The Fifth Floor: Message in a bottle to North Korea

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Park Jung-oh defected to South Korea from the North 26 years ago. Hearing how North Koreans in the Hwanghae Province suffer from food shortage, he started throwing bottles filled with rice and a USB stick into the Yellow Sea, hoping they would land on North Korean shores. Did his messages ever reach anyone? Rachel Lee from BBC Korean brings us this extraordinary story. Plus, Madina Dahiru Maishanu, the youngest presenter at BBC Hausa, shares stories from her award-winning show, Mahangar Zamani, and Thomas Naadi tells us about Stevie Wonder's love affair with Ghana.

Produced by Alice Gioia and Caroline Ferguson.

(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:04.0	This is
0:05.0	You're
0:08.0	You're actually
0:09.0	the fifth floor.
0:10.0	The fifth floor is
0:13.0	this is the fifth floor.
0:15.0	To me have this is the fifth floor
0:17.0	fornak and me this obat.
0:21.0	This is the fifth floor at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all around the world.
0:29.0	I'm your host, Parenak Amidie D. MIT.
0:40.0	We live in a hyper-connected world, we live in a hyper-connected world where we are on messaging apps and video calls with people
0:46.0	all over the world.
0:47.8	So it can be hard to imagine that there are many people out there who don't have access to our regular means of
0:55.1	communication or they simply are hard to reach. So how do you send them a
1:01.2	message?
1:06.0	Let's say they have no internet access. Their phones are tapped and their mail is controlled.
1:10.0	Or what if they just don't have time for you?
1:13.6	What about a message in a bottle? I know it might sound like something out of a storybook or a movie,
1:21.2	but in this episode of the Fifth Floor, we are talking about people who are sending messages
1:26.4	and bottles, literally and figuratively, to people who can't be reached.
1:40.0	There's a stretch of the Yellow Sea that sits between South and North Korea, lapping the shores on either sides.
	...

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