667: Wartime Radio

Ira Glass

When Dave was turning his life around and trying different things and figuring out what to do next, one of the places he looked was to the Howard Stern Show. And I think that was a really good choice.

I know everybody is not a fan of Howard Stern, but I am. And I think that one of the best things about the show is that it's always been a place where people talk with this kind of brutal and funny honesty about themselves. One of Howard's innovations is that he took the strain of crude, dark, confessional comedy that's always been a big part of stand-up, ever since Lenny Bruce-- Howard figured out a way to turn that into radio, daily radio.

Anyway, to get back to this guy Dave, he loved that about the show. And in 2015, he was a few months sober, in his early 40s, working as a waiter at Katz's Deli in New York City. When he was younger, he'd worked in television, hosting an interview show for college kids but ruined that career with heroin addiction.

Now sober in recovery, he needed a project. And he decided to a podcast about drugs with the feeling of the Howard Stern Show. Like, he remembered the years when comedian Artie Lange was on Howard Stern-- definitely my favorite period of Howard Stern.

When Artie would come on every day. He would talk about his own drug problems. He would tell crazy stories. He would talk in this very real way about the mistakes he was making in his life at that time that he was not able to stop, and Dave wanted to shoot for that. He would co-host the show with his friend Chris who-- he had met Chris years before in rehab.

They would spend hours in rehab smoking cigarettes and talking about the crazy things that they'd done on drugs. That's what they wanted the podcast to be. People'd come on, tell wild drug stories, and-- very important to Dave-- no recovery talk, which Dave found to be sanctimonious and annoying.

Ira Glass

OK, in case this isn't clear. In these recordings, Dave is the one with the deeper voice and the loud opinions, Chris is the other guy.

Ira Glass

Notice how at the end there, Chris is not agreeing with Dave. Chris is 10 years younger than Dave, but started drugs and drinking at an earlier age-- he was just 11 or 12-- and has way more extreme stories about it, including a year in prison. He's also spent way more time in rehab.

And at this point, he'd been sober for nearly two years versus four months for Dave. And all of that gave him a different feeling about recovery and sobriety. He was game to talk about it, but Dave was adamant. Sobriety isn't all that entertaining. And first and foremost, he wanted the podcast to be entertaining.

Ira Glass

So they'd tell drug stories. It wasn't meant to be good for you. It was meant to be fun. They listed it in the comedy section of iTunes, not self-help. If you want self-help, Dave had said, go to a meeting.

They were going to call the show War Stories, but there was already a podcast called War Stories. It was about actual war with tanks and guns and stuff, so they came up with Dopey, which really captures the spirit of the show perfectly. As Chris put it, two dopes talking about dope.

Ira Glass

In Dopey, there's going to be no judgment of drug use, past or present. They recorded the first episode on a laptop, no microphone or anything, near a fish tank in Dave's apartment in Manhattan. Maybe you could hear the hum of the tank in that recording. But between this episode, Episode 1 and Episode 143 of Dopey-- just 2 and 1/2 years later-- their lives are going to change drastically.

By Episode 143, Dopey would sound completely different. In the episodes in between, they chronicle this story where so much happens to them and some others, things lots of drug users face. But because podcasts and radio are so intimate, it all gets documented in the most unfiltered way.

Dave and Chris wanted their show to be just for fun, but it ended up being so much more. Today, we're going to have two stories like this. Stories about a kind of DIY radio-- very different kinds of DIY radio-- but in both stories, it's amateurs inventing how to talk about what it is that they're going through.

And really, both stories are dispatches from two very different battlefields. I know that sounds a little grand, but really this story-- from the opioid epidemic-- and then the other story is from a small town in Syria, in the middle of the war that's going on there. And we hear about life during that war in this way that is much more personal and close up than we usually get. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Two Dope Kings. So OK, you remember the premise? Two guys-- Dave and Chris-- they have this podcast. It's called Dopey. Dana Chivvis from our staff, listened to dozens of hours of the podcast, spanning 2 and 1/2 years, and tells the story of what happened.

Quick warning before we start, since this is the podcast internet version of our show, we have removed the bleeps that we use when we do the show on the radio. If you prefer a bleeped version of the show, it's at our website. Now here's Dana.

Dana Chivvis

We've been talking about this podcast for five minutes already. And the whole point of the podcast is to tell crazy drug stories, so let's get right to one. This is from the very first episode. Chris tells the story.

