By: National Public Radio
Dec 11, 2019
Lual Mayen, a video game developer based in Washington, D.C., remembers the first time he saw a computer. He was just a kid at the time. It was 2007, and his family was registering for benefits at a refugee camp in Uganda, where they’d settled after fleeing civil war in South Sudan.
He didn’t tell anyone at first, but in that moment he knew in his heart that he wanted to learn to code, he says. More than a decade later, Mayen is garnering international recognition from Facebook and the global gaming community for an innovative video game that brings players into the life of a refugee. The latest version of the game — called “Salaam,” which means “peace” in Arabic — will be released on Thursday.
But before that could happen, Mayen had to get his mom to take him seriously.
When he eventually confessed his dream to his mother, he says she laughed at him. “She looked at me like I was crazy. ‘What are you going to do with a computer? Who’s gonna train you?’ But because she was a mother to me, she didn’t discourage me.”