parsing non-ascii characters

[Ronn]

Hello all,

I have a list:
  suffix = ["aĉ", "ad", "aĵ", "an", "ar"]

and I'm trying to check a word to see if any of the suffixes exist in
the list for example:
  if word in suffix:
      print "A suffix exist in your word"

when I run this it give me an error:
   SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc5' in file vortaro.py on line
33, but no encoding declared;

is there a way to parse Non-ASCII characters in python?

Thanks in advance,
Ronn