The Happy Pod: Letters from dad - with love

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Speaker 10 This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service.

Speaker 10 I'm Julia McFarlane and in this edition, How Old Family Letters Inspired a Project Offering Fatherly Love and Support to Daughters Around the World.

Speaker 11 I tell them right away that I'm proud of them, but that their fathers don't want them to grieve.

Speaker 13 I'm immensely proud of my dad and really excited for how much of a difference we can make.

Speaker 14 Also, he's down at the water and he's loving life. I am incredibly happy because I see him having fun.
I also get to clean up the environment. I call it a match made in heaven.

Speaker 10 An unusual pair of rubbish collectors finding joy in clearing plastic from the seas. I find out why old-fashioned hobbies like knitting are becoming increasingly popular with Gen Z.

Speaker 15 And teaching cooking helps us learning new skills and become part of the community.

Speaker 10 The cooking classes where people learn about more than just food.

Speaker 10 We begin in the U.S. state of Ohio with the joy and warmth that handwritten letters can bring.

Speaker 10 Rosie Porlick grew up receiving almost daily letters from her dad Buzz whenever she was away from home, at summer camps, college, and even when she moved into her first apartment just 20 minutes away.

Speaker 10 So, when she sensed he needed a new project, she came up with the idea of offering Buzz's letter-writing skills to others.

Speaker 10 They called it the Dad Letter Project, with the tagline, mail that'll make you smile or cry in a good way, and were overwhelmed with thousands of requests from all over the world.

Speaker 10 Our reporter Harry Bly spoke to Rosie and Buzz.

Speaker 11 I learned that it's important to write letters from my mother,

Speaker 11 who wrote letters to me when I started going to camp when I was 11 years old. It meant a lot to me, and I still have all her letters.

Speaker 11 And I look at them every once in a while, and I know that she touched them, and now I'm touching them.

Speaker 1 When you were writing letters to Rosie when she was a child,

Speaker 1 when she was at camp, what did you write in your letters?

Speaker 11 I told her

Speaker 11 how proud I am of her and how much I loved her

Speaker 11 and

Speaker 11 how much fun that she would have

Speaker 11 at camp and then would

Speaker 11 tell her

Speaker 11 a funny story

Speaker 11 about

Speaker 11 what had happened during the day.

Speaker 13 I remember one summer at camp.

Speaker 13 So I went to, it was the very first day, and my dad had made sure to write letters well in advance of me arriving at camp so that I had already had so many letters to open when I got there.

Speaker 13 It was just like, wow, my dad loves this and he loves me.

Speaker 1 Buzz, tell me, what is it that makes letters so special? Because you could pick up the phone. you could nowadays send an email or a text.

Speaker 1 What is it about handwritten letters that you find so important?

Speaker 11 I find that letters are

Speaker 11 permanent

Speaker 11 and that it actually

Speaker 11 takes some time and effort to write the letter

Speaker 11 and that

Speaker 11 there is a lot more love

Speaker 11 shown

Speaker 11 in a letter than there is in an email.

Speaker 13 I thought, I wonder if total strangers would want to receive letters from him. And so I made a TikTok.
And then quite a few people started saying, yes, I want to hear from your dad.

Speaker 13 But it was clear people really wanted to hear from a dad. And it is all different types of walks of life that want to hear from a dad.
They can be really sad, but they can also be really heartwarming.

Speaker 13 I've spoken to honestly dads all over the United States, and they're more than happy to jump in. They just want to know how quickly they can start writing letters.

Speaker 1 And the online form, I'm going to read it out. Just tell us what's going on.
We're talking. A breakup, a new job, being a human with emotions.
Tuesdays, generally.

Speaker 1 One of the dad writers will write you a letter, no strings, no weird upsell, just a letter from someone who genuinely wants you to know we're all rooting for you.

Speaker 1 It's a lovely inviting statement that you've written. And Buzz, how do you know what to write? Does it come with just being a father?

