Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: Climbing a mountain 64 times to inspire others

Episode Date: May 17, 2025

Listener Tania tells us how stories on The Happy Pod helped her fight for life after a near fatal mountain fall. Now she's determined to inspire others. Also: a park designed in a computer game becomes a reality; why happiness boosts vaccines; and the cheerleading businessmen.

This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson and in this edition, a woman who nearly died on South Africa's famous Table Mountain has climbed back up 64 times and hopes to inspire others in the way others inspired her. I couldn't believe that I am now inspiring other people. For me to be on the Happy Pod, I cannot tell you how incredible because you've been my inspiration and now I can inspire other people. The thing that's extremely important to me is to understand that you are so much stronger than you think.

Also the children who used a computer game to design their own real life park in Bolivia. A chess master returning to the poor Nigerian neighbourhoods he grew up in to urge young people to dream big. I don't want to be remembered as a guy who could beat multiple people at chess or great world records. But as a guy who could help those children, I believe that they could also do great things

for small places. And why a guy who could help those children, but believe that they could also do great things for small places. And why a group of businessmen in Japan have taken up cheerleading. We start with a remarkable story of recovery and endurance from one of our listeners. In September 2023, Tanya Morkal, an experienced trail runner and mountain guide, fell 18 metres down a ravine while hiking on Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. She was 64 at the time and sustained numerous life-threatening injuries, including a broken back, a skull fracture and a brain hemorrhage. But, inspired by other stories of resilience, she's heard here on the HappyPod, Tania vowed to return to her beloved mountain and has just completed 64 climbs in 64 days to raise money for the Wilderness Search and Rescue Service

that helped save her life. She's been speaking to Holly Gibbs, starting with the moment the ground just disappeared under her feet. I didn't have the opportunity to say to my husband, I love you, goodbye. It was just absolutely no warning and suddenly I was gone. So I was knocked out immediately. My niece phoned my son and she said, your mum just had a full and I don't think she's alive please come immediately she found the search and rescue. We were incredibly lucky on that day there was an Austrian

and notice and she actually taken the wrong route and she came across my niece who was calling out for help. And she was able to get very fast down a very precipitous area and get to me. She woke me up and I just felt somebody stroking my hair and she said you're a strong person, you're going to survive. And that was the message that was encoded into me right from the beginning. Even when the rescue teams arrived, she said, this woman is strong, she'll survive. What was going through your mind when you were being rescued?

The one thing that really stood out for me was this incredible calmness. It was quiet. They worked with so much efficiency and they calmed the entire situation down. So I was moving my feet so that they could see that my spinal cord's not broken. And I wanted to, in case they were called out to a much younger person on the mountain, I wanted them to say, no, this woman, you know,

she really has fight to know, so we've got to keep going. As I was airlifted, I remembered a story just a few months before on the happy part actually of these people in Pakistan that would dangling in a in a cable car and I remembered so clearly the voices and this incredible rescue operation and I felt so held by that my happy part is being every been every Saturday I go for my walk with my dogs and I listen to it. And I've had so many of these stories that actually sustain me as well when I was in hospital. Well, we are totally honoured to have played any part in your recovery.

Do you hope that sharing your story might do the same to someone who might find themselves in a similar situation to you when they've just had a really bad accident. Yes, you know, I spent three weeks on a ventilator in hospital. I just needed to push through this time. And I often thought of people that had actually pushed through, you know, this is the thing I remember that very distinctly as well somebody who'd dived into a dam and he knew he was paralyzed from the spine down he said to himself on the way I will never say why me and I decided to make that my mantra I will never say why me and that is the advice I give to absolutely everyone and no matter how severe your injuries, you can get up and you can fight back.

It was extremely hard to sometimes come out of a coma and not know where I was. I did not know even who I was. And a nurse came, you look me in the eye and you just believe that you can do this. So I had to often trust in the people around me. And I remember my trauma surgeon one day came to me and said, you're going to climb the mountain again.

I can't believe that I will. But if you think so, I would absolutely love to do that. That day, it just turned for me. And now you have climbed Table Mountain 64 times in 64 days. Oh my goodness, yes. I got these incredible physios. I said to them, I have the dream to do the mountain 64 times to actually give back to the people who saved my life.

And they said, of course, and if you want us to, we'll come up the mountain with you. We're going to train you for this. The search and rescue people even joined me on a number of them. And I cannot tell you how incredible it is to be supported by the people of Cape Town and by all the tourists that came up that heard about my story. I couldn't believe that I am now inspiring other people. For me to be on this, on the Happy Pod, I cannot tell you how incredible because you've been my inspiration and now I can inspire other people. The thing that's extremely important to me is to understand that you are so much stronger than you think you are. You have to surround yourself with positive people and never give up.