Dana Chivvis

If Chris is the lamb in a drug addicts clothing, Dave is the border collie, constantly circling Chris, herding him between drug stories, nipping at his ankles. For his Boston accent--

Dana Chivvis

Or for Chris's vaping habit--

Dana Chivvis

Chris, on the other hand, comes across as a sweet docile kind of dope who finds subtle ways to subvert Dave's alpha maleness. Like on episode 15, it's as easy as the word toodles.

Dana Chivvis

Which Dave hates, so Chris starts saying it at the end of every show.

Dana Chivvis

They do very little editing, except they do bleep out people's last names. They want the show to be anonymous, which is why I'm not using last names either, by the way. And they use nontraditional bleeps like this one.

[LASER SOUND]

Dopey is not the kind of show you bring home to meet your parents. Dave and Chris swear a lot, for one thing. And obviously they're talking about heavy drug use. But it's not just that-- they can be insensitive and insulting too.

It is not politically correct by design. They use the kind of language you might forgive your grandfather for using, but which is harder to stomach coming from a 30 or 40 year old today. And then sometimes there's also language you wouldn't forgive your grandfather for using. I'm not going to play you that stuff.

On the first few episodes of Dopey, they run through most of their favorite drug stories-- how Chris made wine from orange juice at rehab, how Dave once stayed up all night doing coke, heroin, and ecstasy before appearing on Howard Stern. How Chris shot crystal meth while at a brain injury clinic.

They're not supposed to be engaging in recovery talk, but of course, the only reason Dopey can exist is because Dave and Chris are both in recovery. There'd be no Dopey without it, so recovery keeps slipping into the conversation. Even Dave does it.

Dana Chivvis

Chris actually has a scholarly knowledge of 12 step philosophy. And now and then, he quotes by memory from the big book, which is sort of the Bible of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Dana Chivvis

In the beginning-- for the first 20 episodes or so-- they get like 500 downloads an episode-- so barely an audience, but they start hearing from people right away. They get their first fan email from some guy named Troy three weeks after they upload the first episode. They can't believe anyone is listening to them. They call their newfound audience The Dopey Nation.

Other people start emailing, leaving reviews on iTunes. Some listeners leave voicemails with their own war stories. Their downloads grow. By October, they average about 1,000 downloads an episode.

Dana Chivvis

There's a Reddit thread about Dopey. A few people even get Dopey tattoos with the show's logo and the word Toodles underneath it. One guy takes Dave and Chris out to a steak dinner. He tells them he didn't get sober until he started listening to their show.

Dave and Chris try to write back to every email they get. They respond to comments on Facebook and Twitter. People aren't turned off by the recovery talk. They like listening to sober guys having fun, enjoying life in recovery. It gives them hope. Chris says the listeners come for the debauchery and stay for the recovery. He calls his marketing strategy rope a dope.

Dave and Chris know they have a finite number of drug stories between the two of them, so they develop a roster of recurring guests, friends of theirs who are also sober-- near celebrities like Rob Reiner's son, Nick, Dave's dad Alan, and then there's a guy named Todd, one of Dave's best friends from college.

They got addicted to heroin together in their 20s. Dave always said if Todd got sober, he could be the third host of Dopey, and Todd really wants to be on Dopey, but Todd is never sober.

Dana Chivvis

Todd is one of the few recurring guests still actively using drugs. His life is in shambles. He's 42 and he can't hold down a job. He spends all his money on drugs, lives in his parents' apartment in Manhattan. He often just watches DVDs all day.

Dana Chivvis

That's Chris talking to Todd on Episode 54.

Dana Chivvis

On this episode, Todd tells a very dopey story about getting so high on heroin, he passed out in a subway station and then slept through a meeting at the unemployment office the next day.

Dana Chivvis

Towards the end of this story, the call drops and Dave says--

Dana Chivvis

As a listener, to me it seems like Todd has a specific purpose on Dopey. He's a caricature of how not to treat your addiction, an example that Dave and Chris can hold up to their listeners and say, don't do it like this guy.

When Dave and Chris talk about recovery, they often talk about abstinence and 12 step programs. That's what worked for them, but the science shows that opioid addiction is best treated with medications like suboxone and methadone, which are associated with a 68% decrease in death.

For a while on Dopey, Dave was pretty clear that he thought medications were dangerous, that you should learn to live without any substances. Chris was more middle of the road. Dave's opinions have changed by now. He feels like whatever works best for you is what you should do.

Less than a year into making Dopey, Dave moved out of the apartment with the fish tank and in with his partner Linda and their six-year-old daughter. Chris eventually moved to Boston and started working towards a doctoral degree in psychology.

He was dating a med student named Annie. They lived together, had a dog. He was also working part-time for his sister's company-- which helps people who are struggling with addiction and other issues find treatment-- and he was working every other weekend at a sober living house.

