New Vision

(The New Vision – Tuesday, March 22, 2016) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It’s the foolish things of this world that can shame the wise and the weak that can upend the strong. This is how it was put a couple of millennia ago by the apostle Paul when he foreshadowed this great reversal, this deep sorting out that will be known only fully in the hereafter. But it’s the story-tellers in the here-and-now who often say the very same thing, and you’d have to be blind or deaf or both not to see it in the new Star Wars movie, “Episode VII: The Force Awakens,” which recently made it here to Uganda.

(The New Vision - Saturday, December 12, 2015) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ She questioned if having the surgery was “God’s will,” but the truth is that she was afraid and misguided and besides her own safety, she was leaving her unborn child’s life to hang dangerously in the balance.

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Some days you hardly know how to keep going, how to take even another step. The hunger pangs gnaw that much at your stomach. But it’s your children and their lack of good food that worries you more, especially these days since they are so sick.

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ You’ve worked hard for this your whole life, this, your university career, your education and future, your dreams of a better life. Then it happened. You made a mistake. Now you’re pregnant. You’re pregnant while at a religious university. You know what happens next. You get thrown out. Everything will be gone. Your hard-earned tuition and your honour and your hope for tomorrow too, all lost. So you got that abortion.

(The New Vision - Saturday, March 8, 2014) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s International Women’s Day and we’re all happy to celebrate women in Uganda and around the world, but the truth of the matter is that it’s the men who need to come to terms with who they are and why they’re around, or it’s all for nothing. This is the strangeness of this big yearly celebration. Women’s Day largely revolves around the hard times women face because their men are so hopeless. Plenty of husbands and fathers don’t pull their weight and don’t understand or care how desperately their families need them. Now I am not about to beat-up myself or my brothers everywhere because I have nothing better to do. The Daughters of Eve are just as fallen as the Sons of Adam. But have an honest look into the homes of Uganda. I’m imagining you see what I see. It’s a bloody mess.

(The New Vision - Saturday, February 15, 2014) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ There’s new joy in our Mukono home these days. Our Ugandan daughter, Hannah, is now legally in our family. She danced when we showed her the formal adoption paper. This, after waiting more than 500 days. That’s five hundred. Welcome to the world of international adoptions where you need the patience of Job to slog through it all. Adopting a child, especially in Uganda, can be this much of a roller coaster ride. In our case, we’re Canadians in Uganda since 2005. My wife and I met Hannah in 2009, when she was three, in a Jinja orphanage. When she was barely larger than a cat, she had been found abandoned in an Mbarara hospital. Her family? Unknown.

(The New Vision Online - Monday, April 15, 2013) JINJA, UGANDA ✦ It's Monday morning and I sit in a Jinja café wearing a bright tie, blue shirt, navy blazer and brown pants, but I’m wishing I could start the day over and wear black from my neck to my feet, everything as black as the black in Uganda’s flag. This, as I read the latest news report of Black Monday, the growing citizens campaign pointing out what we already know, that Ugandans need to mourn, to grieve, to be saddened for their deepening losses, losses from thefts of public funds that are key to the wellbeing of this nation.

(The New Vision - Monday, January 14, 2013) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ There are six of us around the table. We’re disturbed and talking about how to help. The place where we work and live and have friendships and worship with others is under attack. Through 2012, this place, an educational institution, became, as one Ugandan said, “a den of thieves.” Then the new year had barely arrived when a campus home was broken into and robbed while its Ugandan family slept.

... if America ever had greatness, if America ever was a modern republic to emulate, it’s largely because it’s been a nation united with rather different peoples and regions and perspectives.

There’s the guilt and fear. There’s the drama and emotion. There’s the conformity and the teaching of “Us versus Them.” Of course, there is also that feeling that you’re not good enough, that you have to somehow work your way into God’s love. These are hallmarks of cults, dangerous but strangely appealing religious groups like […]

Information can misinform and divide our world as much as it can inform and bring it together.

So it is Christmas, a good time to give thanks for the past year, especially for our children.

There are various things horribly wrong in blaming Mbale health workers for the much-publicised maternal death of Cecilia Nambooze.

Kaitlin Boyda could have had something for herself, but she donated her wish instead.

Time for class. Time for thinking. Time to cut through the nonsense of vegetable journalism.