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Step One is a podcast about people striving to change their world – our world.

We tell you stories from the Bosch Alumni Network, a network of doers and thinkers connected across the globe, working toward positive change.

EPISODE 06 - I Hear My Train A Comin'

January 21, 2019

Haunted by a dead cow, Ben rides a small train through the Portugese countryside and into The Gardens of Listening where he hears about a plan to change the world.

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EPISODE 06 - I Hear My Train A Comin' – Transcript

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Episode 6 – I Hear My Train A Comin’

Introduction

This is STEP ONE

a podcast about people striving to change their world -- our world.

We tell you stories of the Bosch Alumni Network. A network of doers and thinkers connected across the globe working toward positive change.

From Berlin

I am Benjamin Lorch.

And today’s episode: I Hear My Train A Comin’

But before we dive into our story, we want to introduce you to the community this podcast is part of.

[Jingle]

It’s the Bosch Alumni Network, which consists of people who have been supported, in one way or another, by the Robert Bosch Foundation. The network is coordinated by the International Alumni Center, a think & do tank for alumni communities with social impact. The iac Berlin supports this podcast. If you want to know more about the power of networks, visit iac-berlin.org.

[Jingle]

Hey. You.

You listening?

I mean really listening?

What’s going on in your head right now? Are only listening to me… Or do you have some thoughts of your own?

OK, since you’re with me, I want you to check this out and try to really L I S T E N.

(pause)

I want you to meet Tiago. He’s going to tell us a story.

01 TIAGO VILLAGE

I grew up in a small village in Escapães right close to Santa Maria Da Feira where my father was born and my grandparents lived there.

...

My father used to tell me that he used the train to go to Oliveira de Mais to go to the commercial school where he studied when he was a kid.

(TRAIN SOUNDS

For me one of the most interesting stories that pictures quite well the time... He remembers that a cow was overrun by a train. Then the authorities came, the police came and they buried the cow for health issues. And the next day the cow the cow was already not there because along the line there was a several eh, a gypsy camp and obviously they took this opportunity. This is a whole cow! And they dig the cow. This is kind of stories that only happens in villages.

Tiago is an urban planner and historian. He likes to tell stories and to listen. Stories like the one of about the cow. These are kind of the local legends that bind people together in small towns, even if the stories – like all stories do – change over time.

The train has been an important part of Tiago’s life but today it’s not in the best of shape. It’s old and neglected, covered in graffiti and it’s rarely full of passengers. But Tiago, and a group of people close to him, want to revitalize the train and its stations and they think that stories, like the one about the cow, could play a central role in that effort.

(MUSIC)

Today we are going to find out how.

The train is here, let’s get on and begin our journey.

(TRAIN SOUNDS)

The rails we’re riding are called Vouga Line. They are named after the river which runs along. The tracks were laid in 1908, one hundred and ten years ago, before cars and modern highways came to the region. When it first opened, it ran over a 170-kilometer semicircle and linked the Portuguese countryside to the beaches where some people had summer houses. A seaside casino at Espinho was a big draw to a more urban, more cosmopolitan life, devoid of farms...and dead cows.

The line has just one set of tracks, so trains only ride in one direction at a time and the gage is smaller than most trains you might know but it is not exactly cute or touristy.

Today, parts of the line are closed so the system is a relic of what once was. It’s mostly used by students and older people without access to automobiles. Powered by diesel. Loud. Polluting. It’s not some sort of shiny, energetic train. Or not yet.

02 TIAGO DREAM

We have this very futuristic dream of having this railroad renovated and in better conditions to provide not only a good transportation system but also so that more visitors can see this territory -- to know its history, its culture because it fact it is quite interesting territory.

It is late November, and I am riding the train down to the sea together with Tiago, João and Karsten. Along the way we are going to pick Teja and Constança, two additional team members. All five of them, are urbanists and members of the Bosch Alumni Network, seeking to regenerate cities and regions through social engagement.

This is their second time meeting face-to-face in Portugal and they are riding the train together to lay down plans for their work. Their project is called Gardens of Listening - Back on Track and it aims at renovating that old train line and renewing a special bond: the old marriage between the train and the towns it passes through.

We roll through picturesque countryside, and towns such as

Oliveira de Azeméis, São João da Madeira and Feira. It is raining on and off as we pass farms and houses nestled into the hollows and valleys. Many of the houses are the first to be laid down here, long ago. Tiago explains to me that Roman roads first gave shape to the many settlements of the region.

Eventually we pull into São João da Madeira, a town of important industrial heritage, best known for its production of hats, footwear, pencils and a metalworking factory. As soon as we get off the train Karsten begins to take lots of photographs. Some graffiti sprayed on the wall of the station catches my attention.

03 GRAFFITI 00

Ben : Quiero Voga - - Read this to me.

Tiago : “Quiero Voginia ateo Porto”......The sentence means I want Voginia train up to Porto. So a proper connection between here and Porto.”..

It seems Tiago is not the only one with a dream to renew or expand the trainline. For people living in towns and villages in the countryside, having an improved rail train line would also invite tourists to the region.

São João da Madeira is small city of about 21000 inhabitants. It’s a pleasant, but a sleepy place. There is not much going on. We walk through a shopping mall built in the 80s, and it is depressingly defunct. The indoor market down the road is empty and quiet too. Tiago’s expression fluctuates between disappointment and hope.

04 TIAGO LET’S GO

Lets go over there . . .

After a short walk we enter an industrial area wedged into the cityscape. This is where a big metalworking factory called Oliva was located. It employed many in the region. This iron and steel works produced sewing machines, farming tools, even at one point small combustion engines.

05 TIAGO OLIVA

We are looking at the industrial complex of of Oliva that was one of the biggest metal factories in the country. They started to make taps and other parts for plumbing; metal tubes … but along the years and decades they started to do all kinds of materials like fridges, and sewing machines, even televisions, radios, all kinds of stuff. And in the 80s, like most of the industry, it started to collapse.

These goods were exported around the world, particularly to Portuguese colonies. But global competition encroached. The factories closed and jobs disappeared. The region went into economic decline.

Now it is quiet in the factory complex. The buildings are closed up. Some of the roofs have fallen in. The area is deindustrialized. Ghosted.

Through the rain Tiago leads us to one part of the complex that is lit up bright and refurbished. It’s the Oliva Creative Factory which houses a startup center, a few shops and a museum. Creative Factory has all the outward signs of hipster coolness: plywood furniture, a fixie bicycle leaning up against a black chalkboard wall, exposed brick and fancy vintage-style light bulbs but there is no one there when we visit...

TIAGO ARTISTS

If you had a really good train to bring visitors here and also to bring artists and to take artists to other places then you could actually create another kind of movement. Artists like to be on the edge of creation and normally it is in cities where they feel inspired, very few like to stay in small places... they feel trapped so

For Tiago and the group, the train could be a lifeline to connect the small villages to larger towns and cities. If it were modernized, it could draw for not only artists but also tourists to the region.

It is dark out as we leave the Creative Factory and walk down the hill to return to the train station.

07 TIAGO CLOCK

Tiago: And you can actually see the state of the building it’s abandoned, its closed, its derelict even the clock is completely destroyed…you can see only the numbers . . .”

This clock at the train station is a slightly terrifying sight - a clock face without hands. Unprotected by any glass, the white paint is weathered away. The numbers are still clear -- bold and black standing there, facing the tracks. They are strong and can be seen from a distance . . . but there is no time.

It is not that time has stopped --it’s just uncounted here.

Actually, it feels kind of symbolic. Not just this clock, but all of the clocks along the line are this way. Because the train brought precise industrial “railway time” to the region over 10 decades ago and now these clocks no longer measure the time or set the pace for the people here.

At the train station in São João da Madeira, there are only few people, waiting for the train. No one is talking to each other. They look to me like a collection of glowing blue ghosts with their faces each illuminated by their phones. Everyone is looking at their phone. Nobody is talking to each other. They are standing there, alone together.

Tiago and his team want to change this. The way they see it, improved train service could provide more than just transportation for people in the region. It could change the way people relate to one another, the way they talk and listen to each other -- the way they engage with the community that surrounds them.

But, how?

(music transition)

It’s Thursday now. The Back on Track Team boards the train and heads to the coastal city of Espinho. And this day also happens to be the 110th birthday of the train. As we ride the train, something unexpected happens.

08 TEJA MUSIC STORY 1

So we board and look, There is this guy! With a accordion. Ah, What a lovely accordion. I am completely amazed by looking at this instrument.

This is Teja, a member of the team and expert on the renovation of cultural heritage sites. At that moment, she is sitting next to Karsten who tells her he was in Romania just last week, and he got invited to a birthday party, he learned a song. So he start to sing. And the guy with the hat..

And the guy, from this musical group turns…

Oh! Romanian! this is Romanian! And they start talking. And so Karsten immediately starts interacting with him. And the guy starts playing. We sing, we dance. Karsten gets up! and he starts waving and dancing and everything. The guy from the musical group is constantly saying thank you madam, God Bless You.

Karsten goes to the front to maybe introduce, to explain to the people because they are startled. They pretend they don’t see us. That we are not there. What is going on? Yes.

(MUSIC TAPE OF SLIGHTLY WILD ACCORDION MUSIC)

Somehow no one the train really seems to care what is going on. They stay focused on their mobile phones while we carry on with the musicians sharing a little bottle of local brandy that appeared out of nowhere. There are some smiles among the people but we, the outsiders; and the musicians are really the only people engaged and enjoying the scene.

When Karsten stops the accordion player to publicly explain that this day -- this very day -- is the birthday of the trainline....some people smirk but no one really seems to care.

Karsten

Do you know about this?

Today is the birthday of this train.

Constança Translates

Disconnection and disengagement is of course not specific to this region. Listening to people, and especially listening to people at length to really understand what they are saying is just not something we – well, on a global scale -- are very good at doing these days.

Would you agree?

To find out more, I Googled some stuff.

(** Sound of typing **)

“Short-en-ing at-ten-tion spans”

Hmmm...OK, here we go.

So according to a research published by Microsoft in 2015, our attention spans have dropped in just the span of the past 15 years. In 2000, people were able to stay on task for an average of 12 seconds.

But, in 2015 it was measured to be, on average, just 8.25 seconds. Eight and a half seconds is less than that of the everyday goldfish, which clocks in at an attention span of a whopping full 9 seconds.

These findings have been disputed but

the thing is -- a good story takes more than 8 or 9 seconds to tell and a productive conversation certainly takes much longer than that. Like that cow story that we listened to at the beginning? It lasted at least a minute. And so often we don’t seem interested in taking that much time to fully listen to each other.

As Karsten puts it, it is listening without connecting.

09 KARSTEN LISTENING

Mostly the people around us are listening to get answers and not to understand. Its is just answering. It is not listening, it is not understanding, it’s just exchanging snippets

And I really, really suffer with this because I think to understand things, to understand one another's opinions or needs or wishes, you have – first you have to kisten to listen

Karsten, in contrast, has developed his own way of getting into conversations, with people when he visits places -- just as he did on the train.

10 KARSTEN ENCOUNTERS

So, when I go to a place I have never been before.

I never research anything about it. So I am just, this is a white sheet of paper. And then I am in the position to need help for everything. I have to ask everyone for help. And that brings me a bit under the eyeline of the locals and so they can help me and then we can have an encounter. And I have to create some encounters because I have to ask for everything.

He looks and he explores directly -- looking and being looked at, listening, talking, looking and listening again.

But is this the approach of creating encounters the right one for everyone -- even for the team of the Back On Track Project?

Riding the train again, Tiago and Karsten explore this important question about how to engage the people of the region and talk with them.

11 K & T CONVERSATION

We need to put ourselves at their level. Or… its always doubts that I have. In terms of speech. In terms of communication or

. . .

