We have all heard about the refugee crisis in media. Some stories are horrifying, some are simply heartbreaking. For the most of us “refugee crisis” is a few minutes worth of reading on social media. But for others, words “refugee crisis” represent their whole life
In 2013, Stories From self published and released ‘Almost home’. The book began as a simple class project, whereby university students visited a local community to learn more about the people within it. While there, the students collected stories, which would later be adapted for Almost Home. This book featured the stories of refugee and stateless children living in Malaysia, and took more than 100 people a year to complete. In the process students, staff and members of the public learned a great deal about this specific community. The project was then revisited when the recollections from the special needs community were featured in a book called ‘As Life Found Me.’
In 2015, our team will publish stories from three different refugee communities. The stories in the book come from the recollections of refugees living in Malaysia and were collected from a number of learning centres in and around Kuala Lumpur. These stories were then shared with writers from Malaysia and beyond who then adapted and turned them into stories. Next, a team of designers from Taylor’s University took the stories and used them as inspiration to create illustrations. The last stage of the project is layout and design whereby all the stories and illustrations are pieced together.
I use vagrant for all my developments, it was easy for me to setup and play around with some new tools, such as saltstack (configuring master and minions) and reused the same bash scripts to setup the dev env.