know wouldn't we all want to travel the world and do great things that's what our guest today did john mr right here john i was so thrilled that you were coming on the show i just had ask you about these adventures of yours which one was the most fun alaska croatia afghanistan or this and then yes pretty much all of them in different ways afghanistan was probably the most difficult just because of what was going on around me at the time well as weak as we get into these places you could've had your choice of lots of places to go and lots of things to do because you know you're a broadcast professional why would why did you want to go to places like this well there's well first off there's money in it in the sense of the international media development is a thriving business so you're not going to paris they don't need it  but afghanistan certainly needed it and so it was very rewarding to do that to one of the things that we were talking about right before the show started there was some early days of your early days of radio and working in alaska and actually i thought that that was really kind of neat either weather was alaska or minnesota in the way that radio itself was relevant then is radio relevant now yes especially around the world radios affordable you just  few batteries you can also surround a radio with people my mother told me about listening to orson welles war the world and the whole family was surrounding the radio and they didn't believe the hoax they knew it was just of drama but that's what happens in africa you'll find ten fifteen people wrapped around a radio television is a little harder to do you can do it there's a lot of cafes and such that will have a television set and people will sit around and watch t v and drink tea or beer or whatever depending on where they are so but radio is so much more accessible it's easy radio was important though in alaska absolutely well absolutely was it the same kind of community feel yes in fact a story that happened in petersburg when i lived there it's a small town in iowa in the middle of nowhere and this woman got on the ferry to go to catch candy and she was nine months pregnant and she's never baby catch can well as the ferry left petersburg her water broke and so the ferry editor around the wrinkle narrows which is not a very good thing to do but they managed to do it now the problem was a coming back to petersburg but no one's expecting the ferry to come so they couldn't find the guy that ties up the ferry so we put on the radio hey get down to the ferry terminal the ferries coming back there's an emergency medical emergency so the whole town knew about this and they all went searching for the guy to tie up the ferry so that kind of thing is really important in alaska and it's important in africa we've we had a lost child in juba south sudan that somebody brought by the station and we put the child on the air who said mommy come and get me and we finally found  parents and so it's a rewarding thing all around radios really important well let's go to croatia and you were there one thousand nine through two thousand and two are in there abouts it was basically right at the end of ten years at least of wars in that area right in the first place i lived was a place called buka bar which flattened during the war and my job was to help serve radio stations going in croatia and don't forget the serbs in the craw it's we're the ones fighting  so the serb having the serbs having a radio stations of their own was important to get the serbs to resettle come back home after the war and if you have local culture that's familiar to you you'll be more likely to come home  i'm not no but they were and so i was just helping them try to find ways to survive what did you do help them with business planning i found a ngo there that taught business planning and it was taught in croatian and had a book written in croatian and then i had a hired a korean assistant to help walk them through it so some of them slept with their business plan under their pillows and those radio stations are alive and kicking today many years later when you went into corporation did you get the opportunity to find out what the fighting was all about it was really difficult to do that everyone wants to tell you their story a long history of it and there are some really really sad stories what struck me as odd was they wanted to go back to world war two there were some untold stories they weren't allowed to talk about under tito regime so they wanted to get that out because it just wasn't allowed to be spoken about and world war two was fifty years gone yes but that that that's the root of what the difficulties were yugoslavia was forced together after were two and they didn't necessarily like each other and part of yugoslavia was more pro azzi and the other was pro allies so there was a lot of animosity still spread around and you start a radio station and all that yeah what what are they broadcast on radio in croatia that people will listen to at that point music just music music i mean you know there was there was talk shows a lot of it was the way the radio stations could finance themselves the un for example was trying to transition out so the u n would hire radio stations if they would do an hour long program on what the efforts were to help people relocate and access to community resources and that kind of thing and they would pay the stations and sometimes that was the only income the stations had because businesses were dead one radio station in fact made money by doing concerts they would have local musician come up they'd play on the air and then when the station was ready to sign off they'd say hey we're going over to this tavern and if you want to hear some more music come out and join us and then they would take at the end of the month they do a concert and get all four musicians you know from the past four weeks throw this concert and charge like you know a dollar to get in and