The event took place Kaufman said Yaaka came to him a few weeks into the pandemic. Kaufman, though, thinks the channel's independence is what makes it powerful.
We can't understand the news or other things on the TV—other American things—so we watch things from back home.
But the UNHCR estimates that
Yaaka started uploading videos to his channel on April 14, when Illinois had recorded 23,247 coronavirus infections and 868 deaths. In some videos, Yaaka quotes information about the disease from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
Stay home like your life and the lives of your loved ones depend on it. Stay.
She met Yaaka in 2018, who by then had lived in Chicago for a year and wanted to speak at an event called the Chicago Jews for Refugees Assembly.
As Yaaka and Morrison started to plan for the channel, the coronavirus pandemic erupted.
What matters is that the information is coming out of Either way, he could build the resource-knowledge infrastructure that he felt was seriously lacking in Chicago's refugee community.
Yaaka was born in the Manafwa district of eastern Uganda in 1992.
We speak Chicago to Chicagoans, but we couldn’t do it without your help.
He befriended a truck driver whom he convinced to smuggle him across the border.
On a warm Saturday evening in May I join a Zoom call with Yaaka, who's sitting in his closet, and Morrison, who's in a plush chair, a more traditional work-from-home spot. "'If you do something, they'll listen to you.'"
A retrospective look at the weekly Black-led food distribution program outside Burke Elementary.
He wandered until he came upon a group of people sleeping on the streets.
This seemed like a surmountable problem: People need help.
His resettlement agency, Heartland Alliance, first got him a job on the janitorial staff at a hospital in Evanston.
Why couldn't anyone figure out a way to bridge this gap? "So, I said, where do I sign up?" Because they do.
The single most important action we can all take, in fighting coronavirus, is to stay at home in order to protect the NHS and save lives.
So far, WordOut only has English-language videos.
Yaaka arrived in the capital city of Nairobi confused and alone. "Please, whenever you cough," he says as he fake coughs into his fist, "cover your mouth."
While the facts and figures are widely available across the Internet, his perspective is not.
Home.
As a Ugandan fluent in four languages and certified as an EMT and in first aid, Yaaka got the job.
"Being that we [as refugees] have limited families around us, visiting our friends, visiting other people around the community where we are living, it is so essential," he says in one video.
If he could make videos in the four languages he speaks—English, Luganda, Lumasaba, and Swahili—he could explain to refugees how to access the available services.
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Yaaka's own account is stuffed with conversations with refugee clients and friends who live in far-flung places from Iceland to Nairobi. "We're learning every time, though," Morrison says. Nothing Yaaka says in his videos is new.
Though Yaaka had a full-time job and Morrison was finishing her thesis in her final semester of grad school, they mobilized quickly.
Video, 00:03:27'I refuse to let a British slaver take my name away' Video, 00:03:23'I refuse to let a British slaver take my name away'