Speaker 11 I usually will get a letter

Speaker 11 from

Speaker 11 someone who is grieving

Speaker 11 because

Speaker 11 she lost her father and she wants

Speaker 11 somebody to be proud of her.

Speaker 11 And I tell them right away that I'm proud of them

Speaker 11 but that their fathers don't want them to grieve. They want their children to enjoy the rest of their lives and have fun.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 some

Speaker 11 young women

Speaker 11 have

Speaker 11 had a father who has

Speaker 11 abandoned them

Speaker 11 and I have told them that I will be happy to be their father.

Speaker 11 And I have

Speaker 11 people who have returned letters to me and they call me dad and that makes me very happy

Speaker 11 because it means that I'm doing the right thing and making a difference. in people's lives.

Speaker 13 It has been beyond special to hear all of these stories and then to hear people who are more than willing to jump in and start writing letters to people who need it.

Speaker 13 I'm immensely proud of my dad and I'm also really excited for like how much of a difference we can make.

Speaker 10 Buzz Ecker and his daughter Rosie Paulick who's also hoping to start a version of the letter writing project for mums very soon.

Speaker 10 Here in the UK, there's an unlikely character helping to clean up our oceans. Logie collects bottles, cans and other rubbish from the waters around the southwest coast of England.

Speaker 10 The twist, Logie is a dog, a four-year-old black Labrador. The Happy Pods Hollygoods spoke to his owner, James Westgate.

Speaker 14 He's my best friend. Everyone says like their dog's their best friend, but he is.
He goes everywhere with me. We have a really

Speaker 14 strong bond and he's incredibly loyal.

Speaker 14 Logie has an incredible drive for retrieving as he's a Labrador retriever, but I kind of honed his skill and his drive into picking up litter, which he absolutely loves because a plastic bottle is essentially a ball for him, so he'll just go and retrieve it.

Speaker 14 We live near the sea and we're probably down swimming twice a day, once a day, and usually there's litter in the sea.

Speaker 14 As an ecologist, seeing it in the sea was really making me feel unhappy, knowing the damage it can cause. And Logie can swim really well.
He can retrieve really well.

Speaker 14 So why doesn't he just go and get it? He retrieves it from the sea and brings it back. And we get a big pile of rubbish.
And then I take it away, put it in the bin, and recycling.

Speaker 10 And how did you train him to do this?

Speaker 18 Is it the type of thing that you point to a bottle in the sea and you tell him to go and get it?

Speaker 14 We didn't have a pool one day when we went down to the water, but there was a bottle in the sea. And he spotted it, he went for it.
and he brought it back and I thought, oh, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 14 He went around the whole of the key area picking up all the bottles in the water and he was like, once we're all done and it's all clean he's like okay where's the next one? Let's go and do it.

Speaker 14 So he was just constantly just going around the quay cleaning it all up.

Speaker 14 We live in a really high populated area and we have this stunning coastal area called the Plymouth Sound and a lot of litter ends up in that area. So I can feel the kind of direct impacts from that.

Speaker 18 How do you feel when you are out on the beach with Logie and you see him go into the sea and retrieve litter?

Speaker 14 As soon as he sees a bit of litter, he just lights up. He is so driven to go and get that piece of litter.

Speaker 14 Sometimes I have to be like, okay, chill dude, because he'll go for things like traffic cones, which are like the size of him, really heavy, like 10 kilogram traffic cones, and he'll just go into the sea and just try and get it.

Speaker 14 And he'll be there for like 15 minutes trying to wrestle this thing. And I'm just like, okay, this guy is actually pretty nuts.

Speaker 14 But him going down, especially onto the beach, he will just see something from really far away and he will just go for it. He will just sprint for that object and retrieve it and bring it back.

Speaker 14 Once he's brought it back, he'll put it in my hand and then I'll just get him back to go away again and he'll just fire off another one and just keep coming back and back.

