Newspaper columns Archives – Page 31 of 60

Love is our highest calling

Leave a Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / March 12, 2014 / 2014, African culture, African politics, Christianity, East-West relations, gay rights, homosexuality, human rights, relationships, suffering, Uganda's anti-gay law, Ugandan politics / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – March 12, 2014)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ By now you’ve heard plenty about Uganda’s new toughened laws on homosexuality, the news that spread to the West with the fanfare of a dark sporting event.

Even short of jail—terms range from seven years to life—it’s a new day of survival in a horrible state-sanctioned chill.

Several weeks in, like so many things in developing nations, it’s hard to know all that’s happening. Was that murder really a robbery gone bad? And that street beating? Why did she really lose her job? Many things simply don’t make the news here in Uganda.

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After Women’s Day, men … wake up!

2 Comments / New Vision, Newspaper columns / March 8, 2014 / 2014, African culture, human rights, International Women's Day, poverty, relationships, suffering, Women's rights / 5 minutes of reading

(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.

After Women’s Day, men … wake up! Read More »

What if the joy of singleness is just for you?

Leave a Comment / Newspaper columns, The Standard / February 27, 2014 / 2014, African university life, divorce, Jesus Christ, relationships, singleness / 4 minutes of reading

(The UCU Standard – Thursday, February 27, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ Last time in this space we were talking about marriage, how good things come to those who wait, and about falling in love with our Creator, really, the One who knows us better than we know ourselves.

I shared that I was 35 before I met my wife and how there was something to this, something mysterious and with joy, the sort that you can’t contrive because it comes from a deeper place inside but also somehow outside of you too.

What if the joy of singleness is just for you? Read More »

The long rollercoaster ride of one Ugandan adoption

2 Comments / New Vision, Newspaper columns / February 15, 2014 / 2014, African adoption, African culture, Froese family, Hannah Froese, maternal mortality, Ugandan adoption / 5 minutes of reading

(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.

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You’ve heard of Jamaican bobsledders? These are Ugandan hockey players!

2 Comments / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / February 15, 2014 / 2014, African hockey in the Olympics, hockey in Africa, hockey in Uganda, humour, Winter Olympics 2018 / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, February 15, 2014)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Okay, maybe it’s too late for Sochi, but I hope you haven’t forgotten about Olympic hockey in Africa. Yes, dear members of the International Olympic Committee, I’m before you to personally share the good news of a Ugandan ice-hockey team.

Of course, in Canada nobody says “ice” before “hockey” because Canadians realize hockey’s natural state is with ice, even the frozen-pond variety.

Uganda, on the other hand, is a place where some poor soul with a hockey stick in-hand might yell out, “We’re Manchester United!” before informing you that he’s a “striker.” But I’m working on this and I’m happy to report remarkable progress.

You’ve heard of Jamaican bobsledders? These are Ugandan hockey players! Read More »

This Valentine’s Day, fall in love with the One who knows you

Leave a Comment / Newspaper columns, The Standard / February 14, 2014 / 2014, African university life, God's love, love, marriage, relationships, sexual culture, sexuality, singleness, spirituality, Valentine's Day / 4 minutes of reading

(The UCU Standard – Monday, February 3, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s soon Valentine’s Day and you’re alone.

The flowers are out there and so is the wine, and much more. One would have to be blind and half-dead not to notice. But you’re alone, a rose in the parched dessert, and you don’t know how much longer you can hang on.

This Valentine’s Day, fall in love with the One who knows you Read More »

Distracted by distraction

Leave a Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / February 1, 2014 / 2014, authentic living, journaling, meditation, social media, solitude, spirituality, T.S. Eliot, the harm of social media / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – February 2014)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ If you’re too busy to read this, just ignore it. I mean, really, I understand. We’re well into 2014 and there’s some serious new clinking and clanking that likely needs your attention.

Yes, in our brave new distracted world, the one that never really turns off anymore, (I was recently in a funeral in Uganda where the cell phones rang and rang and rang), it’s a fresh year to slip further into it, this new place where it’s hard to know what – and who — is real.

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What we can learn from Nelson Mandela about solitude

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / February 1, 2014 / 2014, African culture, African politics, Apartheid, meditation, Nelson Mandela, prison, solitude, South Africa, spirituality, suffering / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, February 1, 2014)

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

— From the poem Invictus

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Much has been made about the tremendous story from Africa that ended 2013, that of Nelson Mandela and the worldwide send-off he was given, and rightly so.

Mandela will be remembered as the embodiment of William Ernest Henley’s poem, Invictus, that 19th-century verse describing a man who, as Henley put it, fell in the clutch of circumstance, who knew the bludgeonings of chance and bloody head, who found wrath and tears and horror, but through it all was unafraid and, in the end, “captain of his soul.”

Well over a month after Mandela’s death, his name is still easily spoken across Africa.

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