From one hell to another: Family fled Laos to live in miserable conditions here

The organizer of a national conference on refugees in Winnipeg knows her subject too well.

As a child, Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe and her family fled Laos and ended up in rural Manitoba in the dead of winter in a three-room house with no running water and a wood stove for heat.

“We had a terrible experience,” said Stobbe, who was seven in December 1979, when her family arrived in a southern Manitoba town she declined to identify. Their situation that winter was more perilous than the refugee camp they’d left, but it made her stronger and set her on a career path.

Source: Winnipeg Free Press