Featured Podcast : Dreams From My Mother (BBC Documentaries)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/09/090915_dreams_from_my_mother.shtml

Barack Obama made history on 4 November 2008 when he defeated Republican rival John McCain to become the first black president of the United States.

The son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas, he was named after his father who grew up herding goats but gained a scholarship to study in Hawaii.

There the Kenyan met and married Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, who was living in Honolulu with her parents.

The president has famously written of the influence exerted on him by his charismatic but absent father in his memoir, Dreams of My Father, but what of his mother, Ann Dunham?

The world knows very little about her, but how did she affect his formative years and help to shape him in his political rise?

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She was christened Stanley Ann Dunham because her parents yearned for a boy.

Born in Kansas, she was the only child of hard working middle class parents who kept moving to improve their lives.

She married Barack Obama Snr whom she met in a class at the University of Hawaii at the age of 18.

It was a time of racial tension in America in the early 1960s and mixed marriages were not very common.

When Barack Jr. was still a toddler, his father decided to take up a scholarship at Harvard, turning down a more financially generous offer from New York University which would have supported the whole family. So Ann and young Barry, as he was then known, remained in Hawaii.

He later returned to Kenya alone, where he worked as a government economist, and the couple divorced.

When President Obama was six, his mother married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro and the family moved to Jakarta.

But life proved too conventional for Ann and as she and Lolo became estranged, she moved to Yogyakarta the ancient capital of Java and began a study of indigenous craft industries and their community structures - which she pursued to the end of her life.

As a mature student, she was accepted into a PhD programme at the University of Hawaii and she chose to research the archaeology and anthropology of agricultural blacksmiths. She was the first woman admitted into the inner sanctum of this ancient all-male trade.

As she learnt about the ceremonial dagger making and the ritual power the smiths imbued into each instrument they forged, she also gained an appreciation of all Javanese crafts and culture.

In an effort to alleviate the hardship associated with these peasant industries, she constructed a model of micro-financing which is now the standard in Indonesia, a country that is a world leader in micro-credit systems.

With grants from the Ford Foundation and loans from the World Bank, she worked with many NGO’s to help rural people get loans to launch small enterprises.

In this programme Judith Kampfner talks to Ann’s 80 year old feisty professor and mentor, Alice Dewey.

She also speaks to field workers and executives at the People’s Bank of Indonesia, the Ford Foundation, and the USIA and to anthropologists and crafts workers who knew Ann Dunham.

Listen as the life of this unconventional and idealistic woman is revealed and whether her importance has been deliberately downplayed in the story of Barack Obama.

First broadcast Wednesday 16 September 2009

Featured Podcast : BBC World Service Documentary – Death Diminishes Me

Five men from New Zealand paint a soundscape of memory, loss and regret as suffered by those living with HIV. They relate stories of loneliness and deep isolation - as most HIV positive Kiwis don't know anyone else with the virus.

Visit the page at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/07/000000_global_perspective_death_diminishes.shtml

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DEATH DIMINISHES ME

Fifteen funerals within five years – that's the situation Shane found himself in the early 1990s when his friends started dying from AIDS related illnesses.

Shane is one of five HIV positive men from New Zealand who share their personal reflections and stories in Death Diminishes Me as they work towards self-acceptance.

The men have been living with HIV for over 20 years - coping with both the physical and psychological implications. Some of the shared experiences include the dramatic loss of confidence, having to 'come out' a second time and dealing with the stigma of being diagnosed HIV positive. "Who do I tell, what do I tell?" asks Shane.

"Through their openness we begin to glimpse unspoken truths about how homosexuality and HIV are dealt with in New Zealand society," says producer Gareth Watkins.

Death Diminishes Me asks the listener to consider what isolates people from, and what connects them to their friends, family and each other.

Symbol of hope

Throughout the work we hear excerpts from Michael Parmenter's A Long Undressing - an autobiographical theatre/dance-work that premiered in 1995 to great acclaim:

"We use memory as a way of reclaiming what has been taken away. To value even the feeling of loss, is to value life itself - and so to begin to live again"

Prose, interview and reflection all form the foreground, while fragments of half-remembered sounds form the background - a school yard, a summer's day, the beep-beep-beep of a machine that sustains life.

"Even though there is a lot of apparent darkness in Death Diminishes Me, there's also a lot of burning hope" says Gareth.

"The very fact that most of these men are still here after 20 years with HIV is a strong symbol of hope. The fact that they have coped and become stronger while watching friends and loved-ones die. The fact that they still stand tall is a testament to their will and hope to live.

"Ultimately death does not diminish us. It makes us, and those around us have greater insight into who and what we are."

First broadcast on Friday 17 July 2009

BBC World Documentaries: Lincoln and the World

This post comes directly from BBC World Documentaries. Download the MP3 (Right click with your mouse and save target to your computer.)

To access the site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/05/090522_lincolndoc.shtml

 

Abraham Lincoln and his legacy are a global story. His political influence is more powerful today than it ever was.

His martyrdom increased his global clout. For example, church services were held all over Germany after his assassination.

He is seen as not only an embodiment of values and principles but also as a representative of a nation emerging as a world power.

A month before Lincoln's bicentennial celebrations began, US President Barack Obama evoked him in multiple ways.

He saw their trajectories as similar and he believes that without Lincoln, he would have never had the chance to become President.

UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and former Pakistan leader, Pervez Musharraf both invoked Lincoln in support of their respective domestic agendas.

In Lincoln and the World, Allan Little looks at how movements and leaders from very different political perspectives have looked up to Abraham Lincoln.

He also explores how Barack Obama's championship of him has given Lincoln higher visibility, and whether there is hubris in Obama's conscious parallelism.

First broadcast on Monday 25 May 2009

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Listening Comprehension: Yiddish, a Struggle for Survival (Part 2) from BBC Documentaries

The second installment: Yiddish, a Struggle for Survival (Part 2) MP3 (right click with mouse to save to computer).

Part two

Dennis Marks continues his investigation in New York.

He meets Aaron Lansky, founder of the National Yiddish Book Centre, a library dedicated to rescuing and saving Yiddish books - as he says - from the dustbin of history.

The Centre has saved and preserved thousands of books, many of which now reside in libraries in Oxford, in an attempt to keep this joyful, exuberant language alive.

If having trouble with link above, go directly to BBC World Service Documentaries page on this program HERE. To access the homepage, click on the image above.