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From The Rest of the World Podcast · 11:03

Show by Rest of the World Podcast hosted by Rudy Martinez

Five stories of what went right.A BOY STARTS TALKING ABOUT PERIODSAadvik Jain, 18, is one of 198 young people from 44 countries honored with this year’s Diana Award, for starting a campaign against the shame around menstruation. The winners were announced Wednesday at a virtual ceremony.It began in 2023, in the tenth grade, with a close friend who was in so much pain during midterm exams that Jain could not tell what was wrong. She told him she was on her period and had really bad cramps, then started to cry. The school gave her a painkiller and called her parents to take her home. Back in class the next day she had the same pain, and her parents thought she was trying to get out of her exams.Jain went home and asked his mother what to do. His mother spoke to a teacher, who contacted the friend’s parents and encouraged them to take her to a doctor. She got a diagnosis and treatment, and Jain says she is much better now.He kept thinking about the time he broke his little toe on the edge of his bed. His father left an office two hours away to take him to the emergency room. Jain wondered, “what if we responded to menstrual pain with the same concern?”Team Period began as a school competition. Jain and three friends, two boys and two girls, spent about six months on the issue, and when the contest ended he did not want the work to end. He came up with a dance drama set during the festival of Durga Puja. In it, a grandmother sends a young girl away from the prayers over a stain on her clothes, and the goddess brings her back. The whole school helped stage it, and more than 500 people watched in April 2025.One of the team’s surveys brought a response from an eighth-grade girl. She was angry that nobody cared about a vegetable or ketchup stain on a uniform, yet a red stain on the back of a girl’s uniform became a huge issue. So the team began wearing red stains on their own uniforms, some stitched from cloth and some stickers. At first everyone laughed, and the school objected. Within a week more and more students had joined in. A survey months later found that many students no longer felt it was such a shame to have a red stain. The team has now collected around 4,000 survey responses.At one workshop a boy of about 12 kept interrupting to ask why he had to learn about periods. The teacher wanted to send him out of the room, and Jain’s team said no. About a year later Jain met the boy again. His sister, barely nine, had gotten her first period while the two were home alone, and she was terrified. The boy knew what to do. He called his mother to ask where the pads were, helped his sister get cleaned up, made her a heating pad and ordered her chocolates. By the time his mother got home, the girl was feeling much better.Jain starts studying medicine and public health at the University of Bologna in February.Sources NPRKING KAZU, 59, SETS A RECORDKazuyoshi Miura came off the bench on Saturday at 59 years, 8 months and 12 days old, the oldest player to appear in Japan’s third-tier league.Miura, known as King Kazu, came on in second-half stoppage time of Fukushima United’s 4-1 home win over FC Ryukyu. Saturday extended his own J.League age record.It was his first league match since 2021, when he played once in Japan’s top flight for Yokohama FC. In July he scored in the Emperor’s Cup, which ended a wait of almost four years for a competitive goal. This is his 42nd season as a professional, and he has played in five decades.Sources Reuters via Asharq Al-AwsatA MONTANA RANCH HIRES AUTISTIC ADULTSErik’s Ranch & Retreats, a guest ranch in Montana, has employed 27 autistic young adults, 19 of them in the last year.The ranch sits on 230 acres near Livingston, less than an hour from Yellowstone National Park. Autistic staff work there as concierges, guides, wranglers and cooks. Their saying is “Sheets, towels and lives changed daily.”The idea goes back to 2008, when founder Kathryn Nordberg wondered how her son Erik, then a teenager with autism, would live as an adult. She thought especially about what would happen when she was no longer around. The ranch opened in 2014.Cornell University autism researcher Leslie Shaw found that only about 53 percent of autistic adults in a national sample were working in 2023. The sample included those who could answer a survey unassisted.On a recent late summer day, Jacob Thoresen, 33, saddled horses to lead a small group of guests on a trail ride. He has worked with the nonprofit for ten years, splitting his time between the ranch and its hotel in Edina, Minnesota. Before that he was a baggage handler at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport and worked in retail and manufacturing. He tried a desk job too, but says “that isn’t me.”Ten years ago, he says, he would not have believed he could do anything independently and be trusted to get the work done. Now he says the place is teaching him how to be independent. The staff, recognizing his achievements, have loosened the reins. On the ranch…

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