By episode 96 of Dopey, they're getting about 3,000 listeners a show. They decide to relabel the show. They move it from the comedy section on iTunes to the self-help section, mainly because they thought they could compete better against other self-help podcasts, rather than comedy podcasts, but also because by now they've admitted to themselves they are, in fact, a self-help show.

But anyway, back to Todd. On Dopey, Todd is the foil to the sober good life, to their successes. Where he lacks control, Dave and Chris now exercise restraint. Where he is depressed, they are content. Where he can't hold down a job, they're raising children, getting advanced degrees, making a podcast every week.

Dana Chivvis

On Episode 126 last March, Todd's on the show again. This time though he's sober. He's been to detox and moved into a sober living house. He refused to go to rehab, so Dave and Chris arrange for him to move into the sober house where Chris works in Western Massachusetts.

Dana Chivvis

That's Dave. He keeps saying how nice it is to talk to Todd when he's sober. He's happy to have his friend back, lucid. Dave tells him he bought some new equipment for Dopey-- a soundboard and three microphones, an extra for when Todd is back.

Dana Chivvis

Todd lasted a few months at the sober living house, but he got bored and one day he left. Moved back in with his parents, got a job. And then in June--

Dana Chivvis

Todd died in his parents' house. He was 44 years old.

Dana Chivvis

Somehow after 20 years of heavy drug use, Dave had never had a close friend die from an overdose. Todd is his first one. It changes things for him.

Before, he'd laugh at the war stories-- all these absurd situations and bad decisions that should kill you, but didn't. He'd had the upper hand, but now he didn't anymore. Those things had killed one of his best friends.

Dave is the one who introduced Chris and Todd. They weren't close friends, but even still, Dave thinks Chris is a little cold about his death. And Dave knows this is unfair, but he feels a little resentful towards Chris. Todd was in Chris's sober living facility right before he died. Why didn't he look out for him better?

Todd's death last summer just happens to coincide with an uptick in downloads on Dopey. In July, their downloads double when they land their biggest celebrity interview yet-- Artie Lange, the comedian who inspired Dopey.

Dana Chivvis

He's Episode 140, just two episodes after Todd's death. Artie tells a bunch of stories about getting high-- on The Howard Stern Show, on an airplane, in a Santa suit.

Dana Chivvis

He's a little unhinged during the interview, possibly high.

Dana Chivvis

On the next episode of Dopey, Episode 141, Dave and Chris are on Skype. They do an Artie recap. Chris, whose drug of choice was always cocaine, thinks Artie was probably on cocaine. They talk about it for 30 minutes before Dave changes the subject.

Dana Chivvis

Where he's going is, Dave wants to do a little recovery lesson. Two weeks before, Chris had made a phone call to his sponsor and it was clear he thought he was talking to Dave, so the sponsor got worried and called a friend of Chris's who texted Dave, who freaked out.

Dana Chivvis

Chris is one of those people who always texts back, even if he's sleeping. So when Dave didn't hear from Chris, he sent a message to Annie, Chris's girlfriend. Chris eventually resurfaced and calmed everyone down, but he was ticked that Dave had contacted Annie. He was fine, just a little sleepy and out of it. No reason to scare his girlfriend.

Dana Chivvis

This was just two weeks after Todd died, so Dave was admittedly on high alert. And by the end of the story, he sees it from Chris's perspective. It's one of those irritating things that happens to people in recovery. You act slightly off one day and everyone assumes you're using again. Dave explains.

Dana Chivvis

The next week they do Episode 142. Normally they record the show on Friday night and Chris puts it online on Saturday morning. But that Friday, Chris gets home from a work trip to Texas and he's too exhausted to record the show. They agree to do it Saturday.

Saturday comes around and Chris is fighting with Annie. He tells Dave he's too upset to record the show. He needs to go to the gym. Then after the gym, he needs another hour.

Dave's getting pissed. He knows The Dopey Nation is expecting an episode. They finally start recording late that night, around 11:00. Chris is lackluster.

Dave's doing most of the work, providing most of the energy. And Chris keeps screwing up and saying things that they later have to bleep out, like where he went on the work trip or his sister's name, or Dave's last name.

Dana Chivvis

Dave's worried that Chris has lost interest in Dopey, that he's too busy with the other things in his life now-- his girlfriend, his job, his doctorate. He starts wondering if Chris is going to quit. And if he does, what will happen to the show? They finally sign off at 1:00 in the morning.

Dana Chivvis

This is the next episode of Dopey, Episode 143-- a week later.

