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Thinking Big

Three stories of people who dreamed big - from the couple who set up a health care system across Pakistan, to the cleaner who braves the heights of the world's tallest monuments.

The couple who started small - but ended up caring for a nation. Bilquis Edhi and Abdul Sattar Edhi have built up and run Pakistan's most impressive social enterprise. The Edhi Foundation started off with a tiny dispensary in a Karachi slum but now provides health care to millions of people across Pakistan. They run everything from orphanages, clinics and maternity homes to centres for the mentally ill and disabled, mortuaries, soup kitchens and schools. Earlier this year, Abdul Sattar died at the age of 88. But Bilquis tells Matthew Bannister how she met her husband when she was working as a nurse.

Thorsten Moewes is a German cleaner who travels the world looking for giant landmarks in need of a spring clean. He's worked on some of the tallest and most famous monuments in the world.

Bernie Krause is a "soundscape ecologist" who has built up a vast archive of sounds of the natural world - from the Sumatran rainforest to the Sierra Nevada mountains. But in the 1960s he was one of the pioneer performers of the Moog synthesiser.

Photo: An Iranian child raises his hands at sunset at a beach in the Caspian Sea port city of Mahmoud Abad, in northern Mazandaran province, Iran.
Credit: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images.

Available now

27 minutes

Last on

Mon 26 Sep 2016 01:32GMT

Broadcasts

  • Sun 25 Sep 2016 00:32GMT
  • Sun 25 Sep 2016 07:32GMT
  • Mon 26 Sep 2016 01:32GMT

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