502: This Call May Be Recorded... To Save Your Life

Ira Glass

When the phone calls started, Meron Estefanos was leading a quiet, busy life. She was a single mom with two young boys, going to school, holding down a couple jobs, including working as a freelance radio reporter. She'd been born in Eritrea in East Africa, moved to Sweden as a teenager. She was living in a suburb of Stockholm.

She was also a human rights activist, focusing on Eritrea. That's what her radio stories were about, too. And so she was used to people phoning her with tips and leads now and then. But at the end of February 2011 came this phone call--

Ira Glass

The man said his brother was with other people who had been kidnapped, all of them Eritrean, and that they were in the desert, far from Eritrea. They were on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, close to the border with Israel. He said they were being tortured and held for ransom-- $20,000 each, which seemed absurdly high to Meron. Eritrea's a country where the average person makes less than $1,000 a year.

Ira Glass

Meron wanted it to be a lie. And she couldn't bring herself to try the numbers. But then that night, she couldn't sleep thinking about it. So--

Ira Glass

Meron called the numbers. And remember, she was a radio reporter. She did reporting for two radio stations that broadcast by shortwave and satellite into Eritrea and over the internet to Eritrean emigres around the world. So she recorded these phone calls, hoping she could do a story. This is one of the first calls she made. And yes, someone did pick up, and yes, he said he was being held hostage. He told her his name was Biniam, he was 22 years old, that he'd fled Eritrea in 2010, had been living in a refugee camp in Sudan, working at a farm, when he was kidnapped and taken to Sinai.

He said he was there with other people in a group of 28. There had been 29, he said, but one had died. They were being held by some Bedouins, Biniam said. Meron came to learn that the hostages were allowed access to cell phones so they could beg their families to send money. We have interpreters translating what Biniam and Meron said to each other.

Ira Glass

Meron had heard stories of Eritreans being kidnapped and held hostage in the Sinai before this call. People had been fleeing Eritrea for years. Its government is one of the most repressive in the world. And sometimes, people got kidnapped, either on their way out on the road or from refugee camps right across the border.

But it was still this shadowy thing that human rights groups were just starting to report on at that point in 2011. It wasn't clear how many people it was happening to. And the ransom surprised her, like I said-- the size of it, $20,000. Meron had never heard of a ransom that high. It didn't seem like it could be real. And come on, we'll drink your blood? Really? It could even be some kind of hoax, a scam where they trump up how desperate they were, to get money sent.

Ira Glass

So Meron calls back. And thanks to caller ID, they call her back. And then, reluctantly, she gets pulled in deeper and deeper into this situation where it is not clear exactly what is true and what isn't, and there are people who are saying their lives are in imminent danger, and it's happening thousands of miles away. But it is also happening right there in her own home, over the telephone. Imagine for a second if hostages started phoning you at your house, while you're at the dinner table, while you're sleeping.

Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass as you'll hear, Meron ends up making lots of recordings over the phone and gets more and more involved with these people who are claiming to be hostages. And reporter Yowei Shaw; one of our producers, Brian Reed; and an Eritrean journalist, Bealfan Haile went through those recordings.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are now more migrants and displaced people in the world than ever-- over 65 million. This is a story about the severe danger some of them face. A warning to listeners-- this is a story of hostages and people having their lives threatened. There is some content that is violent and probably not right for children to listen to. Here's reporter Yowei Shaw.

Yowei Shaw

Meron had a lot of questions for these people on the phone. She started with Biniam, the guy you just heard.

Yowei Shaw

Meron listened, took notes, finished with Biniam. And then he passed her on to the next hostage, and then the next-- a 21-year-old named Dejen who told her that he and about five of the others were almost completely naked. For 28 days, he'd been wearing just his underwear.

Yowei Shaw

Meron talked to the fourth hostage, the fifth, the six. They were shackled together in groups of five to 10 people. The traffickers would electrocute them, melt plastic bags, and drip the hot liquid on their backs. They said, we own you. You need to bring $20,000. If not, another option we have is we can simply open you up and harvest your kidneys and hearts.

By the time Meron was talking to the eighth hostage, Yohannes, you can hear in the recording that she's at a loss for what to say. She just keeps repeating, stay strong.

