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The AIH Transcript for December 28, 2017

Hosts: Helen Mann and Jeff Douglas

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

HELEN MANN: Hello, I'm Helen Mann.

JEFF DOUGLAS: Good evening, I'm Jeff Douglas. This is As It Happens.

[Music: Theme]

JD: Tonight…

HM: Metres from the blast. A journalist in Kabul rushes to the scene of a deadly explosion only to find himself filming survivors as they were hit by a follow up explosion.

JD: A statistical tie. A Harvard undergrad breaks the code behind a 15th century Inca language system that used multicoloured knots to record what he says was the data from their census.

HM: Ah, the flush of youth. We check back in with Barney Smith, who at 96 decided to let a younger curator take over his second to none Texas toilet seat museum.

JD: Terrifying sight. A rebroadcast of our feature interview with Emma Jane Kirby, the author of The Optician of Lampedusa, about an Italian optician who woke up one morning to find capsized migrants drowning by his boat.

HM: Eyeopening. Ms. Kirby recounts the opticians realization after rescuing as many survivors as he could that he could no longer ignore the plight of a population in flight.

JD: And…Traffic jam. A Halifax bus driver fills the time while his passengers climb aboard by taking song requests and then accompanying them on his ukulele. As It Happens: Thursday edition. Radio that knows idling hands are the diva’s playthings.

[Music: Theme]

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Part 1: Kabul Attack, Inca Writing Study, Encore: Toilet Seat Museum

Kabul Attack

Guest: Rateb Noori

JD: In an instant a crowded room in Kabul Afghanistan turned into a scene of carnage. It happened around 10:00 a.m. this morning. More than 150 people had gathered in the basement of a Shia cultural centre to mark the anniversary of the Soviet invasion. A suicide bomber walked into that room and detonated a bomb. Two more explosions followed. The attack left 41 dead and more than 80 people injured. ISIS has claimed responsibility. Rateb Noori is the Afghan journalist who rushed to the scene when he saw the news. We reached Mr. Noori in Kabul.

HM: Rateb Noori, where were you when the first explosion happened?

RN: Well, when the first explosion happened I was in my office and I saw on social media that the explosion happened, and so as usual we the rushed to the place. And on the way when I was going to the place the second one happened, and when I reached there the third one actually happened in front of my eyes which was like 50 to 60 metres away from me.

HM: Can you tell us what you saw when that third explosion occurred?

RN: When the third explosion happened I had actually zoomed in my camera to some people who were the rescued ones from the attacked place, and they were coming out of that place and suddenly the third one happened it was quite loud. I escaped but what actually hurt me so much I couldn’t see those people anymore. When I saw the recorded video, so they're coming and the explosion exactly happened in front of them. The only thing I could see, there was a woman and a man, and the man was trying to kind of help the woman to come out of that place probably, she was quite panicked scared, of course. And we were away from the explosion. I was so scared I could actually imagine how terrible scared those people were.

HM: What have you learned about the location for these explosions, what is there?

RN: Well, it's a culture foundation, so people were there on a special occasion and the speeches were going on and some people had gathered there. That's their target minority Shiite community.

HM: It's a Shia cultural centre?

RN: Yeah, it's a Shia cultural centre.

HM: There was also a news agency above that, is that right?

RN: Yeah, that's true. It's called Afghan Voice news agency but the journalists were injured, but I think the main target was the cultural centre.

HM: I know you got closer to the centre after you returned to the scene. Can you describe what you saw around the building?

RN: Usually in those kind of attacks you will always see people who are concerned about their family members attending such occasions, weeping, crying, screaming and searching for their lost ones and trying to contact them — and it was the same scenario here also. And, you know, there were some remnants of the stuff that they're carrying, like shoes, bags, books notebooks — those kind of things. So, you know, they were stained with blood. And some of them were killed, some of them were injured. So all that remnants that had actually remained there, it was either from the dead ones or the injured ones who escaped the place.

HM: This is the seventh suicide bomb attack claimed by Islamic State in Kabul since October. How are Afghans reacting to these increased attacks on these sites?

RN: Well, as an Afghan, I would say that the public opinion is that there is no difference between ISIS and Taliban, because the strategy and the policy, of course, ISIS has is very similar to what the Taliban had. But the fact that they're attacking sects, especially Shias, is highlighting but they also take a lot of places where the Sunnis have gatherings. And I think now they're just trying to grab attention and kind of announce their presence in Afghanistan and in the major cities. And that could be one of the strategy for now, but of course, in between these attacks they’ve attacked several Shia community places also.

HM: There are some that are theorized that the ISIS is trying to drive a wedge — create divisions between Shia and Sunni communities in Afghanistan. Is that having an effect, is it working at all?

