His Facebook page attracted foreign attention

A young South Sudanese tells stories to attract support for refugees

• Refugees chatting in Bidi Bidi camp.

  From the source

• Bidi Bidi is the largest refugee camp on Earth.

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• Malish teaches a refugee how to send stories on Facebook.

  From the source

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The South Sudanese boy, James Mallish, was up late at night listening to his mother telling him folk tales about the blazing fire.

The next day at school he would tell the same stories to his classmates and give them his own dramatic flair.

At the time, these stories were seen as pure entertainment, a kind of TV series expressed in spoken words, rather than pictures, to pass the time.

"I never thought storytelling had the power to help society," he says.

Malesh was honest in his words. When that idyllic, idyllic life was torn apart by civil war, he and his family were forced to flee to the Congo, and later to Uganda, where the stories took on a new significance for him, becoming a means of expressing the suffering and needs of the refugee community in which he lived.

Since May 2019, Malesh has been supervising a Facebook page called Daily Refugee Stories, a New York Human-like platform that publishes excerpts from the refugee experience at the Bidi Bidi refugee camp in Uganda, which is considered one of the largest A gathering of refugees in the world.

The big issues refugees face, such as hunger and poor education, are being addressed on a personal level, which he and other site contributors hope to make these requirements even more relevant and accessible, Malesh says.

Telling such stories also gives a group of people the ability to express their needs rather than have other parties express them, says community development specialist Musa Acoli, who works for the Italian NGO Voluntary Aid Center Association, which provides assistance The humanity of refugees is in my hand, my hand.

“The mainstream media tend to publish their own story about the refugees, which often has nothing to do with their suffering,” Acholi says.

Malish's project started by chance. He saw an advertisement on a billboard in Bidi Bidi announcing a WFP-sponsored course to teach digital storytelling tools to refugees in the camp. At the time, Malesh was a volunteer at a clinic in the settlement, and at one point decided to apply for this course. "I realized that if I wanted to do something different I had to take this opportunity, because I don't want to go back to South Sudan one day and I'm the same person he left before," Malesh adds.

During the two-week training, Malesh was introduced to photography, video, and writing for a social media audience.

At the end of the programme, he got a smartphone and began posting stories and photos on the Facebook page of the Fe Bidi Bidi storytellers program, and Malesh's posts soon began attracting outside attention.

Among those drawn to these stories was the BBC, whose crew traveled to Bidi Bidi to film Mallesh, who decided to create his own Facebook page for daily refugee stories.

The page quickly gained traction when Mallesh wrote about the impact of drastic ration cuts on elderly and single mothers, and readers in the United States and South Sudan made donations.

Later, two NGOs repaired 10 broken water taps and dug water wells, after Malish's page alerted them to the problem.

When Malish saw the high turnout on his Facebook page, and that it was well received among the South Sudanese diaspora, he decided to expand his activity, and established a small non-governmental organization called the African Youth Network, to teach business, technical and art skills to young people.

"We want to give them a purpose and something they can learn so that they can benefit themselves," he says.

So far, Malesh has trained about 30 young people in the kinds of digital storytelling skills he himself has learned, and teaches videos, photography, and screenwriting.

Storytelling gives a group of people the ability to express their needs instead of having others express them.

• Since May 2019, "Malish" has been supervising a Facebook page called "Daily Refugee Stories", a platform similar to the "New York Man" platform that publishes excerpts from the refugee experience in the Bidi Bidi refugee camp in Uganda.

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