Dana Chivvis

Chris overdosed three days after Episode 142. He'd been secretly using drugs again, probably for weeks. After that last episode they recorded together, Dave and Chris fought.

First, Chris put the show online without bleeping out Dave's last name. Dave was pissed. He went in and fixed it, but inadvertently inserted 10 minutes of silence into the middle of the episode, which made Chris mad. So that Monday they're fighting over text message all day.

Dave couldn't make sense of what was going on with Chris. He told Chris it was fine if he didn't want to do Dopey anymore. But Chris said no, that wasn't it at all. He loved making Dopey. Dave believed him.

But meanwhile, Chris was also fighting with Annie. She'd left their apartment and went to stay with her parents. Chris was distraught, crying. He asked Dave to call and check in on him, so Dave called him after midnight and told them he'd check in again in the morning, went to bed.

He woke up at 6 AM to a text from Annie. She'd sent it in the middle of the night asking Dave if he'd check on Chris. So at 6:30, Dave sent Chris a text message.

A minute later, Chris wrote back, I'm good. As you like to hear, I'm sleeping, but not totally good. Alive, nothing to worry about. We can talk later. At 10:30, Annie called Dave and told him that Chris was dead.

In the next few days, Dave had to decide if he was going to do the show that week or ever again. In the 2 and 1/2 years of making Dopey together, they'd never missed a show. Dave thought if he skipped this week, he'd be letting The Dopey Nation down.

It would be like your drug dealer not showing up. And besides, drug users should know if somebody dies from a drug overdose. So three days after Chris's death, he recorded that episode of Dopey. And he calls Annie.

Dana Chivvis

They start to piece together the mystery of Chris's death. Dave had completely misread his behavior. In retrospect, he was probably high on the last episode of Dopey. He was probably high when he made that weird phone call to his sponsor. He was probably even high on the Artie Lange episode.

Dave had been operating off the wrong story-- that Chris wasn't interested in Dopey anymore, but Annie hadn't. She had noticed the strange ways Chris had been acting. He kept taking the dog for walks, for instance, when the dog didn't need to go out.

He was staying up all night and sleeping during the day. She got suspicious he was using again, so she and Chris's sister arranged for a surprise drug test. On Monday, a guy showed up at their apartment and did a saliva test.

That night, Annie told him she was going to stay with her parents. Chris left before her mom arrived to pick her up. Now she realized it was because he couldn't wait any longer to get high. Annie slept at her parents' house and went to work the next morning. But soon after, she went home to check on Chris.

Dana Chivvis

Narcan is a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose. You spray it up a person's nose.

Dana Chivvis

Chris had cocaine, Xanax, alcohol, and fentanyl in his system. He was 33 years old. Soon after, a package arrived for him at their apartment. It was filled with drugs-- Percocet, cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin.

Annie scoured the apartment and Chris's car. She found a bunch of drug paraphernalia-- needles, some of which were used, and clean pee he'd ordered online. Also, she found a small medicated patch that wasn't in any packaging.

She sent a picture of it to Dave. They couldn't be sure, but Dave thought it was probably fentanyl. Annie has a theory about Chris's relapse.

He had recently injured himself doing a high karate kick to try to impress her. Something in his leg popped, he was in terrible pain.

The doctor he saw wasn't his regular doctor and she thinks Chris got painkillers, fooled himself into thinking he could just take them for the pain and stop there. If Annie's theory is right, then Chris started using again two weeks after Todd's death and was dead three weeks later.

Dana Chivvis

Dave hangs up with Annie. And now he's got to end this episode of Dopey without Chris for the first time.

Dana Chivvis

Dave still makes Dopey-- by himself now. He's pulling in bigger guests like the comedian Marc Maron and the rapper Killer Mike. He gets about 6,000 downloads an episode now, but it's not the same show.

Dopey, as the nation knew it, is gone along with Chris. It's not a buddy comedy anymore. It's more of a straight interview show. There are fewer war stories, and when there are, the tone is different. Dave is different.

There's this one moment in Episode 142, the last episode Dave and Chris did together, that I keep thinking about. Chris had just played a voicemail from a listener named Mike, who tells a story about hiding his pee in the closet of his bedroom. It's not important why. And afterwards, they get into a conversation about whether it's OK to laugh at drug stories.

In the first episodes of Dopey, Dave was a solid yes on that-- that was the whole point of the show-- but now they've flipped sides. Chris says yes, it's fine to laugh. And Dave says this--

Dana Chivvis

Dave told me, he always thought Dopey was good for him and Chris, for their sobriety. He thought their creation would protect them, but it didn't. Chris is gone. Dopey, it turns out, was its own war story, playing out week by week.

