Majd’s Diary: Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl
Radio Diaries
Radio Diaries & Radiotopia
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2016
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Majd Abdulghani is a teenager living in Saudi Arabia, one of the most restrictive countries for women in the world. She wants to be a scientist. Her family wants to arrange her marriage. From the age of 19 to 21, Majd has been chronicling her life with a microphone, taking us inside a society where the voices of women are rarely heard. She records herself practicing karate, conducting experiments in a genetics lab, and fending off pressure to accept an arranged marriage. In her audio diary, Majd documents everything from arguments with her brother about how much she should cover herself in front of men, to late night thoughts about loneliness, arranged marriages, and the possibility of true love.
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| 0:00.0 | Radiotopia. |
| 0:03.6 | From PRX. |
| 0:05.8 | From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries. |
| 0:08.6 | I'm Joe Richmond. |
| 0:10.3 | People often ask us how we find our diarists. |
| 0:13.2 | There are a lot of different answers to that question, but it usually doesn't happen like this. |
| 0:18.1 | And today, we're also announcing a search for new teenage diarists on all things considered. |
| 0:23.7 | Our partner Radio Diaries will work with them to produce new stories that will air on our program |
| 0:28.7 | next year. A while back, we launched a contest with NPR to find a new diarist for our series |
| 0:35.0 | Teenage Diaries. The idea was to find a completely unexpected story, someone we never would have come across on our own. |
| 0:42.4 | And that's exactly what happened. |
| 0:44.3 | We received close to a thousand submissions from around the world. |
| 0:47.7 | And in the end, we chose this one. |
| 0:50.1 | Hello, listener. |
| 0:51.9 | This is Mished. |
| 0:53.4 | I live in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and I turned 19 today. |
| 0:58.0 | That's Mazzed Abdulqqani. |
| 1:00.1 | And to tell you more about Mazzed and her story, |
| 1:02.4 | I'm going to hand this microphone over to my co-producer here at Radio Diaries, Sarah Kramer. |
| 1:07.1 | Thanks. |
| 1:08.2 | Okay. |
| 1:08.9 | First, some background. |
... |
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