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From Our Own Correspondent: Portugal, DR Congo, Lebanon and Christmas Island

13/07/2013

Portugal, DR Congo, Lebanon and Christmas Island

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Portugal, DR Congo, Lebanon and Christmas Island

Toughing it out in Portugal, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon and Christmas Island.

The youth of Portugal returning to their former colonies to find work; rising crime in Kinshasa; Syria's silent majority; Christmas Island's enduring traces of 1950s nuclear tests

Emma Jane Kirby meets the Portuguese youth who resent having to leave their lives and families in search of employment. She visits a visa agency in Porto and finds out that in the first five months of this year, demand for visas has gone up by 60%. And, it's not just casual work - unemployed engineers, architects and teachers are all applying to leave the country. 

Johnny Hogg finds a degrading sex industry and pervasive crime affecting both the homeless and the prosperous of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Diana Darke has a rendez-vous in Lebanon with the caretaker of her house in Damascus, who risks life and limb to collect much-needed hard currency.  Plus, John Pickford visits Christmas Island - now inhabited by ten thousand residents and tens of thousands of sooty terns - in search of traces of the former testing sites of the British atom bomb.

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