Lives Less Ordinary BBC World Service

Alain Gachet quit a lucrative career in oil to search for water underground. Colleagues told him he was a 'crazy donkey', but he eventually developed an algorithm that allowed him to 'peel the earth like an onion' and detect water beneath the surface. Soon, he was asked to train his talents to help pinpoint areas of life-saving reserves of water for desperate refugees escaping the conflict in Darfur.
Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producer: Anna Lacey and Hetal Bapodra
Editor: Munazza Khan
Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Beth Rodden escaped her kidnappers, and pushed her body to its limit, following the climber code of whatever hurts makes you stronger. She married her boyfriend Tommy Caldwell, who had saved them by pushing their captor off a cliff in the Kyrgyz mountains. They became the first couple to free climb the Nose in Yosemite National Park. To the world she was a record-breaking athlete, but inside she was crumbling, haunted by that moment in the mountains. It would take her 15 years to face it head on, and in doing so she redefined what it meant to be a climber.
Beth's book A Light Through the Cracks: A Climber's Story is out now.
Clips are from NPR and the Associated Press.
Presenter: Emily Webb
Producer: Louise Morris
Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Beth Rodden was on a dream climbing expedition in Kyrgyzstan when she was kidnapped by Islamist militants. She and her friends spent days moving between hiding places in the mountains, fearing for their lives as food supplies dwindled. Then, six days in, the group found themselves at the edge of a cliff with a single young guard. They had a chance to escape, but it came with a huge ethical dilemma.
Presenter: Emily Webb
Producer: Louise Morris
Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784
Audio for this episode was updated on 6 June 2024.

Setsuko Thurlow knows what nuclear war looks like.
She was a 13-year-old schoolgirl when an atomic bomb was dropped on her home city of Hiroshima, Japan. Most of the places she knew were destroyed in an instant. Narrowly escaping death herself, Setsuko became a witness to the aftermath of atomic warfare, and the things she saw that day would compel her to spend her life fighting for nuclear disarmament.
Archive was from British Pathé
Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producer: Jo Impey and Harry Graham
Editor: Laura Thomas
Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

In 2016, when Jenny Söderqvist and Helene Åberg’s car exploded in the middle of the vast Kalahari desert, their supplies and only lifeline to the outside world went up in flames. No rescue would come. The two friends from Sweden would spend the next five harrowing days lost in the wilderness and stalked by lions, until their salvation appeared to them in the most unlikely of forms: a tin of Spam.
Presenter: Mobeen Azhar
Producer: Edgar Maddicott
Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Mistaken for a terrorist, and detained without trial. Art became his refuge.
Pakistani taxi driver Ahmed Rabbani was arrested in 2002, labelled a terrorist and spent 21 years in US detention, including time in a CIA secret prison. Incarcerated without trial or charge, Ahmed was subject to enhanced interrogation, or what he describes as 62 different types of torture. When he was transferred to a cell in Guantanamo Bay, Ahmed would pick up paint and pastels and find solace through art – creating vistas he could only imagine.
Presenter: Mobeen Azhar
Producer: Maryam Maruf
Voiceover: Mohammed Hanif
Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784