Yowei Shaw

Meron had been talking to the hostages for nearly an hour, and she couldn't absorb any more. But another hostage got on, Semereab.

Yowei Shaw

But Meron had heard all she could take. She cut the call short.

Yowei Shaw

Meron hung up and sat at her desk, staring at a computer screen.

Yowei Shaw

She still wasn't entirely certain whether this call was legit, or if it was, how much of what she was being told was real. But she knew it might be real. She knew it was true that Eritreans were being held in Sinai. And if these 28 people were there, maybe she could help them.

Yowei Shaw

Meron began broadcasting her interviews on Tigrinya-language radio stations. These were not carefully-crafted feature stories. She felt she didn't have time for that. They were basically raw, unedited recordings of her phone calls, with hostages describing the torture and begging for help on the air.

Yowei Shaw

Meron also reached out to other reporters to try and get them to cover the story.

Yowei Shaw

Meron did manage to get a BBC reporter interested in the hostages' story, but he asked for proof. How could he verify that people were being held and tortured in Sinai? She put him in touch with a group of doctors, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, who'd been helping and interviewing Eritreans coming out of Sinai. They'd photographed people's injuries from beatings, shackles, and burns.

In the end, though, BBC story didn't seem to get any attention. Meron went on a phone and email blitz, trying to publicize the issue but also hoping that something could be done for these 28 people. She contacted governments, NGOs, the United Nations Refugee Agency.

Yowei Shaw

Some organizations were taking small steps, like pressuring Egypt to take action. Early 2011 was incredibly bad timing for anyone trying to fix a problem in Sinai. The Arab Spring was going strong. Egypt was going through a revolution. Meron first got in touch with the hostages the same month that Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, was forced to step down.

Yowei Shaw

The hostages continued to call Meron, and the one she talked to the most was Biniam, the first guy in that phone call she recorded. He became kind of a spokesman for the group, and they developed a good rapport.

Yowei Shaw

Very soon, Meron was talking to Biniam nearly every day, often multiple times a day. She wanted to move on from the story, but the calls wouldn't stop.

Yowei Shaw

The way it worked is the hostages would call and hang up before she answered so she could see their number and call back, since they didn't have enough phone credit. And in these conversations, Meron was always trying to figure out what was real in what the hostages were telling her. She knew that some amount of torture and killing needed to be happening to convince hostages' families to pay the insanely high ransoms.

But the traffickers couldn't kill too many people. It would cut into profits. So she figured they forced the hostages to exaggerate or lie sometimes. Still, she felt she could tell real panic when she heard it.

Yowei Shaw

On March 6, eight days after she first started recording the hostages, Meron called them to check in, and a guy named Medhane picked up. A warning-- this call has explicit violence.

Yowei Shaw

The hostage pleaded with Meron to send money as soon as possible, and then Meron heard a noise in the background.

[CRACKING SOUND]

Yowei Shaw

He said the traffickers were beating them right then and there.

Yowei Shaw

Meron is saying, oh, you poor guys, you poor guys. And there was one hostage in particular, Meron told them, she had to speak to-- the only woman in the group, an 18-year-old named Semhar.

Yowei Shaw

Semhar had been kidnapped while living in a refugee camp in Sudan, like Biniam and some of the other hostages with her. She had left Eritrea in hopes of finding a job to support her mom, who was very poor and trying to raise four young children she'd taken in. Meron felt especially close to Semhar.

And during this call, Semhar kept telling Meron how terrified she was, how she was on the verge of death, how she just couldn't bear it anymore. Meron started crying.

Yowei Shaw

In fact, as we were interpreting the phone call you just heard, when we got to Semhar, our interpreter, who'd been listening to these recordings for hours, began crying herself and had to stop. She said she'd never heard anyone beg like that.

Yowei Shaw

And the male hostages who were in captivity with Semhar felt the same way. They told Meron that Semhar had it especially bad, even worse than them. One of the guards was taking her at night, and she came back crying. They didn't know what he was doing with her.

Yowei Shaw

Meron recorded all of these phone calls from the living room of her one-bedroom apartment, surrounded by photographs of her kids and lemon-painted walls in the woods of a quiet suburb of Stockholm. Hostages called at all hours-- during meals or in the middle of the night or early in the morning. She'd have to watch her boys while talking to the hostages. You can sometimes hear her kids in the recordings playing nearby.

