Author: Shalem John

On a sun-warmed ridge at the edge of Kigali, Rwanda, where the paved road gives way to red clay and goats roam between kitchen gardens, pastor Kamanzi folds his hands beside a chipped water tank and listens. From the living room, ten voices in low unison sing “Yesu Ni Wanjye,” barely louder than the creaking of banana leaves in the wind. No drums thump. No amplifiers hum. There are just whispers, because anything louder invites trouble. Kamanzi’s house is solid but plain: glazed brick, iron windows, tiled floors swept clean that morning. I have also swept clean this story for…

More than 30 women and children sit on plastic chairs under the awning at Goro Medical Center (GMC), a clinic in rural northern Uganda. Some nurse infants. Others stare into the distance as their immune systems fight high fevers. As the sun moves overhead, a baby shrieks. The other patients wait silently for Orach Simon, a lab technician, to test their blood for malaria, syphilis, or hepatitis. Orach and the other lab tech, Atimango Mercy, often stay late. They have both come in to work while sick with malaria. Patients enter the clinic, walk behind a blue sheet, sit on…

Kenyan mother Dorothy Kweyu prayed 14 years for her son’s release from a Saudi Arabian prison. Her son, Stephen “Stevo” Munyakho, spent more than a decade on death row for killing Yemeni coworker Abdul Halim Mujahid Makrad Saleh in a dispute over money in 2011. According to Munyakho, Saleh attacked him with a knife, stabbing him twice before Munyakho grabbed the knife and stabbed Saleh in the chest. Munyakho claimed self-defense, and at first Saudi courts, which run on sharia law, handed him a five-year jail sentence for manslaughter. Then Saleh’s family appealed, citing the “right to retaliate” for the…