← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Jan 1, 2011
00:28:01
Nineteen correspondents from around the world join Kate Adie in this special New Year...
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Transcript36 lines
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This is a Happy New Year BBC download of from our own Correspondent we make two editions of the programme Alan Johnston Presents the one aired on the BBC World Service, and you can hear that by going to the from our own Correspondent website or to the BBC iPlayer. This week we've made two special editions and this is the version broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here to present it, Kate Adye welcome
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to this special New Year's Day edition looking at our past year of extraordinary events, people and places around the world. There's some spiritual, spiritual reflection too.
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In our service station we offer a comprehensive package, Manuela told me. We service cars in the garage, bodies in the restaurants and people's souls in the church.
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In Germany, we learned you can park and pray. Steve Rosenberg says there are 36 official motorway churches, or autobahnkirchen.
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Germany is the only country in Europe to have such a network of rest stops for the soul. Many of the motorists who stop by often have very personal reasons for doing so, and some of them record those reasons in the visitors books. At one motorway church on the A13 near Berlin, one driver recently left this I'm here because I've just come so close to having an accident. I'm so grateful I didn't crash. The next page contains this plea to the heavens from another motorist. Dear God, please let my wife become the woman she used to be. Meanwhile, at St Christopher's Motorway Church on the A9 in Bavaria, I found this comment in their Please God, help me. Drive slowly in my new Audi. Drive with me so that nothing bad happens.
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Religion features in many of our dispatches. Sometimes there's a dark story to tell. Jim Muir in Iraq was at the funerals which followed a sectarian attack on the cathedral in Baghdad.
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There was already a row of coffins draped in the Iraqi flag, lined up in front of the altar. Every so often, the doors would open and more coffins would be carried in, one after the other, bringing fresh waves of sobs and applause from the grieving congregation. On her knees, slumped over the end of the coffin laid out closest to me was a young mother who had obviously just lost her husband. Their bright little daughter, less than two years old, was playing on the coffin, running back and forth, obviously just too young to understand. Every so often she would ask her mother, where's Papa? And the reply would come, papa's with Jesus. Perhaps it was a small comfort to those stricken with grief that among the many who came to honour their dead were people and leaders from other communities, Sunni and Shia Muslims, politicians and clerics The Christians are a minority, less than 5% of the population. They're not involved in the struggle for power or mastery. So for most Iraqis, attacking them is haram, which means not just forbidden, but also something that just shouldn't happen, something reprehensible and pitiful and wrong. Because the Christians are a threatened and dwindling minority, many probably also felt that this was an attack on the very fabric of Iraqi society, on the coexistence that has to survive if Iraq itself is to survive.
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Pakistan has had its share of religious and political violence, but it had other troubles, too. Millions were forced from their homes by the worst flooding in living memory. Among the hungry and destitute. Camped on a roadside, Jill McGivering came across a newborn baby.
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She was a tiny scrap, silent and still amid the clamour. She was lying motionless on her back on a small mat under a tree. Flies were thick round her face. The passing traffic was just feet away. Her skin was almost translucent, her head smaller than my palm, balanced in a faded china saucer propped up against a stone. Her young mother seemed vacant with shock. The baby wasn't feeding. She said she hadn't seen a doctor. She didn't know where to find one. I went down the road to a chaotic emergency clinic and interviewed a doctor there, who promised to go and help. The following day, I was busy chasing more stories. I stopped off at the roadside with some trepidation. It seemed very likely the baby wouldn't have survived, but she had. Her mother had just named her Samina. Suddenly she had a name and a hold on life. That evening I was elated. In all the misery and heat and exhaustion, I felt boosted by the thought I'd helped someone, perhaps even played a part in saving a life. It eased my sense of guilt and helplessness. The report I filed on baby Samina met with a tremendous response. In some ways, that's wonderful. But it also made me feel very uncomfortable. I see my job as to bear witness in a tragedy and to report, but not to interfere. I'd urged that doctor to treat Baby. He may have saved her, but what it at the expense of another patient? Is it unethical to attract resources to one family when millions of others may be equally deserving?
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While Pakistanis battled to survive the floods across their northern frontier in Afghanistan, the war ground on. But Hugh Sykes discovered there are still places where people gather, in spite of everything, to try to relax and forget their troubles.
