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--:-- Alex Ritson: This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson.
--:-- Alex Ritson: In this edition, we have a man whose hidden musical talent is helping him turn his life around and supporting others. Earlier this year, Rhys Wynne-Jones was homeless and had gone to a church with friends for something to eat. He sat down at a piano to play and, as everyone stopped to listen, a volunteer started filming.
--:-- Alex Ritson: The video from Penzance in south-western England went viral on social media and his performance of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody has even been praised by the group's drummer Roger Taylor as dazzling. Now, Rhys has been performing concerts and raising thousands of dollars for charities helping other homeless people.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Rhys has been talking to my colleague Evan Davis.
--:-- Evan Davis: The director came over to me because she saw that I was suffering and she asked me, is there anything that you needed? It just struck into my mind that a church like this might have a piano for me to play on so I asked the night church do you have a piano and I was expecting the answer to be no but instead she said yes we have a piano in the church and she showed me over to this lovely baby grand piano in the corner I started playing and the reaction to everybody in the church was, wow.
--:-- Evan Davis: Everybody came into the main church room to see me play and I ended up getting recorded and it went viral.
--:-- Rhys Wynne-Jones: Yeah, it's an amazing story. And then, well, you decided to actually perform concerts. So you went from becoming a social media phenomenon to live performance.
--:-- Evan Davis: The transition to that was due to the social media presence. There was a lot of comments saying that, oh, I would love to see him do a concert. And oh he's really good when is he going to perform live it planted a seed in my head and also at night church's heads about the possibility of doing a concert and I was very reluctant at first to come forward about who I was and my identity because of all that I suffered.
--:-- Rhys Wynne-Jones: Being homeless is like another level of pain that you can't really experience in society but when you're in that place you make friends in the homeless community and you see them dealing with a pain as well when I finally got the confidence to do a concert the night church said oh that'd be brilliant and all the money that you raise will help you get out of your situation you can profit from this but after everything I've seen I was like how can I how can I take any money from myself I need to help the people who have a coping mechanism like I do because the piano is how I cope with pain and the people on the streets don't have that.
--:-- Evan Davis: Can I ask you, Rhys, when did you learn the piano? I mean, obviously you've become quite accomplished at it. You must have devoted some years of your life to that.
--:-- Rhys Wynne-Jones: So I started learning when I was about 11, 12 years old, and I had four years of classical training.
--:-- Evan Davis: The concerts have gone well, and you've raised thousands of pounds. Bring us up today.
--:-- Rhys Wynne-Jones: I have to say, well is a bit of an understatement. It's been absolutely wonderful, incredible response. I've packed all the churches out. Hundreds of people have attended. And I even packed out Truro Cathedral, my dream venue since I was a child to play in. I've raised over £12,000 now. I think it's now £13,000 for the latest concert that I've done.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Rhys Wynne-Jones, who's now moved into sheltered housing and is working towards finding a home of his own.
--:-- Alex Ritson: At this time of year, many of us will have put up our Christmas tree or perhaps adorned our house with twinkly lights to bring some festive cheer. But one man in the United States has taken it a step further. He's decorated his entire street, and it's all in aid of making meaningful memories for his wife, as Rebecca Wood reports.
--:-- Rebecca Wood: That might sound like something Father Christmas or Santa Claus would say, but it is in fact John Reichart from Indianola in Iowa. And instead of bringing presents John has given weeks of his time and spent thousands of dollars turning his street into a winter wonderland much to the delight of his neighbours This is his labour of love.
--:-- John Reichart: I think the whole neighbourhood just feels very blessed to have him in this neighbourhood.
--:-- Rebecca Wood: For John, the extravagant array of twinkling lights and inflatable Christmas characters has a deeper, more personal meaning. It's all for his wife of over 50 years, Joan. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's four years ago, and since then, John has made it his mission to keep making her new memories.
--:-- John Reichart: If it wasn't for my wife, I don't know if I would have done it. But she wanted Christmas, so I'd give it to her. I'll do anything to make her happy.
--:-- Rebecca Wood: Word of his efforts spread, and now there are helpers, and a steady stream of admirers. And to think that he's done all this work just to make her happy, that's what Christmas and love is.
--:-- Alex Ritson: A man who got lost in a blizzard in the Carpathian Mountains has survived for eight days with the help of an unusual companion. Vladislav Duda, a journalist fleeing conscription in Ukraine, was found soaking wet and lying in a ravine after managing to text a friend his location.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: He separated from his friends about an hour, an hour and a half before he fell in the ravine. The other two guys, they left him over there and said that they abandoned him actually and they said that they will continue and they want to save their lives.