Speaker 18 What's the reaction been like online and in person?

Speaker 14 Everyone loves a dog. Everyone hates litter.
And so what Logie does is he combines the cuteness of a dog with the removal and destruction of litter pollution.

Speaker 14 The whole reason why we started this page is purely because my friends were like, you've got to post this online. You've got to post what he's doing online.
Because before

Speaker 14 we would just pick up plastic without videoing it or recording it. Now it's become this kind of thing where people love seeing it and I've used it as a kind of a platform for awareness now.

Speaker 14 I think if people see a dog who's really happy and picking up litter, it's going to make people see it and think, wait a minute, this is actually really cool.

Speaker 14 They want to watch it and it's a really fun thing to do.

Speaker 14 And I'm hoping in the background of people's consciousness is they're going to realize that okay wow that's actually horrible that all this litter's in the sea maybe i won't chuck it away or chuck it outside maybe if i can just impact one or two people just to think twice about chucking a piece of litter down on the floor it might end up in the sea you know that kind of thing the whole beauty of me and logi's relationship is we're doing something that makes us both happy.

Speaker 14 He's down at the water and he's loving life. He's retrieving bottles and he's like, yeah, let's go.
Let's go and get another one. Let's go and get a traffic cone.
That Chris wrapper got my name on it.

Speaker 14 But I am incredibly happy because I see him having fun. I also get to clean up the environment.
I call it a match made in heaven. We are made for each other, I suppose.

Speaker 10 James Westgate.

Speaker 10 Once the preserve of our grandmothers and generations past, the humble art of knitting and other crafts are making a comeback and are now more popular with Gen Z than ever before.

Speaker 10 Perhaps due to the influence of a growing number of celebrity knitters like Tom Daly or Michelle Obama, joining a legion of enthusiasts, sharing their positive experiences and latest projects on social media.

Speaker 10 But what is it about these rather old-fashioned pastimes that appeals to younger people in our fast-paced world today?

Speaker 10 Well, to find out more, I went along to Knit With Me, a yarn shop in West London that hosts a weekly knit club.

Speaker 6 Hi, I'm Vasco, and knitting to me is

Speaker 6 most people go to yoga. This is my yoga.
You are creating something that is unique, just like we are all unique. It's a unique garment because there'll be no other one like it.

Speaker 6 And that's what does it for me, as well as meditation, really.

Speaker 19 So I've been knitting for about 50 years.

Speaker 19 and originally because it was cheaper than buying clothes and I was always into fashion when I was young so the only way I could do it is by knitting it myself.

Speaker 10 Yutta, who we've just heard from, is here in the store for the weekly knit and natter.

Speaker 10 It's an event that shop owner Carol organizes for people to come and knit together and have a bit of a chat over a cup of tea.

Speaker 10 It's this sense of community, this bridging between the generations and bringing together different people with one common interest that keeps everyone coming back.

Speaker 10 But in a post-pandemic world, one that's filled with endless negative news cycles, doom scrolling, and soaring levels of anxiety and mental health challenges, knitting is increasingly attracting younger generations for its stress-busting and mood-enhancing effects away from the screens.

Speaker 22 By the end of the weekends, I was kind of burnt out and only had enough to do, like enough time to do laundry or what have you, the bare minimal.

Speaker 10 My world was work. Lupe is one of the group's Gen Z knitters.
She works in the film and TV industry. The long and grueling hours left her feeling frazzled and unfulfilled.

Speaker 10 That is, before she discovered knitting.

Speaker 22 This is just now another thing that brings me joy and another thing that fills my time and energy and creativity where before I had nothing.

Speaker 22 And I mean that as in literally pandemic hit and I was just sitting on the couch like, what am I going to do? Because there was no work, there was nothing.

