Category Archives: Features

The Missing Children

Truth, justice, reparation.

If you walk through the Puerta del Sol, you might be forgiven for avoiding the crowd gathered here. At first, I found their story hard to believe. They say that hospital and adoption officials colluded to steal babies and traffic them throughout Spain for decades.

This 28-minute radio documentary, produced by Overtone Productions, and which I reported and presented, first aired on BBC Radio 4 on March 25th, 2019: [streaming link].

It is the second of a two-part documentary called Spain’s Lost Generations. The first part, which aired March 18th, focuses on the recovery of people executed by the regime of Francisco Franco.

Franco’s Disappeared

People are just now, in 2018, recovering the remains of family members lost after the Spanish Civil War, almost eighty years ago…

This 28-minute radio documentary, produced by Overtone Productions, and which I reported and presented, first aired on BBC Radio 4 on March 18th, 2019: [streaming link].

It is the first of a two-part documentary called Spain’s Lost Generations. The second part, airing March 25th, focuses on Spain’s stolen babies.

See also my related 2016 feature for SAPIENS: [html].

A matter of trust

Health researchers and workers use their training and the treatments available to them to prevent and treat illness. But they cannot bring their expertise to bear if they do not have the trust of the people that they are trying to treat.

This August, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, communities in the midst of an Ebola outbreak continued traditional rural burial practices that include touching bodies, despite health workers’ advice on sanitary burials. Residents in the village of Manbangu burnt down a health centre and injured an Ebola health-care worker after one resident died of Ebola. Sometimes fear and misinformation drive even more violent behaviour: in a 2014 outbreak of the disease in Guinea, residents of the village of Womey killed a group of eight visiting health workers, journalists and government officials. Continue reading A matter of trust

Squeezing water from a drying Himalayan desert

When water does come to the former Kingdom of Lo, in the rain shadow of the Himalaya, it is often sudden and violent. A storm may boil over a mountain ridge, a glacial dam may collapse, or meltwater may surge through a gorge. But slower, less-visible changes are forcing the region’s farmers and herders to reconsider their relationship with water and each other.

Continue reading Squeezing water from a drying Himalayan desert