On 9 June this year, we, members of the LNB youth organisation Eliza Kupruka and Alice Mālere, had the opportunity to participate in the experimental podcast studio of Radio 5 – pieci.lv as part of the “Lampa” Conversation Festival.
We took this fantastic opportunity to gain new experience in podcast production within the ERASMUS+ PROJECT N° 2022-2-LV01-KA210-ADU-000099955 “Education is key”. How did it all start? We found out about the opportunity to participate in the Lampa Festival from Madara and Kristaps, who are the coordinators of the Education is key project. As young people who like to take risks and try new things, we agreed. The first thing we had to do was to figure out what topic we were going to talk about with the radio DJs from pieci.lv. We decided to collect the questions that sighted people usually ask visually impaired people. Now all we had to do was send in our application for the festival. Once we got the confirmation that we could take part, we prepared the questions most frequently asked by our sight-impaired peers, as well as the questions asked on Facebook. Once everything was done, all we could do was look forward to Friday with joy and excitement. The morning of 9 June, the day of the festival, greeted us with sunny, summery weather. We drove to Jugla, where Kristaps, the project coordinator, met us and we were ready to go on an adventure. The festival was held in Cesis, so we had a two-hour journey outside of Riga ahead of us. We successfully made it to the venue where we were met by Laura Lauziniece, editor-in-chief of pieci.lv. We got to know each other and after a while we started making plans for future cooperation. But in the meantime, it was already time to go to the podcast recording tent. We were ushered into the tent and led to chairs and given a microphone each. On the arms of the chairs were headphones that you could put on to hear yourself and the other participants better. The podcast was recorded in 40 minutes and we were interviewed by Toms Putniņš, a DJ from pieci.lv. We talked about various topical issues related to people with visual impairments. We discussed environmental accessibility, education and job opportunities, the daily lives and dreams of blind people. You can listen to the conversation on the Radio 5 – pieci.lv spotify page https://open.spotify.com/episode/4PBtf6G2xlsApdQ41L5nAz. We travelled back to Riga in high spirits and with a sense of a job well done. It was a great pleasure to have had such a positive experience and a nice atmosphere at the festival. We, like many before us, proved that vision problems are not a barrier to going out in public and saying: Here we are! Many thanks to Kristaps, who was with us the whole time, didn’t let us get lost and do wrong things, and to the team of pieci.lv, who were not afraid of working together and gave us a positive charge!
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