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I've just been to a place that reminded me of that lovely Italian film, Cinema Paradiso. About the little boy Toto befriended by the old projectionist played by Philippe Noiret. The clatter of the projector, the faint image of the big screen seen through the little window of the projection booth, whistles and catcalls when the sound fails. But this is Cinema Park Kabul. 544 seats only. The circle is open, with a low concrete wall across the front instead of a guardrail, and plush upholstered flip up seats. Very dusty seats. As the beam from the projector cuts through the dark, it catches strands of cigarette smoke curling up from some of the dozen or so young men who've come to see an Indian action film. The sound is distorted and the print so scratched that some of the images are almost obliterated. Halilullah is the manager. He started working at Cinema Park Kabul 32 years ago. He and most of the staff fled when the Taliban came in 1996. They saw them coming, literally nine turbaned, bearded Talibs with guns over their shoulders, walking through the pine trees in the park next to the cinema. Some of the staff didn't get away in time. The Talibs beat them and said they were pimps for Western decadence, but they let them go.
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If you climb up on top of the blast walls that surround the BBC compound, the negotiate your way past the guards armed with Kalashnikov rifles and around the coils of barbed wire, you'll come to a little wooden step ladder. At the bottom is a warren of narrow concrete alleyways, yet more blast walls. And behind one of those walls, a short walk away, there lies hidden a small oasis of the old Baghdad, a place where things are more or less the way they used to be. This is the Awiya Club. The other night, some Iraqi friends and I went to the club for dinner. Mustafa, an engineer in his 40s, had brought along some old footage reels of family film taken in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. Life back then seems to have consisted of an endless series of birthday parties, weekend excursions and holidays abroad. Men and women smartly dressed in the latest European and American fashions, joking, singing, dancing together, heads uncovered and skirt firmly above the knee. This was Iraq in its heyday, a country that was relatively liberal, prosperous and well educated. It looked like a carefree existence. Life, Mustafa said, was quite literally a picnic. The garden suddenly went dark briefly as the city's power supply gave out and the rumble of a dozen generators kicked in. Just then, a pair of American helicopters hovered overhead, sounds that provide the quintessential backdrop to life in Baghdad today.
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Gabriel Gatehouse. And in rural Kenya, in very different circumstances, Will Ross found others trying to make the best of life.
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Spare a thought for Hassan Farah. He's a teacher in northeast Kenya, in a hot, sandy village called Saka Junction. His students sit cross legged in the sand under the generous shade of a thorny tree. Resources are limited, to put it mildly, so Hassan is forced to use a bit of homegrown ingenuity. With no walls to display any visual aids, he's pinned a few posters to the twigs of the trees to help with the English lesson. As he points with a stick, the students shout out, A for apple, B for ball and C for cow. You have to be careful where you tread. In Hassan's classroom, the entire Alphabet is spelt out in the sand using goat droppings. And he's not going to run out of letters anytime soon, as the goat enclosure is just a stone's throw away. In there is enough literary ammunition for him to spell out every page of War and Peace. Halfway through the lesson, a six year old boy holding his right foot started crying his head off. Stung by a scorpion, Hassan told me after the lesson. But with our traditional medicine, he'll be alright in a couple of hours. The Kenyan government says hundreds of thousands of children from nomadic communities have been missing out on an education because of their lifestyle. These mobile schools aim to change that. Instead of sending the students away to school, the school goes to them. The children operate a shift system of a few hours at school, followed by a stint looking after the livestock. And they no longer have to make a choice between their nomadic lifestyle and an education. They can do both.
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Right across Africa, we hear of the hardships of poverty and the struggle against it. But in some areas the greatest fight is still against HIV and aids, as Joe Fidgeon was finding out in.