--:-- Dan Benga: So, yeah, I know it's cruel. It's hard to believe, but they left him there. So this guy was trying to walk again, to walk, to save his life, and he fell into a ravine of 420 meters, actually. And then he was lying in a small river. was the only place, the horizontal place where he can lie.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: The guy was screaming, cat, cat, please, cat. We thought he has some medical problems and actually was screaming, we have to take care about his cat. His tiny ginger cat helped him stay alive in snowy mountains for eight days and...
--:-- Dan Benga: When we opened the jacket, the cat came out from the jacket. Now when everything is over, I can say that cat rescued his life because he has someone to discuss with. He has someone with him.
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: The condition were very bad. Actually, he was begging, he was plating us. If he's dying, he says like that, if I'm dying, please take care of the cat.
--:-- Dan Benga: And so what did happen when you got him to safety? What was his response?
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: I was crying and he was very happy. He was very happy because actually we saved his cat life.
--:-- Dan Benga: And what is happening with them now? Are they safe? They're together still?
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: Yeah, they're together and starting learning Romanian language. He is so happy. He arrived in Romania. He's so happy he's alive and he's so happy his cat is alive that he wants to stay here to make a new life.
--:-- Dan Benga: From last week is a massive change, 180 degrees change. What you just described to me sounds like extremely dangerous rescue work to get to these people, but it's something that you seem to take such great pride in. Why is helping these people so important to you?
--:-- Stephanie Prentice: Believe me, it's probably one of the best jobs in the world from my point of view. Actually, it's not only one feeling. It's a mixture. Crying. Yeah. It's happiness. It's a moment of truth when you can look in the mirror and you can say mission accomplished.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Nigeria has the highest rate of neonatal jaundice in the world. It's a common condition which causes yellowing of the eyes and skin in newborns, but left untreated can lead to serious health issues like cerebral palsy and brain damage.
--:-- Nkechi Ogbonna: We actually say that one in three to five babies come with neonatal jaundice. About 60% of all 10 babies and about 80 to 100% of all preterms. So the prevalence is enormous.
--:-- Dr. Chinnere Ezaka: Nunata conditions is actually one of Nigeria's major health issues. So we're having multitudes of deaths from preventable causes, all complicated by nunata jaundice.
--:-- Nkechi Ogbonna: Treatment needs to occur within 10 days of birth and can be done fairly simply. But in Nigeria, equipment shortages and a lack of awareness are significant. And it is these issues that Project OSCA is trying to tackle.
--:-- Dr. Chinnere Ezaka: The launch here in Lagos is spearheaded by the Wellbeing Foundation, focused on health care and headed by Toyin Saraki.
--:-- Toyin Saraki: First of all, we're asking all health providers to screen every child. Then post-distort, we're equipping mothers with the tools that they need to monitor their own child.
--:-- Nkechi Ogbonna: The project is also looking to provide greater access to treatment. Project OSCAR is training 300 health workers in Lagos to cascade that knowledge.
--:-- Toyin Saraki: We're also equipping health facilities with the equipment to treat jaundice. And the hope is that over the first year, we will reach 10,000 mothers, screen 9,000 children, and of course, treat all those that require treatment.
--:-- Alex Ritson: A man who got lost in a blizzard in the Carpathian Mountains has survived for eight days with the help of an unusual companion.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Coming up in this podcast...
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--:-- Alex Ritson: According to a nationwide survey conducted by GeneSight, nearly 9 in 10 Americans who've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety believe that mental health medications are somewhat or very effective.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: That's why Dr. Whitney Brown, a family and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner based in Alabama, often recommends genetic testing to our patients as part of their treatment journey.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: As part of my treatment plan, I offer the GeneSight test, which analyzes how a patient's genes may influence how they metabolize or respond to certain mental health medications. It gives me insights and takes out some of the guesswork that can be associated with prescribing them.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Here's an unusual question for you. Where do you think this animal might be from? It's a dolphin, of course. But now researchers have found out that, like humans, they have regional accents and can sound very different from one another depending on where they live.
--:-- Dr. Julie Oswald: I was working on a tool that we use to identify different species in acoustic recordings because we make a lot of underwater recordings but we don't know what animals are producing the sounds.