Karsten:

This is something I dislike so to say that we need to bring ourselves on their level so . . .

Tiago: No, no, when I say, in terms of communication. I already saw in some situations. In this participatory process. Who is running it, they keep themselves on a higher position. Like I am the one who has the whole knowledge. I am the one who came here to solve your problems. And I hate to be, I hate to give that impression. I want to become a better urban planner and better facilitator, urban mediator and so we need constantly evolve the way we read people, the way we analyze people. NO?

Karsten: No, no, no. Don’t do that. Don’t analyze or read.

Tiago: In the way of trying to understand…

Karsten: Yes but there are different ways. If you try to analyze you are always on a higher position. You come there and this is your field of studies and you study somehow the people. And I think this is the wrong way.

Tiago

I normally tend to be myself and I like to engage. I like to sit down with an old lady. Have a really nice tea and knowing her life.

Karsten: If she is not interested. And she has the right to be not interested in something and we have to respect this. I think the most important thing is time and trust. And for trust you need time.

There is no conclusion, no resolution. After this conversation, they both fall into a respectful silence -- thinking.

(BELLS VIBES AND OCEAN SOUND MONTAGE)

Now at a beach hotel in the coastal city of Espinho. Karsten, Tiago, João, Constança and Teja sit in deep cushy chairs in the lounge area of the hotel bar where we are staying. The space does not seem to have changed at all since the hotel was built in 1973.

The group is here to solidify their plans for the coming year and formally kick-off the Back on Track project. Post-it notes cover a low marble table in the center of the group.

Constança, an expert in design thinking and the group facilitator, summarizes the plans.

12 CONSTANÇA FOCUS

So, the focus for the first year will really be about listening and reading the territory and the needs of the community. With the emphasis on the train and the role of the train and also creating the engagement network for the project, for the outputs for the network or any other things that might emerge from this project.

And then, Teja steps in.

13 TEJA OPPORTUNITY STORIES

In this European setting it is important to give the people the opportunity to share their stories about their daily lives, about their experience of the buildings and environment and artifacts and everything, you know.

In this first phase of the project they will commission photographers and sound designers to photograph and record the trainline and its people. Their hope is to elevate awareness of the train as a real asset to the region. Exhibitions in the towns and in the stations along the line will reflect and echo the line and its communities back to the people while the team and looks and listens for responses.

If they succeed, they could transform the region through improving transportation. But they could also improve the quality of the conversations and connections between the citizens.

Travelling together along the train line has brought the project group together and they feel it could work for other people as well. If their method works, they’d like to take it elsewhere and change the way the rest of our noisy world works too.

This is their Step One.

(CAR NOISES)

On my last day in Portugal, João drove me to another train that would take me to the airport. Shortly I would be returning to Berlin while he and the others would continue to work on the project for a few more days.

I think this is a very political project. If we promote this active listening, if we promote this active vision and definitely to think about what others have to say. This is a very political -- a very very strong political statement.

Right now it is all about traiding. We are all pushed to trade something. So, I am going to speak with you because I want something from you. I want to trade something with you. And that’s it. The base of politics today is all about this.

And I think there is such a potential for being something else, right?

Words are powerful

and can be used in so many ways.

Words make worlds

and only we humans were given this gift of language.

When we exchange words with one another, we can do so with care or indifference, even violence.

But when we listen and speak with patience and understanding of each other, we engage in the most graceful act of giving and receiving. A beautiful recognition of the other.

In this way -- it has been said -- that Listening is an act of love.

João: People really need to give more affection to each other.

People now say, ‘oh affection, that is so silly’ and people waste it completely. And Really I do not know why because that is the thing that makes us humans. It’s really what makes us connect with each other and what makes us want to be with each other. Right? And there are so many amazing ways for us to be together and to connect with each other, you know.

In the car now, With all that I asked João how he was doing and how he thought the Gardens of Listening project was progressing.

“I am in Heaven,” he said.

And as I listened to João say that, I was there with him too.

Thanks for listening.

This has been Episode Six of Step One.

Reporting by me, Benjamin Lorch.

Our editor is Jelena Prtoric, our producer Yannic Hannebohn.

Our theme music is composed by Niklas Kramer.

A special shout out this time goes to the whole iac Berlin crew that supported us throughout this first season, especially Lucie and Alexandra and Lisa - this would not have been possible without you.

The teams whose voices you hear in the piece and our team, too, we’re all part of the Bosch Alumni Network.

This was the last episode of the first season of Step One.

Will there be a second season? Maybe.

We’re evaluating our options and hope to be back later this year with fresh stories. If you have ideas or suggestions, we would love to hear from you.

Remember the next step is always step one.

This is Benjamin Lorch and thanks for listening.

No Mafia sign in Capaci, at the place where the bomb that killed Falcone was detonated from

EPISODE 05 - Leave the gun, take the cannoli

December 11, 2018

Jelena goes to Palermo, Sicily, to find out what happens when we lose trust in the institutions (and each other), and how one can fight the mafia. With stickers.

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EPISODE 05 - Leave the gun, take the cannoli – Transcript

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Transcript

Episode 05

"Leave the gun, take the cannoli"

Intro.

This is STEP ONE

a podcast about people striving to change their world -- our world.

We tell you stories of the Bosch Alumni Network. A network of doers and thinkers connected across the globe working toward positive change.

From Berlin

I am Benjamin Lorch.

And today’s episode: Leave the gun, take the cannoli

But before we dive into our story, we want to introduce you to the community this podcast is part of.

[Jingle]

Jelena: It is a nice and warm Saturday in May 1992, and Antonio Vassallo sits on the terrace of his family house, in a small Sicilian town right outside of Palermo. Antonio is 26, he is a photographer and he is just putting a new role of film in his camera, preparing for an afternoon gig, when he hears a deafening explosion.

Antonio: Quel pomeriggio mi trovavo qua giù a casa, nel terrazzo esattamente. Stavo preparando la macchina fotografica, stavo montando un rullino perché la sera avrei avuto un servizio fotografico e sento questa esplosione potentissima.

Antonio is somewhat accustomed to the sound of explosions. There are two stone quarries in town, and pretty much every day one can hear detonations. But this explosion is different, much more powerful. The windows of his house are shaking.

Antonio: Personalmente mi è bastato girare lo sguardo in direzione di autostrada vedere questo grande nuvolone di fumo..

Jelena: Above the highway, some 200 meters from his house, he sees a cloud of smoke. So he puts his camera around his neck, gets on his scooter and heads there.

Antonio: Sono costretto a lasciare il motorino appoggiato ad un albero circa 100 metri prima perché era impossibile proseguire perché l'autostrada che non c'era più era ricaduta tutta....

Jelena: It is impossible to get to the highway on a scooter, there is rubble everywhere. Olive trees are down, lying around, the air smells of explosives...And a large part of the highway is simply - missing. There is a huge hole where the road used to be. There are some other people around, some farmers working on their land nearby. They start to gather, and Antonio after some time scrambles to the remaining part of the highway. On the road he sees a white car, demolished.

Antonio: Noi diamo un’occhiata all'interno di questa macchina e vediamo quest'uomo alla guida...

Jelena: Antonio and the others approach the car. Inside they see two men and a woman. The face of the driver is covered in blood.

Antonio: ...gravemente ferito, al torace, alle gambe, sanguinante in viso. E ancora con gli occhi aperti.

But he is still breathing; his eyes are open, and Antonio catches his gaze.

Antonio: Io quello sguardo l’ho incrociato per un attimo.

The man will die in the hospital that evening. His name: Giovanni Falcone. A famous prosecutor, one of the symbols of the Italian state’s fight against the mafia. And Antonio is among the last people to see him alive.

(music)

Jelena: The killing of Giovanni Falcone is known today as “Strage di Capaci”, or Capaci bombing because it took place on the highway crossing the town of Capaci. Mafia members put more than 400 kilos of explosives in a drainage tunnel under the highway. The bomb killed Falcone, his wife, as well as three police escort agents. They wanted not only to get rid of Falcone, but also to send a message - you don’t mess with the mafia.

Ben: Wow, that’s unbelievable.

When Antonio looks back at it today, he says that this death has changed the course of his life, and in general, Sicilian society.

Ben: What do you mean?

Jelena: Well, Falcone’s killing was the sad climax of a series of crimes that the mafia committed in Sicily in the ‘80s. It might seem unreal but there was a time in the Italian history when the very existence of the mafia was considered almost an urban legend. But then, the violent 80s came.

Edoardo: So, I was born in 1975, but during the ‘80s when I was ten for example, you know, I could see with my eyes all the violence of the mafia and let's say that the worst moment, the worst period of time for Palermo was for sure, let’s say between the late ‘70s and the early ‘90s. What we call usually the long ‘80s.

Jelena: This is Edoardo Zaffuto, Palermo born and bred. He showed me around Palermo. The city is stunning. For me, it is hard to imagine that Palermo was ever anything but an easy-going city. For Edoardo: not so much. As we drive outside of the city, towards the beach of Palermo he tells me that while growing up, he often wondered why of all the places in the world he had to be born in Palermo?!

Edoardo: Imagine that, at the beginning of the ‘80s, in particular, there was one of the most violent mafia wars in the history of Cosa Nostra, of theorganised crime. During that years, the mafia were killing each other and there was one year in which there were something like 1000 mafia murders in Palermo. So imagine 3 murders per day, on average.

Jelena: The mafia committed crimes so violent that eventually a special anti-mafia pool was formed and, in 1986, a trial started. Giovanni Falcone was one of the main anti-mafia prosecutors. The trial was known as “Maxi processo”, a “Maxi Trial”?

Ben: A Maxi Trial?

Jelena: The ‘maxi’ stands for the importance of it. The trial lasted until 1992; almost 500 people mafiosi got convicted and the existence of Cosa nostra was finally confirmed in court.

(historical tape)

The trial is still regarded as one of the greatest successes of the Italian judiciary system and the biggest anti-mafia trial in the country’s history. It was a sign the mafia is not outside of the law, untouchable. It gave hope.

Ben: Right.

Jelena: But then, the mafia killed Falcone.. Less than two months later, in July 1992; another prominent anti-mafia judge and Falcone’s friend was assassinated as well. Paolo Borsellino. A bomb was planted in a car parked in front of his mother’s house in Palermo. Two murders in less than two months. It shook up the Sicilian society. Everyone who I talked to, told me they know exactly where they were and what they did when the murders happened.

Ben: Hah, just like 9/11?

Jelena: Exactly. It provoked a lot of emotions, especially among younger people.

Edoardo: That was like, that was too much, I mean, not again, all the people started to say not again. It was rebellion of the people who said - enough. You know, I was probably still young, but that was a moment in which some seeds have been put in the ground, not for only me, but my generation as I say.

(music)

Jelena: These seeds, as Edoardo puts it, grew to become an important project in Sicily. And also, it is exactly because of the Capaci bombings that the paths of Edoardo and Antonio will cross years later.

Jelena: But before we get to that moment, let me tell you the story of how I met Edoardo.

Ben: Where was that?

Jelena: I was in Palermo for an event named “Trust and Transparency”, organised by members of the Bosch Alumni network. The idea of the conference was to enhance trust and communication between public administration, media and businesses. And Edoardo was one of the speakers there.

(music end)

To understand why mafia was able to become so powerful in the first place, it is crucial to look at the concept of trust.

Ben: How can you conceptualize trust at all, what’s the basis?

Jelena: Well, you can start by understanding the concepts that you already know, that are familiar to you. This is why we began by looking at trust between individuals, then between institutions.

Vitor: First of all, trust is about taking chances, assuming a risk.

Jelena: This is Vitor Simões, a founder and coordinator at 4change, an organisation specialized in communication and consultancy, based in Portugal. Vitor wrote his thesis on trust.