And it wasn't the kind of work that ended when she hung up the phone.

Yowei Shaw

Things only seemed to be getting worse. The hostages told her that a fifth person had died, and Meron says that's when she reached a turning point.

Yowei Shaw

Meron knew that paying ransom was a bad idea. She knew it just encouraged more hostage-taking, and she knew it might not work. The traffickers could take her $20,000 and still not let Semhar go. Also, it was so much money. She'd raised money for causes before, but never that much.

Yowei Shaw

So Meron began asking for money. She wrote posts on Facebook and used Paltalk, a social media voice chat where a lot of Eritreans hang out. At night, she went into different chat rooms, making her appeal. She got Eritrean ex-pats in the US, Norway, and the UK to collect money from people in their respective countries.

But donations came slowly-- $20 here, $50 there. People were reluctant to give money for a ransom payment, understandably. She also had to contend with the internal politics of the Eritrean diaspora. Meron's pretty well-known as a strong opponent of the Eritrean government, and there are still large groups of Eritreans in the diaspora that support the government. So they didn't trust Meron. Some claimed she and the hostages were making the whole situation up to make the government look bad.

Yowei Shaw

It was stupid because people did take the hostages' phone number and started calling them, Biniam and the others, but not for the reason Meron had hoped.

Yowei Shaw

On the phone afterwards, Biniam told Meron it really upset him.

Yowei Shaw

For Biniam, the fact that people didn't believe them struck at the one thing that was giving him even a shred of optimism-- the thought that Meron would be able to rally people on the outside to come to their rescue. He was losing faith in Meron.

Yowei Shaw

Some hostages, like Biniam, Meron was talking to you nearly every day, sometimes several times a day. But there were always new ones, too. One day early on, Meron got a call. A hostage began talking to her.

Yowei Shaw

And after a few minutes, she realized, wait, this isn't the same group of hostages I've been talking to. This is a whole different group of 31 people in the same situation-- being tortured and extorted for money in Sinai.

Yowei Shaw

At first, Meron was reluctant to get involved with other groups. But not surprisingly, she got drawn into their situations, as well. And as she spoke to more people, she was able to piece together a clearer picture of the criminal networks that were doing the trafficking. As best she could tell, a small group of Bedouin bosses in Sinai were at the top, but they had connections with gangs of kidnappers in Sudan, who would bring them truckloads of people. And they seemed to have agents in different cities around the world who would collect ransoms for them.

Meron also learned that there were Eritreans working for the traffickers in the encampments. Some of them were kind of like indentured servants, forced to do construction and cleaning jobs for the traffickers. Others were interpreters, Eritreans who spoke Arabic as well as Tigrinya and served as go-betweens for the Bedouins to help them communicate with the hostages and their families.

And in the first hostage group she was talking to, she learned that there was one interpreter in particular named John. She couldn't figure out his place in the hierarchy, whether he was a hostage forced to translate for the traffickers or if he'd actually joined their ring himself. A former hostage and a hostage's brother warned her that he was shady. But then when she asked Biniam and Semhar if John was working with the Bedouins, they told her he wasn't.

So in early April, when John came bearing good news, she didn't know if she could trust him. She had been asking the traffickers for weeks to lower the ransom, and John brought word that they'd agreed. The new price was $5,000 per person. At this point, Meron had already sent $2,000 for Semhar. So this meant she needed to send just $3,000 more, which was a lot more manageable than the original $20,000 price tag, if the discount was actually for real.

She called Biniam to see if it was.

Yowei Shaw

So if I pay $3,000 more, he'll let Semhar go, Meron asked Biniam. Yes, Biniam said. If you pay $3,000 more right now, he will let Semhar go. Meron was excited. This was her first break in the whole ordeal. But she soon found out it wasn't that simple.

Ira Glass

Yowei Shaw. Coming up, things get precisely five times more complicated in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "This Call May Be Recorded to Save Your Life." We've been hearing a story that we first ran in 2013 about Meron Estefanos, a human rights activist and journalist who was trying to save a group of Eritrean hostages who were being held in Sinai.