--:-- Dr. Julie Oswald: And in analyzing the recordings of all these different species from different areas, I came to realize that the same species in a different location sounds different from one another. Why? Is it like the kind of human evolution of communication and language? You're saying it's the same in dolphins?
--:-- Dr. Julie Oswald: That's right. Yep. Dolphins are what we call vocal learners. so they learn to produce the sounds that they produce and so animals learning in one location are learning from their closest neighbours and the animals they spend time with so they're learning slightly different to animals on the other side of the world so depending on the environment that they're in they'll learn slightly different sounds.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Here in the UK, a knitted Christmas tree has been unveiled that's nearly five metres tall and was made as part of a project to reduce loneliness.
--:-- Cameron Angus Mackay: It's now become a social occasion for people but also a chance to be part of something bigger and more important than themselves Norma Johnson is coordinator of the Christmas Tree Project at the heart of New Haven a vibrant community group two miles from Edinburgh city centre
--:-- Norma Johnson: How good it was to have somewhere to go after the pandemic. The group are based in an old Victorian school building in the village of New Haven. They're setting up an intergenerational hub for local people in a bid to reduce loneliness among different generations.
--:-- Cameron Angus Mackay: They came up with the idea of creating a huge knitted Christmas tree to raise some awareness of what they're doing. It started off as a fundraising effort to make this building more accessible. Suddenly it changed shape altogether.
--:-- Norma Johnson: People were coming to us and saying how much they enjoyed being part of a project that had a purpose. Weekly knitting groups have been meeting for months to create green squares which represent the leaves of a tree and there are thousands of them draped over long canes which stick out like branches from a 16-foot telescopic wooden trunk.
--:-- Cameron Angus Mackay: The local men's shed were given the task of building the structure. Here's volunteer Derek Alexander Hamilton.
--:-- Derek Alexander Hamilton: I thought it was a joke to build a knitted Christmas tree. But then when I was convinced it was going to be a true project, we had to decide how it was going to be done.
--:-- Cameron Angus Mackay: Word spread and soon knitting started arriving from England, Wales, Norway and the USA. The next thing it had spiralled, we had three knitting groups coming one evening, two mornings. We were so excited when we had the first hundred squares and then it just launched itself and they were coming from all over and at eight and a half thousand I stopped counting.
--:-- Alex Ritson: It was a story that caught the world's imagination a decade ago, the discovery of a four-year-old girl who'd survived almost two weeks in the Siberian wilderness after getting lost.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: Karina Chikitova was just four years old when she got lost in a bear and wolf infested forest in the Siberian wilderness. She had been following her father, who had no idea she was behind him.
--:-- Karina Chikitova: It's this that led to her nickname Mowgli, the protagonist of the Jungle Book who was separated from his human family as a baby and raised by a pack of wolves.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: But her dog didn't just keep Karina warm. Naida was also central to her discovery. After several days in the wilderness, it found its way back to their village and alerted rescuers to her rough location.
--:-- Karina Chikitova: When she was eventually found in the long grass, the rescuers were amazed that she was still alive.
--:-- Isabella Jewell: Ten years on, the now teenager appeared on Russian States TV for an interview. She says she has no memory of her time in the wilderness, but credits Nida with saving her.
--:-- Karina Chikitova: Over the last few years, Karina has won a child beauty pageant and joined a prestigious ballet school. When asked about her future plans, Carina says she hopes to one day become a doctor.
--:-- Alex Ritson: On the Happy Pod lately, we've been highlighting unsung local heroes around the world.
--:-- Alex Ritson: Stephen Fairhead in London walks for over two hours every day picking up rubbish and cleaning up. After ten years of doing it, he's caught local attention and is now being called a hero on social media.
--:-- Stephen Fairhead: I go out every day and pick the rubbish up, clean the park up. It's approximately 3.2 miles each time I walk around, and I do it three times every morning. And it just looks nice. You can see it when you walk up a hill, when you go the second time. You can see how clean it is.
--:-- Alex Ritson: And that's all from the Happy Pod for now. We'd love to hear about your happiest moments of 2024 from family events to global stories or any unusual plans you're making for the new year.
--:-- Alex Ritson: As ever, the address globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
--:-- Alex Ritson: This edition was mixed by Rob Fanner and the producers were Paul Day and Rachel Bulkeley.
--:-- Alex Ritson: The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritson. Until next time, goodbye.
--:-- Asma Khalid: America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
--:-- Asma Khalid: I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
