One World
By Al Baharul Kader
Categories: Society & Culture, Personal Journals
Life stories from Europe and around the world. One World travels to a different town, village or city in every episode and tells the story of one life — work, family, love, loss and new beginnings — from the bakeries of small European towns to the harbours, farms and great cities beyond. Different countries, different languages, one shared human story.New episodes weekly.Some narration on this show is AI-assisted; every story is written and produced by our editorial team.
58 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- The Midwife School
In the hills near Ntcheu, Malawi, twenty-year-old student midwife Chisomo Banda can recite every lesson in the book, but she has never yet led a delivery herself — until a rainy night brings Alinafe Mwale to the maternity ward by bicycle, and her tutor Sister Grace takes the corner chair with her…
- The Desert Library
In the old Mauritanian town of Chinguetti, seventy-four-year-old Ahmed Ould Sidi keeps a family library of ancient manuscripts in a low stone house, while a great dune leans closer year by year and the fragile pages quietly crumble in their trunks. When a university team offers to photograph every…
- Coding in Lagos
In Mushin, Lagos, sixteen-year-old Funmilayo Adeyemi learns to code on her mother's phone after dark, in the little hours between homework and sleep. At a free Saturday girls' programme in a Yaba tech hub, with a mentor who grew up streets like hers and a design partner from Kano, she helps build…
- The Spelling Bee in Lusaka
In Lusaka, Zambia, eleven-year-old Chanda Mwila loves words and collects them in a torn exercise book, but his voice hides whenever a crowd is listening. With his grandmother's carrying song to steady his breath, bottle-top letters on the kitchen floor, and a teacher who teaches him that a word is…
- The Girl Who Fixed Phones
In hillside Freetown, Sierra Leone, sixteen-year-old Isatu Kamara repairs her neighbours' phones at a small blue table under a market umbrella, armed with a biscuit tin of tiny tools, a borrowed school multimeter, and an honest handwritten ledger — while her mother and her science teacher insist…
- The Teacher in the Camp
In the Kijani settlement in northern Uganda, South Sudanese teacher Grace Lado opens her Mango Tree Class every morning to ninety refugee and host-community children at once, teaching seven grades with one cracked blackboard, a tin of chalk she carried from Yei, and nine circles of pupil leaders…
- The Solar Lamp
In the green hills of Gasura, Rwanda, fifteen-year-old Sandrine Ingabire loves mathematics but cannot finish her homework after dark, because her family's smoky kerosene lamp is rationed and hurting her eyes. When her father repairs a damaged solar lamp sent by her uncle, Sandrine turns one small…
- Ten Kilometres to School
In the high hills near Iten, Kenya, thirteen-year-old Mercy Chebet runs ten kilometres to school each morning and ten kilometres home each afternoon, because learning is waiting and she refuses to be late for her own future. When the rains break the river bridge, her too-small shoes finally give…
- The Wedding Henna
In Omdurman, Sudan, schoolteacher Nawal Abdelrahman prepares for her wedding over seven nights of henna, painted from the leaves of the tree her grandmother planted eighty years ago. When bought powder proves false, the artist's hand tires in a dust storm, and a grieving neighbour arrives with…
- The Returning Daughter
After twenty years working as a care nurse in Rotterdam, Helena Fortes returns to her home island of Santo Antao in Cape Verde when she hears a hidden pause in her mother Celeste's voice on their Sunday call. She finds sealed health centre letters, a leaking roof, and a mother who refuses to be a…
- The Elder Under the Tree
In the fictional Somali village of Balanbal, a quarrel over goats in a sorghum plot, a blocked rainwater cistern, and moved boundary stones brings two related families to the edge of a fight. Under the great qurac tree, elder Haji Yusuf Warsame, eighty two, gives them three afternoons, a listening…
- The Town of Twins
In Igbo-Ora, Nigeria, the town famous for its many twins, the Akinola family raises three sets of twins — six children counted, as their grandmother Mama Risi insists, one by one. When the family is chosen to lead the great Twins Festival while school fees come due, the eldest twins must find…