In the years since we first aired this story, this problem has actually stopped in the Sinai Peninsula because of increased Egyptian military presence there. But it still continues elsewhere. According to Meron and human rights groups, Eritrean migrants are being held in torture camps and other places, particularly Libya. Meron says Libya is an even worse situation than Sinai was a few years ago.

At this point in our story, it's been over a month since her first phone call with the hostages, and she's been offered a discount, a break on the price to save one of them, the only woman in the group of 28. Her name was Semhar. Instead of a $20,000 ransom, it would be $5,000 to release her. Release means, in this case, they would drive her to the Israeli border and tell her to run for it.

Just to repeat the warning that I made at the beginning of the program, this is a story with violence and lives being threatened. And there is some content that is probably not right for younger listeners. Yowei Shaw picks up the story from here.

Yowei Shaw

Meron called John, the Eritrean who was translating for the Bedouin traffickers. She wanted to finalize the deal to get Semhar out, and John said, for sure. He could do this deal. He knew the Bedouins. And as for the hostages, he said he was looking out for them as best as he could in a very difficult situation.

Yowei Shaw

John said the traffickers would do the deal. They would release Semhar for $5,000, but only if at least four other hostages paid $5,000 each at the same time. In other words, the discount only applied if Meron bought in bulk. A friend of Meron's who was on the call with John tried to push back, but John said, basically, don't tell me how to do my job. Just do yours.

Yowei Shaw

Meron was skeptical, but she had no other option. She got in touch with four other families who were willing to pay the discounted ransom. Biniam was not one of these four hostages, by the way. His family was having trouble delivering the money.

The families would pay $5,000 for each of their relatives, and Meron would pay $5,000 for Semhar. Meron put out a frantic call to the people around the world who were helping her collect money for Semhar's ransom. And maybe it was the urgency or maybe it was the fact that $5,000 seemed like a more realistic amount of money to raise than the original $20,000, but people chipped in. Within 48 hours, she had the money she needed.

Yowei Shaw

Meron was so nervous she couldn't sleep. She spent the next 24 hours calling her contacts in Sinai and Israel to see if they had any updates. She tried John again and again. Finally, he picked up.

Yowei Shaw

John, tell me honestly what have you done, she asked him. I've set five people free, he said.

Yowei Shaw

And then Meron got a call from the brother of one of the other hostages who was supposed to have been freed to Israel.

Yowei Shaw

Meron phoned John and asked about Semhar.

Yowei Shaw

John hung up on Meron. A few minutes later, Meron got a missed call. She returned it, and it was the hostages. They insisted that the people who had been paid for had been freed, that they'd made it to Israel. They begged Meron to free them now, too.

But she didn't believe them. Her plan had completely failed. It had been five weeks since her first phone call with the hostages, and now she thought John was trying to get more money out of her by forcing the hostages to say these things. Biniam got on the phone.

Yowei Shaw

Meron hung up on him. But she couldn't help yourself. It wasn't long before she called Biniam and the other hostages again, but John and the traffickers prohibited them from speaking to her like they used to.

Yowei Shaw

Eventually, Biniam, Semhar, and the rest of the group stopped talking to Meron completely.

It's been more than two years since that happened. Meron kept talking to other hostages on the phone, dozens of them. And without ever meaning to, she became one of the people Eritrean hostages and their families turned to for help. In those years, she's learned about the different traffickers and the different tricks they use, which traffickers can be relied on to let people go once they've paid, and which ones can't. One former hostage described Meron's phone calls this way-- she said when she talked to her family from the torture camp, all they would do is panic and freak out. Meron, on the other hand, was mostly calm and comforting. She'd give you clear updates and tell you what was being done to help. It was a relief.

Meron isn't sure how many hostages she's helped get free over the years, but one of them is Biniam.

Yowei Shaw

Biniam got out of Sinai in 2011. He's showing one of This American Life's producers around his small apartment in Israel, where he lives now.

Yowei Shaw

My producer Brian Reed and I interviewed Biniam. He sat on his twin bed, next to an interpreter, and described what he remembered from the months he was talking to Meron. From the outside, the place they were held looked like the foundation of a house with a corrugated metal roof placed on top of it.

Yowei Shaw

That's my producer, Brian.