Vitor: You can only trust if in the meantime you assume your vulnerability; you cannot trust if you are closed in yourself. You have to assume risk. It assumes a voluntary cooperation, so trust can be instilled through control and fear but in the long run, it is not a productive way to instill trust. Trust is better if you do it voluntarily and in a cooperative way. You cannot build trust based on laws.

Jelena: In a personal relationship - be it in friendship or in love, we usually need a lot of time to start trusting the other person. You need to trust that somebody will not betray your confidence, you need to believe that another person will not hurt your feelings if you show them how you feel. And this simple concept also applies to professional relationships.

Let me ask you something

Ben: Sure, go ahead.

Jelena: At work, have you ever been in a situation where you had to do something that goes against your values?

Ben: That’s a good question, let me think. All right, in one of the schools I worked for, one of my tasks was to get people to apply to scholarships. It was the first one we have ever had. And once we had this very qualified applicant so it seemed logical to me that she would be given the scholarship. And that what was on the lips of everyone.

But then, at the very last moment - and I was in touch with her about all of this - I was told somebody else would get the scholarship. And this person didn’t really need the scholarship, but he was a very famous face on television, and the school management wanted his very famous face in school.

Jelena: So, what did you do?

Ben: WelI, I had to get back and talk to the first woman and tell her that she would not get the scholarshi, even though it seemed inevitable. It was actually awful. I was horribly disappointed by the school management and the position I was put in. The trust I’d established with the first applicant was totally shattered. I felt sick about that. And the trust I held with the school was also damaged.

Jelena: So it’s funny because some of the participants in Sicily had very similar experiences. They lost faith in their coworkers or bosses – in public administration, media or businesses, wherever they were working. Here is one of the examples:

Conference case (woman speaking): ... So one ministry of Education got the grant and it was supposed to provide equipment to schools. And suddenly my manager, who is my direct supervisor, decided to add one additional school, besides those five, that were first selected to get the equipment..And then I have found that he did that because he had a friend who will actually buy the equipment for that school...

Jelena: This was one of the cases we discussed in small groups. I can’t play you more of these, since they were very sensitive cases and could potentially endanger the participants if they were made public . But we did come up with a list of dos and donts for each case. And we also discussed how trust in institutions could be enhanced.

Vitor: If you don't trust the formal aspects of your life, like governments, you kind of search refuge in the not formal aspects, like your family or your neighbourhood. And here in Italy, and in Sicily, you have a good example of that...If the government is not responsive to you, if its rules are not enforced, you go for the rules of other entities not so explicits and not so formal, like mafia, and others...

(music)

(sounds of Sicilian streets)

Jelena: Buonasera

Raffaella: Buonasera

Jelena: It is not by accident that we were discussing Trust and Transparency in Sicily. It’s here, where the trust in government was low enough to enable the mafia to spread its influence.

Raffaella: La mafia è nata nel momento in cui c(è stata l'assenza dello Stato...

Jelena: I visited Raffaella Candido in a small hat shop in Palermo she runs.

Raffaella: Era l'antistato. Quindi la mafia faceva quello che lo stato non faceva. Proteggeva. Aiutava i più poveri…

Jelena: In her words, the mafia was actually born from “the absence of the state”. They offered protection to those the state didn’t protect. They positioned themselves as Robin Hoods in a way, protecting the poor. They even call themselves “uomini d’onore”, men of honor.

Raffaella: Ma infatti si diceva “uomo d’onore”, lo si chiamava, “uomo d'onore” perché una sua parola data era quella.

Jelena: Raffaella says “men of honor” comes from their integrity.

Raffaella: Non avrebbe mai cambiato l'idea. Si io ti dico; sta tranquilla, me ne occupo io;

Jelena: If they would give you their word, they would live up to their promise, stand their ground.

Raffaella: Se ne occupava lui.

Jelena: They would protect you…

Raffaella: ….e non poteva mai cambiare l'idea....

Jelena:... if they said so.

Ben: So they were filling in for a state apparatus that couldn’t provide the kind of trust that was needed.

Jelena: I would say that rather, they tried to portray themselves as a substitute for the state apparatus.

Ben: That is pretty smart. But were there actually a lot of threats they protected the Sicilians from?

Jelena: Of course no, it was more of a marketing campaign, you could say.

Although the mafia men presented themselves as protectors and good doers, they were always expecting something in return. They didn’t do favors. And of course, if you’d disobey them, if you would not show respect, you’d be in a problem. Raffaela herself actually had a close encounter with mafia, couple of years ago.

Ben: Oh really, what happened to her?

Jelena: So, as I mentioned, Raffaela runs a traditional Sicilian hat shop in Palermo. And I think you would like it a lot actually, there are hats of all colors and fabrics on shelves around the room.

Ben: Ok you have my attention, I like hats. What is a traditional Sicilian hat like?

Jelena: Now you can buy them in all the colors and they can be made of nice fabrics, but Raffaella explained me that a traditional hat is flat and was made of cheap, black fabric.

Raffaella: Allora, la coppola nasce di panno nero e spiego perché, perché anticamente...ed era usata dai contadini. Perché di panno; era il tessuto il più povero che esisteva. Ma pensarono a questa forma di cappello perché doveva servire per lavorare i campi, quindi non doveva dare fastidio, e….

Jelena: These hats were initially worn by Sicilian farmers. The hat has a short bill, important for farmers because it protected them from the sun while working in fields. And Raffaella says these hats were an important part of the Sicilian identity. She remembers her grandfather donning these hats, called coppolas in Italian, even when he was at home.

Ben: Wait, what Coppola? Like the film director?

Jelena: The pronunciation is the same, yes. And actually, you see coppolas in Coppola’s Godfather. Have you seen the movie?

Ben: Yes, of course I have seen the movie, but it was years ago. Ok, refresh my memory; where are the hats in the movie?

Jelena: So you know when in the first Godfather, Michael Corleone goes into hiding in Sicily because he killed two men who attempted to assassinate his father. So, he is in Sicily and is walking in the middle of the fields with two other guys…

(Godfather tape in the background)

And then stumbles upon Apollonia, and he falls in love with her at first sight and she becomes his first wife.

Anyways, the story is that while walking through the fields, Michael and his men are wearing coppolas. And the thing is that the mafia appropriated it as a piece of their identity. To the point that ordinary citizens actually stopped wearing the hats.

Raffaella: Con l'andar degli anni, questo copricapo non è stato più portato, perché? (In the background: Perché comincio ad identificare solo ed esclusivamente gli uomini di mafia, gli uomini d'onore, perché solo loro la portavano.)

Jelena: While the farmers would wear their coppola straight, the mafia would wear it slightly bent on one side. For many years you could see men with hats bent to one side walking the streets of Sicily: Until one man had the idea to “give back the dignity to the Sicilian coppola, to make it a hat that ordinary Sicilians would want to wear again. He reached out to Raffaella’s father to help him out - her father was in the clothing business. Raffaella eventually ended up running the store that sells these hats.

Ben: Amazing.

Jelena: And the business does well, she told me. Coppolas in various colors have become a fashion accessory, many tourist buy them as a souvenir from Sicily. In December 2013, Raffella had another store opened in town, at another location. It was a temporary shop, just over the Christmas holidays. But several days after setting up the shop; they could not open the door.

The lock was filled with glue.

Ben: Coming up after the break: Palermo resists.

(plug to Project ungoverned)

Hi, I’m award winning author Nicole Harkin.
And I’m Dr. Kim Ochs.
Are you interested in other podcasts that take place within the Bosch Alumni Network?
In our podcast, Project Ungoverned? The Online Learning Landscape, we speak with educators, learners, and pioneers in online education from across the globe.
We examine new possibilities, challenges, and innovative organizations in online learning. K: The Project Ungoverned? podcast is out now. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also find us at projectungoverned.com.

(end of plug to Project ungoverned)

Jelena: Raffaella knew what glue meant. A warning from the mafia. It is their way of saying that if you don’t pay money to the mafia you are “not getting into your shop”. Even worse: Ignore the warning and - your shop will get demolished, eventually, could be set on fire. Raffaela had no chance but to do something.

Ben: So what did she do?

Jelena: I will tell you about that in a second.

Ben: And so this extortion money is paid by everyone in Italy?

Jelena: There have been some estimates in the past, so yeah, a lot of people allegedly paid protection money, but it is very hard to determine what’s the percentage of the businesses do it.

Ben: Ok, I can understand that.

Jelena: Ok, and what is important to know is that the pizzo, an this is the way they call protection money in Italian. It is one of the ways in which that mafia actually establishes their “rule” over a territory. The money itself is not that important - if you have a small business you might pay something like ten or twenty euros per month; so almost nothing. If you have a bigger business, you would pay more, of course. What is important is first and foremost that you “acknowledge” their presence, that pay respect. Nowadays, pizzo is still present in Sicily, in Palermo, but much less so since 2004.

Ben: Oh really, 2004, what happened back then?

Jelena: So one morning in 2004, the city of Palermo woke up covered in stickers.

Ben: Stickers?

Jelena: Simple stickers, simple action. And the stickers read “un intero popolo che paga il pizzo è un popolo senza dignità”. Which you can translate into “an entire population that pays protection money, is like a population that has no dignity left”.

Ben: But who put the stickers around?

Jelena: People had no clue. But, we already heard from Edoardo who showed me around Palermo. In 2004 he is working in a small publishing company. The business is not flourishing, they don’t make a lot of money. And one of Edoardo’s colleagues, Vittorio, plans to open a pub in Palermo with several other friends. One of them writes a business plan so he lists all the expenses for their future business. You know. He puts rent, he puts supplies on this list; he puts like administration, whatever, and then he puts - pizzo, protection money.

Ben: As a line item? Ok!

Edoardo: It was a provocation of course, but it was an excellent provocation because all the other people of that group started to say of course we don't want to pay the money. Are you crazy, you put it in business plan and we did not even start yet, we don't even know if we will start it...But actually it’s there, and he said you know what – this is normal here in Palermo.

Jelena: The fact that people perceive pizzo as something normal upsets Vittorio, Edoardo’s colleague. So he comes up with this catchy phrase and one night he posts his stickers all around the city. And this is a very strong message. I mean, Edoardo explained it to me. It touches on the concept of the Sicilian dignity - and Sicilians are super proud. This action was repeated over the next couple of months.

Ben: Ok, but weren’t they also scared that mafia could get them?

Jelena: Yes they were actually very scared. When they started the website, every time Edoardo would want to work on the website, he would go to a different internet cafe; just to be able to change locations so that he does not get caught by the mafia. And every time they would run their sticker actions; they would do it during the night. So every next first step had to be carefully planned. However, at some point they realized they needed to shift tactic.

Ben: In which direction did they go?

Jelena: So, at the beginning this was more of a protest action for them. But then the idea of the critical consumption appeared. They thought it was wrong to call out shops that paid protection money’, so they did the opposite. They wanted to set up a list of shops that didn’t pay. They knew it would be hard to get businesses on board though, because they weren’t the first to attempt such a thing.

Ben: How so?

Jelena: It was in 1991 when a shop owner was gunned down by the mafia because he had been reporting mafia threats to the police and published it in a local newspaper. And no one would back this poor guy,

Edoardo: So what we did, before going to the shop owners, we said let's go and put together a group of townspeople, of citizens who said that in the future; when there will be a list of mafia free list, a list of business that don't pay the protection money, I will support this network, I commit myself to do it.

Jelena: They turned to customers first, asking them if they would support the businesses that don’t pay the protection money. More than 3500 people signed this petition. The names were published in a local newspaper. And it rassured the shop owners, they felt that there was a critical mass of consumers that would support them, that there is solidarity

Edoardo: So, with this list it was easier to go to the shops and say, knocking at their door basically, as you can see you will not be alone, there are already 3500 people ready to support you.