So now on the show, Dave's mission has changed. The drug stories aren't just in service of a laugh now, they're in service of an urgent message. You could die. Todd died. Chris died. You could die.

Ira Glass

Dana Chivvis is one of the producers of our show. The Dopey podcast, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up, what happens when you go on the radio and make fun of a militant Islamist group who also happened to run your town, because you're in Syria. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show-- Wartime Radio. People in battlefields of one kind or another, using very DIY grassroots level radio or podcasting to try to make sense of what is happening around them. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two.

Good Morning, Kafrenbel. So back in my 20s, I was a volunteer reporter at a community radio station in Washington, DC-- WPFW, a great station, that really did reflect the community. DC was 2/3 African-American back then and also had immigrants from all over the world.

And the most popular show on the station, I remember, was the Bama hour. It was a guy named Jerry Washington who would play songs and talk a lot about his niece. There were Caribbean and Central American shows. There was a show made by Iranians who missed the former Shah of Iran. And then another show with Iranians who hated the former Shah of Iran.

There was a call-in poetry show. Listeners would call in and read their own poems and it was daily. This was a daily call-in poetry show, that in my memory anyway, never seemed to have any kind of trouble getting callers. That's community radio.

Well, this next story is about somebody setting up a station like that-- a community station-- only they're doing it in a war zone, in Syria, in a small town called Kafrenbel. That's Kafrenbel, it's spelled with a K-- in the Northwest part of the country, not far from the Turkish border, rural town, surrounded by olive trees and fig trees, 30,000 people live there.

And for almost eight years now, Kafrenbel's been in a kind of no-man's-land where different factions have fought. And now militant Islamists are in charge. Reporter Dana Ballout heard about the station years before she ever listened to it.

Dana Ballout

I crossed paths with the founder of the station back when I was covering the war in Syria for the Wall Street Journal. His name is Raed. Raed Fares. He lives in Kafrenbel.

We never met in person. I was based across the border in Lebanon, because American press was mostly not allowed in Syria. But when the regime struck a town near Kafrenbel or ISIS was advancing and I needed to know the details from the ground, me and my colleagues would pull out our giant spreadsheet of contacts and go through them. Raed's was one of those names. I'd Skype him to confirm a death count or verify a location, then move on.

Raed was an activist. Before the radio station, he was sort of famous for these banners, these homemade signs written in big block letters on white sheets. He would bring them to protests, post pictures of them on Facebook and Twitter. I always saw them in my feeds. They were witty, like this one from Thanksgiving, a holiday Syria does not celebrate.

Black Friday special offer-- whoever, wherever you are, bring your enemy and come to fight in Syria for free. Limited time offer.

One of the most viral of these was after Caitlyn Jenner announced her new name Caitlyn, spelled with a C and not a K like the other women's names in her family. Raed gave her this shout-out. Caitlyn, he writes spelling it with a C, we would write Kafrenbel with a C, if it meant, like you, we could be free.

I knew Raed had his own radio station, Radio Fresh, though I never tuned in back then. But around Thanksgiving last year, I heard Raed had been killed. It hit me harder than I expected.

Saddened by the news, I listened for the first time. You can stream Radio Fresh on SoundCloud. There's hours and hours of programming. Listening through was like reliving the war from the inside. Seeing it in a totally different way from deep in the small town.

It was incredibly alive, hyper-local, sometimes utterly ordinary, people complaining about their neighbors. But other times, so radical I couldn't believe they got away with it. Here's an example of that. One of the first things I heard-- this satire program called [ARABIC] backstage with the president, where an actor impersonating president Bashar al Assad has made up conversations with an officer in his army.

Dana Ballout

That's the actor making fun of the president's lisp, which is very pronounced. He's pretty spot-on.

Dana Ballout

I was shocked when I first heard this impression. My knee jerk reaction was oh my god, how did you not go to jail for this? Because in the past, that's what would have happened.

Before listening to Radio Fresh, I had literally heard of two other places in the whole Arab world where anyone had tried to do political satire-- one was Lebanon, where I'm from, and the other Egypt, where for a while til the government ran him out of the country, they had their own version of Jon Stewart. And now there were these guys out of a small town in northern Syria. It completely blew my mind.

I talked to a bunch of Raed's friends in Kafrenbel. They told me he was always a rebel. Before the uprising against the Syrian regime, he would curse the president in a way no one else dared. He mocked religious figures too.