that was enough to pay the salaries for a month i can imagine local politicians would be just fine with concerts but anything outside of concerts or music local politicians perhaps may not be so fond of  in croatia a matter of fact most of the radio stations are political owned by a party or owned by the mayor and so when the new mayor comes along they fire all the staff and put in his people into that station so yeah it's very very political how did you deal with that i tried to find it really radio stations that were independent and willing to listen to everybody and anything and then build it help them build on that and really hold those ideas of independence which was also a challenge because we were funded by the u s government so we often had to tell the u s government wait a minute we're really independent media that means independent from the croatian government the local government and the american government oh my gosh you know and in getting ready for the show i can just imagine the phone call you'd they call up and say mom i'm done with croatia and guess where i'm going next their answer was afghanistan yeah well my parents got a kind of used to me bouncing around in various places afghanistan was a challenge actually i was in seattle before i went to afghanistan and i was having a hard time finding a job and afghanistan title as chief of party believe it or not already the company i work for is called internews and internews was the party and i was the head of internews as activities in afghanistan so it's cheap of party guys anyway it's kind of complicated but  there will be built radio stations across the country in if you wanted to talk for a while if you wanted to talk to afghans you had to come to us and the community radio stations we built and we built them into a network so each station was privately own some were for profit some were non profits some were all women stations and then we produce our own newscasts two hours in the morning two hours in the afternoon and then each station broadcast that and then we saw also sold advertising so if you had an ngo that was vaccinating children they had problems when these helicopters would land and people get off the helicopters and go grab children and parents would of course hide their children well we would put on air hey this is about vaccination and here's why vaccinations are good and we do have a doctor we have an e mail from the local mosque and talk about how vaccinations were good so then what happened was the helicopters land and people are bringing their rabies to the helicopters i got like a thousand questions right now and so i'd like to that's the i'll just start firing them off the people how would they accept you i mean you know you don't look after any i do actually now do you in fact one of my escape plans which is something you should always have  was put on a commuter show you just kind of the pajamas looking thing it's a very long shirt and very baggy pants and if i wore a scarf and specially i have put the scar from my mouth which is their kind of habit and sat on my heels and you know on the ground i would look afghan but if i spoke games over why did you have to have an exit plan always have an exit plan you never know you never know in south sudan i had bought a car in kenya so i could drive around in in south sudan but i kept my kenyan license plates and that was part of my escape plan in case the war broke out again i could just put plates on my car and head to the ugandan border and get through a little easier well when you were in afghanistan though we can't say in case war broke out again because war was there it was there and still we also kept i kept a pakistani visa always in my passport so that if i had to leave i could at least get through without having the hassle of waiting for a visa you forgive me it's pakistan safer that afghans sometimes yes sometimes no there was also un flights out but it's always nice to have more than one way of getting out if you had to as far as kabul we have had people come on the show who would actually be critical of the media that said that whenever media came to town they would stay in kabul but the real action was outside is that it was that you know will we i didn't get out that much for security reasons mainly if i could catch a flight with other people who were going someplace i would do that but normally we wouldn't go out very often but the project had one hundred seventy afghans working for it so those guys got out all the time or they always on your side not always tell us about sometimes one of them one of the dangers of doing broadcasting in a different country in different languages is not knowing what you're broadcasting so i was very careful the voice of america has learned this lesson repeatedly you got to have some listening that knows the language that you trust to tell you what's happening it happened to me in alaska we had a great show on a radio station i guess i probably should say where that had a great program called fiesta philip indiana and it was a group of filipinos that came in and did this really great music show on a friday night and it was a really really popular show and it was all into golic so if didn't speak to god you didn't know it was happening well it turns out they were fundraising for the marcos they were raising money using our airwaves but since nobody was listening to it that spoke to golic we didn't know that so i learned my lesson and tried to make sure that we always know what's being broadcast no matter what all right so if you 're in afghanistan there's somebody who is saying something on the station and you are the chief of party over and saying something that he or she should say probably he what do you do those people were trusted and did a good job and you know we listen to them too and we would talk to them afterwards if there were things that were off but i wasn't trying to be the the guy with a whip you know and generally speaking