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I'm relaxing with a cup of coffee when my good friend Margaret smacks me round the head. She doesn't use her fist. She's not the violent type, but what she tells me has the power of a heavyweight's punch. I am always soothed by her company. She glides through life despite a seemingly endless supply of problems. In the time that I've known her, she's lost one room of her four room house to floods. A distant relative has left a four year old boy with her and disappeared. And her husband, who works as a mechanic but never gets paid, has been constantly ailing with malaria, cholera, diabetes. Then out of the blue, did I tell you my husband is on antiretrovirals? She reads from my face that she had not. He lied to me when I married him, she continues. He didn't tell me when I was pregnant with our first child, not even with our second. She is serene, apparently above or maybe beyond anger, she pauses and stares into the middle distance. I shan't get married again when he goes. It's better not to be a wife. Similar forces may have been at work in yet another disconcerting conversation, this time with a very forceful, very successful government official. I'm packing up my bag at the end of our meeting when suddenly she asks if I'm married. Husbands are bad, she warns me. Mine died of aids. I'm carrying the virus. To my astonishment, in the very next sentence, she urges me to tie the knot. Only through marriage can a woman claim a place in society, and if the price is to put her health on the line, so be it. HIV has coupled itself with inequality, and you fight them together or not at all.
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Half a world away from Zambia, in Cambodia, there's a struggle of quite a different kind trying to deal with the legacy of the Khmer Rouge years. In a land haunted by Pol Pot's genocide, Neil Trevithick was encountering what he thinks of as a great silence cloaking the events of the past.
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The psychologist talks methodically for about 15 minutes, and everything slows as he paints a picture of a country of small villages in which an entire society is distorted by the tragedies and atrocities of the past, where everybody knows things that can't be said, where one businessman doesn't deal with another because he was a killer, where victims killed too. Sometimes it was simply necessary for survival. Today, children who lost both parents live amongst their parents, killers. Secrets are everywhere. Knowledge of where bodies were buried, who buried them, who did what to whom. This is a country I feel, crisscrossed by invisible threads, the paths that people walk to avoid their history. The psychologist concludes by saying, all we can do is try not to get closer. And then he simply stays silent, eyes cast down, hands in his lap. If I hadn't taken the battery out of his wall clock before we began the interview, you'd just have heard the clock ticking. We walked out into the humid heat in silence.
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Of course, the harrowing episodes encountered by our correspondents don't always come in the most dangerous places. Sometimes they come to the dinner table. As Rajesh Muchandani learned on trip to
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Alaska, elders told me that chicken or steak that you buy in the shop just isn't enough. Their bodies crave whale blubber. Later, a friendly man insisted I taste another delicacy. Fermented whale meat. This seems to be flesh from the autumn whale hunt, so by now several months old. I was given just a small rectangle, about the size of a microchip, with a thin sliver of black skin along one edge. It was squishy, fuzzy, overripe, caving in under the expectant hospitality. I popped it whole into my mouth and chewed and chewed and chewed. I don't think I made a dent in it. My eyes watered at the overpowering taste. It smelt strongly, but I guess it would be rude to call it a stench. Three hours later, I still had the taste memory, despite having tried to mask it with tea, chocolate and pizza.
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It was the height of the feast, and our waitress laid a grand platter on the table. In it was a mound of roast duck ringed by translucent fronds of the finest shark's fin, glistening in a magnificent sauce. It was a grand gesture on the part of my host, a wild extravagance and a rich reference to Chinese culinary tradition. I also knew it would be astoundingly delicious. The only problem for me was that I decided some time ago to stop eating shark's fin for environmental reasons. I knew that the Chinese appetite for fins was helping to drive many shark species to extinction. But I also knew that my host had served the dish to honour me and that a refusal to eat it might appear rude and ungrateful. I considered disregarding my pledge and eating the fin. After all, it was already on the table. So the dirty deed was done and I'd had nothing to do with it. The other guests at the banquet started eating the fin. None of them seemed to have any qualms at all. Although a handful of Chinese celebrities have publicly renounced eating shark's fin, the controversy that surrounds it abroad has so far had little impact on Chinese attitudes. Most people can't afford to eat it anyway, and those that can tend to insist that it's part of their culture. And it's very easy, I reflected, for Westerners, to expect the Chinese to give up shark's fin. But are we going to give up our sushi, our tuna sandwiches and our cheap hamburgers for the sake of the environment?