Speaker 22 So it's been, I would say, mental health wise,

Speaker 22 really important in terms of just free time. I spend most of my my nights kind of crafting.
I enjoy it with friends and my husband, who's now gotten into knitting as well.

Speaker 22 So, mental health-wise, infinitely, you know, fills me up.

Speaker 10 Many studies point to the positive benefits of taking up what people might sometimes refer to as granny hobbies, slower-paced pastimes like knitting or crocheting, but also gardening, baking, or painting.

Speaker 10 Creative pursuits helping to bestow a sense of fulfillment.

Speaker 10 Speaking to some of the younger people in the knitting group, it's clear they they see them as a comforting escape from some of the stresses of modern life, as Marielle explains.

Speaker 24 I'm not super bothered by people calling it a granny hobby because, yes, grannies do do it. There's nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 24 That's nothing for us to be ashamed of or to think that us doing it as a hobby now makes it any less valuable or interesting.

Speaker 24 Lots of the things we've been taught are valuable or should have interest for us as young people now are just quite exhausting and like are not good for you.

Speaker 24 Social media, like 24-hour news cycles, they are exhausting.

Speaker 24 And so, going back to things that you know have proven peaceful or regenerative for older generations makes a whole heap of sense when things are overwhelming.

Speaker 10 In a fast-paced city like London, where there's a need to hurry, it's comforting to think that there's a growing number of little corners and nooks where people are gently pushing back, taking the time to be slow and go stitch by stitch.

Speaker 10 Still to come on this podcast?

Speaker 25 It was a game changer actually. It just started with fruit and veggies and then now it's got absolutely everything you can imagine.
It's a bit of a beehive of activity on a Saturday morning.

Speaker 10 Why a local shop has had so much impact in a remote community.

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Speaker 10 It's often said that the way to someone's heart is through their stomach. Indeed, across the world, food is something that bonds families and communities together.

Speaker 10 And that's exactly the ethos behind the UK charity My Grateful, that cooking together can help refugees integrate into British society and create a more positive perception of migration.

Speaker 10 Isabella Jewell went to one of their cooking classes to find out more.

Speaker 28 It's dark outside, and I'm donning an apron in a warmly lit room with a bunch of strangers.

Speaker 28 We're standing at steel kitchen worktops, and each station has a variety of fresh ingredients: herbs, spices, yogurt, meat.

Speaker 28 We're here for a a cookery class. The twist.
All the chefs are migrants or refugees. And today we're in for a treat.

Speaker 15 I'm Ladan. I come from Tehran, the capital of Iran.
I really like Tehran. It's like London.
It has beautiful areas and lively city with so much going on.

Speaker 28 Laadan has been a chef with the charity since last year.

Speaker 15 I love to cook at my groundful and I learned so many things. Teaching cooking.

Speaker 15 It's got me many confidence. Cooking helps us learning new skills and become part of the community.

Speaker 28 And tonight, she's teaching us some rather special recipes from back home.

Speaker 15 I want to cook some special food, Iranian food, special rice cake, special stew, like fasinjan, and I want to

Speaker 15 show to people they can cook with lots of pomegranate molasses and lots of walnut, make some delicious food and healthy.

Speaker 15 We add the saffron, yogurt, eggs with rice, and we wanna have some nice crispy bottom.

Speaker 28 There are about a dozen of us in the large kitchen. We work in pairs making different dishes following Lardan's instructions.

Speaker 28 My Grateful has run more than 5,000 of these classes so far in London and Bristol. Founder Jess Thompson told me more about why she set up the charity.

Speaker 20 I became interested in the idea that people can feel prejudiced towards a group, but when they actually meet them under the right conditions, that prejudice is reduced.

Speaker 20 And cooking and eating together is a really great way to facilitate that contact. What's exciting about it is it's something to feel really positive about when it comes to migration.

Speaker 20 It's a lot more than just an average cookery class because you're also learning about someone's life story and people have said to me that they read so much about refugees in the news and they haven't actually met a refugee.

