Global News Podcast: The Happy Pod: The gift of sight

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The captain, you know, he went on the radio and he was like,

we just want to make sure everyone knows he has a Paralympic captain on the plane.

On the podium is back with more Olympians and Paralympians sharing their remarkable stories.

On the podium, listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Hi, I'm Joyce from the Philippines and you are listening to the Happy Pod.

Hi, I'm Rhys and welcome to the Happy Pod.

This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service.

I'm Jackie Leonard and in this edition uploaded on Saturday, the second of September,

the extraordinary impact of an experimental stem cell treatment for a serious eye injury.

They kept talking about thank you for participating and thank you for doing this for us.

And I told them thank you for doing this for me. They saved my life.

The Italian who saved a little girl as she fell from an apartment block.

I opened my arms, I closed the eyes and an upper to catch her.

I don't know how, but I did it. She fell down my chest in my arms.

The green tech to help reduce the costs and carbon footprint of the fishing industry in

Southeast Asia. To have the possibility that you can give more to fish your folks out there,

it's a very, very good feeling. Also in this podcast,

the feet start moving and the movement is one, two, three hop, one, two, three hop,

one hop, two hop and then there you go with the sticks.

Our political correspondent like you've never heard him before.

Many of us perhaps take our sight for granted, but for Phil Durst, who's 51 and from Alabama in

the US, a life changing accident left him blind and in terrible pain. Then he was given a ray of

hope. He heard about an experimental procedure to treat corneas damaged by chemical burns and

other such injuries. We'll hear about the science in a moment. First though, Phil told us what happened

to him. So I was standing in front of a piece of commercial equipment in the back of a restaurant

and the pump built pressure somehow and it squirted right across my face. It's 27 percent

sodium hydroxide, landed pretty hard and heavy in my left eye and a little bit in my right eye

and I was blind and suffering some of the worst pain I've ever felt in my whole life.

And then you volunteered for this trial for this experimental procedure. Volunteering for

something experimental takes courage. What were your thought processes?

I couldn't go on doing what I was doing. I was suffering cluster headaches, migraine headaches

one to two a day. I couldn't leave the house. I was living in the dark. So the thought of

volunteering and being brave, I do not have a cape and boots in my closet. I would have done

anything to make this stop. After the actual transplant, my light sensitivity has decreased.

I actually started to see for a while there. I was super excited to get to see the big A

on the eye chart, you know, the biggest letter. And my distance vision in my right eye is 20-25

with glasses on. So I can drive a car. I can do all sorts of things. But talking about the

quality of life and how life has gone on and how much better it is, I don't have words to describe

it. I couldn't go on. It wasn't just being blind. It was what light did to me. I was walking around

with my eyes closed everywhere I went because there wasn't a pair of sunglasses or shades

that could filter the light enough to give me the relief that I needed in this house. I mean,

they kept talking about thank you for participating and thank you for doing this for us. And I told

them, thank you for doing this for me. If not for Dr. Yurkunas recognizing a need for something

like this, what I was going through, I probably wouldn't be here today. And I mean, so Dr.

Yurkunas, do you need me to cut your grass and clean your gutters? Give me a call. I'm on the

next plane. Whatever you want, I will do it. She saved my life. They saved my life.

Well, let's hear now from Dr. Ulla Yurkunas from Mass Eye and Ear in Boston, who's behind the

knee treatment. This procedure is called callic. It's basically taking a small biopsy of a corneal

tissue from a healthy eye, taking that biopsy to laboratory to cultivate the cells or grow them

and after making more stem cells, placing them back onto the patient's eye. So there's already

another procedure using stem cells from a healthy eye on an injured one. But this is different,

isn't it? You've improved the system and this one is less risky. Yes. So currently in the United

States, the most common modality is to actually take the biopsy and directly place it on the

diseased eye without cultivating those stem cells. And a lot of times the risk of that is that you

have to take pretty large biopsies from the healthy eye, putting the healthy eye at risk.