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It looked like a mummified baby. Its dark brown skin was stretched taut over its face. Its eyes were half open and its lips drawn back over its sharp teeth. Tacorentia must have sensed I was curious because he held the body up towards me so I could get a good look. It appeared to have been grilled over an open fire, and I noticed that whatever it was, it still had eyelashes. Kaai, he said, waving the little corpse. He must have realized I didn't understand because he then tore a strip of flesh from its shoulder and popped it into his mouth. He chewed it with exaggerated relish, but pointing at his mouth and grinning, you will already have guessed, as I did, what was going to happen next. Tacorentia pinched a generous piece of meat again from the creature's shoulder, a white bone now poked through and held it up to me with a smile. Clearly this was an invitation to dine. I looked around at the expectant faces of the 20 or so hour people who were looking on. They wore ragged T shirts and shorts or skirts. Some of the men had rope bands decorated with feathers around their biceps, and some of them, women wore necklaces with beads and animal teeth. I look back at Tacorentia's repulsive offering. I was already pretty certain I'd worked out what it was when one of the men from the Brazilian Indigenous People's Organization who'd come to the village with us confirmed my fears. Macaco, he said. I was being offered a mouthful of
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barbecued monkey just in Rolatt and before
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him Fuchsia Dunlop on the perils lurking at the dinner table. Our correspondents may not always eat well, but they do go on extraordinary journeys. Petroch Trelawney took to the tracks in Zimbabwe.
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That evening I was back at Bulawayo Station. An old illuminated advertisement for Gilby's gin helped light platform 1. Easy listening music was piped through the loudspeakers and on Platform four sat the night train to Victoria Falls. The carriages, built in Birmingham in 1951, were were already packed and in total darkness as hawkers sold clothes, toys and mobile phone credit. Families loaded parcels on board. My compartment was in car 1068. As I approached, a man in a white tuxedo stepped out into the chaos of the platform and introduced himself as the night steward. He was apologetic about the lack of electricity but was keen to show me the fold down tin basin in the corner of the carriage. Then he solemnly apologised again for the fact that there was no longer running water. Through the night I slept fitfully, woken by shouting at remote stations, crashes and scrapes as the elderly train lurched forward. By dawn we were well on the way north when suddenly we braked violently and ground to a halt. A great cloud of acrid smoke blew back from the diesel engine. Buffalo. Someone shouted. We've hit one. I quickly dressed and walked the length of the train to find the driver looking anxiously at his engine, its front wheels six inches clear of the track. It turned out we'd hit seven buffalo, all of them dead. Their final act to derail the Victoria Falls Express.
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Travelling on India's massive rail network, while not always comfortable, is never dull. But Mark Tully says sometimes the trains aren't quite what you might expect.
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Arunachal Pradesh has no trains, although the railways try to convince the people of the state that they do have one. It's a train called the Arunachal Express, but it isn't an express and it doesn't touch Arunachal. It runs along the north bank of the Brahmaputra, stopping at some stations which are quite near the Arunachal border. But the state's isolation has preserved the tribal way of life. While I was in Pasigat, there was a kebang, or gathering to sort out a land dispute. It was held in a clearing in the middle of the thick jungle which still covers most of the state. The adjudication consisted of a series of speeches on behalf of the two sides in the dispute. At one point, the most vocal speaker on one side challenged his leading opponent to a peki or a trial by ordeal. This apparently could involve clutching burning coal, putting hands into boiling water or even into boiling oil. But happily, things didn't reach that pass. No decision was taken, and the aggrieved party went off to enjoy a feast washed down by rice, beer.
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Economic downturn and belt tightening were the top stories in Ireland. Yet some things, it seems, are resistant to change. Like one defiantly unfashionable pub in the town of Lahinch. Trish Flanagan was rather lucky to be served at all.
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Frawley's is a tiny pub. A dozen customers would fit comfortably. There's an abundance of dark wood. Panelling and a couple of spartan benches line the back wall. A fluorescent sign advertises no stag parties welcome here, but there's more than drink available. An assortment of groceries at the front contrasts with bottles of spirits at the back. Plastic containers of salt, rusting tins of custard, boxes of stock cubes and faded packets of jelly. Tom Frawley, the oldest publican in Ireland, is a man of routine. Every day except Good Friday and Christmas Day, he opens between 10.30 and 11, maybe later if there are chores to be done. But he closes for lunch from 1 to 2 and dinner from 6 to 7. Tom's been pulling pints for 81 years. He tells me that Guinness is still the most popular drink in his pub. That's no surprise because there's only the one tap on the counter. No dishwasher, no refrigeration, no ice. You take your drink as it comes. A man comes in. Have you cans of cider? He says. I have, says Tom. Are they cold? No. Have you ice? No. He murmurs something and departs. We don't see him again.
