Stronger than Death: How Annalena Tonelli Defied Terror and Tuberculosis in the Horn of Africa

Think Mother Jones meets Mother Teresa, in Mogadishu.

Amid a volatile mix of disease, war, and religious fundamentalism in the Horn of Africa, 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,” she always insisted. Yet by the time she was killed for her work three decades later she...