His cousin told me this always made people super nervous. Everyone in town knew him as the guy who got kicked out of med school. Raed was a burly guy in his mid 40s, clean shaven, warm eyes, mischievous face. He was sharp, taught himself English, ran a thriving small business.

One of his best friends, Hadi Abdullah, told me how Raed started the radio station.

Dana Ballout

These are the speakers for the call to prayer five times a day. At one point, early in the war, the Syrian military showed up in Kafrenbel and started shooting protesters. Raed wanted to get those soldiers to defect.

So he loaded up a bunch of recordings on a USB stick and had some friends at the mosque blast them over those speakers. Anti- regime slogans like--

Dana Ballout

So shortly after, when Raed found himself meeting with international groups, including the US State Department, he pitched them his idea for a radio station. There are always opportunities in war, and this one would be an unusual chance to push back on the rules, make fun of people they could have never made fun of before, an opportunity to blast out ideas like free speech and democracy to whoever tuned in to 90.0 FM.

Dana Ballout

This is a clip from the station's first few weeks on air, August 2013. Radio Fresh was based out of an old government building in Kafrenbel. The studio was done up with shiny purple curtains for soundproofing. There was an ashtray on the table and lots of smoking while they were on the mic.

The host, who's talking about how to form neighborhood councils, has a thick local accent. One of my favorite things about Radio Fresh-- it sounds rural, slangy, homegrown.

Dana Ballout

While I was charmed by the station from the very first clip I heard, the people it was actually made for-- the citizens of Kafrenbel-- many of them were against it in the beginning. Here's Raed himself, on the second anniversary of Radio Fresh, one of the rare times he actually went on air.

Dana Ballout

He's saying, in the beginning, there was a lot of talk about how the money for the radio would have been better spent on aid for families in need. People were hungry. They didn't have clean water or electricity.

It seemed extravagant and frivolous to spend money on a radio show, but pretty early on, the station came up with a program that became indispensable throughout the village. It was called The Observatory. Radio Fresh put 24/7 watchmen in tall buildings to keep an eye out for air strikes.

As soon as they saw one, they radioed into the station, which would interrupt programming on, say, the nutritional benefits of lettuce--

Dana Ballout

--with an air raid siren.

Dana Ballout

They're saying, planes are circling over Kafrenbel. Raed's response to the doubters was the radio isn't frivolous. It's about saving lives.

Dana Ballout

He's saying, if these airstrike warnings saved even one life, that would be worth the whole cost of the station. Before the observatory, people used to jerry-rig their own version of this alert system-- buying a walkie talkie and eavesdropping on the regime's frequencies.

It was expensive-- over $100. And parents hated how much the regime thugs would swear and cuss on the frequency. They didn't like that the kids overheard. The Observatory was a clean version for the cost of a basic radio-- $5.

The air raid warnings-- they were just one of a slew of super practical, you live in a war zone and here's how to survive of programs. There was a medical show that teaches people how to administer first aid. That show has episodes on chemical burns, meningitis in kids, how to treat head injuries--

Dana Ballout

Here the host is saying when you think your skull is broken or when you see blood or a clear fluid coming from your ears or nose, get medical help immediately. Radio Fresh had language learning programs in case you had to flee the country.

Dana Ballout

They're doing the alphabet in this episode of Teach Me Turkish. More than 3.5 million Syrian refugees have landed in Turkey the last eight years. They also taught French, English. And what I love about these programs is how the people teaching the language are actually not at all fluent in the language they're teaching, but you can hear how hard they're trying.

Dana Ballout

Everyone I talked to about Radio Fresh brought up this one program, called the Complaints Show. It was Radio Fresh's version of a call-in show, except they couldn't actually have a call-in show, because the regime had cut off all the phone lines. So they put up a bunch of little black boxes with a Radio Fresh sticker on them, all around town. People would drop in slips of paper with their answers to quiz shows, their comments and complaints. The host would choose one complaint each week to talk about.

Dana Ballout

Often, it's very specific stuff. At one point early on, a faction set up shop inside a school building, using it as a police station. Parents were worried about sending their kids to school in a building shared with criminals and thieves. Plus, the police station made the school an easy target for the regime.

Parents told the rebels their concerns, but nothing happened. So they turned to Radio Fresh.

Dana Ballout

Today, we have a complaint that there is a police station in the same building as a school, and that, the broadcaster says, defies logic. Again, here's Raed's friend, Hadi.

Dana Ballout

People complained about the price and quality of their bread. Someone brought up their neighbor using a hole in the front yard as a bathroom, while his actual bathroom was broken. The neighbor heard the episode and fixed his toilet. When I first heard the Complaints Show, it felt pretty familiar. We had a similar program in Lebanon, although not quite as small towny as the neighbor's toilet.