Tanya, this is so inspiring. My final question for you is how is your life different now? Has your outlook on life changed? It's almost like I see colour more enhanced. The sky is bluer for me than it ever was. I feel so incredibly lucky to be alive. Tanya Moorcall and our thanks to her stepdaughter Danielle for getting in touch. If you have a story to share about something that's inspired you and helped you in tough times, please send us an email or a voice note globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. For the past 16 years, kids and adults alike have used the video game Minecraft to create their own virtual worlds. In the so-called sandbox game, players are able to build things with

blocks ranging from houses and cities to tools to take on adventures. Well, now a group of children in Bolivia have used the game to design a real life park in their city, as Isabella Jewel reports. It's the best-selling video game of all time, with tens of millions of active players every month. Minecraft has captivated gamers since it was first released in 2009, many of them drawn to the creative freedom the online playground provides. Now the virtual world has been brought into reality by a group of children in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba.

Working with the local authorities, Save the Children and UN Habitat, they spent a few months designing their dream public space on Minecraft. Hayden, who's 11, was one of the 20 children involved. This is an unforgettable project because we are redesigning Cochabamba. We want to make people comfortable and happy in our city, so we designed squares, parks, gyms, football fields and schools all on Minecraft. Minecraft. We built squares, parks, gyms, football courts and schools. A neighbourhood in the south of Cochabamba called Barrios Unidos was the focus of the project.

It's an area that, despite having four schools, doesn't have much in terms of child-friendly public spaces. That's something 14-year-old Nicole said she wanted to change. We came up with so many ideas. We really wanted the authorities to help us make our designs. The children involved in the project had lots of ideas, and after months of work, they had pulled them together into one coherent plan for a central park, as Bernardo Castillo from Save the Children explains. Bernardo Castillo, Director, Save the Children

Part of the experience is to realise what are the real possibilities of the municipality and the real needs of the neighbourhood. So at the end of the project they have made a design that includes a park, playgrounds, an outdoor gym and skating rinks. All these things were things that the municipality agreed to build and that were needs that the children have identified in a democratic way. An urban planning expert was brought in to adapt their plans, so they complied with health and safety requirements and planning rules. The design for the United Ideas Park was then proposed to the local government and the authorities agreed to fund it.

My name is Michael Mercado. I am an architect and I am currently serving as the Secretary of Planning and Environment. It's been a passionate effort as the children were working and playing at the same time, and the community showed remarkable openness towards this kind of project development process for the benefit of the community. The use of Minecraft in urban design is unusual, but after the success of this project, Save the Children and UN Habitat are hoping to replicate it with other groups of children across Bolivia. Michael Mercado again.

We believe that with this project we are building a new society, the society of the future, because the children are being taken into account in the construction of cities. So, perhaps this will be the start of a new approach in design, for children by children. Isabella Jewell reporting. Now it's long been known that how we feel emotionally can affect our physical health too, but research suggests that happiness could even boost the effects of vaccinations. A small study of 184 people having mRNA vaccines for COVID found

those in a more positive mood had a better immune response, making more of the antibodies needed to fight the virus. Health psychologist Kavita Vedara from Cardiff University in Wales spoke to my colleague, Claudia Hammond. We've been working in this area for a couple of decades, as have others, but this new study is particularly exciting because it's doing two things that are different. Previously, my work has focused on older adults where we know they already have a declining immune system, so there's a greater potential for you to see an effect of mood or anything else. This population in our current publication were younger adults, an average age of around 30 years. And the second aspect that's really interesting is that we're looking at positive mood and very

briefly at the time of vaccination, which completely transforms or opens up whole new avenues for intervention. So why might this happen? What could the mechanism be that means that because you're in a good mood, your body for some reason mounts a better immune response when you get the vaccine? So we don't exactly know, but there are some things that we could consider that are plausible. One of the things that seems unlikely is that it's behaviour because of course we're talking about something that's happening in a very short term context so it's not likely that sleep or diet are the pathways driving this. So it's much more likely to be physiological where we're seeing potentially a decrease in the amount of inflammation and that might enable vaccines to produce that antibody response

more robustly in the first phase. And so that decrease in inflammation might just come about because you're in a better mood at that moment. Yes. Does that mean there needs to be some way of putting everyone in a good mood while they're in the waiting room? I've heard it called an inoculation of fun. What kind of fun would we be talking about, you know, playing people comedies or videos of penguins? They're used a lot in psychological studies, I guess they put people in a good mood. They are. Well I'm pleased you asked that because actually we have put together a very brief

package of only 15 minutes for older adults which does appear to do a great job of improving positive mood. It doesn't include penguins I'm afraid but it does have the two Ronnies, a little bit of Elvis, a bit of faulty towers and what we're really evoking there is this kind of nostalgia of the comedy of, you know, 30, 40 years ago. And what we find is that actually it has pretty good reliable effects, improving positive mood and even decreasing negative mood, even in people whose mood's pretty good, even before they start.

