The first shipment of 5,000 clothing items and blankets from the Relief and Rehabilitation Committee for Chin IDPs (RRCCI) arrived in southern Chin State’s Paletwa town on Monday.

Most of the clothing in this batch was secondhand and collected from donors, according to Mai Nang Wai, who is working with RRCCI, but the next batch is new clothing.

“We already sent the second batch of assistance yesterday. These are new clothes. We will send new clothes again. We bought new clothes directly from the garment factory. That’s why we had to wait a little while,” Mai Nang Wai told Khonumthung News.

RRCCI has actually sent four rounds of assistance to the internally displaced persons (IDPs), with the others en route.

There are 6,000 blankets and items of clothing in the second batch, 3,000 in the third batch and 4,000 in the fourth batch.

The Chin State government has sent 1,000 items of clothing, according to Mai Nang Wai.

“There are more than 10,000 IDPs there. We sent around 20,000 [items of clothing],” the RRCCI representative said. “I think they will have enough clothing once all of the assistance arrives in Paletwa.”

The RRCCI still is hoping to send 8,000 more clothing items and 100 bags of rice.

Khonumthung News first reported the IDPs’ need for winter clothing on November 7—the day before Burma’s general election. At that time, the government did not have an immediate plan to send donations to the IDPs; spokesperson Soe Htet said that the state administration was “busy with election matters.”

At that time, a Paletwa IDP told Khonumthung News that “nobody” had come to provide them with warm clothes.

The needs persisted into mid-November when Paletwa MP Salai Myo Hteik said IDPs still required blankets and warm clothes since they could not bring their belonging with them when they fled clashes between the Burma Army and the Arakan Army.