RN: Well, that's as we saw in Syria and Iraq, that was their strategy to kind of provide the grounds for the sectarian war. But as of now as long as we consider Afghanistan as their next target, Afghans have always solidarity. And as of now we don't actually see the biggest effect of the sectarian war in this country and they have always been together, they have stood up for each other. And even today, you know, most of the Sunnis to the hospital to donate blood and show kind of solidarity and the attack was condemned by the Sunni community and Sunni religious leaders. And also it was condemned by Shia leaders stating that such attacks will never create any kind of gap between Sunni and Shia communities.

HM: You mentioned earlier how frightened you were when you witnessed that explosion. You've had some hours now to process what you saw and I know you've witnessed things before. How are you dealing with all of this? How are you coping right now?

RN: Well, you know, for me like today's explosion was quite big because it just happened in front of my eyes. And I still have some problems with my ears because they're hurting a little bit due to the very loud sound of the explosion. But, you know, living in a country like this and growing up in civil war and then experiencing all these attacks and things going on by the insurgents and different parties in this country, for me even though we have kind of gotten used to the situation, but still it's not very easy to not think about these attacks. At some point you have this feeling of very pessimistic future and you are never happy with what's going on in this country. And today after the attack happened at some point I was thinking, ‘What if I was very close to the scene?’ I would never know whether I was alive or dead or injured. It's somehow affecting psychologically and especially, you know, when you're done with your work, when you file footage, when you write the story and then when you go to bed, you start thinking about all these things and it actually moves you for quite a couple of days. But then you forget — which has become very normal.

HM: I am sad to hear it. I really appreciate you taking us through what you witnessed today and sharing your feelings with us as well. Thank you very much.

RN: Thank you. Thank you.

HM: Rateb, thank you. Bye, bye.

RN: Bye.

JD: Rateb Noori is an Afghan journalist who rushed to the scene of the suicide bombing today in Kabul. We reached him in Kabul. For more on the story go to our website: www.cbc.ca/aih.

[Music: Sombre Guitar]

Inca Writing Study

Guest: Manny Medrano

JD: Manny Medrano did not spend his school break sleeping in or doing body shots with his buddies. The Harvard undergrad was too busy making a huge archaeological breakthrough. Mr. Medrano was studying khipus, which are knotted ropes that the Inca used to record information back in the 15th and 16th centuries. Archaeologists knew the knots had a meaning, but they were not sure what that meaning was. But Mr. Medrano appears to have cracked the khipus code. His findings will be published in the journal Ethnohistory next month. And we reached Manny Medrano in Sacramento.

HM: Manny Medrano, you are not an archaeology major, so how did you get interested in studying the meaning behind these Inca knots?

MM: So, I've had an innate interest in archaeology and looking at the past since I was a young child, and I don't know where it came from, but even since the youngest ages I remember my first love, which was Egyptian archaeology. I was fascinated by the mystery of the pyramids and the pharaohs and that sort of innate interest is something that I allowed to blossom once I got to Harvard and has fuelled sort of my new studies.

HM: What is it that the professor said that got to sort of on this track?

MM: It's amazing how coincidences happen because in the last lecture before the spring break of my first year, the professor brought up a set of these artifacts in his lecture and basically told the class that we have this group of artifacts that I think might be a link between numbers and language and could surpass the numerical artifacts that we have now to perhaps even go beyond that to encode language. And I was already working as his research assistant at the time, and I approached him after class asking him if he'd like to put in a few hours loking for patterns and behold something appeared to me over spring break my first year of college.

HM: So what is an Inca knot anyway?

MM: Well, an Inka knot and khipus were knotted string devices used by the Inca empire that encoded numerical and narrative information. So this ranged from census and tax-record data, as well as perhaps narrative stories, Inca social customs and lifeways.

HM: And what did they look like? You say they're like strings, are they attached to something?

MM: Yes, I would picture a horizontal string from which up to hundreds, sometimes, of other strings came down. And on these strings that hang down, imagine a stretched out string mop of a sort of similar material. Each of those cords with a series of knots tied on it and those knots have meanings.

HM: So it was understood they had meaning, that they were imparting some kind of information, but you were kind of stuck, I guess, the researchers were stuck on more specific meaning. What did you discover to change that?

MM: That's exactly right. For about 100 years researchers have understood that many of these artifacts — there’s about a thousand of these khipus still in existence today — encoded mathematical data. So kind of like an ancient Excel spreadsheet. But what is just emerging now, and the research that I've been working on, is to try to show that perhaps these artifacts, through the colors of the cords using locally available dyes, might have actually encoded the names of tax payers. So these weren't anonymous spaces that we're faced with. Instead, what we're perhaps looking at, is a census document in strings and knots that could encode and identify and categorize these villagers.