And what sorts of eye injury are we talking about? What sorts of people might this be able to help?

It helps various injuries, but it goes even beyond that. So if there is a patient who has an

infection that has depleted their stem cells, if there is an issue of trauma to the eye or

chemical injuries, so anything that can destroy those stem cells can be actually treated with

this procedure. So you've made the science clear and it has been a really lengthy process to get

this far. Tell us about the patients that you've been working with. It is a really great pleasure

and really honor to be able to do this trial. Because first of all, the patients have entrusted

their eye to us. This trial is a combination of 20 years of work, literally from bench to bedside.

So for me personally, it's wonderful that the basic research that we were working on is now

in humans. Dr Ulla Yokunas and before that we heard from Phil Dust. Now to cheer in in Italy,

which is celebrating an incredible catch, Mattia Aguzzi and his girlfriend Gloria were on their

way to buy bread when they heard desperate cries from high above the street. We heard somebody

screaming for the balcony on the other side on the street. Stop, don't move, go back. Looking up,

we saw a little girl at the fifth floor of the building next to us. We started shouting to her

to stay back, but she didn't hear us. She continued until she was angry just with her small hands to

the balcony. In that moment, I was following her movements. I opened my arms, I closed the eyes

and I opened to catch her. I don't know how, but I did it. She fell down my chest in my arms. It has

been a strong impact. Both of us felt on the street. I couldn't breathe for a few moments.

Then after a while, she started crying. The worst was over. She was alive. Gloria must be so proud

of you. Yes, yes. She was very, very scared, not only for the baby, but also for me. Well,

yeah, it was a long fall, a huge catch. You did fall to the ground. Are you okay? Yes, yes, I'm

okay. I've been at the hospital just for some checks until today afternoon, but after a few

hours, I was at home. The strongest impact has been under an emotional point of view. The following

night, I could sleep just a few hours. I started thinking more and more about what happened,

or maybe more about what fortunately didn't happen. I felt like I've been in a parallel dimension,

so many media were calling for an interview to get information. Including me, it must be said.

Importantly, the little girl, is she okay? Yes, also the baby is fine. On Saturday afternoon,

I saw her for a few minutes at the hospital. She was smiling, watching cartoons. This is the most

important thing for me. And you mentioned the reaction and all the media interest. Tell us a

bit more about the things that you've heard from your family and your friends and social media and

famous people. When I met my mom Saturday evening, she gave me a long hug crying for the motion,

as well as my dad and my sister. I received many messages from friends, colleagues, even from people

who don't know. The prime minister, the Piedmont president, is important to share the credit with

Emilio, who was the first person to raise the alarm when he saw Frida on the balcony.

So, Matteo, you've had this huge emotional reaction from your family and friends and

international interest. What's it like to be a hero? No, I don't feel like a hero. I follow

with my instinct, hope that anybody else would have done the same. For me, in that fragment of

second, it was the only right thing to do. I always been a rational person, but now I stand

to believe the destiny.

Traditional prosthetic limbs can be expensive and often heavy, and a lot of the places where

they're most needed lack trained personnel and infrastructure. Well, one company trying to do

something about that is called Koala. It started what proved to be a successful pilot scheme in

Sierra Leone in 2021 and is now working to roll it out nationally. Founder Nate McAbuag

told us what's different about his prosthetics. The way we make prosthetics is much more akin

to how you might make a trainer or bit of sportswear or an item of clothing. So, instead of

a rigidly moulded socket, it's soft, flexible, it's reinforced where it needs to be, but the rest

of it is made out of fabrics. And then instead of really complicated things on the end that are

quite heavy and hard to use, which have simple tools that clip on and off and you have ones for

pens, for playing music, for doing other sports. Obviously, you've been working in the UK, but

you've also been carrying out a pilot project in Sierra Leone. What took you there?