But listening hour after hour, what I realized was that this Complaints Show was doing something besides solving practical local problems. It was also spreading a revolutionary idea, that you could voice your concerns, and hold people accountable, and get results. The guys at the station confirmed this was Raed's original mission for the show. This, in a place where the rules were so recently non-negotiable and you just had to keep your head down and deal with it. The Complaints Show was just one of the many programs, debates, kids shows, series on Islam doing this kind of work.

One problem people had with the station from the beginning was that it was funded by the Americans, which, in the middle of a war where the US was not being particularly helpful, was not a good look.

It's true. Almost all the money for the station has come from the US State Department. It's around $40,000 a month these days, which covers the salaries of 53 people. It's a pretty big operation. When listeners accuse the station of being a mouthpiece for the Americans, Raed was happy to address it head on. This is him on the air.

Dana Ballout

He says the response is very simple. Have you heard anything on Radio Fresh that sounds like we're supporting the Americans? We're always trying to prod them on the radio, with our banners. We have opinions about them, and we don't hide them. Raed's vision of democracy meant everyone in Kafrenbel had an equal say in what was happening, including women.

He wanted their voices on the radio too. Although that was such a daring idea for Kafrenbel, even his friend Hadi wondered whether it was possible.

Dana Ballout

This was bold, because almost no women in the village worked outside the home. They took care of the kids and the homes. That was it. And it was bold because of who was running Kafrenbel at the time. Raed was always offending the local leaders, including just about everyone who was in charge of Kafrenbel over the last eight years.

First, the Free Syrian Army was offended by a banner, so they came to the radio station and kidnapped two guys. Next, ISIS attacked the station in 2013. A couple weeks later, they shot Raed multiple times, almost killing him. But when Raed was deciding to put women on the air in 2015, two years after Radio Fresh had started, Kafrenbel was run by a new extremist Islamist group, Nusra, al-Qaeda's branch in Syria. Raed knew they wouldn't like this, but he went for it anyway.

Dana Ballout

That's Hiba Abboud introducing the afternoon newscast. She's now the director of the women's division of Radio Fresh. She talked to me from the women's office over Skype.

Dana Ballout

Hiba was a young newlywed who had just moved to town when she heard that Radio Fresh was recruiting women to go on air. She'd been listening to the radio and was curious what it was like to make it. So she, along with 20 other women, went to the first training. They did icebreakers, spent three days on voice technique.

Dana Ballout

I did not know this one. Neither did most of the people at This American Life.

Dana Ballout

Hiba passed the training and began working at the station, made news shows, programs about women's rights, interviews with local women who had lost their husbands in the war. By the time Raed put Hiba and the other women on the air in 2015, the Islamists in charge of Kafrenbel, Nusra, already hated Radio Fresh.

The station poked fun at them in all sorts of ways. For being illiterate, hypocritical. One satire depicted their religious police rushing people to the mosque without actually understanding the rules of prayer. Nusra assigned people to listen to Radio Fresh in shifts. They issued regular warnings and threats to the station whenever they heard something they didn't like.

Now Radio Fresh got a lot of warnings for having women on air. Nusra considered their voices shameful, a form of nakedness. Finally, in January 2016, Nusra had had enough. They burst in one morning to shut the station down, broke down the door, faces covered, carrying machine guns. They took everything-- laptops, the transmitter, Hadi's hookah, flash drives. Hiba and the other women watched the Nusra guys ransack the main station from another building, the women's office just up the hill.

Dana Ballout

They quickly rearranged the office to make it look more like a home.

Dana Ballout

Nusra blindfolded Raed and took him to the infamous al-Uqab Prison. They left two armed men at the station to keep anyone from coming in. Every day, Hiba would finish her housework and get dressed to go in for her usual shift, but there wasn't anywhere to go anymore. People started spreading rumors that Radio Fresh was over.

Days passed. Nusra finally reached an agreement with Radio Fresh. They'd let Raed go and return the equipment, under a few conditions. First, that the radio station wouldn't play music. Here's Raed talking about the agreement. In English, actually, in an interview with the CBC.

Dana Ballout

Haram, sinful. Nusra had been on Raed's case about playing music for a while. He's cheerfully defiant.

Dana Ballout

Kidnapped me like three times, he's saying.

Dana Ballout

Animal sounds. Radio Fresh replaced the jingles leading into each segment with animal noises.

[ROOSTER CROWING]

There was a rooster in the morning.