HM: Now there's been very little in terms of the record of these Indigenous communities who were basically overtaken by Spanish invaders. The Spanish had some data that helped you interpret what you were looking at with these knots. How did that work?

MM: That's exactly right. The Spanish we have today a set of hundreds of documents from after the Spanish conquest beginning in 1532, which of course changes the Inca empire forever. And what we've been looking for, in those roughly 100 years of research, has been to try to find a match, a Rosetta khipu if you will, between a Spanish document and a set of these knotted artifacts in order to try to make matches. And in this case since 2012 or so, what Professor Urton and I think we have found, is for once a match between one of these documents and a set of these artifacts.

HM: Was there a eureka moment for you when you saw that link?

MM: There was. I think back to my first year of college over spring break. I was sitting alone in my dorm room right off of Harvard Yard and my roommates all gone home for the break to visit with their families and I had chosen to stay on campus for just those few days. But needless to say it was an exciting moment because there appeared a correlation that seemed too strong to be random. It was a moment of great discovery, but also a moment of realization that these studies and this field is something that's so much larger than me or any single person because it's really about reversing and pushing back against the course of history.

HM: What did you find that told you about the Inca class system and the names of some of the people whose records you were looking at?

MM: In the Spanish document that we had from 1670, we have a list of names of 132 Indigenous villagers in this valley in coastal Peru. You know, we have Joses and Felipes, these names are listed out in the Spanish document. But we also have the set of the actual knotted streams that we think goes along with it. So the matching game that was happening here was to try to count and to graph how many Filipes are there, how many Joses, and then to see if there's a match between that and some form of the construction of these khipus. And what we think it is, is the colours that were used.

HM: Archaeologists have been, as you pointed out, looking at this for a very long time and yet you’re one of the key players in breaking this. What is it about your skill set that allowed you to do this that maybe others weren't able to see things that you saw?

MM: First of all with a lot of guidance from Professor Gary Urton, who's the chair of Harvard anthropology department. He's been instrumental throughout this whole process in guiding me, and in fact, helping me be more open to forming a new hypotheses, because needless to say, this didn't start as a eureka moment, it never really does fall out of sky.

HM: Do you feel a personal connection to the work itself?

MM: I absolutely do. I think that anthropology and the archaeological discipline are known to have been founded in the study of other people’s culture, by researchers who historically were part of a conquering class. And this is especially true for the Incas as with many other civilizations. My heritage is Mexican American, and while I'm not Peruvian, nor do I claim to be Peruvian, I do think it's important to have researchers in these spaces that look more like the people that are studied.

HM: Mr. Medrano, congratulations on your discovery.

MM: Thank you so much for your time.

HM: Nice to talk to you. Take care, bye, bye.

JD: Manny Medrano as an undergraduate student at Harvard and the lead author on a new study on the Inca people. If you'd like to see more photographs of their key khipus head to our website: www.cbc.ca/aih.

[Music: Whimsical Orchestra]

Ukulele Bus Driver

JD: He'll play you Wheels on the Bus while he's at the wheel of his bus. A Halifax Transit bus driver has found a unique way to brighten his passenger's day — by playing his ukulele. Peter Stevenson has been playing uke for the past 10 years and now he serenades commuters when waiting at bus stops. Not course while he's driving. Mr. Stevenson spoke with the CBC's Laura Fraser about how people react to his musical interludes.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER STEVENSON: There was one Saturday route where I would show up and there was a Saturday route that was a lot of stops and there was a lot of waiting because there are not a lot of passengers. So I had one passenger that once she realized that I would play it when I stopped, she would call out for me to play, like ‘Hey play that place a Mr. Bus Driver’ or something like that. So every Saturday she would get on and then I’d feel like I have to actually play something. You know, this is something I can do that and that relaxes me. So, you know, you check your e-mail at a stop or something like that you don't always get a great e-mail or a text message or, you know, those things. Some of those things add more anxiety to your day. But if you're just playing a little bit of music, you know, it kind of quiets my brain down and allows me to, you know, just relax a little bit. For the ukulele it was also just so portable and it has a different sound, it has a very happy-go-lucky sound. It's kind of hard to make that sad, you know, even if you play this chord it is still kind of happy.

JD: A very uplifting little instrument. That was the ukulele playing Halifax bus driver, Peter Stevenson, speaking with CBC's Laura Fraser. And here's a little taste of what Halifax commuters may hear when they get on Mr. Stevenson’s bus.

SOUNDCLIP

UKULELE PLAYING

Encore Toilet Seat Museum

Guest: Barney Smith

JD: 1,322 — that is an impressive number of items for any collector to accumulate. It is especially impressive in Bernie Smith’s case because the items he collects are toilet seats. In October we heard that Mr. Smith had decided to sell the Toilet Seat Art Museum. So we decided to call him at the museum, which at that point was housed in his San Antonio, Texas garage. As we revisit some of our more memorable interviews of the year, here is Barney Smith in conversation with Carol back in October.

