Hamilton Spectator

(The Hamilton Spectator - Thursday, October 24, 2013) PANMUNJEOM, SOUTH KOREA ✦ We’re at the border of North and South Korea, at the planet’s hottest line in the sand, and the guard – a youth in military garb and dark sunglasses – tells my wife to change her footwear. She has open sandals and the North Koreans, even from a distance, might see her feet. Which shows that while war may be hell, it's strange too, certainly this pseudo-war at Panmunjeom, the UN’s demilitarized zone, the so-called DMZ separating these two Koreas, countries that stopped formal shooting 60 years ago but still without any treaty.

(The Hamilton Spectator - Friday, September 20, 2013) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It was late and dark and unusual because the visitor lives hours away and I didn’t expect him. But he came anyway and sat at my front door and cried and told me all about it, how thieves had come the night before. He had been at church, he explained, at one of those all-night prayer services common in this part of Africa, when the rats did it, when they broke in and cleaned out his house. Clothing, furniture, cash I had recently given for his kids’ schooling, everything gone by sunrise.

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, August 17, 2013) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It’s a strange world, especially here on what is, for all I know, my deathbed. It’s malaria and I’m dreaming. Or maybe in the fight of it I’m actually hallucinating. I see a friend, a writing mentor, a bear of a man, the sort you can disappear into when he hugs you. He’s an American who’s never been to Africa, no not once. But he’s somehow made it over the ocean and through the walls to kneel at my Ugandan bedside. ­“What are you doing here?” I ask. “I’m praying for you.”

(The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, July 26, 2013) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ Love has always been one of those loaded words, one that means everything and nothing at the same time because we can love the latest Bond movie or country music or summer rain, but this has nothing to do with summer love at, say, a July wedding, or the love that shows on the faces of a couple who have sailed through thick and thin. This is what it was the other day, an anniversary of 55 years. The man smiled and looked me in the eye and told me that he knew from the first time he saw her. “She stepped off the train and I heard a voice: ‘This is the woman you’ll marry.’”

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, June 15, 2013) It’s 10 years later, dear Elizabeth, and it’s true: Home is where your heart is. You’ve said it now in plain words. Your heart, with your imagination, is in our African home. This is what I know you mean when you say with sorry sadness, “Daddy, the roads are too smooth here. Everything’s too perfect. I’d rather be in a place where the roads are bumpy but more interesting.”

(The Hamilton Spectator - Friday May 31, 2013) JINJA, UGANDA ✦ It’s Monday and we’re on the road early, dressed up, driving the 90 minutes down a dangerous road, the road that we won’t drive at night anymore because we fear it may kill us. We arrive at the court in Jinja, a relaxed beach-town on Lake Victoria, to finally be told ‘Yes. Yes, everything is in order and the court is satisfied, and Hannah will never have any family outside of yours, the family she clearly belongs in.’ Hannah is the Ugandan girl who’s been in our home for almost four years now. We just need the final stamp of court approval to make her adoption official.

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, March 30, 2013) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ I’m the odd man out in a loose circle in the campus home of the university president talking about God’s grace, an unsurprising discussion because, besides being a university and my own family’s home, this is a nearly century-old theological training centre. The horrible news of late is the roadside murder of a young law student, John Otim, beaten dead with an iron bar for money that he didn’t even have.

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, February 16, 2013) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It was YouTube and it was Barack Obama talking to the neighbours in Kenya. You may have heard that they’re about to vote. The last time the Kenyans did this, six years ago, 1,000 lay dead on the bloody streets. Another 600,000 were displaced, including here to Uganda where UN shelters near the airport are still up.

(The Hamilton Spectator - Friday, January 25, 2013) ARUSHA, TANSANIA ✦ Edward should be fired. I can't trust Alice. And our piano and laptop won’t resurface any more than anyone will know what happened to that $13 million. This is how it’s going around here. Not right here, actually. I’m on business one country over, just southeast from my home in Uganda. At the moment I’m drinking a cider of sorts, what the gentleman beside me called 'rotten apples,' a pretty good name, I think, for my recent experiences.

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Once there was a little Ugandan girl who loved school. The girl, who had been an orphan when she was younger, loved learning new things and making new friends and pretty well everything about it, especially the stories. Maybe she loved school all the more because of her years as an orphan, which started in a hospital in Mbarara, in western Uganda, where she was left abandoned when she was barely larger than a cat. There she was given all she ever owned, her name, Hannah.

The official charge is ignoring orders of a public official. But the real problem is words. Just words. You know, words can be enough. Too much, even, when they say this and that; when they’re relevant and lacerating; when they’re passed to others and speak more than anyone even realizes; when they speak truth that isn’t just truth to be understood, but that deeper truth that causes a lump in your throat because you know someone has experienced it with some amount of pain.

We’re in the air again, my family and me and today’s newspaper. This time it’s the Daily Telegraph, dominated on Page 14 by a large ad for the latest iPad. Beside it, a smaller story on how one in four U.K. teachers wouldn’t send their own kids to the schools they teach in. And below, a brief about a Pediatrics Journal study that shows obese youth don’t think so well.

SANTA FE, N.M. I’m in America’s oldest state capital, in Café Olé, with a sandwich and drink and new hope to never become a moron. Here for some postgrad studies, I’m also enjoying a recent copy of America’s satirical news tabloid, The Onion. “Nation’s Morons March on Washington State,” is its banner headline. Thousands of morons, the Onion reports, recently marched in Washington State thinking they were actually in Washington, D.C.

So, my mother recently had brain surgery. Then it was the bum’s rush out of hospital. No need to wait, to monitor, to make sure. Keep ’em rolling. Free the bed. Such are the system’s pressures. What if something goes wrong back home? Call 911. This is what I was told.

So what would Jesus say? I mean about this debate on T-shirts that bear his name, and freedom of expression and religious tolerance and these sort of very Canadian things. The opinions have arrived in a crazy roll, thanks to the Grade 12 Nova Scotian suspended, then returned, then pulled from his school by his father, all because of his bold T-shirt that says “Life is wasted without Jesus.”