Yowei Shaw

Biniam told us that John, the Eritrean who was working with the traffickers, was constantly standing over them on the calls, telling the hostages to make thing sound as horrible as possible, that the traffickers were going to kill them now, that they'd harvest their organs. The hostages came to understand these were bluffs. And when Biniam told Meron that Semhar and the four other hostages had been freed, in fact, they were sitting right there in the room.

But Biniam and another hostage from this group that we spoke to said the torture they described on the phone to Meron was all real. It would have been hard to exaggerate, Biniam said, because it was so awful. He and the other hostage both remember at least four people who died while in captivity.

Yowei Shaw

So picture Meron's first phone call from Biniam's perspective. He's lying on the ground, shackled, blindfolded, almost completely in darkness. All of a sudden, John comes up to him and holds a cell phone to his ear. There's a woman's voice on the line saying, hello? She's from Sweden, and she's on the case, telling him to stay strong and not to worry.

Yowei Shaw

So when Biniam first spoke to Meron, he felt the same way about her that she felt about him. He didn't know if she was trustworthy. But as Meron called more and more, he noticed that it put the traffickers in a better mood. They became encouraged that money was on the way. It seemed genuine. Sometimes they took his blindfold off to let him speak to her. And sometimes, amazingly, after a call from Meron, the traffickers wouldn't torture the hostages.

Yowei Shaw

And Meron did something else for Biniam.

Yowei Shaw

Biniam listened to Meron. He called his family and asked for the money. And to his utter surprise, they were able to scrounge together more than $10,000, getting money from relatives as far as Germany, Angola, and the United States. Biniam says they sent the money to John, but John told Biniam he never got it.

Biniam was sold to another group of traffickers with Semhar. This was a group that was worse than the first. They raped Semhar in front of him. Other awful things happened until finally, one day, a guard came up to Biniam and took his chains off. He was so weak he could barely walk. So he rested at the camp for five days before the traffickers drove him and some other hostages to an area near the Israeli border. They crawled through a hole in what Biniam hoped was the border fence.

Eventually, some soldiers came up to him and told him he was in Israel. When he got access to a phone, he called Meron.

Yowei Shaw

Biniam's name's doing pretty well, considering. He has a job as a housekeeper at a hotel. He's slowly trying to pay his family back the thousands they raised for his ransom. To unwind, he writes poetry and songs, though he hasn't written about Sinai yet.

But life in Israel is hard. Biniam still has injuries. He limps. His eyesight is impaired. He has trouble using his hands because he was chained for so long, which means his job making hotel beds is difficult. He applied for asylum when he arrived in Israel, but he says the government hasn't given him an answer on that. That means he gets no assistance with medical care, no legal work permit.

And he's not alone. This is, in practice, Israel's policy towards migrants. In the most recent figures available from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Israel granted refugee status to less than 1% of people who might qualify, the lowest rate of any developed country. A US State Department report declared in 2012 that the Israeli government doesn't even process asylum applications from Eritreans.

As best as we can tell, of the 29 hostages Biniam was originally held with, at least four died. One disappeared. One went back to Eritrea. And the rest, over 20 of them, are now in Israel. They try to get together when they can. Biniam says most of them are doing OK.

But you don't go through an experience like this and just move on. One last warning-- this next quote gets graphic. Here's Biniam.

Yowei Shaw

Biniam says Semhar's the person from his group who is doing the worst. She eventually made it to Israel, but only after an epic ordeal that went on long after Meron paid the $5,000 for her. She told Meron the whole story in an interview afterwards. Once the trafficker cut off Semhar from Meron and demanded $15,000 more, Semhar's mother in Eritrea, who is very poor, scraped together the money by begging people and taking loans. She sent it to the trafficker. Here's Meron.

Yowei Shaw

Finally, these new traffickers cut their losses and dropped Semhar near the Israeli border. They told her to climb the fence to get into Israel. Semhar was weak from months at the torture camp, and before she could get across the fence, Egyptian guards spotted her and shot her in the leg.

They took Semhar to a hospital in Egypt, where she got treatment. Eventually, Semhar told her story to a nurse, who felt sorry for her. The nurse brought Semhar home for a while and later paid a smuggler to take her to Israel, where she lives today.

