With acceptance, San Francisco’s gay community opened up

 
James “Robbie” Robinson says he’s delighted that now there is more ‘blending’ between gay and straight communities in San Francisco. This has been a result, he believes, of mainstream acceptance of LGBT identity.

Storyteller: James “Robbie” Robinson
Date of Story: 1957-present
Location of Story: San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.
Location: The Castro, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.
Date: 11 October, 2016

Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

 
Scheherezade Rahim talks about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, in 2007, the first female Prime Minister of Pakistan. She explains how this day directly affected her sister’s wedding and explains how Pakistan went through three days of mourning as people were afraid to leave their house.

Storyteller: Scheherezade Rahim
Date of Story: 27 December, 2007
Location of Story: Karachi, Pakistan
Location: Bronxville, New York
Date: 20 September, 2016

Meeting Mark Zuckerberg in Germany after leaving Syria

 
Programmer Rami Rihawi left Aleppo at the end of 2015, and five months later he was sitting with Mark Zuckerberg in Berlin, talking about the potential for virtual reality in social media.

Storyteller: Rami Rihawi

Date of Story: 2015-present
Location of Story: Berlin, Germany
Location: Berlin, Germany
Date: 11 March, 2016

20,000 people showed up at our demonstration

Nadia Rida and Aras Mufty talk about how they were moved to organize a protest after witnessing the poor conditions at a refugee center outside Vienna. Starting with a simple Facebook post and expecting no more than 500 attendees, over 20,000 people showed up to call for a smarter solution for the thousands of refugees arriving in Austria.

Storyteller: Nadia Rida and Aras Mufty

Date of Story: 31 August, 2015
Location of Story: Europaplatz, Vienna, Austria
Location: Vienna, Austria
Date: 7 December, 2015

We didn’t take advantage of the “magic moment”

 
Nutritionist Emanuela Spiga laments that the country did not use the historic opportunity offered by Tangentopoli (“Bribesville” scandals) to enact lasting change.

Storyteller: Emanuela Spiga

Date of Story: Early 1990s
Location of Story: Italy
Location: Monserrato, Italy
Date: 5 February, 2016

This post is part of a collaboration with author Davide Rubini to collect the stories of Italy in the aftermath of the “Bribesville” (Tangentopoli) scandals of the 1990s. Find out more about Rubini’s new novel,  il fischio finale (The Final Blow).  

The Scotsman that lived in the Kurdish mountains in the 1950s

Ambassador Tariq Aqrawi remembers the Scotsman who lived in Akre for a brief period in the 1950s, who dressed his whole family in Kurdish clothes and spoke the native dialect. He linked this Mackenzie to a bookshop in Baghdad that sold banned Kurdish books.

Storyteller: Tariq Aqrawi

Date of Story: 1950s
Location of Story: Akre, Kurdistan
Location: Vienna, Austria
Date: 29 January, 2016

I quit my job to help my fellow Yezidis

Activist Pari Ibrahim, founder of the Free Yezidi Foundation, talks about how she devoted her life to helping her people–the minority Yezidi population in Iraq– since the morning of 3 August 2014 when family members called from the Sinjar region in Iraqi Kurdistan to let her family know the Islamic State was carrying out massacres and kidnappings against these practitioners of an ancient syncretic religion.

Storyteller: Pari Ibrahim

Date of Story: 2 August, 2014-present
Location of Story: Netherlands; Sinjar, Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Location: Netherlands
Date: 31 October, 2015

Hosting a Syrian refugee family in Vienna

A story of how a family was moved by the plight of refugees at Vienna’s Westbahnhof (West Train Station) and took in a family of eight as they made their way to Germany to start a new life in a safe environment.

Storyteller: Elaine Slevin

Date of Story: 2015
Location of Story: Vienna, Westbahnhof
Location: 1160, Vienna, Austria
Date: 14 September, 2015