SOUNDCLIP

CO: Hello, Barney?

BARNEY SMITH: Hello there.

CO: How are you?

BS: So you’re the host of the show?

CO: I'm the host of the show.

BS: Oh good! I’m glad to talk to you about my toilet seat collection.

CO: But now Barney, why are you selling your collection?

BS: Because I'm 96-years-old, and I’m getting ready to leave this whole world.

CO: No!

BS: I've seen a lot of changes in my 96 years.

CO: You know and some of those changes are actually on toilet seat covers aren't they? That you painted.

BS: Oh yes, in fact, my wife and I’s — I've got a last anniversary that we celebrated on our 74th wedding anniversary — I’ve got that on a toilet seat. That’s the last one that I put.

CO: What’s on that toilet seat?

BS: It's just me kissing her goodbye.

CO: On the toilet seat?

BS: On the toilet seat.

CO: Well, how many toilet seats do you have in your museum?

BS: 1,322.

CO: You've got on some of these… I've got pictures. You got license plate….

BS: I need a bottle of water to drink.

CO: All right… good idea.

WOMAN IN BACKGROUND: Did you hang up on her?

CO: [Sound: Laughter] No, no, I'm still here now.

BS: Now I’ve got it on the speaker.

CO: OK Barney, I'm still here. Now you’ve got license plates, you got tributes to all the states and to Canadian provinces too.

BS: I’ve got five of the ones out of Canada the ones — the ones that I could get my hands on the license plates. I put them all with Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and I’ve got about a half-dozen of them.

CO: I think you got Manitoba too.

BS: I’ve got the Yukon.

CO: Yukon, right. And so you've got those on your toilet seats. But there's a really weird one you got. It looks like a swarm of hornets and a hornets’ nest.

BS: Hornets’ Nest is the one that the yellow jacket did to little brown hornet and it stung me on top of her head. I said I’m going to put you on my toilet seat. So I put a wasps’ nest on the toilet seat.

CO: Now can anyone… I mean can anyone actually sit on these toilet seats and do their business?

BS: Can they do what?

CO: Can you sit on the toilet seat? Can you actually use one of these toilet seats?

BS: The hinges are taken off. You may fall through the toilet if you sit on a plaque. I call them plaques.

CO: Right.

BS: They’re made out of toilet seats, but they’ve got the hinges off.

CO: Barney, why toilet seats? I mean why not dinner plates or doors or something? Why are you painting on toilet seats?

BS: Because I’m a master plumber, retired.

CO: You were a plumber?

BS: I’m a genuine electrician, retired. I’m a minister, retired. And I'm so tired because I'm almost gone. I tell you, it won’t be long until I’m gone. I got to get rid of my toilet seat collection. I've got 1,322 toilet seats, and they're all catalogued. In fact, I've got the book right here in my hand now. Number one is my dog tags. Number 500 is “Dogs” that's the one that I was supposed to quit, but I didn’t. I’ve been in the doghouse ever since.

CO: You told your wife you're going to quit at 500?

BS: Yes. That's my “Dogs.”

BS: I’m hitting the button again! I am back on the speakerphone.

CO: OK.

BS: I’m going to lose you there. I can’t hold the telephone up to my ear without hitting a button or two. It’s a little, portable phone.

CO: Barney, I’m going to let you go. But just tell me what does it cost? What does someone have to come up with in order to buy your collection?

BS: I'm going to let that be whoever is interested in purchasing it.

CO: OK. Well, we'll see if anybody in Canada or one of our listeners wants 1000 toilet seats with your art on it.

BS: 1,322 toilet seats hanging in my museum.

CO: Exactly. All right, we'll tell everybody how they can see your toilet seats, Barney. And I hope you have many more years ahead of you, in spite of what you're saying. And it’s good to talk to you. Thanks.

BS: Well, I'm so glad to get to talk with you. I want you to come and see me. What part of Canada are you from?

CO: I'm in Toronto. I'm in Toronto

BS: Toronto.

CO: Yeah.

BS: We went to Toronto and went on the train. And we went right underneath the hotel, and got on the escalator, and right up in the lobby of Toronto that is the Queen Elizabeth is it?

CO: That's in Montreal. Anyway Barney, it's great to talk to you. And good luck with your museum.

BS: Alrighty. Thank you so much. Give me a call some time and see as things going.

CO: All right, we'll do that.

BS: Alrighty. Have a good time now.

CO: You too. Bye bye.

BS: Bye bye.