Ben: Alright, and did it work?

Jelena: They started with some dozen shops, and now they are over 1300. So it is not really an exponential growth, but they achieved that pizzo isn’t seen anymore as something normal in the society. Here’s another thing. Every Addiopizzo member gets a small sticker with inscription of Addiopizzo and a sentence saying “pago chi non paga”, or “I pay to those who don’t pay”.

Edoardo: This is a new promise we can give, it is like, if you put the Addiopizzo logo on your window, so if you join Addiopizzo in your window and put that sticker in the window, be sure that the mafia is way less inclined to come to your shop. This sticker means “be aware because I am with Addiopizzo - if you come here for the first time asking me for money, I will go to the police, I will go straight to the police”. So these stickers keepz the mafia away from the shop.

(music)

Ben: But did Raffaela have one of these stickers?

Jelena: So her shop is also a member of Addiopizzo network. But the other shop, the temporary shop, the one that got glued, didn’t. However, Raffaella contacted Addiopizzo, they went to the police together, denounced the threats. She received no threats afterwards.

(music ends)

Jelena: Addiopizzo has evolved into a more ambitious project, so nowadays, they also have a travel agency. Let’s say you want to book a trip to Sicily. You could book it through Addiopizzo, and they would only take you to hotels and restaurants that are part of their network, so you would be sure that no money that you pay goes to mafia. And also, you would be able to go to one of their organised tours.

And this is where Antonio and Edoardo’s path cross. When the Addiopizzo agency was looking for a person that could help them out with the tour of the place where Falcone was killed, Antonio turned out to be their guy. He still lives in Capaci and he still works as a photographer. And today he is sharing his story of that day in 1992 with groups, usually schools and universities

Antonio: Lo facciamo in qualsiasi condizione meteo - con il sole, con la pioggia, con il vento, con il caldo d'agosto….

Jelena: He meets the groups on a hill overlooking the highway, just next to a place where the bomb was detonated from. And today there is a concrete hut painted in white with an inscription in blue: NO MAFIA.

Ben: I wonder if the work Addiopizzo does in Sicily could also be s replicated successfully in places where there hasn’t been such a clear threat as the mafia?

Jelena: So I see Addiopizzo as trust enablers between the system and the citizens. And it is important, because we live in a time when there’s so little trust in the institutions. So it is not about having one specific opponent, it is more about mobilizing the citizens, and reminding them that they have rights and with rights come responsibilities. And this is actually one of the things that I took from the trip, and one of our findings that we had at the end of the conference.

Male voice,Tape from the conference: It is a question for everybody, it not just the question of the shop owner and the mafia, it is also the consumer, so this is culture, so everyone has to feel concern about this topic, and not just the one involving the corruption...

Ben: And so nowadays businesses are doing their business without the mafia involvement? Did they win?

Jelena: I mean...Unfortunately, it is not that simple. But what we can say is that Addiopizzo changed some things and it did help people to gain courage to say no to the mafia extortion. And I think that little by little, it also changes the way the society looks at itself. Raffaella told me this nice story.

Raffaella: Io mi ricordo,bambina, andai un anno in Inghilterra ed ero ospite in una famiglia, andavo a studiare. Avevo nove anni.

Jelena: So when she was a young girl, she went to England to learn the language, and she was hosted there in a family. So one evening they were all sitting in front of the TV, and all of the sudden she saw that something was happening in Italy, in Palermo. You know, her town appeared in the news. And it was related to some mafia murder- again.

Raffaella: E il mio padrone di casa disse: “Ah, tu vieni da Palermo, Palermo- Sicilia, Sicilia - mafia”.

Jelena: So her host turned to her, and said something like “Oh, you come from Palermo, Palermo Sicily, Sicily mafia”. And she felt so ashamed, she wanted to say “Sicily is not just mafia”. She was nine back then, and she tells me that today, at the age of 52 she feels that the things have changed, and she is happy to look back at that time and to tell herself that, yes, she was right and Sicily is not just about the mafia.

Ben: That sounds like a nice story….Although I do not completely understand what she is saying because I have not really spoke Italian since 1990.

Jelena: Well Ben, I guess you’ll have to trust me.

Ben: I do.

Outro.

This has been Episode four of Step One.

Reporting by Jelena Prtoric.

Our editor is Yannic Hannebohn

Our theme music is composed by Niklas Kramer.

A special shout out this time goes to the crew behind the Trust and Transparency project, especially Peppe who knows where to find the best pizza in town.

The teams whose voices you hear in the piece and our team, too, we’re all part of the Bosch Alumni Network.

If you liked this episode, be sure to tell your friends about it. We’ve received a huge amount of positive feedback and we want to thank you for spending your time on this thing. We appreciate it. Also if you want to support us even further, tell one friend about this episode.

Remember the next step is always step one.

This is Benjamin Lorch.

Thanks for listening.

EPISODE 04 - Princess disruption

November 21, 2018

Yannic goes to New York to find out how Uber disrupted the taxi industry in the city, meets Princess and finds out why, sometimes, it is important to have a toothpick in your car.

EPISODE 03 - Taxi to Sarajevo

October 5, 2018

Yannic goes to Sarajevo to try to understand the complicated world of Bosnian politics ahead of the general elections. There he discovers kafanas.

Learn More

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EPISODE 03 - Taxi to Sarajevo – Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Episode 03

"Taxi to Sarajevo"

This is STEP ONE

a podcast about people striving to change their world -- our world.

We tell you stories of the Bosch Alumni Network. A network of doers and thinkers connected across the globe working toward positive change.

From Berlin

I am Benjamin Lorch.

And in this episode we take a taxi to Sarajevo

But before we dive into our story, we want to introduce you to the community this podcast is part of.

[Jingle]

[sounds of inside a car]

Yannic: It’s a Monday morning in early September and I am in a cab from Sarajevo airport to the city center.

Driver: You come from?

Yannic: I am from Germany.

Driver: Dann reden wir lieber Deutsch.

Yannic: Du sprichst Deutsch?

Driver: Besser als Englisch

(laughs)

Yannic: Emily, an American reporter you might have caught laughing in the backseat, and I – we are here to report on the elections in Bosnia on October 7th. Sarajevo. I’m new to this city, and I am also new to reporting from the Balkans.

So, what’s up with the elections?, I ask my driver casually. He laughs. We’re full of it, he says. Nothing new happens. They promise you everything and then – nothing changes.

Driver (in German): Es passiert nicht neues. Die versprechen viel vor den Wahlen, nach den Wahlen passiert nichts.

Yannic: What I know about Bosnia is based on a prep talk I had with Jelena, our editor, – and the BBC documentary series, “The death of Yugoslavia”. It’s basically a crash course for foreign reporters. A short history of what happened in the Balkans and in the Bosnian war between 1992 and 1996. The documentary shows how nationalist Serb forces besieged Sarajevo for almost four long years. Almost 14.000 people died during the siege and more than half of them were civilians.

The driver tells me he fled to Hamburg during the war. He was always working, even there, he points out. No social assistance. He headed back home, as soon as the war was over.

If he had the power in this country, he would get rid of all the old politicians, he says. Let the younger people lead the country. Old politicians brought us nothing, 25 years after the war and where are we now?

Driver (in German): Wenn ich Macht hätte würde ich alte Politiker entfernen. Lasst neue intelligente Leute das Land zu führen. Die alten Politiker haben uns nichts gebracht, 25 Jahre nach dem Krieg. Und wo stehen wir?

Yannic: We drive by a campaign billboard, I see an almost bald man, grinning.

Jelena, she explained me parts of the political system in Bosnia. It’s very confusing, tangled, she says, to a point where I’m wondering if the elections can have any impact on the country, really.

We drive on a highway, Sarajevo is to our left. I lean forward and I peak through the window, the bright sun illuminates the houses and few skyscrapers patched together like a puzzle.

20 minutes in, the driver pulls over. I ask for his name.

Driver: Essad

Yannic: I’m Yannic, I say.

Perfect.

(music)

Yannic: So my trip has begun and I am only scratching the surface of something that is to me unknown, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Ben: What were your thoughts after this first encounter?

Yannic: I saw some patterns, such as “My vote won’t change anything”. Also, there is this other pattern that people are leaving the country to find something else. I also felt that Bosnia is complicated. Because of Bosnia’s past, the war and the ethnic divisions. To be honest, I even had more questions.

Ben: Like what? What else was on your mind?

Yannic: Like, the feeling that I had when I was talking to the driver, I felt really that he was indifferent about the elections?

And, what are people of my generation thinking?

Ben: And you were there for a study tour on the Bosnian elections organized within the Bosch Alumni Network? Is that right?

Yannic: Right. We were twelve, and we were journalists from all over the world basically. And we were there because four of them, and that is Emily, the woman that was in the cab with me; and Jelena, they organised the trip, together with Almir. He is Bosnian, and he secured us access to all these great sources during the week. We were with the prime minister for example..

Ben: Wow, all right.

Yannic: Yeah. And political analysts, younger journalists…

Ben: Nice, sounds like your access was quite good.

Yannic: It was. And Sarajevo is just completely beautiful. Before it became part of the socialist Yugoslavia, Sarajevo was conquered by the Ottomans by the Austrians. And you don’t really have to be a culture nerd to see this. When you walk around the city center, you stumble across a Cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue and an Orthodox Church within a radius of 500 meters. The market stands are also pretty exciting. They display stuff like Bosnian coffee pots – they look like small kettles, but they have this straight handle. Also you would find oriental carpets and jewellery...And then there’s Kafana.

(fade into kafana music playing)

Ben: What is kafana?

Yannic: I don’t speak Bosnian but for me kafana means “having a good time despite all of your worries”. You go into these bars and there’s a band playing. They go from table to table basically and play you some songs. And people start getting up, they react to music, they get up and dance, and this happens almost immediately.

Ben: Alright, it sounds like Kafana could be a good place to start exploring the social dynamics.

Yannic: Well, at first, first night, I was more than sceptical. But on the second night already, in the second kafana, there was no way escaping it. People were grabbing me, they were like, ‘Yannic, are you gonna come?’, they were basically inviting me to dance, to sing along even. I didn’t know the lyrics, because I don’t know Bosnian…

Ben: Okay, but there seems to be a contradiction between this joy of Kafana and the current political frustration.

Yannic: Yeah, at first, it seemed strange to me, too.

(music fading)

Yannic: On my only free day, I set out to explore. I decided to spent some time with a young woman we met during the conference. Her name is Naida. She’s 22, she’s pretty tall, one meter eighty or so, she’s got light brown hair, and she looks very athletic.

Naida: Nice to meet you..we were together after we finished

Yannic: You were in the car...

Yannic: We head to the cable car of Sarajevo - it’s one of Naida's favorite places in the city.

(music)

Yannic: Uphill we walk around and enjoy the view over Sarajevo. We chit-chat for a little bit. We walk around with no real destination …. and then maybe thirty minutes into our conversation – we find a connection. Naida tells me about a terrible accident she had only five months ago.

It was during a volleyball match.

Naida: It was in the third set, practically at the end of the game. I played the first two sets and the trainer than said Naida you should stay out, we can do that without you. And then when the result in third set was 20:20 he called me to come in, and he tell me... he….hug...He hugged me and said, you should make a score...you can make a score, we need you now. And I make two scores and after that…

Yannic: Her ankle twisted so bad, that she had to go to the hospital.

Naida loved volleyball, she played since she was 9 years old. For her it was more than about exercise or success. It was the sense of sisterhood, belonging to a group, having the same goal and working hard for it.

Naida (in Bosnian): And there was the fact that the girls also believed in me. When there was a difficult situation, they would say ‘Naida will do it’. This is what was giving me strength.

