1. Many children lacked clothing, so many were often naked. This was common in all the different camps.
2. Those children who had one set of clothes,when water was available the family laundry could be washed, so those kids went without clothes while the washed clothes dried. Other children’s parents simply arrived with only the tattered clothes on their backs after escaping from Laos or had no means to buy any in the Thai market.
3. Foreign and Thai organizations donated clothing by the truckload to refugee camps housing Hmong, Lao, Khmer and Vietnamese families to be distributed to the poorest families. If a family had relatives already resettled in a third country such as the US, they would ask for money for clothing, especially at winter or for Hmong New Year.
4. In Loei province in northern Thailand the winter temperatures can reach freezing.
5. When escaping Laos some families had literally only the clothes on their backs:
6. “At that time we just wore our old shabby clothes. We didn’t have clothes, didn’t have anything, but they did give us food to eat. They gave us food but no clothes so we just wore whatever shabby clothes we had”
7. “When we were about to leave, we packed a bit of food for us but as time went by, we didn’t have food left so we would just eat whatever we could find in the forest while running away. There was nothing to eat so we’d have no choice but to eat things in the forest that was edible. For our clothes, we only carried about 1-3 outfits with us. The clothes that were ripped, we would leave it behind and when we arrived at the camps, we ended up with about only one outfit. We also did not carry guns with us.”