Yeah, our chairman at the time had done work in the past and he had some contacts out there and we

met an amazing guy called Dr. Abston Boyer. He was born with polio and he saw what we were making

and was like, guys, that would be so useful here. So, what we kind of realised by making

prosthetics like clothes is that you can put in a box and send them to anywhere in the world.

Tell us a little bit about the source of response that you have had from recipients.

They send videos of doing new sports, doing new hobbies, of trying new things, of doing

things that haven't done in years and it's like, I wake up to these every day. That's the most

fulfilling thing I could imagine. So, I mean, the first time we actually went to Sierra Leone,

which was 2021, we're only there for a week and we managed to fit about 20 people with upper

limb loss, which is kind of unheard of. How is that? Very excellent. The polio bull is excellent.

They were just happy to see that there were people paying attention and for us it was amazing because

a completely different culture, but actually what we saw was a lot of the similarities.

A guy called Sullivan, the other son, and in his thing, he didn't need a prosthetic for most things,

but when he says, when I'm walking my son to school, I can't hold his hand when I'm crossing

the road and help him carry his school bag and he said photos afterwards of like, this is great,

this is amazing. So, the last thing we did was train the clinicians that make prosthetics from

the country. There's only four, which is about 20, 25,000 amputees in the country. So, it shows

you the scale of the mismatch of the problem and the funding. So, it's a model that if we get it

right in Sierra Leone, it can scale to literally anywhere on the planet. You can't describe that

feeling of being even just a little bit useful to someone else. We were with approaching 1,000

people around the world. It's the coolest job ever. That was Nate Maccabourg from Kuala.

Now, some of the other things that caught our eye this week. The magnificent return of gymnast

Simone Biles, who broke a 90-year record by winning her eighth all-round title at the US

Gymnastics Championships. Her win came less than a month after the four-time Olympic champion

returned to competition following a two-year break. Her triumph took her ahead of Alfred Joachim,

who claimed his seventh US title in 1933. Some good news for Atlantic Puffins on remote

islands off the coast of Maine in the US. They have had their second consecutive rebound year

for fledging chicks after they suffered a catastrophic 2021. It's partly down to the

abundance of a fish called the sand lance, allowing Puffins to thrive. Now, you might have

heard a report on the Global News podcast about some very eye-catching footage that emerged this

week from Nebraska in the United States. Police there pulled over a man for driving on a motorway

with a huge bull nestled in the passenger seat. Chad Ryman of Norfolk Police explains.

The officers received a call, reference a car driving into town that had a cow in it. They

thought that it was going to be, you know, like a calf, something smaller, something that actually

fit inside the vehicle. There were some sightable issues with that situation. The officer chose

to write him a warning and ask him to take the animal back home. The car actually had half its

roof cut off in order to fit the animal and its magnificent horns in. You can see the footage

on the US and Canada pages of our website, bbcnews.com. And a winner has been declared for

Finland's ugliest vase. It's a thing, apparently. The winner against tough competition was a shiny

gold vase decorated by a pair of fire red roses. Second was purple, decorated with golden ornaments

and a sparkling plastic crystal. Third was an unusual combination of a copper pipe and black

stiffened metal chain. If you want to look and why wouldn't you, I will share using the hashtag

The Happy Pod. Still to come in this podcast. I felt like it's a whole new, like, learning and

fun. It's like a whole new world. What 11-year-old Reese thinks about the new Braille Lego?

Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich?

Our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire, takes one billionaire at a time and explains exactly

how they made their money. And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain

wealthy. So if you want to know if Rihanna is as much of a bad gal as she claims or what Jeff Bezos

really did to become the first person in history to pocket $100 billion. Listen to Good Bad Billionaire

with me, Simon Jack and me, Zing Zing, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi there, this is Camilla Cooley from Sydney, Australia. I live next door to a school,

which at the 8.30, 8.45, 9 o'clock mark of a morning has a sound. It's like letting the

children know that school's about to begin. And the sound is really quite jarring. It's just

really not conducive to children starting out their day at school. And it's not particularly

enjoyable for neighbors like myself. And very recently, I noticed that the sound had changed.