Speaker 20 So in the cookery class setting they get a chance to really understand them as a fellow human and understand their story and why they've come to this country, try their food.

Speaker 20 The kind of words that people have used is it's very humanising and really reminds people of what it means to be human through that act of sharing food.

Speaker 28 The charity also helps the chefs build up their confidence and professional skill set.

Speaker 20 For a lot of our chefs, teaching a migrate for cookery class is their first kind of job in the UK. It's their first time when they feel welcome and celebrated in this country.

Speaker 20 So it's about practicing their English, it's about feeling connected and coming out of social isolation, making friends, but also developing professional skills in the UK, food hygiene, qualification, chefing skills.

Speaker 28 Back in Lardan's class, the different elements of the meal are coming together.

Speaker 23 Ellie tells me to stop.

Speaker 4 So there's some amazing, colourful food around. We've got some sort of spinach-fried bread and some bright yellow rice, and everyone's just digging in and working together to make all of the meals.

Speaker 23 Sorry, we're done. We're done.

Speaker 15 Well done. Well done to you.
And everyone

Speaker 16 can help

Speaker 28 Around a large wooden table, everyone heaps their plates with the colourful food. With Iranian music playing in the background, it feels like Lardan has given us a real flavour of her life in Iran.

Speaker 10 Isabella Jewell reporting.

Speaker 10 To Paris now, and a man keeping an old tradition alive.

Speaker 10 The streets of the Saint Germain neighborhood were once busy with bustling and energetic newspaper hawkers, but they have now all disappeared, except one.

Speaker 10 Ali Akbar is the last such newspaper seller in all of France, and as you may have heard on our Global News podcast, the President Emmanuel Macron is to award him one of the country's most prestigious honours, the National Order of Merit, in recognition of his distinguished service.

Speaker 10 He's been speaking to Aya Khan.

Speaker 12 I sell

Speaker 21 Tell the story of how you found out about the honor and how you reacted.

Speaker 12 At the beginning, I thought maybe some people are joking. It's not true.
Who's going to giving the reward?

Speaker 12 I couldn't imagine even some friends. They said, no, no, no, it's true, Ali.
It's true.

Speaker 10 So how did you end up in Paris? Because you grew up somewhere else.

Speaker 17 You grew up in Pakistan.

Speaker 12 Well, when I left Pakistan, I had a dream of to build a home for my mother because we were living just like in a cave where we had not even drinkable water. So I was the eldest son in my family.

Speaker 12 I saw my family was suffering in the misery, in the poverty, and I took a decision that period of time that I will do something for them.

Speaker 12 Then I started making money, saving money and also giving some money to my mother and saving some money in the bank and then I left Pakistan I came to Greece and there I joined the ship after joining my ship I started to send all my salary to my parents and my mother saved some money and she built them we built a home since 77 we are living in a proper home and my junior brother and sister they started to go to school.

Speaker 12 I mean I fought all my life for them for their surviving for their education, for their comforts. That's it.

Speaker 10 And what do you love about the newspaper and the news that made you do this job?

Speaker 12 When I communicate with the people in the street, I stop sometime in the bars, in the restaurant.

Speaker 12 I have so many friends and I talk with them and I learn so many things from them, and they learn something from me. And I feel free, you know.
I don't depend on anybody. I buy my papers and I sell.

Speaker 12 That's it. I'm free and I like this freedom.

Speaker 10 Ali Akbar speaking to Aya Khan.

Speaker 10 How far do you have to travel to pick up groceries? For people living in Barangara in Western Australia, even basic food shopping used to mean a 10-hour or 440-kilometre drive.

Speaker 10 But now the remote settlement, also known as Mount Augusta, finally has its own local store again. My colleague Will Bain spoke to Samantha Dalton, principal of the Barangara Remote Community School.

