Modern.
The podcast is supported by from the New York Times and WBUR Boston.
This is modern love stories of love, loss, and redemption.
I'm your host, Magna Chakrabarti.
Imagine a map of the world.
Now zoom in on the Horn of Africa.
In between Ethiopia and Somalia lies the country of Djibouti.
This small country has become the center of Rachel pye Jones world, one that looks nothing like her Minnesota roots.
Mireille Enos.
You may recognize her from shows like Big Love, the catch, and the killing, reads us.
Rachel Pye Jones essay a child of two worlds.
A somali proverb says that a woman should be either married or in her grave and in the horn of Africa.
The proverb might as well go on to say that if she is married, she had better be pregnant, nursing, or postmenopausal.
My husband, Tom, and I moved to Somaliland nine years ago with our two year old twinsd to work for a non governmental organization that aimed to serve the local population.
But within a year, the escalating violence there forced us to evacuate, as in grab what we could and run and resettle across the border in Djibouti.
A couple of years later, when our twins, Magdalene and Henry, were five, our djiboutian somali neighbors began suggesting that my next pregnancy was long overdue.
Surely my mother marriage couldn't survive with only two children, and Asha, my landlady, added to the pressure, asking over chipped mugs of steaming tea, how are the kids?
Are you pregnant?
The trouble wasn't that I didn't want to have another baby, though part of me did fear the possibility of having twins again.
The trouble was that I lived in Djibouti with neighbors like Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia pirates in the Red Sea border skirmishes in Eritrea intermittent political tensions in Ethiopia and al Qaeda terrorists hanging out in Yemen.