France emerges from lockdown
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
France had one of the toughest lockdowns but now people can go shopping again in outlets that had been shut for the last two months. Lucy Williamson joins customers in Paris as they queue outside, to ask them how they have been faring. Sudan can't spend much money on healthcare. But as Mark Weston reports, the young activists from the revolutionary committees that helped to oust President Omar al-Bashir last year, are battling against the coronavirus, armed with hand sanitiser and food for the vulnerable. The Roma are a minority that has often been blamed for social ills wherever they live, and now they're being scapegoated for the arrival of Covid-19 in some parts of Spain, as Guy Hedgecoe has found. In Bangladesh, garment workers had been enjoying better conditions since the Rana Plaza factory collapsed seven years ago. But now there's a new worry about the coronavirus, and how to get good healthcare. Christine Stewart meets doctors and patients at a charitable hospital where even the poorest patients get top class care, and not just for Covid-19. And if you thought that having a cup of tea could provide respite from the news about the pandemic, spare a thought for Steve Evans in Australia, who finds that the knock-on effects of the virus on supply chains means he can no longer get the right tea bags. Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Arlene Gregorius
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Good morning. |
| 0:06.3 | Today your country is poor, but you aim for democracy. |
| 0:10.0 | So in Sudan, it helps if you hand out hand sanitizer to children. |
| 0:15.0 | Who's to blame the crude reaction to coronavirus and in Spain the fingers pointed |
| 0:21.0 | almost inevitably at the Roma. In Bangladesh there's also widespread poverty |
| 0:26.8 | but we visit a hospital where the poorest get top-class treatment and the answer to everything in this troubled world. Of course it's a cup of tea |
| 0:36.3 | in Australia made involving a clothes peg these days. |
| 0:41.2 | First going shopping now involves rituals we'd never imagined. Even so in France |
| 0:47.8 | lockdown's been eased. You no longer have to fill in a form when you leave home. |
| 0:53.5 | Lucy Williamson joins the French on their first forays. |
| 0:57.6 | What will they buy? |
| 1:00.0 | Fatu is the kind of woman who looks elegant even in a face mask even when she's lost her hair. |
| 1:06.5 | Her tiny earrings glint in the sunlight as she inches gradually towards the front of the queue. |
| 1:15.5 | I'm sick she she tells me. This is the first time I've left my house in two months. The queue she's in snakes halfway down the block. |
| 1:20.6 | The shop is open this week for the first time since the middle of March |
| 1:24.8 | when France imposed its lockdown. An unremarkable high street outlet offering beauty |
| 1:30.7 | products, mobile phones and money transfers. It's one of the most popular |
| 1:35.3 | in the neighborhood. |
| 1:36.3 | What are you here for? I asked Fatu. |
| 1:38.7 | Face Cream, she says. |
| 1:41.6 | In these first days of France's national experiment with freedom, stories like |
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