it's better if the afghans police themselves so there were people that were monitoring and were that in charge of the of the programs and they obviously speak the language and they know the language so they would catch things before they were broadcast what did they have to annies want out of a radio station afghanis the currency's the afghans of the people ok sorry thank you very much for the education and well it's  easy to be confused anyway what were they concerned about there were they want a better life and they knew the broadcasting was part of it like there was a woman on the staff when women could get driver's licenses she decided to do a poor program about her getting a driver's license and so she recorded the entire process unfortunately when her first day out driving by herself she also brought her recorder with her and she got this on tape but she was h out of a car and beaten because women are supposed to drive i was going to ask you the question of how did women fare and i guess you just answered it yeah not good they were very brave we had a gender sensitivity training that we did that i would be asked to speak at the beginning and at the end of graduation and it would bring me to tears every time when i think about my mother in the wow the world changed for her you know the leave it to beaver generation to today if the role of women in the united states has changed or here's women that are taking control of their own lives in afghanistan my h r officer was a woman who taught english from her home during the taliban she could have been killed for that oh absolutely what was your relationship with the u s military none we were again the company i work for was in our news they had a board level policy to have nothing to do with the department of defense we also trained our staff that if you if they were going out on a field trip and they saw a military convoy to make an immediate ninety degree turn just get the heck out of the way the military convoys the target not not as were you did you ever feel like you were a target oh yeah oh yeah in many places how to deal with it you just kind of go with it  especially if you're a white person so there's not much you can do about it you just kind of go along with it there and no one that i know of has been shot but it's possible and you say you don't know what to do with it in afghanistan what we did is we went to the local mosque and we worked with the mosque in the in the mosque and did things for the community like go pick up garbage or we fix bridge over a small creek and the neighbors got to know us because we're the guys that did this so all of us were out there i mean clue to picking up trash or doing whatever so that we would be part of the community so in a way that your defense at the end of your time in afghanistan what did you feel like you had accomplished a great deal it was amazing to see how much people listen to the radio we did  a program on homosexuality and afghanistan in afghanistan we got more comments and praise for that program than any other broadcast we did people expected us to talk about controversial issues and research we did audience research at one point and that program was talked about a lot as being something that they really liked they wanted to hear about it let's go to sudan or should i say to ninety eight point six ninety eight point six s r s f l when you put out a radio station anywhere in the world you've got to get your frequency in there somewhere and if they get them to do it and in the united states you can't get a frequency of ninety eight point six and i've always wanted it because you have to have an odd number in the u s so i do go to say that it was an exciting project i heard about it when i was in afghanistan somebody we had gone out and done some plymouth very research on whether a project would work or not and the u s government decided it was worth doing so it started up and it ran for about six years before i got there the guy that was there for those six years  could finally get back into sudan into sudan at the time it's now south sudan and he didn't want to go because he was married and his family was living in nairobi and he didn't want to have to move them to juba in fact company post with the u s government calls our company post you can't bring your family with you because too dangerous and there's not schools and there's no infrastructure so it was difficult for a day for him so he decided that it was time for him to leave and i came in and took over since i was single that was easy with regard to sudan itself it was you were not working for the u s government they were just they were funding a contractor right right and then you worked for the contractor right so it was you were you ever representing the u s government no no and we tried as much as we could to be independent they only concession i made on the front gate i put the usaid logo on the front gate thinking that if somebody wanted to do a hostile takeover because what happens in a military coup you take over the radio station you know right so i was hoping that would slow them down maybe an f for my staff to sneak out the back door but i've we tried to keep ourselves distant usaid has always been wonderful well not always but most of the time is a wonderful about recognizing our independence so what was your approach there what were you trying to do i mean it sounds fascinating to be able to go and start a radio station and not just a country but so the goal from day one was to have it run by the south sudanese so it meant training you know creating a middle management creating a manager i left the place with the general manager i gave you a photo of him his name is originally by the project in when we were in kenya in broadcasting and shortwave and he went to night school and got an m b a so i left the radio station in good hands and he is brilliant he's doing a fantastic job that's what i wanted and it took me about four years four