Meron eventually went to visit her. Semhar still has injuries and pain, which make it hard for her to work. Plus, Meron says--

Yowei Shaw

Meron tried to get Semhar to start seeing a doctor to help her deal with the trauma, but Semhar refused. She was living with a man in Tel Aviv who claimed to be a healer who could help exorcise her demons, and he wouldn't let her seek standard medical help. After Meron's trip to Israel, she pretty much lost touch with Semhar.

In July 2012, on a trip to Israel, Meron did something she'd been waiting to do since she first started talking to the hostages-- meet some of them face-to-face. She sent word to former hostages that anyone who wanted to meet her should come to Levinsky Park, a place in Tel Aviv where a lot of Eritreans go.

Meron got there in the early evening. A filmmaker was with her shooting video. She was excited, anxious.

Yowei Shaw

About 20 people stood in a circle around Meron. She went up to each of them, one by one, and hugged them. There was a man whose cousin Meron had convinced to pay his ransom. I'm so happy you guys made it out safely, Meron said to him as they hugged. I'm so happy that I've seen you alive.

Another was a 14-year-old girl whose ransom Meron had paid with money she raised herself. The girl broke down in tears as soon as Meron got close to her.

Yowei Shaw

The group headed to a restaurant. Meron bought a round of beers. She seemed giddy. She was talking a lot, way more than the hostages, telling stories about this phone call or that phone call, about the time people thought the hostages were lying and making up a radio drama, or about the time she told John the translator off.

This is Meron's life now. She still covers the torture camps on the radio. She helps other reporters do stories, too, speaks about Sinai at conferences. And she used her recordings to co-author a lengthy report that was submitted to the European Union Parliament. A few months ago, she even went to Sinai for the first time to try and get local sheikhs to address the hostage problem.

And then, of course, she still gets phone calls from hostages and their families all the time.

Yowei Shaw

When was the last time you talked to a hostage?

Ira Glass

Yowei Shaw. Brian Reed produced her story. As I mentioned earlier, since we first reported this story in 2013, the Egyptian military increased its presence in the Sinai, putting a stop to the Bedouin torture camps there. But people are still fleeing Eritrea in large numbers. They're paying smugglers to take them to the Mediterranean for a shot at getting on a boat to Europe.

And just like in the Sinai, these smugglers often take Eritreans hostage and torture them, trying to extort money from their families. Meron says she gets more calls from hostages now than she ever has.

And a new danger has emerged in the last few years. Even if you manage to avoid a bad smuggler, there's a chance that you could get caught by ISIS on your way to Europe. And unlike the smugglers or the Bedouins in Sinai, they're not interested in money. They try to get the hostages to join ISIS. And if they refuse, they kill them.

As for the situation in Israel, according to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which works with migrants there, there are roughly 30,000 Eritrean migrants living in Israel who made it through the Sinai. But as of last year, the state has still only recognized fewer than 1% of Eritrean asylum applicants, according to the UN, leaving thousands of Eritreans in a holding pattern, including Biniam, who's still in Israel. Meron tells us he's now married.

Semhar eventually got out of Israel. She's now living in Sweden, not far from Meron, actually. Meron says she's taking classes. She's doing better mentally. She recently got married. Semhar invited Meron to the wedding. Meron says it was the best day she's had since the calls began.

[MUSIC - "IF YOU CALL" BY SHARON JONES AND THE DAP KINGS]

Well, our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak. Other staff for today's show-- Phia Bennin, Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today show is Julie Snyder. Production help from Emmanuel Dzotsi. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Other staff-- Elise Bergerson, Emily Condon, Kimberly Henderson, and Seth Lind. Music help from Damian Graef, from Rob Geddis. Research help from Michelle Harris.

Research and Tigrinya translations by Hanna Haile. Tigrinya interpreters who you heard during this hour-- Bealfan Haile, Helen Ghebreselassie, Ayda Equbay, Gideon Gebreyesus, and Phillipos Tesfai. Thanks also today to Lina Attalah, Jerry Simpson, Shahar Shoham, Claire Beston, Sigal Rozen, John Stauffer, Maya Paley, and Isayas Sium.

Our website-- thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia, who's been getting into-- and, OK, I know how this sounds-- Eritrean stand-up. Seriously, he's been doing comedy bits for me all week around the office. I tell him, Torey, they're not that funny. He says--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "IF YOU CALL" BY SHARON JONES AND THE DAP KINGS]