JD: That was our October conversation with the inimitable Barney Smith. A San Antonio, Texas resident, who was at that time, trying to sell his massive toilet seat art collection. And we did reach out to him again today for an update. Still hasn't sold the collection. He says he's still waiting for the right offer. But there is a book about the collection that is set to be released in May and Mr. Smith is working on another piece — a Star Trek themed toilet seat adorned with a portrait of Spock. And we do have more on this — more of Barbey Smith on our website: www.cbc.ca/aih. I love that guy.

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Part 2: Encore: The Optician of Lampedusa

The Optician of Lampedusa

JD: More than 2,500 migrants have died in the Mediterranean this year. That is one person dead for every 50 who made it safely to the European shores. Emma Jane Kirby has described the waters between Libya and the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa as a quote “watery graveyard.” Ms. Kirby is a reporter with the BBC. She has been covering the migrant crisis since its early days. She is also the author of The Optician of Lampedusa. It is about an Italian optician who rescued dozens of shipwrecked migrants off the coast of Lampedusa on October 3^rd of 2013. We interviewed Emma Jane Kirby about the book in April of this year. Here's an encore presentation of that conversation.

SOUNDCLIP

CO: Emma Jane, first of all, can you just tell us what happened that day off the coast of Lampedusa. This is October the 3rd 2013.

EMMA JANE KIRBY: The day before on October the 2^nd, 2013, we know that a boat full of migrants, more than 400 came, left Misrata in Libya and made its way towards Europe, drifted towards Lampedusa. And we know that in the small hours of the 3rd of October they were so close to Lampedusa that they could see car headlights on the island, the survivors have told us they could see the car headlights on the island driving around. And they decided to signal that they needed help. So they cut the engine. Unfortunately that meant the billage pump wasn't working so the boats began to flood with water. So they lit a towel and some flares to try and attract attention. Unfortunately they caught the boat caught fire, there was petrol on the deck, everybody ran to avoid the flames and it caused the boat to tip over.

CO: How many people were on the boat?

EJK: There were more than 400 people on that boat. We know that 368 of them didn't make it.

CO: And so they all, did they all end up in the water. Everybody ended up in the water. Of course women and children on those boats are always asked to stay below deck. And we know from the migrants who survived, that the women and children had been up on the deck because they wanted to see the excitement of the lights of Europe, The New Promised Land and they had gone back down below deck to dress themselves up, to tidy themselves up so that they would look good and clean and fresh for their new arrival and the start of their new lives. And of course, when the boat tipped over they were trapped and they didn't have a chance.

CO: The man, this optician. How does he enter the picture?

EJK: So Carmine Menna decided at the beginning of October that he was very tired and frankly he hadn't had much of a summer holiday. He needed a bit of a break. He decided to have a little weekend away with his wife sailing and six friends. One of his friends had an old boat. And off they went on the boat had a great night the night before and the optician wasn't sleeping very well. He woke up and heard the seagulls screaming as he thought over a lucky catch and he couldn't get back to sleep. It was annoying him the noise. So he came up on deck and then he started to hear those seagulls getting very loud and he was very perturbed by the seagulls. Other people on the boat woke up as well, came up to see him and said “What is that noise? He said, “I'm sure it's just seagulls. It's just seagulls isn’t it?” And they said “We don't think it is seagulls.” So they upped anchor and they moved towards that terrible noise. And as they got closer they saw black shapes in the water. The optician at first thought it was fish. I thought the black shapes were fish, but then he saw that these fish had arms and legs and faces and he realized that the sea was boiling with drowning people. And Carol, he was on a boat I should say, it was a small boat. It had a maximum capacity of 10. There were already eight of them on that boat. And there were hundreds of drowning people in the water.

CO: How did they respond to that when they saw those people. What did they do? They knew immediately that they would help. The optician's first thought, he remembers, and it stuck with me when I spoke to him in that interview a couple of years ago when I first met him. He didn't say “I wondered what do I do? How do I save them?” He said “How do I save them all?” Because he realized right from the start that he was never going to be able to save them all. They couldn't, there were just too many of them. So what they did they made a deal with each other that they had to move towards the groups of people that they could see rather than individuals and pull as many people up as they could at once. But remember these people had been in the water a very long time. By that time they'd been in the water several hours. They were exhausted. They had drunk seawater, they’d drunk gasoline. They were covered in petrol and gasoline which made them incredibly slippy to try and pull up. And the optician remembers the pull of that first young man that he pulled from the water. He still remembers the feel of that man's hand in his, grasping it and feeling the bones of that man the young man's hand cracking against his. And suddenly for him, as he touched that young man, he realized that the migrants the migration crisis was real and it was something which now absolutely concerned him.

