Lives Less Ordinary

After being kidnapped, a promise to return to his mother helped Antonio Salazar-Hobson through his darkest hours. Antonio Salazar-Hobson was four years old when he was kidnapped from his Mexican migrant worker family in Arizona by the white couple who lived next door. From Phoenix, he was taken more than 300 miles away to California, where he grew up suffering terrible abuse. Throughout his ordeal...

While visiting friends in Uruguay, British teacher Tom Michell saw a penguin covered in oil and tar on a beach. Tom cleaned the bird as best he could and then tried to release it. The penguin refused to return to the wild, it just followed Tom around. So he took it home, smuggling the animal across the border into Argentina where he lived and worked at a boarding school. The penguin became a part...

In Judith Obina Okumu's imagination, Joseph Kony was a monster. As leader of the Lord's Resistance Army he'd fought a decades-long war against the government of Yoweri Museveni – displacing and destroying hundreds of thousands of lives across Northern Uganda in the process. But one day, a visit from a stranger would challenge Judith to face her fears. In her role as assistant private secretary to...

Opal Lee is now affectionately known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth. She led the campaign for the 19th June, the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas were finally told that they were free, to be declared a national holiday. As President Biden signed the bill into law, Opal stood beside him. She had very personal reasons for wanting all Americans to think about freedom and the damage that ra...

When Dr Pier Piccioni woke up after a car accident, 12 years of his life had been erased. Dr Pierdante Piccioni is an unwilling time-traveller. Twelve years of his life were completely wiped from his memory after he suffered brain damage in a car crash in 2013. When he woke up in the hospital the next day, he thought it was 2001 and could not recognise his wife or his now adult sons. Reeling from...

Alexandra Morton-Hayward unlocks the secrets of the human brain but her own betrays her. Every night Ally Morton-Hayward has a headache so painful it wakes her up. She says it makes her feel like a werewolf. But by day she's unlocking the secrets of other human brains. Ally was at university when she started feeling a shocking and extraordinary pain in her head - 'cluster headaches' - which became...

Remembering the former president of Uruguay: José 'Pepe' Mujica. He started life as a flower farmer on the outskirts of Montevideo. As a young man he became politically active, part of the left-wing guerilla group the Tupamaros, who were bent on revolution through armed struggle that involved bank heists and kidnappings. With the authorities on his tail Pepe was eventually captured, he was shot si...

Marcelo Rubens Paiva was 11 when armed men came and took his father away. Brazil was under a military dictatorship at the time. Marcelo's father was an opponent and was killed for it. His mother Eunice Paiva was now alone, raising five children. For decades she fought for answers from the state. She became a prominent lawyer and human rights defender and helped to set up Brazil's Truth Commission....

Lothar Hermann found out his neighbour was ‘architect of the Holocaust’ Adolf Eichmann. Lothar Hermann’s German-Jewish family perished in the Holocaust, but when he escaped to Argentina, little did he know that within a few years a Nazi fugitive would wind up living at the end of his street. Lilianna Hermann spent two decades uncovering the story of a hidden family hero - her great uncle Lothar -...

Kwesia X grew up in south-east London, surrounded by busy roads and tower blocks. As a teenager her mental health spiralled after a member of her family was killed, and she also lost a close friend to knife crime. Faced with a period of homelessness, Kwesia eventually turned to nature to find peace. Now she's working hard to bring the experience of the natural world to young people in the city, an...

Juano Diaz was taken in to care aged six, his mother was battling alcoholism and he wasn't being cared for. But Juano missed his mum and with no photos of her, he became obsessed by drawing her face so he wouldn't forget her. He was later adopted by a strict Catholic and Romany Gypsy family but when he came out as gay he was asked to leave. Now down-and-out on the streets of Glasgow, with his life...

Former Harvard athlete Chris Nowinski turned World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) star after a reality TV show catapulted him into the world of professional wrestling. Performing as the obnoxious and slick-talking villain Chris Harvard, he worked alongside superstars like Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, John Cena, and Hulk Hogan. Chris lived the dream, until one fateful match left him suffering from pos...