So we might in the future see a day when we go and I don't know sit for 15 minutes first watching lovely comedies before we have our vaccines. Well that's exactly what we've been working on for a couple of years now is trying to find exactly the right sort of audiovisual content. We're focused on older adults so we've specifically chosen content suitable for them but of course you can imagine that we would use different content for different groups. I can see episodes of Friends coming on here. That's a brilliant idea. Thank you, Claudia. Professor Kavita Vidara from Cardiff University. Coming up in this podcast. We actually have put black rhinos back into the wild and the science behind it absolutely has made a difference.

So I have a lot of hope for the future. A surprising way to help rhinos breed. It's possible to do great things from small places. That's the motto that Tunde Onokoya says has helped him go from a childhood of extreme poverty in Nigeria to becoming a chess master. Last month he set the world record for the longest ever match, playing against Sean Martinez in New York's Times Square for a staggering 64 hours. The event helped him raise money for the charitable organization Tunde founded Chess in Slums Africa to help children growing up in similar

circumstances to his own. He's been speaking to Katie Smith. Every person that has done very meaningful things on the world, it all really started from a small place and I remember writing it down and just putting it on the wall in my room that it isn't it possible to do great things from a small place and as long as that remains a possibility then I have to try to help even children believe that. You broke the world record for the longest chess marathon and you did it alongside Sean Martinez.

I think the real beauty of that moment was that we shared it with so many other people. And when you push that limit of human capacity, you give the world something new to believe in. And that is always an inspiring thing that we can push what human limitation is. You never want to gather around us and just feeding off that energy just kept me going. This was now so much more than the chess, the game, even the record. It was about having people share this moment with us and we just kept going. So you've done a great thing. Can we go back to that small place? Maybe go back to when

you started playing chess. When did you fall in love with the game? 21 years ago. You know, I was nine. You know, we grew up in some hardship. So sometimes I would go out to help my mom sell food. And I just stumbled into this chessboard. It was in a barber shop at the time. I've called it love at first sight. And I think chess is one of those really captivating things,

even by design, that triggers curiosity in a child's mind. And I mordered the chess pieces myself and I got a cat board and I draw the checkered squares. So by just watching, I was able to pick up the rules of the game. I'll teach my brother so I could beat him. You know, then one day eventually they called me to the table to play and I was so excited to show them all the things I had learned. But I ended up losing in two moves. I was checkmated in two moves. I remember he gave me a book to read. I struggled to read it, but I read it eventually like cover to cover. And after reading the book was when I got my first win against him. It felt like I had found the one thing I could succeed at. There was a lot of things in my life that I couldn't control. Sometimes we'll go to

bed without food. But the first time I had found this magical world of 64 squares, I could always escape to. And he taught me an important lesson about consequences and reward for hard work. And also knowing that all growth comes from knowledge. If I hadn't read the book, I wouldn't have discovered new knowledge and that knowledge helped me to beat this master. And it's now valuable lessons like these through chess that Tunde is passing on to others through the organisation that he founded, Chess in Slums Africa. Thankfully, through chess, I've been given the privilege of dining with the very successful

people and being in all of these places, traveling the world to share my talents, my gifts. But the real truth here is that, and there are just children of the slums that can do even better, but then opportunity. My whole entire ideology is turning that spotlight into flashlights and illuminating the things that I do and the things that I see that the world probably wouldn't see. But because they see me, they will see those children and also appreciate their talents. See, I don't want to be remembered as a guy who could beat multiple people at chess or break world records, but as a guy who could help those children believe that they could also do the same thing and do great things from small places. Dundee Onokoya talking to Katie Smith for Not By The Playbook, which you can find

wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Eastern black rhinos are among the world's critically endangered species, but global breeding programmes are starting to make a difference and one of the secrets to success is what scientists are able to learn from hormones in their droppings. Technology reporter Alistair Keane went to Chester Zoo in northern England to find out more. Emma! Come on lady! Come on! I'm up early to join Callum Garner, one of the black rhino keepers at Chester Zoo. This is Emma in front. She got lovely long hairy ears so we can tell there's her. And then this is Kasulu.

