Recent Episodes

Inside the Middle East

Episode 41

HOSTED BY HALA GORANI FROM EGYPT

NUBIANS IN MODERN EGYPT - HALA GORANI
They once ruled Egypt and now they're barely clinging to relevance. In the space of a single generation, the Nubians, one of the oldest and richest cultures in history, have been forced into an exile of sorts in their own country. A series of floods from the construction of dams displaced this ancient community from the banks of the Nile, sometimes deep into the arid desert. Hala Gorani visits their villages and speaks to Nubians who remember their people's golden age, as well as the younger generation whose main source of income comes from turning daily Nubian life and culture into tourist attractions.

MARRIED TO A BEDOUIN - SCHAMS ELWAZER
What would you do for love? New Zealand-born Marguerite van Geldermalsen met and fell in love with a Bedouin man while trekking through the Middle East as a college student in 1978. They married and lived in his two-thousand-year-old cave carved into the red rock of a hillside in Petra, Jordan. Marguerite became the resident nurse and learned how to live like the Bedouin: cooking over fires, hauling water on donkeys and over the years became as much of a curiosity with tourists as the cave-dwellers. Schams Elwazer has her life-changing love story.

SAUDI DESERT ECOLOGY - NIC ROBERTSON
For centuries the Saudi deserts have provided a renewable if spartan food resource for sheep and camels. Now over-population, misuse of water resources and changing climate is threatening that. Technology can make the problem worse. Herdsmen are allowed to use water trucks instead of taking their animals from oasis to oasis, leading to overgrazing. Nic Robertson introduces us to a Saudi activist who believes his nation's wealth is not just oil beneath the deserts, but the deserts themselves.