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Outlook: Outlook Weekend: Pick of the Week

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Kim Ryen-Hi (Left), Ben Mirin (Right)

03/10/2015 GMT

Outlook Weekend: Pick of the Week

BBC World Service - Outlook, Outlook Weekend: Pick of the Week

Including: The North Korean defector who wants to return; The man beatboxing with lemurs

Including: The North Korean woman who defected to South Korea, but now wants to return to her family in the North; How a beatboxer and lemur expert have teamed up to save lemurs

Four years ago Kim Ryen-hi left her family in North Korea to visit her cousin in China. She ended up defecting to South Korea. But now she's become the only known defector to try to return to the North - a country known as one of the world's most secretive and repressive states. She says her defection was all a terrible mistake, and she has gone to great lengths to get back. But her efforts have got her into serious trouble with the South Korean authorities.

Ben Mirin is a beatbox musician from New York. He's also a keen birdwatcher and combines his two passions by using the sounds of the natural world in his beatboxing. A chance encounter with Professor Patricia Wright, who has spent her life studying the endangered lemurs of Madagascar, lead to an unlikely partnership.

A slightly different perspective on the conflict that's been tearing up eastern Ukraine over the past year comes from two young science enthusiasts, who have a cult following online for the slightly madcap experiments that they carry out on TVs and microwaves and household junk. They're called Pavel Pavlov and Aleksandr Kryukov, or Pasha and Sasha, and they come from Luhansk, on the border with Russia, which has broken free from Ukraine and been declared a so-called People's Republic. Over the past few months, they've become an unexpected source of information for their millions of viewers about what's been happening in Luhansk. 

Aqeela Asifi - the Afghan teacher who set up a school in  Pakistan's Kot Chandana refugee camp. 

For 30 years, Don Shipley was a US Navy SEAL. These elite special forces soldiers are proud of their reputation for courage under fire and so they understandably don't like it when people who weren't part of the team pretend they were. Today, Don operates an online video channel showing him tracking and challenging fake SEALs. 

Walter Mugwe is a professional yoga teacher giving free lessons to poor communities across Africa with the Africa Yoga Project. But his childhood years were very different. Walter grew up as one of six children in a notorious slum area of Kenya's capital Nairobi. His father died in a car accident when he was just 7-years-old and, despite his youth, Walter took on the responsibility of providing for the family.

(Picture: Kim Ryen-Hi (Left), and Ben Mirin (Right) - picture credit: TED Ex NYU

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