From Paralympic pools to the English Channel, Melanie Barratt took on the toughest swim of her life — laying to rest her demons, and honouring her beloved mum. Melanie Barratt was born with congenital toxoplasmosis that left her severely visually-impaired. As a teenager she excelled academically but found it hard to keep friends. She found solace in the swimming pool where again she shone, earning...

After a terrible motorbike accident 18-year-old Alex Lewis was left with no memory of his previous life. The only person he could remember was Marcus, his identical twin brother. He became the person Alex most relied upon to rebuild his entire life and memories. But then Marcus made an extraordinary decision - to shield his brother from their traumatic past by re-writing history and creating a new...

A bonus episode from Dear Daughter - the award-winning podcast from the BBC World Service. You can find more episodes by searching for 'Dear Daughter' wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Bridgerton actor Adjoa Andoh joins Namulanta in the studio to share the letter she's written to her three children. She tells them the importance of trusting their bodies and following their instincts - a life phi...

How a book-loving prisoner showed a young Alex Wheatle the path to self-belief. Alex had been born in London to Jamaican parents, but grew up in care in the notorious Shirley Oaks children’s home. As a teenager, he was convicted of assaulting a police officer during the Brixton Riots. He felt totally alone and without hope. But as the door slammed on Alex’s prison cell, he met a book-loving man ca...

Michael Visontay thought he knew everything about his family’s past, but there was one shadowy character he was aching to know more about: his grandfather’s second wife, Olga. As Michael went through old papers, he uncovered a trail to the world’s most coveted book, the Gutenberg Bible – a rare antique printed in the 1450s – and the scandalous scheme to break it up. Presenter: Asya Fouks Producer:...

ANC spy Sue Dobson infiltrated the South African government. Then her cover was blown. After training, Sue had got a job within the government's propaganda unit, and she was feeding back good intelligence to her ANC handlers. Then she got a phone call. The security services were on to her, and she was a long way from safety. Presenter: India Rakusen Producer: Harry Graham Editor: Deiniol Buxton So...

Sue Dobson was a white South African who risked her life as an ANC secret agent Sue was a student when she was first recruited as a spy for the African National Congress liberation movement in the 1980s, and she knew that if she was caught she'd face prison, torture or death. Sue's mission would require her to infiltrate the pro-apartheid media establishment, but first she needed to learn spycraft...

Edith Blais was kidnapped by armed militants and held captive in the Sahara for 450 days. As a young French-Canadian who had overcome her teenage agoraphobia, Edith took several years to work up the courage to go travelling – but once she did it, she got the bug. In 2018 she backpacked to West Africa with her good friend Luca Tacchetto. When they got to Benin they were kidnapped by armed militants...

As a boy, Ishmael Beah was forced to kill. How do you turn a soldier back into a child? Ishmael Beah was just 13 when war reached his village in Sierra Leone and he was made to flee. In the chaos, he was separated from his family. He ended up with a group of other children at what they thought was the safety of an army base. But instead, he was taught to become a hardened killer and sent out to fi...

In 1942, several years into the Second World War, the British government sent out a series of bulletins requesting any personal photos the public might have of the French coastline. Odette Hallowes, a French woman living in the UK with her three young children, answered the call and was invited to London where she was offered a role in the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The SOE, formed under...

Reggie Nelson grew up on an East London council estate in a British-Ghanaian family that struggled with alcoholism, domestic violence and money worries. After a brush with the law at a young age, he found direction through his Christian faith and then, as a teenager, being signed to play professionally for Woking Football Club. Following his dad's sudden death on Father's day in 2013, Reggie had t...

In April 2010, Cathy Terkanian received a letter that turned her world upside down. It revealed that her daughter, Alexis, whom she’d had to place for adoption in 1974, had gone missing. Then she was given more shocking news—the police had a new lead, could the unidentified body of a young woman found in Wisconsin be Alexis? They needed Cathy’s DNA to confirm it. As Cathy began to process this, he...

In 2020, Ellidy Pullin’s life was turned upside down when her partner, Olympic snowboarder Alex ‘Chumpy’ Pullin, died in a tragic accident. The couple had been trying for a baby, so in the deeply disorientating hours after his sudden death, when a friend suggested the possibility of a posthumous sperm retrieval – a complicated, and sometimes controversial procedure whereby sperm samples are taken...