« Arctic Reimagined
The Garden: Summer »

The Lonely Funeral

May 20th, 2010 by Steve Bowbrick

Something quite humbling from Holland. Michele Ernsting made this lovely programme for Radio Netherlands Worldwide (it's in English) and the BBC World Service transmitted it as part of the Global Perspective series. It says here:

Every year up to twenty people die completely alone in Amsterdam. There are no friends or family to prepare their funeral or mourn over the body. Sometimes these people are illegal migrants, drug mules, or simply people who for one reason or another, cut-off all social contacts. Poet Frank Starik decided that these people also deserved to be eulogized. He contacted the Amsterdam city services and asked if he could take part in these forgotten funerals. Producer Michele Ernsting of Radio Netherlands Worldwide brings us the story of the Lonely Funeral.

Here's the MP3.

Presenter: Michele Ernsting
Production Company: Radio Netherlands Worldwide
Listen: [MP3]

This entry was posted by by Steve Bowbrick on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 12:15 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “The Lonely Funeral”

  1. Rich Says:
    May 20th, 2010 at 5:34 pm

    Really want to hear The Lonely Funeral, but it won’t play. Get an error message when I click on the flash player icon. However, thanks for keeping your site active with good stuff on a regular basis (mean it).

  2. Steve Bowbrick Says:
    May 20th, 2010 at 10:48 pm

    Fixed! Thanks for pointing out the problem (and for your support!).

    Steve

Leave a Reply

(You can do this safely while listening; thanks to Internet Magic you can add a comment here without causing the page to refresh and reloading the programme you are listening to. Try it.)