And I imagine the reason the sound changed was to consider that we need to be more welcoming to

children as they start their day. And to acknowledge that maybe for some groups more than others,

a jarring sound can be really off-putting. So this is my sound that makes me happy is the switch

from the jarring emergency type alert sound to a really gentle, warm, welcoming, cheerful chime

to set people on their day. And Andrea from Rome sent us this.

That's the sound of crickets when he works out on his bike in the empty Appia Antica Park.

Thank you, Andrea and Camilla. Now, subsistence fishing is a huge industry,

employing hundreds of millions of people around the world. And it also has a huge carbon footprint.

Now, a team of scientists is developing a solar power bank to help people in the southeast Asian

fishing industry reduce their impact on the environment, improve their own health, and save

money. Jeriza Molina from ShiftTech Marine in the Philippines told us about their project.

These small-time fisher folks usually go out at night. So they need the battery so that they

can power the lights that they need. And what they use usually to power those lights are these heavy,

bulky car batteries that are very, very dangerous, as well as they spend a lot on it. And then they

can just use it for like a few months and then they need to buy again. And well, after our

fisher folks are not able to use them anymore, they just throw it away. So that's terrible for

environment. So we wanted to help these small-time fisher folks get the most out of their living

and then make it safe for them so they can get home. So that's the problem. What is the solution

that you have come up with? We created a safer and more convenient solar power bank. It works

like the usual power bank, but it can be recharged via solar power. So when fisher folks go out into

the sea, they can use the power bank to power their lights. And right now, it lasts around 18 hours.

And then in the morning, they can use the solar charter to power their power bank. And then we

are also working on the wind. So imagine you're in the ocean. It's very cloudy. We can use the

wind power to charge our power bank. And it's really affordable. So our fisher folks spend around

26,000 pesos a year for their artificial battery. But we offer around 10,000 right now.

So what sort of impact is it having on the people who work in this industry and their families?

They're getting more fish out from the sea. That means they can get more income. It's really an

amazing thing to hear about from them. You know, they share that they were able to go to a mall

recently and then to hear that their child has the goal of becoming a doctor and then thinking

that her parents can actually afford that now. And to be able to think that you already have this

impact on such a small family and then to have the possibility that you can give more to other

fisher folks out there, then there may be more children wanting to become a doctor, engineer,

an attorney, and you can be a part of that dream. And it's a very, very good feeling that many people

strive for, yeah.

On a standard brick where you might have six little dots to connect other Lego pieces to,

the Braille bricks correlate to the same as you would read out in Braille. So they would have one

dot, three dots, four dots, five dots, but they also have lettering on the bottom actually printed

to tell you what Braille they correspond to. So an A would be top left corner and that's all you'd

have. You just have one tiny little dot. So it's very much to help someone who wants to learn Braille

to be able to put them out and actually feel the dots as opposed to try and feel the little

dots on a piece of paper.

Does it still work to build things the way that the original Lego does?

It does. And that's the beauty of it. It's still compatible with your original Lego

that you might have lying around or that you play with at home. But the beauty of this is

you kind of learn Braille as you go along. So I've got two young kids who are both into Lego.

They're both sighted. They want to learn Braille because they watch their dad,

but gets to a point where they're just bored. So I found that with Lego Braille bricks,

we can sit down and we can play, but they're actually learning as they go along. So in our

household, it's a win-win.

How important is it for kids who have impaired vision that manufacturers are paying attention

to the sorts of toys and learning devices that they can use and have fun with?

Lego for me is one of those universal games or toys that you can interact with despite

having sight loss. And you can play it with everybody in the household. So I think manufacturers

need to take notes on when they're producing games, making games, to make sure that they're

inclusive and there's a way of being able to play with them with everybody else.

What is the most impressive thing you've ever made from Lego?

