Nepal: Living on the edge of disaster

Pascale Harter introduces stories from Nepal, Gaza, Florida's Cuban-American community and Spain.

Recent catastrophic floods have heightened fears in many at-risk mountain communities in Nepal, who're living under the looming threat of melting Himalayan glaciers. Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent reports from the village and monastery of Halji in the country's high plains.

UNICEF says some 98 per cent of schools in Gaza have been either destroyed or damaged during the war between Israel and Hamas, which began after the Hamas attacks of October 7 2023. In recent weeks, Gaza's Ministry of Education announced it was going ahead with the new academic year, leading to hundreds of thousands of children returning to the classroom for the first time in three years. Lina Shaikhouni has been speaking to one teenage girl about her experience of trying to keep her education going.

For decades, many in Florida’s Cuban-American community have dreamed of regime change on the Communist-run island, which many left as children. Will Grant met a group of Cuban-American entrepreneurs in Miami formulating plans for the future.

Spain’s organ donation programme is widely seen as being one of the most successful in the world – and unlike many other countries, it allows donations of tissue and organs from people who chose to die via euthanasia. Linda Pressly recently met the recipient of a pioneering face transplant in Barcelona, and heard about the ethical questions raised during the procedure.

Producer: Polly Hope
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
Production co-ordinator: Katie Morrison
(Image: The Rinchenling monastery in Nepal - site of Buddhist worship for a thousand years, but now menaced by flood risks. Credit: Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent/BBC)