Drumming up support from the slums of Brazil

rainforest city of Belem there is a child, just

10 years old, who lives down the seedy alley of a favela,

a Brazilian slum. His name, invested with extravagant hope, is Wagner and he is struggling to learn the cello in the most unpromising conditions.

Outside his home scavenging dogs bark day and night, and gangs of boys, smoking and drinking the hours away, wait to bully Wagner when he leaves for rehearsal carrying an almost sacred cello loaned apprehensively by a local music school. For Wagner, greater than the worry of not keeping up with his fellow students is the fear that the cello will be stolen or damaged during the hazardous bus ride over cobbled roads to the stifling, run down practice room provided by a church.

Wagner belongs to a remarkable youth cello orchestra whose only teacher and founder, Ario, has now left Belem to live in the United States. If you listened to no other programme this week but Music From The Rainforest: One Year On (Radio 4, Tuesday), you would have felt rewarded by something incomparable, the sheer, glowing wonder and determination of these children to make music in the cauldron climate of Brazil.

And as the programme's presenter, Mark Richards, escorted Deborah and her cello home through the night dangers of the Plaza de Republicca, one thought kept recurring: what kind of philistines have we become that so blithely we tell opinion pollsters that classical music in Scotland deserves no public funding?

These children with next to nothing had found gold in Haydn and Vivaldi, and much of Belem loved them for it. In fact, two Belem teenagers have gained places at Trinity College of Music in Greenwich where one of them, Diego, now says: ''I am in paradise.''

Richards discovered the band 12 months previously through Ario, an accomplished musician who now drums up American support for the orchestra and still coaches them via the internet. ''I think we are using the globalisation to help us,'' Deborah told Richards, and the result of this long distance teaching was impressive: a Haydn concert given by the children, conducted by Ario who had returned for the occasion in Belem's nineteenth-century opera house.

An audience of 1000 filled the auditorium, the youngsters played out of their skins with joy and Wagner's mother wept with emotion. As Richards observed: in Belem at least the orchestra has a future. And the parents? They are the striving keepers of their children's dreams.

Lambing time came in The Archers (Radio 4, Sunday-Friday) with whinging Ruth and David sounding more and more like their Dead Ringers' imitations. And lambing time, too, in Gentle Shepherds (Radio Scotland, Sunday repeated Wednesday), the first programme in the People's History series in which that guardian of the Scots tongue, Billy Kay makes a welcome return.

With anecdotes drawn from living shepherds and their families, Kay explored the vocation of

these hardy, outdoor folk who have been at the core of Border country for centuries.

Much of the pleasure of such recollections is the loam-rich speech of Kay himself and his guests. Shepherd's wife, Jessie Scott, with a voice as seductive as warm scones, recalled how the menfolk, driving sheep to market for days, would wrap their worsted plaids in such a way to create ''a nook'' to keep their only sustenance, a dumpling, safe and dry.

But, alas again, a recent poll found that interest in old Scots was minimal to the point of indifference. Many thanks, then, to Kay for sticking at it and offering what

he rightly calls a celebration

of the continuing ''smeddum''

of the language. But since his programmes are among the

most popular on Radio Scotland, just who are the barbarians

who always seem to be on

hand when people with

clipboards and lots of yes/no/couldn't give a damn questions hit the street?

Man's skill at denial is one reason why the cruelties of the world keep being repeated.

In Misha Glenny's powerful investigation, Europe's Forgotten War Crime (Radio 4, Monday),

we learned that when Czechoslovakia was liberated from the

Nazis the people took revenge

not on the occupiers themselves, but on the ethnic Germans living in their midst.

In an act of collective

vengeance, the Czechs forced

all three million Germans

from the Sudetenland region to join brutal ''death marches''

out of the country without

any compensation. Agreed at Potsdam, this ''crime'' of ethnic cleansing was sanctioned by Churchill, Stalin and Truman,

and still today - despite the urgings of Vaclav Havel, the

Czech Republic's former

president - it remains unrecognised by politicians on both

the left and the right. Even

Havel's apology for the atrocities was judged by the people to be a grave mistake.

Chechnya, Zimbabwe, the Middle East the brotherhood of man scarcely hangs by a thread.