(in English) Sorry, I am a little bit sensitive.

Yannic: Ok, sorry, I didn’t want to evoke these feelings.

Yannic: It’s heartbreaking even if I don’t understand all the details. Searching for something to say, I ask her: Isn’t there a goal that Bosnia can pursue as a team?

Naida: The best goal for the country should be that nobody should be separated in three different groups of people. We have here three ethnicities, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats and in my opinion we should all be Bosnians.

Ben: Is there a party that corresponds to this idea of unity Naida has? Who is she voting for?

Yannic: Well, she is not voting actually. She told me that on the election day, she would take her ballot paper, she would take a pen, and just cross it over.

Ben: She’s going to spoil her vote?

Yannic: Yeah.

Ben: Why would she do that?

Yannic: Exactly. That’s what I asked her.

Yannic: But why? Is there not one candidate that speaks for you?

Naida: I don’t think that anyone of them can make something better. They all say always the same sentences. I will do that I will do that, I am better than him.They only talk. And don’t do anything.

(music)

Ben: Yannic, now tell me. I got to step back. I know this is the general election but how exactly does the electoral system work in Bosnia? How does the voting system work?

Yannic: It dates back to the Dayton peace agreement. December 14th, 1995. It was signed in Paris by the representatives of the international community and by the leaders of the former Yugoslav states in conflict.: Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia. The Dayton agreement put an end to the war in Bosnia that pitted three different ethnicities against each other. It brought peace to the country – but it also changed the Bosnian constitution significantly. Ever since, Bosnia is divided into two parts: the Republika Srpska, and the Federation, which are mostly Bosniaks and Croats.

Ben: And what are the differences between these ethnicities?

Yannic: Well, there are mostly religious differences. So the Serbs are Orthodox, Bosniaks are mostly Muslim and Croats are Catholic.

Ben: Okay. And at this point how independent are these two parts?

Yannic: Both entities, both parts of Bosnia, the Serb and the Federation, hold individual parliaments, bureaucracies and individual courts, which makes the Bosnian administration huge – for a country of 3 and a half million inhabitants. On the highest, on the state level, there’s another Parliament and representatives from the two entities, plus the presidency which is chaired by three presidents, one of each ethnicity: There’s a Bosniak president, a Croat president and a Serb president, with each ethnicity voting for its own president. Did you understand that?

Ben: Yes, I did understand it, but now I have forgotten it.

Yannic (laughs): Can you explain it back to me?

Ben: No!

Yannic: So if you didn’t understand all of it now, let me play you some tape of how I struggled during the week.

Ben: Okay.

Yannic: This is us, Aleksandar, a Macedonian journalist, Kemal, the photographer that escorted us during the week and me. We are passing by a big banner of the SDP party, the social-democrats in Bosnia, and I spot something unusual about it.

Yannic: The spd is the only party with 4 candidates.

Aleksandar: So they have a candidate. Denis Becirovic and he’s Bosniak.

Yannic: Aha, ok.

Aleksandar: So you can not vote for a Serbian candidate here.

Yannic: But they have different candidates in the Serbian part, in the Republika Srpska.

Aleksandar: I guess.

Yannic: Okay. But Magazinovic does not run, because he’s not Bosniak...He is a Serb.

Aleksandar: Only for the Parliament.

Yannic: Yea. He’ll run for Parlament

Aleksandar: He’ll run for Parlament

Yannic: As a Serb in Bosnian territory, in Sarajevo.

Aleksandar: Yeah.

Yannic: That’s so complicated. Especially for my German brain (laughs)

Driver: Hat-Tschi. (sneezing)

Yannic: Gesundheit.

(mumble)

Ben: Indeed it seems that you were pretty confused.

Yannic: By now, I understood most of it. But there’s still so many details that I didn’t get, I fear.

Ben: Is this why people are disillusioned by the political system?

Yannic: It must be one of them. But honestly I also feel that it has a lot to do with how the politicians are speaking and what they are saying.

[Tape of Bosnian politicians - Saša Magazinović, Šefik Džaferović and Fahrudin Radončić - speaking]

Yannic: For me they sounded almost too similar. Like, I couldn’t really tell the difference. And also their salaries are around six times higher than the average Bosnian wage, which is just over 400 euros net. This makes the Bosnian members of parliament the best paid MPs in Europe, if you compare them to average wages in their respective countries. And because of that, many feel that one goes into politics – only – to get rich.

Driver Essad (in German, in the background): Es gibt viele junge Leute die haben Schule fertig, die haben Uni fertig und die haben kein Job. als einziges ausweg die Denken: Ok, dann geh ich in irgendeine Partei, damit sie dann da einen Job finden. Ich brauch das nicht. Man kann aber nichts dagegen sagen, die Leute haben (sic). 12, 13 jahre in die Schule gegangen, studiert. Ohne Job. Man kann da nichts sagen.

Yannic: This is also what Essad - you remember the driver, that brought me to Sarajevo? - told me: young people either go into politics, to earn what they can earn, or leave to the West, the EU mostly.

He also says that with the lack of real options in this country – you can’t even blame them.

(music)

Yannic: It is the last day of our study trip, and we’re meeting this political analyst, Ivana Maric, in a café in downtown Sarajevo. I ask her about it, about the youth of Bosnia.

(music)

Yannic: I would like to ask you a question about the younger generation, because they told me, they are leaving the country, they want to go West, because they want to invest in their future, because apparently being a hairdresser in Western Europe is still better than being nothing here. How do you explain that?

Ivana Maric: I don’t think that you can live better as a hairdresser somewhere else than here. You can live really nice here, if you like that. People think ….they don’t even try here. Especially people with an university degree. They say, I am going to live abroad in Germany, but you have to work hard there to succeed and they did not even try, we have…

Yannic: And then… one journalist of our group, Aleksandar, he is an investigative reporter from Serbia, bursts out. He’s sitting in the back so it’s hard to understand him but he’s angry about Maric’s view on the mentality of the people.

Aleksandar: I have a problem, many people from this region, especially in Serbia, I hear it very often. After thirty years of ruining this countries in this area, we are putting the blame at the common people. That really bothers me because that same people were very good from 1945 to 1990, the same people were building, our grandfathers and our parents were building this country, they were very hard workers, very good scientists, it was a good life. And after thirty years of wars, sanctions, killing each other and ruining the system and corruption, in the end, all we need is to blame the people.

Ivana Maric:I understand what you said but i don’t like to be...victim, we are not victims, actually. If you vote for somebody for twenty years than you are not a victim. We all have this mentality…

Aleksandar (in the back): The option to go abroad?

Ivana Maric: No, the option to fight here…

Yannic: This goes back and forth for five minutes or so.

Aleksandar: I really disagree. People are really aware that they live in a corrupted system. And they don’t have any hope because the professors from the university are corrupted, judges are corrupt, policemen are corrupt ...politicians are on the top of this pyramid, and we expect from the common people to do what?

Ivana Maric: Actually I was never a victim and I don’t want to play victim, I can change something….

Yannic: Until it ends.

(music)

Yannic: As we walk out of the café, I have the chance for a quick chat with Aleksandar, who still seems to be agitated by the discussion.

Yannic: You didn’t like her?

Aleksandar: No, I am almost becoming mad when I hear this opinion. All we need is to put the blame on the common people. You are not good enough, you don’t work enough..pure neoliberal thoughts, you know. Like treating people like slaves, they don’t have any right, every institution in this country is ruined and corrupted and what do you need? Work harder? What does it mean, work harder?

(music)

Almir: It’s not normal that young people from Bosnia go to Germany and become good workers. And that the same young people in Bosnia are not good workers.

Yannic: In the evening, on that same day. I meet up with Almir, who lives and works in Sarajevo. He’s one of the organizers of the study tour. And in the car we start discussing the argument that Ivana Maric and Aleksandar were having earlier.

Almir: It’s not normal because it’s the same person in Germany and in Sarajevo. It is the same mentality. But when someone goes to Germany and becomes a worker in some factory, he has some kind of system. The main thing is perspective. Why perspective? The young people in Germany and in Bosnia are the same young people. But the only difference in Germany is that they can see and predict and make plans for the next ten years.In Bosnia the people are living day for day.

Yannic: He blames the generation of his fathers and grandfathers for the current situation in the country.

Almir: They destroyed the country in privatisation in stealing from the tenders and so on. My generation is still coming. I believe that that generation will love the country more than a few generations earlier.

Almir: I have to find a parking place. You can tape that.

But I have to leave this to my friend who is working on parking. He is a night shift. He’s probably works for 150 euros per month.

Yannic: Does that sadden you?

Almir: Yeah, but it’s a problem because we’re something like an unhappy society with a great potential. We’re hedonist. We like to be hedonist. We like to drink coffee, look on the city, on the viewpoints and enjoy it but believe me, sometimes we have to be fighters…. Come on.

(door slams)

(music)

Yannic: We walk through the center of Sarajevo. The sun has set, and the streets fill up with people. It’s a Thursday night. Almir leads us to a shisha place with lots of wooden benches outside. There’s pop music playing in the background, the air is filled with the sweet flavour of mint Shisha. And he orders us a pipe. For the first time during that week, I’m relaxing.

Yannic: In the car we were talking about fighting the fight, you were saying basically that Bosnian should keep fighting the fight. What is your personal fight?

Almir: Huh. I don’t know. right now i don’t know. Why? Because it is a very tough question for young generation in Bosnia. Why? We are not so stupid. We know what’s happening in the world, we know new techniques, we have some jobs, someone have good jobs, like me, we have friends in all parts of the world. We understand differences in East and West, we understand what Russia wants here, we understand that the US is powerful, we understand that we want to the EU. Not because we are in love with the EU, no because, we are Europeans.

Ben: Right, potential EU membership. A whole other layer...

Yannic: That’s the topic that has been whizzing around every conversation in that week. Europe, the EU. Bosnia is waiting for its candidacy status for quite some time now. It’s the one thing that nearly everyone in this country can agree.

Ben: Could they join the EU anytime soon?

Yannic: Not really. The Eu says that Bosnia has a lot of “homework” to do. This is mainly fighting against the corruption and organised crime. It’s the reform of the judiciary system and the public administration.

Edin Kukavica: Joining the EU and NATO is the only solution for Bosnia and Herzegovina in this moment and for all our future.

Yannic: Edin Kukavica is a publicist and the director of a cultural center in Sarajevo.

Edin Kukavica: Unfortunately it will take more time than we like to talk about.

Yannic: In his books Kukavica describes a revolution within the people, that for him is a first step towards a prosperous Bosnia. I got the chance to interview him after a group meeting.

Edin Kukavica: That revolution that I’m writing about, is first of all a revolution inside of every single person in this country and in every national course, a revolution among the Bosniaks, revolution among the Serbs, among the Croats and whoever else exists here. Just to think about Bosnia as our home country, as our home in the full meaning of that word. Not to think about the different entities. We need that revolution on that level of consciousness and awareness of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is the first revolution, private, intimate, inside revolution.

(music)

Ben: Is this their step one? A revolution within themselves?

Yannic: What I saw is that the young generation is already taking their first step. They’ve proven to be hard workers and are pushing the system to its limits. While speaking to Almir, Naida and all the others, I saw a lot of determination. A determination to go forward.

And I saw a lot of kafana.

Ben: I’m pretty sure we’ll have to check with Jelena on the real concept of kafana. But I really am starting to get it.

Yannic: Go check, go check. But until you do that, should I play some more music?

Ben: Sure. Do you wanna dance?

Yannic: Sure.

Ben: Can I buy you a drink?

