A series of radio programmes produced in Bradford on the Ebola Crisis have been receiving a positive response with lettersand emails of thanks from across West Africa. They are the work of Nick Mangeolles, the treasurer at St Clement’s Church in Bradford, who is Programme Manager at Whistling Frog productions and also works with the mission organisation ‘Reach Beyond’ ,formerly known as HCJB, which produces programmes for rebroadcast on African radio stations.
Nick with his colleague Mary Kolu Massaquoi, (pictured left), have been producing ‘Calls to my Sister’, a series of short health related programmes which use local actors and have been translated into French. But with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, Mary, who is a native Liberian, felt passionate that this issue could be addressed through ‘Calls to My Sister’.
Nick said, “Since July, Mary and I have been urgently producing a set of five Ebola response programmes of Calls to My Sister which are now available for download from the main Reach Beyond website: https://reachbeyond.org/ministry/healthcare/education These have been distributed to radio stations right across Africa with an extremely positive and thankful response from stations.
“We’ve even had an official thank you letter from the Union of Liberian Organisations for the work Reach Beyond has put into this. I just took the opportunity and sent out as many emails as I could to as many contacts I could think of in order to save lives, and it worked – praise God!”
Welcomed in Africa
Typical of the emails of thanks is this from a radio station in Liberia: ““Greetings from River Cess!, It was wonderful to see when the County health team was conducting the test hearing of the Ebola program all you could hear in the hall was this is it, this is exactly what we need. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to you and the team for such a wonderful program you are a real frontline soldier in the fight of EBOLA……..Bless, Jerry”
Now says Nick the programmes are rapidly expanding: “Currently we are aiming to have a set of French versions produced and distributed, with a set in Portuguese on its way. I’ve also had requests from all over Africa for the scripts in English so they can be translated and produced locally into regional African languages. In addition to this we have had requests to make further emergency sets of programmes to cover a range of subjects like cholera. We would value your prayers!”
For more on the work of Reach Beyond visit their website here.