Radio Review: You didn't have to be a psychologist to figure out early in the programme which of the three women interviewed for The Nun I Never Was (BBC Radio 4 Saturday), stayed in the nunnery once they got themselves there.
Terri admitted joining because she looked a bit like Julie Andrews and she seemed to think her life would be a cross between Audrey Hepburn in the Nun's Story and Doris Day, sweetly singing Que sera sera. She hit on the idea of being a nun having reckoned it was the most likely way to become a saint. She lasted nine years. Fran was looking to escape a drunken father and a controlling, miserable mother and thought the convent would be the ideal place. From the age of 15, she went to the local convent on weekend retreats and loved them; the feather bed in the large, luxurious room being a particular highlight. So at 18 she joined and was alarmed to find herself on the first night sleeping in a dormitory on a straw mattress and things went downhill from there. "Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. In the novitiate I felt I was surgically attached to the Hoover," she remembered. By the time it came to take her final vows, the Reverend Mother had spotted that it wasn't for her and asked her to leave, which she did, by the back door with her £20 dowry in her hand. Several years, a husband and kids later, she still sounded devastated.
Of the three women interviewed, only Helen sounded like it was truly her vocation. In her mid-20s, with a job and boyfriend, she felt drawn towards prayer and quietness and a calling "purely and simply to serve God", she said.
The three talked about how they dealt with the life of poverty and chastity and Helen spoke of her daily struggle to live this very particular way of life . "My big regret is that I'll never have children," she said. Now at 38 years old she is the youngest nun in her order in Yorkshire - a telling statistic in itself.
The grimmest statistics turned up on Days of Darkness, Days of Light (World Service, Monday) where Fergal Keane returned to Rwanda, 10 years after the genocide. The power in Keane's reporting is in his intimate knowledge of his subject and his ability to get a perfect balance between an emotional personal response and journalistic distance. He was in Rwanda for the BBC during the massacre where he remembered the high-pitched sound of Hutus "sharpening machetes on the pavements", and he has been back several times since.
The estimated 800,000 Tutsis who died were killed with clubs and machetes in, as Keane vividly described it, "a genocide of fearful intimacy". For a decade he has followed individual survivors' stories such as that of Valentina who was 12 years old when her village of 10,000 were massacred. She survived by hiding for a month among the dead bodies. In the only moment of reconciliation in the programme she said that she forgave the men who wiped out her family. Keane is not confident of widespread, true reconciliation, at least for this generation. "The pain of slaughter is vivid and ever-present," he said, "how could it be otherwise?"
Post-conflict endurance has been a theme running through the The East Link (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturdays), where presenters Katriona McFadden and Donal O'Herlihy have been touring the 10 EU accession states. This week it was Hungary and they interviewed Imre Mecs, one of the leaders of the 1956 uprising; quizzed an FBI operative - there's an FBI office in Budapest; and visited Sopron, which calls itself "the dental capital of the world". Apparently Germans and Austrians flock there to one of several medical hotels for cut-price dental treatment and a holiday all rolled into one. An Italian family on a gnasher package were paying €4,000 for treatments that at home would cost €24,000.
One of the reasons why this series has been so good is that McFadden and O'Herlihy work well together, sparking off each other in an easy going, Mary 'n' Marty way, but with a more spontaneous sense of fun. It's unusual for any RTÉ radio programme to have two presenters but this works.
The most colourful character was Anetka, a would-be European-parliamentarian whose pre-election tactic is to promise to get her kit off and who dresses in the sort of provocative gear that Bob Dylan might be encouraged to endorse. It was the only time in the programme that its small radio-sized production budget showed. Mustering all her feminine wiles she defended her get up - fishnet tights, leather hot pants and a tight black top, and her forthright sexy approach and the whole lot was translated and spoken by the programme's "one voice, suits all" translator who - disconcertingly - was male.