Yannic: (laughs)

(music up and fade)

Almir: I believe these people need something like celebrations. For 20 years we didn’t have any celebrations, any sports success that we can celebrate, any cultural thing we could celebrate. We didn’t have any Nobel prize winner in the last 3 decades, before we had them from literature to chemistry. AndI think the political elites if they understand this country, they should invest and improve some part of the society, like sports. We need something to bring back the smile on the faces of ordinary people. That’s something that we need.

(Music fade)

(Outro)

Ben: This has been Episode three of Step One.

Reporting by Yannic Hannebohn.

Our editor is Jelena Prtorić.

Our theme music is composed by Niklas Kramer.

We have a special shoutout to Almir. Why? Because of his catch phrase “We can arrange this.”

Almir Šećkanović, Emily Schultheiss, Aleksandar Đorđević, Aleksandar Janev and our team, we’re all part of the Bosch Alumni Network.

If you liked this episode, be sure to tell your friends about it. We’ve received a huge amount of positive feedback and we want to thank you for spending your time on this. We appreciate it.

If you want to see pictures of Sarajevo by the official photographer of our study trip, Kemal Softić and an uncut video interview of Yannic with Edin Kukavica on the political forces in Bosnian politics, visit our website at www.stepone.berlin.

Also if you want to help us, you can rate Step One on Apple Podcasts and and click on your computer and have fun.

Remember the next step is always step one.

This is Benjamin Lorch.

Thanks for listening.

Wandering in the Digital Woods (Singapore)

EPISODE 02 - I’m Gonna Quit My Job

July 29, 2018

Ben quits his job running a business school and looks for a new place for himself in the future.

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EPISODE 02 - I’m Gonna Quit My Job – Transcript

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Step One Transcript
Episode 02
“I'm Gonna Quit My Job"
© 2018 – Step One Productions

This is STEP ONE

a podcast about people striving to change their world -- our world.

We tell you stories of the Bosch Alumni Network.
A network of doers and thinkers connected across the globe, working toward positive change.

From Berlin

I'm Benjamin Lorch.

And in this episode I’m gonna quit my job.

[Jingle]

But before we dive into our story, we want to introduce you to the community this podcast is part of:

It’s the Bosch Alumni Network, which consists of people who have been supported, in one way or another, by the Robert Bosch foundation. The network is coordinated by the International Alumni Center, a think & do tank for alumni communities with social impact. The iac Berlin supports this podcast. If you want to know more about the power of networks, visit iac-berlin.org.

[Jingle]

Three months ago I quit a pretty serious job running a business school in Berlin.

I hereby terminate the existing employment relationship between us properly and on time to the next possible date.

I took pleasure in writing that letter and delivering it in person to the Chief Executive Officer.
Placing it on the desk between us was long in coming.

There are many reasons I left.
It’s hard to count them all
and to speak my mind right now might not be in my best interest.

Here's what you need to know:
I gave up a good salary
and money like that is hard to come by in Berlin, where I live.

Not only that, I had a German work contract which comes with lots of protections
it is almost impossible to get fired,
I had five weeks of vacation, full health care coverage.
But, these are all gone now.

I am 46 year old.
Married.
with a kid

So, what do I do now?

(music)

I guess I need a job and income
But more than that
I need to do something genuine that brings meaning.
And I'm searching for that now.

But this story is more than just about me.
It is about all of us
and the world of work we find ourselves in.

Because work has changed since I began working back in 1993. At that time I was good a faxing and the web was new.

Today I communicate over email, whats app and a bunch of other channels.
All we share with one another is text.
No one wants to talk on the telephone or even take a message. It seems like the art of conversation is lost and with that a lot of soul has left business and work.

(musik hoch)

You know, work is a funny thing.
It fills so much of our lives.

Some work is paid
and a lot of the work we do brings no money at all.

Some people work to express themselves
Some work to make things better
Some just work to keep their lives glued together

Sometimes we’re in control.
Sometimes work controls us.

It shapes our lives, our relationships.
And, it is closely tied to our identities and our emotions. Our wellbeing.

Most all of us have to work with other people and that can be a minefield…
or an immensely beautiful, fulfilling experience ….

(fade out)

Now, when I say WORK, I want you to think of two things at once:
the “small” work we do everyday as individuals – our jobs
and THE BIG WORK – CAPITAL LETTERS BIG WORK – that all of us are doing collectively in cooperation or in strife to shape the future.

THE BIG WORK operates at such a large, global scale that no one person can understand it all
but the consequences are massive, all around us and important for the future.

So, what is our job now?
What should my work be?
What should your work be?
What should OUR COLLECTIVE WORK be?

Stay tuned, walk with me we’ll find out.

LOST IN THE WOODS (WOOD SOUND)

After I left my job I found myself one day wandering through a dark German woods and I lost my way.

It was like I was sleep-walking.

The sun was beginning to set and it quickly became colder and darker. I began to worry I would have to spend the night there. But I managed to stay calm.

And then … I encountered someone,
nothing but a silhouette at first.
Silently he led me to a clearing and then to a small harbor with a dock.

And then this stranger began to ask me questions:

WOODS 1 - Gravel road

“What do you see.”

“Now I see a gravel road and some nice farm equipment that reminds me a little bit of my past…

WOODS 2 - Body

“What do you feel in your body”

“I feel...just….anticipation”

WOODS 3 - Heart

“What do you feel in your heart.”

“Nothing much”

WOODS 4 - Longing

“What are you longing for”

“I am longing for a kind of an energetic balance”

…… (SOUNDS OF THE WOODS)

The man is Peter Kesselberg, a member of the Bosch Alumni Network. We are in Paretz, a small village outside of Berlin. Peter is the first person I encounter during workshop focused on THE FUTURE OF WORK. To begin the weekend all of us participants walk into the village of Paretz together, answering the questions you just heard in pairs, to get to know one another and begin the workshop.

Paretz feels like a place to slow down and think. It lies the banks of the wide Havel River west of Berlin. It was built when horses and walking were the only transportation options. The streets are cobblestone and the houses and barnyards are in an austere Prussian style. and it holds a pastoral spirit of farming and work

Attending the conference there is a perfect opportunity to connect with new people and “network.” Fancy words for “look for a job.”

HARDENING 1

-Three months ago I quit my job and I don’t have any next job to go to.

-To quit the job or.. to come here…? To quit?

This is Fredericke Hardering from the sociology department at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt. Since Hardering is an expert on work-life balance I took the opportunity to ask her my question.

HARDENING 2

I mean, if you don't get out of the job what you want from it, and you have opportunity, the exit option, of course you should quit. I think it is so important that we really try to listen to our hearts what we really want to do, and if we change what we do and improve our working situations, then of course we should do it, yeah.

I like what Hardering says and I agree with her. She is an expert that understands why people work, how they define work and when they experience their work as meaningful. And I was on that very quest, to find something meaningful.

HARDENING 3

The conference is about the future and I am 47 years old and I am thinking about my future..And I am wondering if there is a place for me in the future of work. So just for fun, I brought you my resume, and I want you to look at it, and I want you to give me your first impressions of my resume. Here I am at the piece of paper, that’s me (that’s you?) so you look and who do you see, what should this man do?

….

Actually….you look like a lawyer or something like this here, and I only screen management and administration, you look very off icial and like in a high qualified professional job , lawyer or economic researcher, but when I look at you now you look pretty different than this….

HARDENING 4

(Ben) And if you look now in the actual Lebenslauf (?), this is my recent jobs….what do you see in this person? Where should he go?

(Hardening) I would say you can also follow the steps you have already done and follow your way as a self-employed.... The headphone and mic suit you well, so maybe you should do more podcast and everything like this, and maybe a bit of You Tube… and...yeah, yeah,…. Go this way with the headphones…

(Ben) So, your advice is wear headphones …(laughs)....ok...

Headphones!.... Of course!

She is right because I have always loved radio.

I mean, I was raised on radio -- listening all the time in the kitchen when I was a kid. And I love the stories and voices that radio bring us.

They have a tremendous power to resonate within the souls of others.

Hardening reminded me that of that and she reminded me that I want to make meaningful conversation a part of my work.I am not the only one searching for the meaning in work.

Millions of people around the world quit their jobs every month: They are not necessarily unhappy, but many hope to establish their own businesses, with a healthier business culture. More and more people are ready to abandon traditional work for self-employment, they are ready to face job market uncertainty if that means they can escape the old. The 9-5, cubicles, office politics and bad behavior.

Today, it just feels so normal to look for self fulfilment in work. It is not just survival.

It is close to our souls. We do more than toil.
But it hasn't always been that way.

To put this all into perspective I spoke to Simon Berkler, co-founder of TheDive, a collective helping organizations and teams to reformulate how they work together.

Simon led a workshop which took an historical look at work and the way we relate to each other through our organizations

This gets a bit big picture, but this part is important because knowing a little about how we got to this point might help us to understand the here and now

So what he's saying is basically this:

(sound collage)

We have passed through four grand epochs of work and its organization.

First, people settled down to cultivate land, work was done to grow and store food. The materials came directly from nature and the major source of power were wind water, animals, and the sweat of your own brow. It was the agrarian era, when you worked to serve your lord, like a King.

Then early Industrialization occurred, at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Machines started to organize our lives and people were taught to use the tools and become a part of a larger production. The world of work was made of steel and powered by steam.

Industrialization led next to the Information Age. People began to work more and more with information in the form of data and computers. Tools are not anymore just objects anymore but rather information technologies. This era ends with the moon landing in 1969.

Today we live in the Globalized world wherein we are exposed in big and small ways to all of our neighbors around the world. The Internet is at the center of all of this. People work more independently or in the “gig economy.” Rapid change is the norm and increasingly decisions are made by computers.

......

In the globalized world, what is our new material of work ?

BERKLER 1

On the tangible level it seems to be data, I think this is the answer you get most often. On a deeper level, not sure about that, it is rather frequency or energy or something like that but this sounds a bit spiritual and it is also meant like that. Because, the idea of being interconnected to everything around us is a very spiritual idea, and data is maybe a metaphor for the way we are intertwined with everything around us, maybe.

Change has come so fast that many people can't remember an earlier world, but that earlier time was just a few years ago. Before the smartphone and the apps, before amazon, before Google and Facebook . . . even before the Internet. We were connected to each other differently. And because of that we worked together differently.

In the past things moved a little slower but perhaps in a good way. Work was a more deliberate and taken at a more soulful, human pace. People were more focused – and far less distracted by the many channels we are all monitoring.

So, just what should we call times we are living in?

We need new words to describe our era. How does “Post-Internet, TransLocal, Technocapitalism sound to you?

We need better language, better codes to describe what is going on.

Because in ten years from now, we will be working more and more with robots and quote “smart” devices that we talk to and they will talk with us. Actually, we work with them now! Alexa. Siri.

And these devices, they are watching us, listening to us and sucking up all the data they can. So, how can I get ready for the brave new world of work with the robots, the Artificial Intelligence, the Big Data?

Should I learn their language? Learn their code? Learn coding?

PARESEKE 1

It is a future skill and we are convinced everyone needs it.

This is Nora Perseke of the Calliope Company. She knows something about code. teaches workshops on coding. She offered one of these in Paretz at the conference

You don’t have to delve into it very deeply but understand basics of algorithms, how the computer and the programs are working. Because there is more and more digitized tools around us in our everyday lives and our work lives. We need to use them, and we want to not only produce consumers, but people who really know what they are doing. So that’s the point.

She came there with this small do-it-yourself computer that looks like an electronic star fish with chips on it. You can program it to do basic functions and learn the basics of coding in that way.

I wasn’t so into the Calliope and I asked Nora if we should be scared of it.

PARSEKE 2

(Ben) Do you ever fear that Caliope machines will get together and do their own thing and do their own thing, without your influence or command?

