Recent Columns

We were eating. It was the first meeting with my side of the family since all of us, the Froese 5, returned to Canada. And my nine-year-old, Liz, was explaining everything that I had taught her. Ever. ‘Daddy says not to wear high heels. It’s bad for your back,’ she explained. ‘This is the only thing Daddy has […]

Back from Uganda, now in Canada for our first full week, the question from someone happy to see us is given to Jon. ‘So, what do you like the most about Canada?’ Jon: ‘The clean toilets.’ You think my son is a funny boy. He is. But clean toilets, something we, naturally, don’t like to […]

One day, maybe, science will measure just what exactly happens to the deepest part of our beings when we go home — what happens not just to our emotions, but what happens physiologically in our organs, in our cells, in our very molecular makeup when we go to the place where we belong. I don’t mean […]

We’re in the moment saying hello to an old, balding gentleman. It’s Jon and myself. The old man is a sociologist and professor and writer who had just made us laugh and think and wonder, along with Mom and Liz and several hundred others in the crowd. He had just talked about giving. How do we give? […]

Time is a funny thing. We tend to believe that we have more than we do but wish we had more even when we misuse what we’ve been given. Then there’s that strange sensation of going back in time, at least when flying through time zones from one side of the ocean to the other. […]

We’re en route from Africa to Canada and finishing a few days in Amsterdam, where Justin Bieber recently made his now well-publicized comment in a guestbook at the Anne Frank House that he would hope Anne would have been a so-called belieber. This is what Liz, all of nine, thinks about the controversy. ‘He’s trying […]

We were all on the big bed – this is how we often watch videos on the computer – and it was a 27-minute feature on Anne Frank, the German-Jewish girl in Holland who wanted more than anything to be a writer and, strangely, became just that after her diary was published sometime after she succumbed […]

There were two roads and they diverged in a yellow wood and who among us would not want to take them both? But life is full of decisions that say, no, you must choose one or the other and your very future will depend on the choice. Not just to choose if we go with […]

Liz has a pile of CDs in her lap and she’s rotating the songs, all our favourites, and we’re driving and Fleetwood Mac’s old classic ‘Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow’ comes on and it’s good, it’s all so very good. It’s the sort of song that can say a lot at a wedding. In fact, not long after […]

(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.

Today’s joke. Who is richer?  A millionaire or a man who has 12 children? The man who has 12 children. Why? Because he doesn’t want any more.

So, since you wanted to know, no, Hannah’s adoption did not go through earlier this week. The judge didn’t show up. But this was vexing enough to prompt a column. Two of them, actually. And anytime I can get a column out of a day’s events, it’s not so bad. Stay tuned to this blog’s other side. […]

The cat is meowing, the sun is shining and the children are across the way, at the park, playing in the sand under the mango tree, excited as ever about the castles and rivers and other things they’ve been working on feverishly for several days now, excited that last night’s light rain hasn’t washed much […]

Today, April 8, 2013, is, we hope, the day we finally get Hannah’s adoption approved. We have been here before, to this court in Jinja, Uganda, but the wheels for this sort of thing, especially in Africa, can grind slow. Today, Hannah has on her best dress and, with us – and her siblings and […]

A child is just a child, you say, and when I was younger my own father would make a point of telling us what his father would tell him, namely that ‘Children are to be seen and not heard.’ Some children are neither seen nor heard, true, especially the many orphans – estimates are as […]