CO: What you're describing, that moment when he pulled that man, held his hand and pulled him in, is something that is so striking. And we’ve made note of it here just so I could read it to you, I can read it to our listeners. This is the passage as you describe it of the optician. “He'd never held anyone's hand so tightly before. The intimacy of the gesture with a naked total stranger, it made him wince. Yet when the force of the pull had flung the man up against his bare chest, he'd felt something strangely primeval stirred in him something almost like love.” Why do you think it was such an intimate experience for him?

EJK: Because this was life and death. He realized that, all of a sudden, you know, he was the only person that these migrants had to help them.

CO: He and his friends went into quite an operation it was almost like a triage. And the wives of the men who were on the boat were taking care of those who came up on the surface after the optician and the other men were able to get them in.

They, there's one passage in which that one of the wives gives one of the refugees a shirt to wear that she wears almost like a diaper. So many of these people they're pulling out of the water had lost their clothing and they're naked and they’re, even though they've almost died, they feel shame. So they're trying to help them cover up and. And so they become all involved in something just so extraordinarily intimate as well. And this brings us to the most important theme in the book is that they enter the lives of these people, they become instantly intimate with them. What is it that does that? Why do you think they were so drawn to them?

EJK: I think it's curious, because as I say, the optician just, though he had felt pity for them, he just hadn't seen them as his problem before now, these migrants. Because you know, what could he do to help them. He was just an optician and suddenly he was their only chance of life. He saw people for the first time in desperate need, the most desperate need of all. Desperate to stay alive. And I've met some of the people, a couple of the migrants that he managed to save, and they felt something very very strong too. Because they remember that when they were pulled from the water, it wasn't just that they were helping them and that they were saving their lives, it was the crew, the optician and his friends was sobbing and they were crying. They absolutely felt the pain and the suffering of the migrant people who were in the water.

CO: What happened to that young man.

EJK: The young man with the T-shirt that wore it as a diaper? He went to Sweden. He is waiting for his asylum papers to come through in Sweden. Most of those who survived, the optician managed to save 47 people on that boat made for 10. And every year, they meet up with a few of the survivors, and the first year that they met up with them, they were, they came back to Lampedusa, some of the survivors. That young man was among them and the first thing he did was pull out of his bag that pink T-shirt. So it had meant so much to him as well.

CO: And there was only one woman that they were able to pull into the boat. What was her story?

EJK: We don't know her story. We can imagine it because we know that many of the women who make the passage from Libya to Europe have no money and they are beaten and raped as part of the fee if you like, to get their passage. It's thought that she too is now in Sweden and is safe. Other women were saved by other boats who eventually came on scene, a fisherman's boat. It's a wonderful story that I found out only last October, that one woman was found drowned in the water and a fisherman was heaping bodies onto his boat, dead bodies. And when they came into port, a doctor came and was zipping up the body bags and as he zipped up her body bag, he thought he felt something, some sign of life and he gave her the kiss of life and she was indeed alive. And I saw her this October and she's pregnant.

CO: Good heavens. What a story. And it's these boats these fishing boats and the optician and his friends, how many were they able to pull out of the water?

EJK: They managed to save 47. 47 people on a boat made just 10. And if you can imagine how low that boat would sunk into the water, I've seen a photograph of it actually taken by the Coast Guard when they finally arrived to help. And they’re low in the water that the vendors are skimming the surface. The boat was out of control. They knew that the boat was out of control and that at any moment they too could have flipped over. But they had to save lives. They had to keep doing it because how do you turn your back when there are still hands waving? How do you choose which hand to take? If he took your hand Carol he wouldn't have time to take mine. They were in the most impossible situation and I think the thing that haunts them all the most is that when the Coast Guard arrived, they gave them the order that they have to turn and go back to port. And of course there were other boats by then in the water with the search and rescue operation but they could still see hands, they were still looking for people and they were forced to turn their backs and turn around. And I know that the optician is haunted by that, by the fact he wants everybody to know that he wanted to go back. They all wanted to turn back and help again.

CO: Emma Jane, in this book, you also describe as you've mentioned earlier that there were other people you profiled, including a grave digger who gives small wooden crosses to the immigrants in a holding center where the people are taken, the survivors are taken once they're found. And this is also a real person you profiled. Can you tell us about him?