(Nora) I doubt that because the processor of the computer is a bit dumb, so that they cannot take over the world. They are just our little helpers, our little star shaped computers to make the world better. But who knows….I mean, I don’t know what they do at night, so maybe they are planning a revolution...

PARSEKE 3

(Ben)I am actually very interested in leaving computers behind...I would like to leave anything made of silicone behind me….

(Nora) Technology will move on, and there will be Ai, and it will affect you even if you don’t use the social media. I think it is healthy to stay sceptical and to think of the threats applied but it is also...yes, if you deny everything that will happen that makes it hard to take part in the world, and also if you know how to influence an AI in you favour, for example..

(Ben) Now I am going to become a little philosophical and ask you something…I was just at a workshop across the way and they are talking about this organic networked work, moving away from hierarchy and command and control, but isn’t coding all about the command and control… Are you poisoning the minds of people to think that they can control this world through the use of computers?

(Nora) As you can see in our workshops, people are coding together, so it is a social thing. You can not be a programmer on your own and program a whole car or a whole robot, so you always need a team. What we teach is coding skills but at the same time social skills. They need to work together, they need to make a plan together, they need to present their results to each other in order to create a better product. So I can understand that people think that computers estrange us from each other but it is actually not, and it nice to see that in our workshops, so people should come and take a look.

CODING WORKSHOP 1

Man, I do not think that this coding thing is for me. The last thing I want to do is spend more time in front of a computer that does not know me.

BIRDS 1

EXTRA GRAVEL SOUNDS 1

I gotta keep on moving to figure this out:
Back to the woods to think about all I have heard.
Maybe the answers lie there.

WOODA SEQUENCE : SOUNDS [EXTRA GRAVEL SOUNDS 1]+ [ BIRDS 1 ]+[ SINGING STONE 1 ]

JULIA BEATRICE 1

What do you love,
what do you like to do,
what do you not want to do anymore,
who are people around you that might be interested in doing things with you,
and what is the next thing you can do now to get into motion

BERKLER 2

Keep on moving but in a very sensitive way, in terms of not stressing yourself really train your antennas for the weak signals which might come along, because in the transition times, it helps to be very sensitive to the weak signals…

PARSEKE 4

Learning how to code is a really beneficial career advice...

WHYTE

Go forward by going back on the road you came on
the road you came on
you came on.

[ SINGING STONE 1 ]

[ BIRDS 1 ]

When I was a kid, I spent summers living and working on a farm in Rhode Island. The farm there rolled to the ocean, like Paretz lies by its river.

Some days in Rhode Island, I could hear pounding Atlantic surf as I stood in a field of grazing cows. And sometimes in the morning after storms at night I awoke to find the windows of the house frosted with sea salt.

The farm was old and some of it slowly falling down.

I spent days without time around the animals and the farmer and woodworker, John. I watched him work, I followed him. I watched and I listened and I learned his trades in the fields, around the barn and in the woodshop.

We baled hay. We slopped the pigs. I worked in the woodshop, cutting, pläning and waiting for glue to dry. It was another world -- an earlier world -- something like living in history because John liked old machinery and hand tools and John liked to watch thing rust. We were surrounded by time and this was the first notion of work I ever had.

Paretz reminded me of this and there a deeper, past part of me come forth. Amongst the old buildings on the dirt roads and in the woods, I encountered an earlier me.

It’s emotional to talk about it. It’s emotional because in Paretz I brushed up against my boyhood dreams of what I might, one day, become and the work I would do. Naïve ideas about what life might hold for me.

Now I have walked the roads and I have and I can look back and look forward simultaneously. And, I have enough experiences to know who I am and what I want.

When I awoke on the last day of the conference, after all the talks and workshops, I felt I could chart a course forward.

I knew what work to do.

I want to hear stories and I want to tell stories.
I want to grab a microphone, put on my headphones and head out to go talk with people. Because there is work to be done -- radio to be made -- and it’s time to start.

This podcast -- the one you have been listening to -- is the result.

This Podcast is my StepOne.

(Music out)

Step One is supported by the International Alumni Center Berlin. Producing by Yannic HANNEBOHN. Our editor is Jelena PRTORIC. Our theme music is composed by Niklas Kramer of the band Still Parade.

Special shoutout this time goes to my wonderful friend Jerry Mulderig and my wife, Odette.

Peter Kesselberg and our team, we are all part of the Bosch Alumni network.

If you liked this episode, tell a friend. If you want to tell us about you're quest to find a job, write us to hello@stepone.berlin. We'll publish the best stories on our website at www.stepone.berlin

Before we part ways, I want to share with you some advice I got in Paretz that moved me. It was not about technology, it was about connecting with myself and others. I hope it helps you too.

BERKLER 3

There is just a metaphor which comes to my mind when talking about transitions...it is about a lobster because when the lobsters grow they get rid of their shell because otherwise they wouldn't be able to grow, it would really tighten them, but when they do get rid of their shell they are also very vulnerable for enemies, and this is something I find kind of poetic because that might be true for humans who develop or who grow, to step into their vulnerability and make it part of their transition process...

That is it for this episode. In the next episode we’ll travel to Bosnia to look at the elections.

From Berlin,

I´m Benjamin Lorch

Remember the next step is always step one.

Thanks for listening.

- end -

EPISODE 1 - A Country Goes Nuts

July 28, 2018

What happens to a country when its young people leave to find jobs elsewhere? Jelena goes to Moldova and learns how a small community of newcomers is bringing renewed hope and new economic opportunities.

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EPISODE 1 - A Country Goes Nuts – Transcript

Transcript

This is STEP ONE
a podcast about people striving to change their world -- our world.

We tell you stories of the Bosch Alumni Network. A network of doers and thinkers connected across the globe working toward positive change.

From Berlin

I am Benjamin Lorch.

And today’s episode: A Country Goes Nuts

In this episode, our reporter Jelena shares a story about an Practitioner’s Lab organized by Bosch Alumni, Julian and Liliana. The event gathers some 20 Bosch Alumni to exchange expertise on sustainable rural development.

But before we dive into our story, we want to introduce you to the community this podcast is part of.

[Jingle]

Yvgenya

You are already recording?

Jelena

Yes.

Evgenya

Mamma mia! Ok you will cut it afterwards…

(Laughs)

So Ben, for this first episode of our podcast I was in Riscova.

Wait, where is Riscova?

Riscova, it’s a village in Moldova.

Moldova

You know where Modova is?

Yeah, I do.

Where is Moldova?

It’s between Romania and Ukraine.

OK, what else do you know about Moldova?

It’s landlocked, even though it’s close to the black sea, they don’t have a port.

Exactly.

And I stayed with the woman you hear on the tape. Evgenja.

VOICE OVER - Evgenya

So..you know how it is, I wasted these twenty years of my life in Moscow..I really wasted them..I gave these years to my children. I didn’t have ...let’s call it... youth, or anything. I am really sorry, really sorry. Because I wasn’t with my children, I did not raise them.

Evgenya has three children and seven grandchildren. And she can count the days she got to spend with them. She worked abroad for so many years, trying to build a better life for her family. She missed out on her children’s first steps, their birthdays, they first days of school, their football games and dance shows.

VOICE OVER
How many times did I look back at the doors of my home...I would leave in tears, in tears. My children were crying -- if only you had seen it! I remember it, even if it was so many years ago…

When I was working in a foreign country and I saw young children with braids… that’s when I would ask myself: who is braiding the hair of my children

Whoa, that is pretty heavy but why did she go to Russia in the first place?

Money, really. You have to remember, when Evgenya first left for Russia, it was in early 90s. The Soviet Union collapsed and Moldova gains its independence but almost overnight the country shifted from communism to the market economy. So factories closed and state owned companies just disappeared. And, there was not enough work and not enough money for Evgenya here in Moldova.

Not then, not now.

What’s even worse, that sacrifice she took for her children, she feels it was almost for nothing.

VOICE OVER

What did we get for these 20 years I wasted? I built a home so that my children would have somewhere to live. I educated them so that they would have somewhere to work. But there’s no work here...

(Music)

Wait, Jelena, so I get it. There’s not a lot of work and not a lot of money but what was Riscova like? Did it look really poor? What did you find there?

Wait, so Jelena, so I get that there’s a problem about getting work in Riscova today so I wonder, tell me a little bit about what it’s like in this place. I have no idea / some idea of it but… fill me in, really.

So her children had to leave Riscova. Now I wonder: What was your impression when you first arrived in the village?

Well, Riscova is a smallish village. It has some 1200 inhabitants and it would take you about an hour to get around the village on foot. There is one main dirt road that runs through the village, and it takes you probably about ten minute drive from from the entrance point to the last house on the road.

Is there a stop light there?

Sorry?

Is there a stop light? Like, that’s something in America we always ask. Like, “is it a one-stop-light-town?” Is there a stop sign or a stop light?

No.

No stop light. Nothing

No stop lights. You don’t need stop lights.

You don’t need stop lights. Got it.

They all have gardens. With colorful flowers, grass, dogs. Sometimes, a cow or an old rusty tractor just outside the house.

Sounds nice but the job situation? The economics?

Yeah, that’s the problem. People really do need to have jobs. The official unemployment rate of Moldova was around 4.3% in 2017, so I thought it would be higher, to be honest.

Yeah, that is low.

Yeah, that is kind of a low number so the problem is actually the average income in the country. In the villages, people earn about 150-200 euros per month. In the city, the income is slightly higher, 300-400 euros or so. But it’s not enough. So people leave their country to find work elsewhere. 20% of the GNI comes from people who work abroad and send the money back home to their families. It’s a common thing. So, many people do what Evgenya did for 20 years.

But there is really no way to generate this economy locally?

OK, I have a UN report for you. This is a report with estimation of population growth in the future. The UN publishes these reports like on many things and this report estimates that another 53% of Moldovans will leave their country in the next 80 years, by the end of the century.

Over half!

And this emigration problem I started seeing it not only in piles of spreadsheets. I started seeing it everywhere. Like, even entered the pop culture.

Do you remember this nasty sax hook?

(Nasty Sax Hook)

Totally! Eurovision!

Yea, yea. Yea, yea.

It’s the one from Oslo. So the one from the Moldovan song from Oslo from 2010. And the band performing is called Sunstroke Project.

And the guy that’s playing the sax has been known as Epic Sax Guy.

Epic Sax Guy. Nice! Yeah, he got some play out of this. I remember, it was kinda big.

I think he became kind of a star. Why I am bringing up this song because it kind of describing the country’s problem in a nutshell, in these lines.

Song:

There’s no other time to make it happen

Happiness you have mistaken

We have no progressive future

I know your lying nature!

Oh, I won't forget

Let me breathe, let me leave

Just run away from my mind

Yeah, I remember this. “Let me beathe. Let me leave.”

I have to be honest. It might be a bit far-fetched because I did not find any proof of my interpretation of the song being about the emigration but I just think it is really interesting to find that problem reflected in a piece of pop culture.

Absolutely.

(Music).

So it’s seems to me like that this place, Moldova, where you went -- I am getting this image of a train station where everyone is gathered around and then the train comes in empty and then a whole bunch of people leave and the others are just left there. Maybe they’ll stay. Maybe they’ll go but the place is emptying out.

That’s no way to build a society. People have to stick around. They have to be committed. Do I have it right?

Hmm. So first of all, I like the metafore but Moldova doesn’t have that many train stations…

Yeah, of course, I know but, but . . .

Yes, people especially in the rural areas are waiting for a change and it’s not that it is abandoned completely, it’s just that no one is really keen to go there, because, you know, international reporting on Moldova – is not all that flattering really.

(Newscast Montage)

LILIANA

Within a month period I saw three articles about Moldova… people would go “Look, Moldova was in the news!”

This is Liliana.

And all the three articles would start with “Moldova, the poorest country in Europe…It really didn’t sit well with me, to be honest. It is just, it was hard, that realisation, is that the only thing people hear about Moldova, it that’s what Moldova is known for?

