And this is the truth: there is no good reason why Stories to Voice should exist. The stories are produced by Sai Mun Gani Productions, which consists of me, Chris Robinson. I’m a retired technical writer who’s put in 25 plus years in the semiconductor and IT industries, and it’s been a while since my stories appeared in magazines and newspapers. 

Maybe I should blame my friend, Mark Wilson, who unknowingly lured me into creating audio dramas.

The vortex opened in 2014 at Thai restaurant where I was having lunch with Mark and giving him my sob story about a TV documentary proposal that went south. Hopes were high. I had such a great story based the incredible letters written by Dominican Sisters who served as midwives in Northern Nigeria starting in the mid-1950s. More importantly, an established director who had produced multiple TV programs for EWTN (the Catholic Channel) was interested in the project. Best of all one of the Sisters was my aunt, and she had compiled the letters.

“How old is your aunt?” the director asked.

“In her nineties,” I said.

“Hire a camera crew and go interview her,” he replied.

So off I went. But while I was at the Convent interviewing Sisters, the director received news of funding for another documentary and poof, as fast as you can download a video file, the project went from highly likely to a snowball’s chance.

“Now what am I supposed to do?” I whined to Mark over a Thai iced tea. “There’s no way that I can fund this by myself.”

“Why not do a podcast?” he asked. “They’re a lot cheaper to produce.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’ve never written dialogue.”

Mark poo-pooed me and began to roll play one of the Sisters’ stories, giving a wonderful baritone version of Sister Dominica. 

“Hmm,” I thought, “maybe….” 

A few years later Cornelia, my beloved aunt, died at age 96, and my husband and I moved across the country. On the way to our new home, driving across Texas on Highway 40, I wrote an episode on a yellow legal pad about the tragic story that my aunt told me about the son of a Fulani woman she treated.  I must have been missing Cornelia and wanting to spend more time with her, or maybe she was looking over my shoulder because it almost wrote itself, and in under a half tank of gasoline.

After writing 12 more scripts and producing five podcast episodes, I was hooked on the process of giving voice to the stories of everyday heroes. 

Next came Natalie Crouter’s diary that she wrote in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines during WWII. Her long-out-of-print book found me at the MacArthur Memorial museum’s gift shop. How could I not give voice to such a person’s story?  Sister Hildy presented herself at the American University library as I read a very personal master’s thesis written by a Sister who worked at the midwifery school where my aunt received her certification before going to Nigeria.

Several more stories needing to be voiced are in the queue, but they’ll have to wait “sai mun gani.” That’s a phrase Cornelia used after I broke the bad news over the phone that her TV documentary wasn’t going to happen.

 “Sai mun gani,” Cornelia said wistfully from her convent room.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s Hausa for ‘til it happens,” she explained.

Always gentle, always with encouragement and love, it was Cornelia’s way of saying, “You can do it but remember that we’re all on God’s time, not our own.” Unlike Cornelia, I can’t say whose or what clock we are all on, but I know with my own best certainty that things do happen in their own time—even and most especially when it seems that there’s no reason why they should.

Chris Robinson