- The Funeral That Was a Festival
In the Ghanaian coastal town of Teshie, fantasy-coffin maker Joseph "Uncle Joe" Quaye builds a fish-shaped coffin for Nii Adjei Krakue, a ninety-one-year-old fisherman who plans his own goodbye the way he lived — with laughter, music and the whole town invited. When the old man's funeral day…
- Letters From the Mine
In Ha Sephapo, Lesotho, Lineo Mokoena waits each month for a letter and pay from her husband Teboho, a gold miner near Welkom, South Africa, while her mother-in-law reads every letter aloud twice, once for the news and once for the love. When one month's letter vanishes into a misdirected mine…
- The Griot's Son
In Segou, Mali, griot Modibo Diabate loses his voice to the harmattan dust three days before he must recite the Keita family's hundred-name genealogy at a great naming ceremony. His seventeen-year-old son Sekou, who secretly writes rap verses in a geography exercise book, must carry the line in…
- The Long Afternoon
In Kasanje, Uganda, nurse Ruth Namubiru and carpenter David Ssemwanga bring their two families together for a kwanjula introduction ceremony that runs from late morning to lamplight. A broken bus, a lost letter found under a crate of soap, a rescued groundnut stew, a sudden rainstorm and…
- Grandmother's Compound
In Tanghin, Burkina Faso, eighty three year old Mariam Ouedraogo keeps the granary key and a rope of forty knots for the forty people of her family compound. When a businessman offers a fortune for their land beside the new road, the family sits under the mango tree and answers one sentence at a…
- The Naming Ceremony
In Ibadan, Nigeria, Segun and Folake Adeleke, who waited six years for their daughter, prepare her Yoruba naming ceremony on the eighth day after her birth. Guided by her eighty two year old great grandmother Iya Alake, the family settles the joyful contest of names from Ibadan, Ilesa and London…
- Back to Luanda
In Luanda, Angola, Domingos Fernando returns from Lisbon after twenty years as a tram depot electrician, honest that steady work made him secure rather than rich. Reopening his late father's electrical repair shop with his mother Rosa's ledger, his sister Luisa's hard won trust, and his nephew…
- The Shoe Shiner of Addis
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, twelve-year-old Sami Tesfaye shines shoes by the Piazza, saving knot by knot on his sister's string toward the new school uniform he needs to start grade seven. When a retired cobbler teaches him to repair shoes as well as polish them, and the rains, a lost wallet, and a…
- The Café in Tunis
In Tunis, Tunisia, retired post office clerk Amina Trabelsi takes a seat at the Café des Jasmins during a rainstorm, becoming the first woman ever to sit at its marble tables among the domino-playing regulars. What begins with one glass of mint tea poured high grows into letters read and written…
- The Night Guard of Accra
In Accra, Ghana, Daniel Quartey has kept the night gate of a maternity and child clinic in Osu for twenty two years, with a red radio, a lantern, and a gate book written while things are still true. On one stormy Friday, when the power fails and the street floods, a lost boy, a confused old…
- The Kigali Mechanic
In Kigali, Rwanda, Claudine Uwase runs a motorbike workshop behind two blue doors, keeping a famous brown book in which her riders' brakes are written in red before they can be written in sorrow. When a young rider confesses three dangerous days, a school driver reports a small sound he cannot…
- The Township Barber
In Soweto, South Africa, Bongani Dlamini has cut hair from one chair for thirty four years, keeping his township's news, quarrels and courage in order along with its hair. When a young graduate's interview, a quarrel at the taxi rank and his own quietly failing eyes all arrive at his benches in…
- A Rooftop in Cairo
In Darb al Ahmar, Cairo, retired school caretaker Mahmoud Hassan has kept pigeons above the noise of the city for more than forty years, and his grandson Youssef is learning the keeper's laws from the roof. When a polite letter from the house's new owner orders the loft cleared for roof repairs…
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