Liliana is 40, and she has these big, warm, Bambi eyes.

I would want to live and see a day when Moldova would be known for tasty, healthy food. Where people would be like, “this apple is from Moldova! That’s a really tasty apple, grown without chemicals.

She is excited about the apples.

Yeah, she is excited about many things. And she is not even born in a village, in a rural area. She has been a city person most of her life. She was born in the capital of Moldova, Chisinau, and has lived there practically her whole life. She’s one of the main people running Ecovisio. It’s an NGO working in the field of sustainable development. And Liliana and her family actually moved to Riscova to do that -- to live in a more sustainable way. This was in 2014. Since then they have started building what now is called Eco-village Moldova, a place within Riscova that might change some of the media’s narrative on Moldova.

How would Eco-village change that narrative?

By setting good examples. Let me take you to the Eco-village.

Don’t think of it as of a village. Think more of it as a farm. Sort of.

You enter there through a large wooden gate on a gravel pathway. Your would look around and you would see lots of colors. Lots of green, first of all. This garden with grass, vegetables, some trees and then house right next to the entrance, also painted green...Another house, in yellow. And all sorts of farming equipment just laying around….some shovels and rakes.

There is one thing that surprised me at first. And that was: no animals at the farm.

Because they’re vegetarians...

Right.

And you know then there is this “eco thing.” They built their houses with clay and reed. And they are also trying to save water, so they have these cool composting toilets, that one kind that doesn’t use any water to function, and kind of can get you confused if you do not know how to use it.

Also, there are “do-it-yourself” water tanks, to collect rainwater... And they also want to teach others how to do this things. So they build a training center - basically a building in which they will host trainings. They already did some trainings like on eco-agriculture or this huge “planting trees” in the village initiative…

Is it a big group of people?

Not really. There are only two families living there. Liliana with her husband. And that guy who left Berlin to come to live in Riscova, Julian.

JULIAN

I am the guy with the funny hair and some kids know me because we sometimes play football, and they ask me if I can lend them my bicycle.. so there is a connection. There is a connection to the neighbors, yeah...but I think I will have to grow slowly into a role, before I can say that I have a role, a role of a moderator, the role of a neighbor.

Julian comes from Germany and is married to a’Moldovan. I didn´t find his hair funny, but he does have a big, curly locks so you would definitely notice him on the streets of Riscova.

He’s like the new guy in town. That’s not so easy in a small village.

I was really curious not just about how Julian is adapting to this new lifestyle but also what does he think about being from from the outside. Epecially from this richer, Western country to this small village in eastern Europe. So. I actually asked him about that.

JULIAN

I think that’s important, not to be too fast, and not to be too pushy. Always when you want to teach something or if you learn from something you have to have a positive idea about this person, a positive emotional connection. If this is the basis then everything can happen.

But yeah, trust building...just getting to know each other -- that’s always the first step.

Right, step one.

Yeah, so I did learn that Julian is sensitive about these differences. And he’s trying to gain trust from people but slowly. However this trust building thing is really a two-sided thing. So, on the one side there are Julian and Liliana and their families and they are offering their help. And on the other side the villagers themselves need to be open to embrace it.

And are they?

Well the Ecovillage people, the kind of made sure that it would. They didn’t go in cold, is Riscova. They sort of had a village search back in 2014.

We did have a small list of criterias, what we would be looking for. One of the reasons to move to this village was that we felt that people still cared about the village, cared about each other. We visited some villages closer to the capital, and we had an impression that it is more of a sleeping communities. That people work in the city, they come they sleep and leave again. The spirit of the community is close to being lost there, here it is still happening.

Ah, that’s interesting. So, there was some sort of social infrastructure there, despite the structural flaws and the poverty, that convinced them to settle in Riscova.

It is this community thing and I did feel it when I was there.

How so? What do you mean?

One concrete example comes to my mind. Riscova doesn’t have a trash pick-up. Whatever trash you produce, you can either be a good citizen, and you put it all in your car and drive to Chisinau and then deposit it there somewhere. ..But you know, you can also burn it or dig a hole in a field somewhere and bury it. And many have been doing just that over the years.

So this one guy guy organized a cleanup one Sunday. Some 70 people gathered, there were young and old. And they just started to collect trash, filling up bags and bags with plastic bottles, cans, pieces of fabric – there was a lot of trash. And… at the end of the day, you could tell the difference. Of course, it was cleaner.

What stayed with me is like ‘OK, all these people coming here on a Sunday!’ This is a thing in Riscova; that people help each other out. Because when I talked to my host, Evgenia, she told me this story about how when she got married to her husband, people helped them out to build their house. She wasn’t from the village. And people would still come on Saturdays from the village and help them with the building.

There is a catch, however. I think this community spirit needs to be nurtured. And, you know, if more and more people leave elsewhere. If more and more families get separated, the spirit might be lost.

VOICE OVER - Evgenya

The mother is at home with the children and the father leaves to earn money – it’s not like this happens over night but eventually … how to say … he meets another woman, he gets interested in her and doesn’t see his own wife over some time. And he falls in love – or his wife back home does with someone else – I don’t know how it goes. And then he starts to forget about his family or she does and then there’s the divorce.

Wait, is that what happened to Evgenya?

No, not to Evgenya. But she has seen many families falling apart over the years. Many divorces.

OK, but these are big social forces. Underemployment. Divorce. What can the Eco-villagers do about that?

Well sometimes, you just need something small. Something like growing walnuts.

Excuse me, walnuts?

Yes. And, actually, I brought you something.

You did? Money?

I brought you money.

Let me see!

This is the money.

This is not money. This is a bottle… This is… I have to describe this. This is an instant coffee jar with a plastic lid. And it looks like it is from Russia ‘cause it has Russian cyrillic on it. And, inside, as I am opening it up, there’s some very nice looking walnuts.

May I eat these?

Yeah, eat them.

They are not radio-active?

No. You’ll be fine.

(Chewing)

They are good. They’re very sweet.

Do you like them?

Yeah.

How much would you pay for them?

I am not a big nut purchaser but now I am remembering. That I did have to buy some nuts recently and walnuts are extremely expensive.

This is . . . This is the future?

This might be the future.

So, it was Julian who introduced me to this idea.

JULIAN

I couldn’t think of a tree giving you so much. But 30-50 year old trees, so a tree it his best age gives you, if you are lucky, 30-40 kilos of shelled walnuts. That’s a good tree. And a kilo, is also on the the market -- they are OK -- it's also five euros. So that’s 200 euros per tree.

200 euros per tree. That’s the average salary in a Moldovan village, remember. So, with twelve walnut trees, you would basically secure yourself a yearly salary.

Awesome. So the money is growing on trees.

Julian said their idea is not only to encourage people to plant more walnut trees and sell them on the market. He thinks it could become one of the Moldovan brands.

JULIAN

We thought about a campaign “Moldova Goes Nuts.

Nice. Nice! That’s brilliant. I love it.

And, you are not the only one.

VOICE OVER - Evgenya

What am I thinking? I think it’s great. I wish they would do even more than what they have done so far...and they have done a lot for this village. Everyone hopes they will be able to make something out of this village. Everyone hopes that.

What is the most important thing that you take away from your time there?

I think it’s about the energy of this place. I knew I would be going to a rather poor country, a poor village. I kind of expected foolishly to find people in despair, who are angry, apathetic. And this grandiose project that would save them all. But, I discovered a village and a country where, yes, people have their problems, but that have also preserved this genuine, warm human relationships. And I think this is actually something we could learn from them.

LILIANA

For some reason we keep forgetting that not “human doings,” we’re focusing in jobs, and don’t pay attention so much that we are human beings. How do we relate with each other. How do we relate with nature. With our communities.

Sometimes we get too lost in day-to-day challenges -- I think that we have and a little bit of a consumerist approach to things.

Following my time with Jelena, in the studio. learning all this, I did take a look at the figures. And the World Health Organization classified Moldova within the Top 10 countries in terms of harvest areas for walnuts. When it comes to the actual revenue, they are not even in the top 40, Moldova. They are the 47th biggest world exporter. Meaning all those walnut trees in Riscova, they could make a big difference.

This has been Episode One of Step One as brought to you by the Bosch Alumni Network.

Reporting by Jelena Prtoric.

Our editor is Yannic Hannehohn.

Our theme music is composed by Niklas Kramer. Check out his other beautiful stuff on Spotify under the band name Still Parade.

A special shoutout this time goes to everyone making this first episode possible, especially Lisa Richter of the iac Berlin.

Julian, Liliana and our team, we’re all part of the Bosch Alumni Network.

If you liked our first episode, you can tell your friends and write us an email at hello@stepone.berlin

Also if you want, you can rate us on iTunes and click on your computer and have fun.

Remember the next step is always step one.

This is Benjamin Lorch.

And thanks for listening.

What is Step One?

May 20, 2018

Step One is a podcast about people striving to change their world – our world. We tell you stories from the Bosch Alumni Network, a network of doers and thinkers connected across the globe, working toward positive change.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the respective speakers.

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What is Step One? – Transcript

Transcript

HOST:
From Berlin this is Step One

A podcast about people striving to change the world, our world. We tell you the stories from the Bosch Alumni Network. A network of doers and thinkers connected around the globe, working toward positive change.

JULIAN:
“People here in Moldova, they’re happy and they’re not okay with the status quo, they are not okay with the leadership, with the political system, so they are in the state: Yes, we need change”

HOST:
And we do live in a time of change and it seems the decisions we make today are evermore important.

Whatever you think is to come, the world requires us to think and work in new ways.

Take the Step One team for example,

Jelena from Croatia
Yannic from Germany
both journalists working as freelance reporters

and Me, your host,

I am Benjamin Lorch

I’m an American who has returned to Germany, to live in Berlin.

In the coming months we will travel with you around the world to learn the stories of the Bosch Alumni Network, people who are taking action.

People who want to shape the future, taking their step one.

We will hear their voices and discover their dreams.

LILIANA
“I would want to see a day when Moldova would be known for tasty healthy food. Where people would be like: Oh, this apple is from Moldova. That’s a real tasty apple grown without chemicals.”

HOST:
This show is our step one too and we’re driven by curiosity and a hope that we’ll find connections in the stories and voices from different corners of the world.

PROFESSOR HARDERING
“Go to the places, go to the people, meet them and, yea, follow the energy”

HOST:
We’ll visit new families in the tiny but proud state of Moldova. We’ll search for the future of work and we’ll cover the elections in Bosnia.

and more…

The podcast is part of the Bosch Alumni Network, which consists of people who have been supported, in one way or another, by the Robert Bosch foundation. The network is coordinated by the International Alumni Center, a think & do tank for alumni communities with social impact. The iac Berlin supports this podcast. If you want to know more about the power of networks, visit iac-berlin.org.

JULIAN
“I met a lot of people here that are ready to take responsibility for their society or for their community and also thinking in bigger scales. Also thinking: Yes, If I don’t open this business -- in this 3,5 million society, nobody will.”

HOST:
First steps can be scary and exciting. But they’re needed to navigate the complexity and connectedness we’re all feeling these days.

In the next couple of months, we’ll meet people with dreams, expectations and their own despair as they try to make this place a better one.

But where ever they’re going: These people are on to something new. On to their next step. Step One.

If you want to come on our journey, subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

PROFESSOR HARDERING
“Yea go this way with the headphones . . .”

HOST
“OK, so your advice is to wear headphones? OK.” [Laughter]

Remember:
The first step is always step one.

I am Benjamin Lorch.

Stay Tuned.

Subscribe to

We tell you stories from the Bosch Alumni Network, a network of doers and thinkers connected across the globe, working toward positive change.

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