Oh, when I was a child, it used to be cities and towns, but now with my kids, it's more

dinosaurs, monsters, anything that's big and that you can destroy within a second.

Eleven-year-old Reese has severe visual impairment and he's been trying out the Braille Lego.

So you can play it whilst you're still learning and it teaches other kids, like my little sister

that's free, she understands it's Lego, you build stuff with it. But I've taught her that

with Lego Braille bricks, she can lay them out and make different words. I felt like it's a whole

new learning and fun. It's like a whole new world. So you've been trying out this stuff.

What sorts of things have you been making? I have been writing a lot of sentences and I made

everyone's name and I have been using them as normal Legos sometimes. You can build cars, houses,

a lot of different things. So if you had to give it stars out of five,

Reese, what would your verdict be? If I could go higher, I'd say like 20, but five.

And Amanda, Reese's mum, he obviously is really enjoying it. What's it like for you as his mum

watching him learn this new thing? To be honest, all different kinds of emotions. I always obviously

feel the pride seeing Reese doing all the different things when it comes to Braille. But it's lovely

to see that he's not only learning, he is playing at the same time. And as he's doing that, he's

pointing it out to his sisters and they're picking it up along the way. So it makes you really happy.

Reese and his mum Amanda. Now time for another sound. This one though came to us not from a listener,

but from our very own political correspondent Rob Watson.

Now Rob has been making sense of the twists and turns of UK politics for a global audience for

many years on the BBC World Service. And while on holiday, he was reminded of our historical

signature theme tune. It used to be the tune that would say, aha, I am listening to the BBC

World Service wherever you were in the world. It was, if you like, the BBC World Service's

signature tune. This obviously was not on the BBC World Service. This was not that particular

rendition. Tell us about this particular piece of music. Well, it was an extraordinary moment. So

I was on my holidays in South Devon on the south coast of England. And I came out of the pub where

I was having, of course, the traditional fish and chips. And an extraordinary sight greeted me. So

it was a troupe of Morris dancers and for those of you who's never seen it, it's a tradition that

dates back to the mid 15th century. It's people dressed in whites. They got bells and handkerchiefs

and they're doing this dances. But it wasn't just the dancers. I was like, hang on a minute. I know

that tune. And it wasn't instantly recognizable. But they could, yeah, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

And people Morris dancing to it. I mean, it was just an extraordinary sight. I could just feel

myself light up inside. You know, when you get one of those good feelings, I could feel myself

sort of smiling and thinking, wow, I haven't heard this for a while.

Now, obviously, we normally talk to you about British politics. People might not realize that

you have a cultural hinterland, as it were, you yourself do have an interest in Morris, don't

you? Oh my goodness, Jackie, you've brought it up. I once danced. I think you were there. You

were recording. I once did a bit of Morris dancing in the BBC newsroom. Everyone must have thought

I was mad. I do. So as I mentioned, it's a tradition that that goes back to the mid 15th

century. It sort of went out of fashion in the 19th century as Britain industrialized. But then

in places like Oxfordshire, where I grew up as a boy, it was sort of it was revived. And so

amazingly in the 1960s and 70s, if you were at a sort of humble state primary school that I was at

for people under 11, you learned how to Morris dance. And it was one of the best bits of school.

Every time I hear that music on Mayday in Oxford or a place like South Devon,

the feet start moving and the movement is one, two, three hop, one, two, three hop, one hop,

two hop. And then there you go with the sticks. So I can feel my feet moving.

There really is no end to his talents. That's the BBC Morris Dancing Correspondent, Rob Watson.

And that's it from us for now. Remember, if you would like to be part of the happy pod,

you can email us the sound that brings you joy. We would also love to hear if you have any stories

to share that will make us all smile. As ever, the address is global podcast at bbc.co.uk.

This edition was mixed by Alanna Bowles, the producers were Anna Murphy and Tracy Gordon.

Editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard and until next time, goodbye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.