In 1993 the audio diaries of two Chicago teenagers, LeAlan Jones & Lloyd Newman, brought listeners face to face with their childhood and the world of one of Chicago's worst housing projects.
Like seasoned war veterans, old before their time, the two boys described the bitter truth about the sounds of machine guns at night and the effects of a thriving drug world on a community.
Ghetto Life 101 became one of the most acclaimed programs in American public radio history and went onto win a host of awards including the Prix Italia. It has been broadcast worldwide but never on the BBC.
And LeAlan & Lloyd are now men who have gone their very different ways. One is a teacher, the other, unemployed and training to be a truck driver.
The Chicago they describe, the ghetto of the Projects, has to a large degree vanished. Replaced in urban renewal and rapidly being turned into luxury housing but the violence, poverty and drugs that informed their old world remain endemic problems for many in Chicago.
Once again LeAlan and Lloyd take to the mic and tell it like it is, only now they have an adults eye and an anger fuelled by experience.