EJK: Yes. There were two. There was the grave digger who has the dreadful task of burying those who don't make it. Not very many he can bury now because Lampedusa is a very small place. And of course the mausoleums are getting packed. But he told me, you know, how he was just used to corpses, that was his life, you know, he did it all every day and he was used to death. And then as I talked to him I realized that actually, he wasn't, he wasn't used to it at all. He was almost in tears and he was so angry that this was happening, that he was burying unnamed people all the time. That nothing had been done to stop people coming and drowning in these dreadful boats. And the other person you mentioned is the carpenter of Lampedusa who is a real man Francesco Tuccio, a lovely wonderful man with an incredible faith. And he had the idea of making a cross. It was Good Friday. He made a cross from the washed up shipwrecked boats that float up in Lampedusa and he made a cross from those, from that shipwrecked boat one of those boats, with the nails still in it, very crude and hung it above the altar. And it made such an impact on his parish that many other parishes then asked if they could have a cross. I think almost every parish now in Sicily has one. He also gave for free, he made little crosses for the migrants to have themselves as a sort of symbol of their redemption and hope and new life. And one of our listeners back in London heard that story and was so charmed and taken by it, she was a curator in the British Museum and she secretly commissioned one of those crosses for the British Museum without telling her boss, something she's not allowed to do. And when it arrived from Francesco Tuccio, she dumped it on her director's boss, her boss’s desk. And she said “This is living history. This is what the British Museum should be collecting” and the outgoing director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor made it his last acquisition for the museum. It now stands very proudly in the British Museum.

CO: You know most of these migrants who were pulled out of the water, the ones who didn't make it, are buried in unmarked graves or without knowing who they are, who is in those graves and I know that this has become something that Europeans are very conscious of.

We’re going to play a short clip of an interview we did in April of 2015 with George Vella. He's the Maltese Foreign Minister. And we're just talking with him here about a memorial service that was held on Malta for hundreds of migrants who drowned off that coast. And here is George Vella:

SOUNDCLIP

GEORGE VELLA: It was very sad but it was, there was a service officiate, there was a service that was officiated by an imam, and also by a Catholic bishop. The most impressing thing was that they were actually attending a funeral service of people who didn't know. There was nothing on the coffin but the number. We speak of the Unknown Soldier. But I think we can have an equally equally significant notion of the unknown migrant. When the people are down at the bottom of the sea, we will never know whether they were males or females, we don't know whether what they looked like, how old they were. I mean it's just one big enigma.

CO: That’s George Vella, and Emma Jane, he's speaking as you said, he’s the foreign minister of Malta. He's referring to the Mediterranean as the grave of the unknown immigrant. And there were efforts, European efforts Italian efforts to try and mitigate the situation, try and help people, try and step up the efforts. What actually has been done on the Mediterranean to deal with the people coming across in these boats?

EJK: Let me just say first of all that that extract you just played from the Maltese Foreign Minister is very very poignant to me because, as soon as I finished writing this book, I'd taken some time away from my day job as a BBC journalist. The first report I did afterwards happened to be in Milan in a place called Lebanof. It’s a pathology lab where they are still trying to identify the 368 victims of the optician's disaster. And I will never, ever, ever forget being handed a book of photographs, the kind of photographs albums that you and I have at home you know, of our family snapshots, and in it were the faces of all the drowned, all the people I'd been writing about, all the people that the optician hadn't managed to save. I think it's incredibly difficult to stop people coming. There are so many wars people are fleeing. They’re fleeing hunger, they're fleeing poverty, they're fleeing war, they're fleeing, in Eritrea, a military dictatorship. And it's very, very difficult to stop people coming. Of course after the optician's tragedy, the horror that this had happened so close to the shores of Europe, less than a kilometer. The Italians launched their Mare Nostrum program, which is a search and rescue program using the Italian navy. But there was huge criticism from European partners that this was encouraging more people to come and the Italians couldn't afford the cost of it themselves and had to abandon the program. There are many other programs, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières, have marvelous search and rescue missions themselves. But the Mediterranean is an enormous, enormous ocean. Who can patrol all of it? And while there is still unhappiness and war in the world, of course more people are going to come and risk their lives.

CO: But how effective have those efforts been. And we're talking about the Italian governments the initiation of the Mare Nostrum, which was one search and rescue operation and Operation Triton I think was the one that replaced it. But the criticism of it has been that it's been more preoccupied with trying to protect borders to prevent people from making these crossings than in rescuing those who were in the water as you say. They're not going to stop as long as they're fleeing from desperate situations.

EJK: There is of course a lot of criticism that European countries are not doing enough to protect migrants and are more concerned with protecting their borders. The Operation Triton that you speak about is the Frontex’s operation. Frontext is the European’s border agency force.

What you should know about from Texas and it doesn't have enormous amounts of funding and it doesn't actually have any operational equipment of its own. It doesn't have any of its own ships. It doesn't have any of its own helicopters or planes. It relies on the generosity of other member states to lend them that equipment for a couple of months. I have been on a search and rescue mission with Triton and I can say that they are extremely serious about trying to rescue people. I went with an Icelandic crew who were operating Operation Triton at the time, and we were out at sea for 36 hours in huge seas, four to five metre waves. I've never been so sick in my life. So you can imagine what the migrants go through on those tiny little boats. But of course, you know the pressure is coming with this wave of populism that we're seeing across Europe as well, that people should be stopped from coming to Europe rather than they should arrive and then we deal with the problem. There is of course enormous pressures on countries which are the rival countries like Greece and Italy, Sicily, to deal with these people once they arrive. Where do you put them?