Dana Ballout

Birds during the day.

Dana Ballout

And after dark, of course--

[CRICKETS CHIRPING]

--crickets. The CBC interviewer asked Raed.

Dana Ballout

Nusra's other big demand was for Radio Fresh to take women off the air completely. Raed had a creative fix for this one too. Again, here's Hiba.

Dana Ballout

But these days, Hiba just feels annoyed at the voice. And because the voice is so hard to listen to, Radio Fresh reduced how long women speak on the air to a fraction of what it was. By this past fall, the Assad regime had retaken swaths of the country. And in many other places, including Kafrenbel, extremists like Nusra were gaining power. People like Raed, people who didn't want Assad or the extremists, they barely held any ground.

And finally, around Thanksgiving, Raed was assassinated. I read the news in a tweet, and later heard the whole story. He was in a car with two colleagues from the radio station. It was around noon. A van pulled up next to them and shot and killed Raed and his friend Hamoud Junaid, then drove off.

While Nusra never claimed responsibility for the assassination, the whole town blamed them. Everyone I knew who had reported on Syria was talking about Raed that day, posting pictures of him, writing that his death was the end of the Syrian Revolution. Because Raed was one of a handful of people in Syria who was still living by the principles of the revolution.

He was still talking about non-violent resistance and democracy, civil society and freedom. Raed was there from the very first protests in Syria, and stuck by his principles while so many others either died or fell off the train. Now, he too was gone. Hiba got the news over WhatsApp.

Dana Ballout

The funeral lasted three days. Hundreds of people came. There were programs on Radio Fresh remembering Raed and Hamoud, their childhoods, talking to their friends, chatting about their legacy.

After Raed's death, you can still hear glimpses of Radio Fresh's classic dark humor. They continue to make fun of the president and the local factions. Here's a radio drama about a local guy partitioning his house in Kafrenbel to host refugees.

Dana Ballout

But these refugees aren't displaced Syrian women and children. It turns out, no, he wants to host French people fleeing their own country after the Yellow Vest protests, in particular, beautiful French women.

Dana Ballout

"Mary, Sonya, Emily sleeping in the streets? Not on my watch." I found the episode hilarious, a sign that Raed's spirit was well and alive at Radio Fresh. I wondered if Raed's friend, Hadi, felt the same way.

Do you still feel that? Do you still feel that at the radio station?

Dana Ballout

There's a talk that Raed gave two years ago at the Oslo Freedom Forum.

Dana Ballout

He opens with footage of the aftermath of a bombing, describing the smell of burned bodies, of guns. The audience is rapt and Raed is gripping. But he also looks very tired of trying to convince these Westerners in peaceful Norway to care about the more than 500,000 Syrians who have died in this conflict and the millions that remain. And yet, there he is. He hadn't given up.

Dana Ballout

He ends his speech saying, "There is nothing prettier than a flower that defies death, chaos, and destruction, and instead blooms and radiates hope. Yeah, just like Radio Fresh.

Ira Glass

Dana Ballout. She's a filmmaker and a producer at the podcast Kerning Cultures. That's Kerning with a K, Kerning Cultures, which run stories like this one from the Middle East. Last year, Radio Fresh lost its main source of funding when the United States withdrew stabilization aid to Syria. The employees worked without pay for five months. I guess that's what the US government does these days, is just ask people to work without pay everywhere.

Anyway, then they found some temporary funding, but that runs out in March. They're looking for new ways to stay afloat.

[MUSIC - "WORLD WAR" BY NARCY]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Sean Cole. The people who put our show together includes Elna Baker, Dana Chivvis, Aviva DeKornfeld, Jarrett Floyd, Damien Graef, Michelle Harris, Seth Lind, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Raimondo, Nadia Reiman, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editors-- Susan Burton and David Kestenbaum.

Special thanks today to our interpreters, Saphe Shamoun, Baraa Ktiri, and Hany Hawasly. Also thanks today Dr. Ajay Manhapra, Maia Szalavitz, Andrew Leland, Andy Lanset, Paul Wilson, Neil Verma, Jason Loviglio, Hugh Chignell, Dr. Brian Goldman, Rami Gares, Abdallah Salloum, Abdul wareth Al bakkour, John Jaeger, Isam Khatib, Raja Abdulrahim, and Blueprint Postproduction.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to any of our archive of over 600 programs for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to the public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, last weekend, he and I were up all night, talking in his kitchen. Morning comes, his wife came downstairs, and I don't know. Torey panicked. He just blurted--

Ira Glass

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

[MUSIC - "WORLD WAR" BY NARCY]