KFAI's MinneCulture Presents

This program is an endearing, yet unsentimental, 30 minutes of radio. Created by Radio Netherlands International , producer Dheera Sujan interviews an interracial, international 30-something couple. He's from Brooklyn. She's from Banja Luka. In this quasi-documentary, the couple talk bluntly about what attracted them to each other and what they now love and hate about each other. I first heard this program in Berlin, at a radio festival called Prix Europa . It had dozens of Europeans (and a few Americans) laughing and loving it.

Dare I say it? Autumn isn't too far away. (Here in Minnesota, one is usually a realist.) With the harvest upon us, we thought it would be nice to take a break from documentaries and learn how to prepare a nutritional, hearty meal. That's why we're airing Cooking with MOMbo by Nance Olesen in Minneapolis. Olesen knows seemingly everything about parenting; she's the long-time host of the MOMbo radio show, which has morphed into a great radio enterprise. Its mission: "MOMbo broadasts the everyday truth about motherhood (in order to change the world)."

This week, we start off with two Hurricane Katrina stories. The first, Katrina Photojournalist , is an interview with Times-Picauyne photographer John McCusker, one of the few staffers to stick around and cover New Orleans throughout the hurricane and subsequent flooding. In Rebuilding NOLA , Adeline Goss records an audio diary of building homes in New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity for musicians. We follow up those pieces with Residence Elsewhere , a story of urban nomads contemplating staying or leaving, produced by Joan Schumnan. Finally, we take a minute to really slow down and listen to a man as he builds his mother's casket. It's a short piece from the Salt Institute's pause series, Bringing the Work into You by Megan Martin.

In this hour-long documentary from Radio Netherlands, Dheera Sujan brings us back to her native Australia with two deeply moving stories. Both are personal accounts of Aboriginals, who - like many older generation Native Americans in the US - were taken from their homes at an early age and 'relocated' to be schooled and molded into mainstream white culture. Part 1 is the story of the Collard family, whose children were separated. While one suffered abuse and neglect, another was brought up in the white way. Today the children and their parents are trying to come to terms with being worlds apart. In Part 2, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter met on the streets when they were both teenagers and they’ve been together ever since. They’re amongst the “lucky ones” as they’ve managed to channel their pain into their music. The programme is liberally sprinkled with the songs that Archie wrote and sings together with Ruby.