Stories From the Heart, by Refugee Kids for Refugee Kids

Creative Facilitator
Storytelling Workshop for Refugees
2008

Recently, Chris Ng and I were awarded a RM 10,000 grant to run a 3 month story telling workshop for Myanmarese refugee kids. The two newspaper articles gives a brief description of the grant and its grantees.

http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Thursday/Features/20080730150227/Article/indexF_html
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/Streets/Monday/Stories/2285768/Article/

Chris and I are conducting separate workshop sessions for a total of 30 Myanmarese refugee kids, from two ethnic communities. Each workshop comprises 12 x 3 hour sessions.

This is an excerpt from our proposal:
There are 10,000 registered refugee children in Malaysia. Many more may be unregistered… how many exactly, no one knows for sure. They live in an environment where normal childhood development is a constant challenge. Their priorities are survival and escaping the authorities. Formal education, for most of them is a fairy tale, something to dream about, never to achieve.

While the registered children have a glimmer of hope of going to a foreign adopted land, the reality is many of them will spend at least a few years of ‘lost childhood’ growing up in the jungles, squatters or crowded flats that they call home, here in Malaysia. These children have stories to tell. These stories need to be told so that they know they are not alone…displaced…in a community where they struggle daily to make their presence invisible. They need a voice, one that is seldom heard, if at all. They need to share their stories of laughter, of dreams, of hope, of life because they are living it. They need to tell these stories because the stories come from their hearts. They own these stories.