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Paul Mason found no shortage of evidence of America's economic woes when he travelled to the decaying heart of the once booming city of Gary, Indiana.
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Downtown Gary is a Mecca for urban explorers, not to mention salvage dealers. Much of it is ruined. The church, the lecture theatre, the post office, opened by Henry Morgenthau in 1936. The Palace Theatre with its Moroccan Art Deco interior, all ramshackle but still standing open to the elements and to inquisitive journalists with torches. The past is all around you in Gary, and far more vividly than in the ordinary played out post industrial town. The question Gary poses is one we'll all wrestle with in the west at some point. How do you manage historic decline? Researching the history of these buildings I've climbed into, there's always a horrible moment. Sometime in the 60s or 70s, somebody gets stabbed in the back row of an Art Deco cinema and it closes down. Somebody schemed to renovate the Art Nouveau apartment block goes bust. But the question remains, what happens to places like this long term? I'm told the in trays of American theatre directors are groaning with scripts set in an apocalyptic future in which America has collapsed. If I read one more scene of the Last Survivor crawling across a blackened landscape, I'll be sick. One told me, maybe Gary's future will be as a film set for these dystopias. I hope not.
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Kevin Connolly, leaving the United States after three years, has much to say in its favour. But, he confided, there are irritations to living anywhere and it's the task of the irritable to find them.
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Americans could make their public spaces a little quieter, for example, if they all took one step closer to the person they're talking to. And they could speed up their journeys to work by not insisting on holding every elevator for everyone who wants to catch it, as though it was one of the last helicopters leaving the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975. There will be another lift along in a minute. And after three years of eating steaks the size of elephants, ears off plates bigger than satellite dishes, all of our crockery back in Europe now looks like it was borrowed from a doll's house. That may take some getting used to. But America in one sense was exactly as I expected it to be, a place of gripping public theatre at election times and a place of private virtue nearly all the time. I found that on the night I first arrived three years ago, on a much delayed New Year's Eve flight which slipped and stumbled through the icy skies over the choppy darkness of the cold prairie, I chatted sporadically to the grandmotherly woman beside me about home and family, although I can't in truth remember much of what was said. But I do remember what happened once we landed. There were no taxis, and my fellow passenger insisted, without checking with him, that her husband would happily drive me to my hotel, a round trip for him in the arctic midnight of a public holiday, perhaps two or three hours. I expected to detect at least a flicker of surprise on his face when this was first put to him, but there was none. This is America, son, he told me. We help each other out.
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Back in Europe, this continent of undersized crockery, Hugh Schofield was examining a website which blends lyrics written in classic French with the music of classic rock. It posed, he thought, an important question about the French language.
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It's all in the spirit of high spoof, so the interpretations are comically deadpan. You can hear Le Magicien du Flipper by Lesqui, for example, and Je suis le Morce by Les Scarabees. That's the who's Pinball wizard and I Am the Walrus by the Beatles. There are songs by Les Garcons de la ni Mallerie, the Pet Shop Boys, Les Pierre Roulant, the Rolling Stones and Les Forgerons, the Smiths. And this from Le Roi. Eh bien, c' est un pour largent de pour le spectacle trois pour CE preparet et puis va chat va. Yes, of course, it's Ne machez pas sur me soulier de Sued Bleu. Naturally, the songs all sound plain daft and intentionally so. The website's just a piece of fun. However, there is a slightly more serious undercurrent. I would venture a light hearted jibe at France's linguistic protection laws. These are the rules that still oblige radio stations to play a set quota of French songs. Ok, if that's the way you want it. The website is saying, here's some excellent quota filling politically correct French language content. But more to the point, the spoofs, by being so hilarious, also pose the question, can you actually sing rock in French and also sound convincing? But I suspect it's too late by now. Cultural globalization has hit us all, including the French. As Monsieur Robert Dillon once put it, les temps, il sont a changent.
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Well, times may indeed change, but we'll be here as usual next weekend with more stories from our own correspondents around the world. Do join us. Goodbye.