From There To Here
Ochan Aba · 49 min
A South Sudanese-Ugandan content creator reveals how racial profiling, crushing loneliness, and the courage to speak honestly on camera transformed his silence into a viral movement for migrant belonging.
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Ochan Aba came to Australia as an extrovert, a storyteller by nature. Within months of arriving, he learned to stay quiet. The gap between what he imagined Australia would be, friendly, multicultural, welcoming, and what he actually found there forced him into silence. Kids told him to go back to his country. Coworkers made offensive comments about Black people, then called them jokes when he objected. In sports coaching, he had to earn extra qualifications just to be believed as credible, something his peers never had to do. Friends only wanted to know him when he was winning. By his late teens, after being stopped and searched by police while in school uniform, he began carrying his ID everywhere, conditioning himself to expect harassment every time he left the house.
For years, Ochan carried these experiences alone, buried under the weight of choosing which battles to fight and which slurs to laugh off. Then he started making videos. What began as short comedy sketches became raw, honest reflections on loneliness, racism, and what it means to belong when you are constantly reminded you do not. His videos went viral because they named things many migrants had never heard spoken aloud. Through making content, Ochan discovered something unexpected: vulnerability was not weakness. Speaking the unspeakable freed him to become confident in ways he thought were lost.
He now understands belonging differently. He carries pieces of Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, and Australia within him. Some days he belongs in Melbourne completely. Other days he belongs nowhere. But it is those fractured pieces, he says, that make him whole. His message to newly arrived migrants is direct: find your people where you are. Seek out others who have lived displacement and loss, because they understand in ways Australians cannot. And to everyone else: check on your people. A two-minute call, a quick message, might reach someone who feels entirely alone.
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