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Kate Adie introduces insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents and writers.

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From Our Own Correspondent: Mass Migration and the Families Left Behind

03/02/2022

Mass Migration and the Families Left Behind

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, Mass Migration and the Families Left Behind

With so many leaving Latin America for the US, how does this affect communities back home?

What happens to communities in Guatemala when so many leave, how Australia is changing, plus a controversial rape case in Cyprus, and the former boxer running Ukraine's capital.

Every week, every month, thousands of would-be migrants are still turning up at Mexico’s border with the United States, hoping to get across. This has a profound effect on the people left behind, the families and wider communities where they grew up. Guatemala, for example, has a population of about sixteen million, and some estimates suggest a million of these have left. Megan Janetsky went there to meet some of the many people who have had to wave their relatives goodbye.

It is not only poverty-stricken Latin Americans who go abroad in search of opportunity. This programme depends on people who are working overseas: the foreign correspondents who take up a posting, and then regale us with tales of their adopted countries. Any traveller though will tell you that returning home can also be an interesting experience, the chance to see a once familiar country through fresh eyes. Nick Bryant has just gone back to Australia after eight years, and says that it is not just him who changed during that time away.

It started with her going to the police to complain that she had been gang raped; it resulted in a court case, with her in the dock.  The case dates back to 2019, when a British student said she had been raped by up to twelve Israelis at a hotel room in Cyprus. She then retracted the allegation, and found herself convicted for making it up. That sentence has now been overturned, by a panel of judges in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia. Anna Holligan watched the hearing, and says it focused attention on the way cases of rape and sexual assault are treated in Cyprus.

With more than a hundred thousand Russian troops massed on its border, the Ukrainian Army is on high alert, while ordinary citizens are being mobilised for civil defence. In the capital, Kiev, these efforts are being overseen by the city’s Mayor, the former world champion boxer, Vitali Klitschko. Colin Freeman met him while he was out campaigning, and ponders now how well he’s suited to this new role.

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