CO: I’m speaking with Emma Jane Kirby, a reporter with BBC Radio, who has written a very striking book dealing with the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. The book is called The Optician of Lampedusa. Emma Jane, I want to return to the idea of empathy which is an important theme in your book. And you just touched on it here with where do you put them? Where do you where do these people go? There are, this optician suddenly finds himself intimate with these people and that's what brings him into their world and realizes their plight. What is required? What is it that, how do people come across into that area of saying these are us. These are brothers and sisters, these are these are citizens of the world. We need to help them. And where is the line that they cross in order to become that? And who doesn't cross that line?

EJK: You'll notice, Carol, that in the book I never name Carmine Menna, the optician of Lampedusa. He's always called the optician. And I deliberately chose not to name him because I wanted him to be a sort of every man figure. I wanted us as readers to imagine ourselves in that boat. To put ourselves in the position that Carmine Menna found himself in. What would we feel, what would we do if we found ourselves in that situation? Because we know that other boats were on the water at the time and they chose to go past. They didn't stop. The optician's boats stopped and did all they could. They didn't save them all, they couldn't save them all, but they did what they could. And I think as soon as he had saved those people, and had seen their suffering, and had seen how ill they were, and how close to the end they were, and realized how precious their lives were. He needed to follow them, as did his friends, he needed to find out who they were, where they'd come from, whether they were going to be alright. He was terrified that actually, what he'd done is save them, yes, but save them into what kind of life? What kind of future? Because it wasn't going to be plain sailing. He knew that. They were going to be put in reception centers. It was going to take an enormous long time for them to be given asylum if they were given asylum and to start a new life. And he was, suddenly realized that you know, this was only the beginning of the journey for them.

CO: And just days after this shipwreck, there was another one with Syrians in it. And this was at a time as you describe in the book, many people in the region are like the optician. He is the every man. As they as they become and come in contact with these people, their sympathy, their empathy grows. But now this has been almost four years since that shipwreck. So how have things changed? Are Italians feeling that strong bond with them still?

EJK: It's very very interesting in Lampedusa. Because Lampedusa used to be a place which was full of tourists, particularly Italian tourists. And since the migration crisis began, since the Arab Spring we have seen, they have seen a huge drop off in the number of tourists who come. People don't want to come on holiday and you know that I've even been actually interviewing somebody when his phone rang, a hotel owner, his phone rang and a guest canceled on him because he said he was frightened of swimming in the sea and touching a dead body. So of course the island has lost huge amounts of tourism. And economically, that's very painful for many people. But I've very rarely met anybody in Lampedusa who says, you know they should all just get lost. I don't care about them. I think when you are in proximity to people, and you see their suffering, it's very difficult to not see them as they are, as human beings and to realize that they also have hopes and dreams and feel pain and are cold or hungry. Need laughter, need love. And almost everybody I've met on Lampedusa has had kind things to say, has have been empathetic.

CO: What effect has this had on you in covering this story?

EJK: I won't deny that I cry a lot covering these stories, but I think that's I think that's right. Nobody obviously wants their reporters to be crying and sobbing on air, but I get very emotional behind the scenes and I think that's right. Because these are real people and this is real suffering. And I think it's our job as reporters to tell the truth. And what I see is an awful lot of suffering. So I will always tell the truth.

I think you know the book has sometimes been described as an incredibly political book. That's true in so many ways, but in other words, in other ways it's very apolitical. You know we never know how the optician, for example, votes. There's no moral to this sort of modern day parable either. There's no Hollywood ending where the optician suddenly finds Jesus or renounces his old life to join a migrant NGO. He just returns to work, albeit with his eyes very much wide open. And I think that is why Carmine Menna agreed for me to write this book, because he's an incredibly private man. He doesn't like media attention. But you know what is an optician's job? An optician's professional job is to help us see clearly. And I think that's exactly what he wants to do with this book, to pass on the message. Open your eyes. You can be you know, pro-immigration. You can be anti-immigration. You can vote right. You can vote left. That doesn't matter. But who can really accept, who can close their eyes to the fact that so many thousands of people are drowning on Europe's doorstep?

CO: Emma Jane, thank you for opening our eyes as you have done through all of your reporting on the BBC, and thank you for speaking with us.

EJK: Thank you so much for having me.

JD: From April 2017, that was an encore presentation of our interview with BBC journalist Emma Jane Kirby the author of The Optician of Lampedusa.

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December 28, 2017 episode transcript

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