And one story that always kind of captures my imagination.

The street's lost culture.

And you're listening to Kearning cultures.

Last week, we brought you a story that we made in collaboration with the podcast 99% Invisible

about the growing problem of ship abandonment in the Middle East. And if you haven't heard that

episode, I'd really suggest you go back and listen to that first because it'll help explain

some of the context for what you're about to hear.

There's a lot of complex inner workings to ship abandonment, but to be super simplistic about it,

it's when a ship owner can't afford the costs of running the ship anymore. Can't afford

port fees, fuel costs, or staff salaries, or all of the above. And so they just go dark. In these situations,

they'll stop communicating with the crew, stop answering calls, and leave them stuck on board,

indefinitely. And there was this one moment during the episode last week where Andy Bowerman,

he's the regional director of mission to seafarers in the UAE,

it's an organization that helps seafarers out when they've been abandoned by their owners.

There was this one moment where Andy started telling us about this particularly bad case that he

worked on in the UAE recently, so bad that it became a transnational crisis.

So just on the horizon, you probably can't quite make it out is Shaja.

This is from a video Andy filmed while he was working on this case.

It was off the coast of Sharia, which is in the United Arab Emirates, and it's one of the

UAE's biggest cities.

One of the wealthiest cities on the planet.

And yet here we are just a few miles out on yet another abandoned vessel.

...