Primeros reseñadoresRachel Pieh Jones

Personal friendships with Somali Muslims overcome the prejudices and expand the faith of a typical American Evangelical Christian living in the Horn of Africa. When Rachel Pieh Jones moved from Minnesota to rural Somalia with her husband and twin toddlers eighteen years ago, she was secure in a faith that defined who was right and who was wrong, who was saved and who needed saving. She had been taught that Islam was evil, full of lies and darkness, and that the world would be better without it. Luckily, locals show compassion for this blundering outsider who can’t keep her headscarf on or her toddlers from tripping over AK-47s. After the murder of several foreigners forces them to evacuate, the Joneses resettle in nearby Djibouti. Jones recounts, often entertainingly, the personal encounters and growing friendships that gradually dismantle her unspoken fears and prejudices and deepen her appreciation for Islam. Unexpectedly, along the way she also gains a far richer understanding of her own Christian faith. Grouping her stories around the five pillars of Islam – creed, prayer, fasting, giving, and pilgrimage – Jones shows how her Muslim friends’ devotion to these pillars leads her to rediscover ancient Christian practices her own religious tradition has lost or neglected. Jones brings the reader along as she reexamines her assumptions about faith and God through the lens of Islam and Somali culture. Are God and Allah the same? What happens when one’s ideas about God and the Bible crumble and the only people around are Muslims? What happens is that she discovers that Jesus is more generous, daring, and loving than she ever imagined.

Think Mother Jones meets Mother Teresa, in Mogadishu. Amid a volatile mix of disease, war, and religious fundamentalism, what difference could one woman make? Annalena Tonelli left behind career, family, and homeland anyway, moving to a remote Muslim village in northern Kenya to live among its outcasts – desert nomads dying of tuberculosis, history’s deadliest disease. “I am nobody,” Annalena Tonelli always insisted. Yet by the time she was killed three decades later she had not only developed an effective cure for tuberculosis among nomadic peoples but also exposed a massacre, established homes and schools for the deaf, advocated against FGM, and secured treatment for ostracized AIDS patients. Months after winning the Nansen Refugee Award from the UN in 2003, she was assassinated at one of the hospitals she founded in Somaliland. Rachel Pieh Jones, an American writer, was living a few blocks away, having moved to Africa with her husband and two children just months before. Brought vividly back to life through meticulous reporting and her own letters, Annalena Tonelli challenges assumptions about aid and development, Christian–Muslim relations, and what it means to put one’s faith into practice. She demonstrates the power of love to conquer every fear: fear of disease and death, fear of terrorism and war, fear of failure, and fear of others.