when i created the DB the encode is utf8 but when i opened phpMyAdmin a saw in both DBs :

  chatbot_brain=>utf8_general_ci
  information_schema=>utf8_general_ci
  Total: 2=>    latin1_swedish_ci

So, the chatbot can't find the matching string i don't know where the problem is because before i was using sqlite3 and everything was working. I'm using Django 10, python3 and pymysql to connect to the DB and my language is Arabic.