How does it feel to present news about your home country, knowing your friends and family are listening and living through those events? Three distinguished presenters from the BBC World Service tell their own stories, exposing the raw and deeply personal dilemmas that their ambiguous position forces them to confront on a daily basis.
1: Laurent Ndayuhurume from Burundi: a Long Way from Home
Producer Emily Kasriel
(Repeated Saturday 7.45pm)

A World Service presenter describes the personal dilemma of broadcasting from the UK to his war-torn home country

Talking to My Family 5.40pm R4

Laurent Ndayuhurume presents and edits programmes for the BBC World Service, targeted at listeners in Burundi, Rwanda and Eastern Congo. He's working as a a journalist for a powerful international broadcaster; his role is to present the facts of the war going on in his home country. But Ndayuhurume's journey from Burundi to Blackheath has left him feeling like an outsider in both countries. In the remote and mountainous countryside where his family lives, many of his former friends now consider him a traitor. "My family finds it hard to understand how I can be so remote when I'm broadcasting and my failure to condemn their enemies baffling," he says. In London he feels he must keep his feelings private "to maintain my credibility" - even when he had to report the death of his own beloved uncle on air. He'd stumbled across the story while checking the news wires but had to present it as "yet another casualty of our civil war".