This week, we are presenting a story from NPR foreign correspondent Gregory Warner and his new globe-trotting podcast Rough Translation.

Mohamed was having the best six months of his life—working a job he loved, making mixtapes for his sweetheart—when the communist Somali regime perp-walked him out of his own home and sentenced him to a lifetime of solitary confinement. With only concrete walls and cockroaches to keep him company, Mohamed felt miserable, alone, despondent. But then one day, eight months into his sentence, he heard a whisper, a whisper that would open up a portal to—of all places and times—19th century Russia, and that would teach him how to live and love again.

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