and a half years to get the radio station of the point where it could start to be on that path of running itself one thing's for sure though whether it's afghanistan or those are very poor places south sudan probably is poorer than any of them yet there is how can they afford a radio station well the trick was the radio station itself the equipment the transmitter the tape recorders the cars the building it's all paid for by the us government so now they're trick is to pay for the diesel fuel for the generators so that lowers their expenses here in the united states you have to you have to pay for all your equipment in the replacement that comes up so that was covered so that make sure not a little small or maybe now as you were and as you're seeing this new country you know unfold i mean some o there was during the war the civil war with the south versus the north there was an underground radio in one of my staff with the voice one of the voices and her voice was recognized as being one of those that was on the radio at that time so they liked it they like to hear what's going on they are just curious about what's happening especially what's happening in other parts of the country instead of just their neighborhood so and that continues they're hungry for news they'll just eat it up so that the station was was news twenty four seventh's no we also we had a lot of music when we were on shortwave we couldn't music doesn't do well on shortly but we still did music programs but we  broadcasting is very very expensive i forgot how much it is per hour but it's very expensive so we were limited to a few hours in the morning a few hours and every evening when we got the twenty four hour station first trick  teach my staff what time was because with the with the shortwave we had a five o'clock in the evening deadline they had to have all their programs done that we had to upload the stuff on the internet to london who then put it on  shortwave transmitters it would go out but then and we would also upload the morning show starting at five o'clock in the evening so they had one deadline well now with the twenty four hour station you've got several deadlines a day so how do you get your staff to do that  do you get them to start the twelve o'clock news at exactly twelve zero zero zero zero as a broadcaster you know what that's like so we had the kind of teach them how to do that and advertisers like coca cola advertiser that you'll get right away but they won't pay you if you don't broadcast the commercial on the time that they said so if you're a minute late with their commercial they will pay you for it and you know we sitting here in america that's kind of easy for us to say well you know it's you just watch the clock and you punch the button right but i've been to africa and african time is different it's very different we also have put in the first weather station we had to teach them what the temperature was so that was because we were broadcast weather information from the farmers when there's a lot of learning that in the world right now immediately i'm thinking of robin williams you know and good morning vietnam and he starting about the weather you know just look outside and it's hot and then he goes on right well but they can do you know what  idea it's how much water is being evaporated out of the ground if you're a farmer that's really important you want to know how much water you're losing and how much water you're gaining when it rains so we started teaching people on the air about that we did other things it's also even simpler wash your hands now literally we would broadcast that frequently through the day wash your hands now really yeah i think of the ebola crisis right now and for sure in in else we had lots of difficulties the government sometimes would come by and accuse us of broadcasting something they didn't like his government the south sudanese government sometimes the state government would would react to something and then it turns out we didn't broadcast what the were offended by some other station did but they just got confused about which one it was the catholic radio station in juba south sudan they actually shut the station off and  took the nun that was in charge and put her in jail for a while accusing them of broadcasting things that were against the government and it turned out that they didn't broadcast those things it was somebody else what if you had heard what if you had broadcast those things that were against the government without a but you in jail possibly possibly is what you were trying to teach what you were trying to be independent where you're trying to get an ethic and ethos inside of them that they are independent and they should have free media yes isn't that yours isn't that the american point of view and not necessarily the south sudanese point of you know the south sudanese actually anywhere in the world seriously they know propaganda when they hear it in croatia they had a state run television  and there was just a really quick story there was a joke about that they had three channels twenty four hours a day seven days a week and channel one would be rebroadcast of whatever the pope did last on his visit channel two  whatever the president of the country did with the pope and channel three would be a police officer saying switch to channel two anyway they're the problem they know the propaganda and they can see through it we have less than a minute left i got to ask you are you helping change the world through what you're doing oh absolutely absolutely and that's what i want to do and it really makes a difference what i like is when you find a young man who is upset with something going on in his government and he comes into your radio station says i want to do you to do a story about this or that and said well you know we don't necessarily have axed grinding our going on here why don't you run for office and then you can do something about it and he did well and he's