Dust Road Dispatches

Narrated documentaries from villages the news never visits

Njeri Mwangi2 episodes1 min of audio63 playsEpisodic

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S1 · E2Sep 29, 20260:4330 plays Preview

The Punjab Village Where the Young Men Went to Canada

In a village near Jalandhar, nearly every family has a son in Brampton or Surrey. Njeri records the fathers who stayed, the farms they cannot work alone, and the one boy who came back.

S1 · E1Sep 1, 20260:4433 plays Members

The Tea Cooperative and the Buyer Who Stopped Paying

In the Kenyan highlands, four hundred smallholders delivered tea for six months to a factory that stopped sending money. Njeri spends a week with them as they decide what to do.

About the show

Njeri Mwangi grew up in a village outside Nyeri and spent fifteen years as a rural affairs reporter before deciding that the stories she cared about needed more than ninety seconds. Dust Road Dispatches is a narrated documentary series, one episode a fortnight, around forty-five minutes, each built from several days spent in one rural place. A tea-growing cooperative in the Kenyan highlands facing a buyer who stopped paying. A Punjabi village where almost every young man has left for Canada. A Mexican ejido fighting over water. A fishing settlement in Sri Lanka rebuilding after the harbour silted. A Transylvanian village where the shepherds still take the flocks up the mountain in May. Njeri lets people speak at length, records the sounds of the place, and explains the policy and economics only where a listener needs it. For listeners who are tired of hearing about the countryside from the city, and for anyone who left a village and wonders what happened to it.

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