So Kasulu's in like her young teenage years at the minute. Being a zookeeper might sound like a fun job, but we've got a slightly more grim task to do today. You've got a sample bag. you ready to collect some poo? Let's go and do it, yeah. So you want to break the ball apart and then you just want to pinch bits out of the middle. The poo is actually really important to us here. Collecting them for samples every week, from that our scientists can tell us when's best

to mix our rhinos because they're part of the European breeding programme. It can be dangerous mixing them but if we know she's in distress it's more likely that it could go well and hopefully it will go well. The efforts here are part of a global conservation programme. The zoo is home to Europe's newest and largest endocrinology lab analysing samples sent from all over Europe. Hello. Hi. I've got a sample for you. Thank you. John O'Hanlon is one of the scientists. The challenging bit is particularly of rhino,

so because of what they eat, their browsers, so they leak trees, leak grass, there's a lot of bark in the samples themselves and so what we want, you want the pooey bits. The ultimate goal is to see populations of critically endangered species grow in the wild. Dr Sue Walker is the head of science at Chester Zoo. I firmly believe we can actually make a difference. I've seen it happen in my lifetime. So when I was younger and started off as a scientist, I ran hormones in the lab for black rhinos and I never conceived of the fact that the next generation, their prodigy, would

be returning. But they have. So we actually have put black rhinos back into the wild and the science behind it absolutely has made a difference. So I have a lot of hope for the future. While science still struggles to keep up with the rate of extinction, advancements in tech are bringing new hope of saving these animals in the wild. Alastair Keane reporting and you can see

rhinos Emma and Kasulu on the Tech Now programme on the BBC website. A homeless man has been inundated with job offers from around the world after his sign asking for work went viral online. Mark Hamblin from South West England had been self-employed before having to take time off to care for his father. Jasmine Kettibua Foley has more details. I never thought I'd be here, you know. I've worked hard all my life, I've earned good money. You know, sitting on the street asking for money from strangers, it's hard, it's humbling.

After writing a sign that said he wanted work, not money, Mark, who's homeless, has been inundated with job offers from all over the world. His call for help was shared on Facebook, where it was met with a huge response. I've got work from Scotland, Tuscany, South America. I said yes to all of it. I haven't replied to everybody yet. There's something like 500 responses so far. I've only got through like a quarter of it.

So it's been overwhelming, you know? Mark was a self-employed roofer, but his work dried up while caring for his dying father. His situation forced him into homelessness. But in a dramatic turn of events, he's now looking forward to starting a new job. I've got more than enough job offers at the moment, but yeah, any more tricks to pull?

Yeah, yeah, maybe. Jasmine Kettibuafoli and Mark Hamlin. Many people working in full-time jobs like to blow off steam on days off. But a group of men in Japan is taking this to a whole new level by cheerleading. Around 30 businessmen, many of whom did cheerleading at university, are picking up their pom-poms and meeting at weekends. But there's a twist. Harry Bly reports. Meet the Cheerymans, a group of male cheerleaders in Tokyo who perform

wearing suits. The name is a mash mashup of cheerleading and salaryman because these men all work in traditional corporate roles and this is their way of unwinding and destressing from the busy office. Cheerleading for those not familiar involves lifting teammates in the air, tumbling, jumping and performing other acrobatic moves, all while in sync with each other and following the rhythm of the music. Sho Hayashi is part of the team. I was scared at first for sure, but I got used to it and felt secure knowing that my team-mates would catch me, so I'm no longer afraid of that technique.

21-year-old Soichiro Kakimoto has a typical routine for a white-collar worker. From Monday to Friday, he commutes to and from his software development job on a crowded train, often working late and many nights a week, goes out drinking with colleagues. Weekends, though, are for the cheerymans. On weekdays I use my brain and on Saturdays and Sundays I use my body. Even if one isn't well, the other might be, and that's contributing to my overall mental health. Satoi Mochizuki is one of the co-founders of the cheerymans. They're all just regular salarymen. In my case, I work for a general trading company and I usually go out drinking after work or do overtime. So you can really say that I'm

balancing this with being an everyday salaryman. And as for why the team perform wearing suits… We chose to wear suits for our performances because there's this common image in Japan and probably the whole world of the typical salaryman in his suit working day after day as a cog in society. And we thought it would be a good contrast for us to express ourselves through our performances, wearing suits and doing what we love with all our might. For training, the team often uses a college gymnasium borrowed from a conventional female

cheerleading team there, in exchange for biscuits. The cheery man can often be found performing to the public in local shopping malls, spreading joy to passers-by. Harry Bly. And that's all from the HappyPod for now. But if, like Tanya, you have a story you'd like to share, we'd love to hear from you. Just email or send a voice note to globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk And you can now watch some of our interviews on YouTube, just search for the happy pod. This edition was mixed by Chris Hansen and the producers were Holly Gibbs and Rachel

Bulkley. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritzen, until next time, goodbye.