Hamilton Spectator

(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.”

BERLIN – So Hitler was called to lurk among us. And never showed. Not even in Germany. This regarding Kony 2012, the strange and shrinking campaign that in its posters — now hung virtually nowhere — features Hitler idling behind warlord Joseph Kony and Osama bin Laden. The square-moustached megalomaniac has made a bigger splash online. On YouTube, an impersonator of the führer is enraged over the world’s apparent inaction against Kony. “Get my laptop,” he tells his generals, with English subtitles, in this satirical video with a million views.

KAMPALA, UGANDA – The times, they are a changin.’ Maybe. Sort of. Well, we live in hope, anyway. I think of it while on Skype with Walid al Saqaf. We’re talking to catch up, about Yemen and censorship and technology and other things. Walid is a Yemeni journalist who has been noted in this space in the past. We were colleagues in Sana’a while Walid was publisher and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Times. I worked at his side.

LONDON — The world is getting faster. And stranger. Have you noticed? This is what I know. I think. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to know what we know. Take Joseph Kony. He’s someone who, thanks to social media, you likely know. I’m betting you know Kony is that Ugandan warlord with a strangely genteel face, that he’s abducted thousands of Ugandan boys and stole their souls when he made them into so-called soldiers.

Cultural relativism can blind us to warped thinking and behaviour.

(Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 24, 2011) KAMPALA, UGANDA — It’s late at night at the Ugandan-Kenyan border and a little Ugandan boy is about to disappear forever. Moses Kaloulou, all of seven years old, is crying hysterically. Not that he knows what’s going to happen, that he’ll likely soon die at the hands, and knife blade, of a witch doctor. All he knows is that it’s late — about midnight now — and very dark, and that some hours ago he was taken by strange men.

Government education is a sham but top students are heroes.

Old age is not for wimps. We approach it, even from a distance, with trepidation. It’s like your second childhood.