Volunteering for Freedom

Life Changing

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.6 • 735 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a young man Mohammed, or MFA Zaman arrived in Britain from Bangladesh with a working visa, a patron and a job lined up as a chef. On arrival all the promises of a bright future turned to ashes. His patron confiscated his documents and put him to work. It was a punishing schedule. He then discovered that his boss had tried and failed to get him a Visa extension, meaning that he was working illegally.

But at this lowest of low ebbs in his life, Mohammed decided that he needed to do something - and that something was to volunteer at an old people's community club in Lewisham, near where he was living. For three hours a week every Tuesday, he helped serve the elderly visitors. He talked to them, befriended many of them and they, in turn, started to show him that London wasn't all bad. It was a Life Changing decision and it would lead eventually to him being a volunteer at the London Olympics and a representative of London at the Paris Olympics. But clearing his name and proving to the authorities that he had done nothing wrong and was the victim of modern day slavery was a massive challenge.

Producer: Tom Alban

Transcript

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0:00.0	Eleven climbers appeared to have died on the world's second highest mountain K2.
0:06.0	It was one of the deadliest days in mountaineering history.
0:10.0	Rock falls, avalanches.
0:11.0	Huge pieces of ice. All are big enough to kill you.
0:14.0	He just flew out into Devoid and he was gone.
0:17.0	How did it all go so wrong?
0:19.0	And is it really worth risking death to feel alive? Why would
0:23.2	somebody pay to go to a place called the death cell on a vacation? Extreme, peak danger. With me,
0:29.9	Natalia Melman Petrazella. Listen to the full series now. First on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:40.0	You're about to listen to the latest series of Life-changing.
0:44.0	Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts,
0:47.7	but if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.
0:54.3	Today, a young lad, alone and far from home, with dreams of starting life in a new country
1:00.2	where he'd be welcomed with open arms, but where the reality was harsh, punishing and exploitative.
1:08.1	But what Mohamed Zaman chose to do at a moment when his freedom and his future had been taken from him
1:14.3	was brave and perhaps counterintuitive.
1:17.8	Yet the joy that came from that action continues to echo.
1:22.4	And he's with me now.
1:23.3	Hello, Mohammed.
1:24.3	Hi.
1:24.6	How are you?
1:25.2	I'm excellent. Thank you. It's good to see you.
	...

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