The house that you live in has a lot of stuff in it. In The Netherlands everyone has a couch, a television, a dining room table, a kitchen with a stove, toys in their room and an own bed. In Laos that’s not usually the case. People there have a lot less stuff than people in The Netherlands do.

Below you can read the story of Dong, a girl in the Khong-district. 

Dong is a girl who lives in Laos. She doesn’t have a lot of stuff at home. She lives with her parents, three brother and two sisters in a kind of hut in the countryside. The hut was build by her father and his brothers and cousins, because her parents don’t have enough money to buy a house. All of the huts in the village that Dong lives in have been made by the people themselves. Dong doesn’t have her own bedroom, nobody in Laos does. The family sleeps together in one space. They don’t have beds either; they sleep on a thin mat, right on the ground. Like a lot of kids in Laos, Dong doesn’t have any toys. Even for the little kids there is nothing to play with except twigs and stones, which can be found everywhere. Sometimes Dong has to help her parents in the rice fields or search for food in the forest. Otherwise the family has no food.

Dongs parents never go to a store or to the market. It’s not much fun to walk around there when you don’t have any money. The rice they eat was grown by them. When the rice harvest wasn’t big enough, they have to ration their food. That means that they can’t eat too much, because otherwise there won’t be any food left at the end of the year. Three times a day Dong eats sticky rice. She makes balls out of it that she dips in a sauce.

Often, Dong is still hungry after dinner. That’s why Dong searches for food in the forest. She tries to find mushrooms, bamboo, edible tree leaves and crabs. But most of the time she comes home without food. When she does find something, she always shares it with her brothers and sisters.

Dongs family has so little money, that they also can’t buy any clothes. They get food by growing rice, but usually rice alone is not enough to live off. That’s why her father and brothers go fishing often. There isn’t enough fish for all the villagers and that’s why they catch frogs to eat as well.

Because her parents can’t buy any clothes, Dong often walks around in worn out clothes. She has had these clothes very long and she has to wear them most of the time. Besides these clothes, Dong only has one school uniform, but she can only wear it to school.

Almost all of the things in Dongs house were made by her family. If anything breaks, one of her parents must try to fix it or make something new out of stuff you can find in the forest.

When Dong has nothing to do, she plays with other kids around the house and in the forest. She keeps an eye on the little kids as well. When she has homework, she has to have done this by 6.30 because it gets dark after that. They don’t have any electricity and she doesn’t like working next to a smelly oil lamp. Usually Dong goes to bed at 7.00, because there is not much to do in the dark. Before she goes to school in the morning, she must fetch two buckets of water from the river. It’s not too bad, because then she’ll see her friends while walking.