A Castaway’s Treasure Chest Fawzi Bushra | Principal Producer, Al Jazeera News Channel
Striving to understand the world around me, I spent my younger years reading books and listening to the radio. My fellow Sudanese villagers and I discovered the world through our ears. When I later discovered televisions, the world for me was no longer mere voices. Stranded after heavy rain, my father and I had to spend the night at a friend’s house in Sinjah, the closest town to our village. As we sat in the yard, he brought out a wooden box with curved glass in the middle. I was seven years old and thought it must have been a radio; albeit a bigger one than ours.
Then, a household member switched it on and to my surprise there were living people talking inside that box. They were followed by singers, who added soul and spirit to the lyrics carved into my imagination. I could not sleep that night. Six years later, in the capital, Khartoum, I again encountered something new: the colour television. During the following three years, I happened across the television only once or twice. I was not an exception; this was the case for almost all village dwellers in the vast Arab World.
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