Speaker 25 It's beautiful scenery. It's like Mars landing.
It's red rock and scrub and it's proper desert. I love it.
There is 50 kids at school and I would probably say there'd be maybe

Speaker 25 200 people in the community in its entirety. The local Indigenous people, they work at the clinic and they work at the ranges.
One of our high school girls works at the shop.

Speaker 25 She started off with workplace learning and she's got a little little Saturday job out of it too.

Speaker 27 Well, you've mentioned the shop. Take us to it.
Tell us about its arrival and what it's got.

Speaker 25 It had been closed for something like 12 years, and I'm really, really happy to have it.

Speaker 27 Because what was the situation before? What would you have had to do for? And we're talking groceries here, aren't we? We're talking absolute basics.

Speaker 25 Yeah, yeah, basics. It was a game changer, actually.
It just started with fruit and veggies, and then now it's got absolutely everything you can imagine.

Speaker 25 And a lot of freezer space for meat meat and my favorite cheesecake.

Speaker 27 Give us a sense of the time difference, if you can, for people listening. What would a round trip for a shop have been before and after?

Speaker 25 Well, 500 and something kilometers each way to get to Carnarvon. And that's the way that there's the most bitumen.
The other way is about four hours to Meekathara.

Speaker 25 And that's got a lot more dirt. But the locals would not do that in just one day or one weekend.
The locals would go and it might take a week to do a food shop.

Speaker 25 By the time you spend time with family and catch up with different friends, and then sometimes all your food's gone and your pay's spent.

Speaker 25 So then they'd have to wait another fortnight for their next payday to come back. So we would lose kids.
for weeks and weeks just to go shopping.

Speaker 25 Just to do the food shop. Yeah.

Speaker 27 And so how's it changed the community having the shop? Because I guess people are incentivized to be in and around the community more as well.

Speaker 25 Yeah. Most definitely.
It's a bit of a beehive of activity on a Saturday morning, I can tell you. If I ever need to see parents or do home visits or anything, I just hang out at the shop.

Speaker 27 That's where the real parents' evening takes place.

Speaker 25 Yeah, yeah. It's an informal way of spending time with families.

Speaker 27 And what's next on a wish list then for the community? What would people like to see come after the shop?

Speaker 25 Oh my goodness.

Speaker 10 Bitumen.

Speaker 27 Explain that to non-Australians.

Speaker 25 Oh, a road. We're just on dusty, red, dirt roads and a bit of blacktop.

Speaker 25 That's what I would

Speaker 23 love.

Speaker 25 That's millions and millions and millions of dollars. So we're just always going to have red roads, red, dusty, dirt roads.

Speaker 10 Samantha Dalton.

Speaker 10 Now, we often ask you to share the things that have made you happy. And Pia, who describes herself as an Ecuadorian living in Japan, has done just that.

Speaker 10 She emailed us to say that, like many others, she often feels depressed by the difficult news coming from her country. But she wanted to tell us about something positive.

Speaker 10 Her cousin, Daniel Molina Rodriguez, setting a Guinness World Record for selling 50,000 hamburgers in just eight hours.

Speaker 10 Pia describes it as an achievement that supported many small businesses and brought a sense of hope and unity to the community. So we got in touch with Daniel and asked him how it felt.

Speaker 14 We are very happy, you know. And you know what? What's a surprise? Seeing so much people was three days of festivals, but see more than 100,000 people.

Speaker 14 Ecuador is a small country, but when we get together, we can make things amazing.

Speaker 10 Now, if you'd like to tell us about something that's made you smile or share a story you think will inspire others or make them happy, we would love to hear from you.

Speaker 10 Just send us a voice note or an email to globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

Speaker 10 And that's all from the Happy Pod for now. But you can watch some of our interviews on YouTube, just search for The Happy Pod.

Speaker 10 This edition was mixed by Mark Pickett, and the producers were Harry Bly and Rachel Bulkley. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Julia McFarlane. Until next time, goodbye.

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