4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2018
⏱️ 35 minutes
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0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
0:03.0 | Hello, I'm Kristi Young. |
0:05.0 | Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item |
0:12.0 | that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. |
0:16.0 | For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. |
0:22.0 | You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website. |
0:30.0 | Music |
0:50.0 | My castaway this week is the journalist and author, Kristina Lam. |
0:54.0 | Over the past three decades, she has travelled the world, reporting from the Amazon to Zimbabwe. |
1:00.0 | But it's her first hand accounts of the turmoil in the Middle East that have secured her reputation as a first-class war reporter. |
1:07.0 | Whether dodging bullets in Hellman or having clandestine meetings with Taliban chiefs in the back streets of Kweta, her nose for a story has repeatedly led her into perilous territory. |
1:18.0 | She seems to like it. |
1:20.0 | The cobalt blue mosques and sweet grapes of Kandahar are something of a contrast to the suburban England of her comfortable 1970s childhood, |
1:28.0 | where she rebelled against the starchy uniformity of her grammar school and dren't of a life of adventure beyond Kroyton. |
1:35.0 | She has, she says, navigated through roadblocks manned by red-eyed drug-crazed boys with Kalashnikovs in West Africa, |
1:42.0 | been abducted in the middle of the night by Pakistani intelligence and come under sniper fire in Iraq. |
1:48.0 | All around me, she says, people have died. My life, I believe, is charmed. |
1:53.0 | And that strikes me, Kristina Lam, as quite a dangerous thing to think that your life has been charmed. |
1:59.0 | Well, explain it to me. |
2:01.0 | I suppose, I mean, listening to it does sound like a dangerous thing to say. |
2:07.0 | I guess doing this kind of job, you have lots of narrow escapes and that you feel that luck plays a part of your survival, |
2:19.0 | and I've had far more than my nine lives by now. |
... |
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