Recent Columns

(The UCU Standard - Tuesday, January 14, 2013) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It was the children. “Daddy, daddy,” they said, unable to sleep. “What if the thieves are still out there?” Yes, to add to the rotten tally of 2012, at year-end thieves stole our electric piano, the one my children loved. Six days later, thieves got my bride’s laptop plus valuables from her purse. Two violations in six days from inside our campus home. It took our breath away. Six days.

(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.

Being popular and oatmeal don’t seem to have a lot in common. But you have to know Hannah. My daughter, the one who is as black and beautiful as the night sky, turned seven the other day. She opted for her party to be in her classroom, which isn’t so uncommon here in Uganda at the […]

So, they’re still at it, still after my son and asking for his hand in marriage – Agnes and Rainer – the two seven-year-old school girls who are flat out and deep into it, unable to control themselves because Jon, apparently, has everything that it takes. Faithful Reader will recall that the two girls both proposed […]

The photo, which had been shot for our engagement, has been on the wall of one home office or another: first the one in Yemen, and for some  years now, our work space here in Uganda. My Bride and I are on the shore Lake Erie, just outside of St. Thomas where, in another life, I was […]

Today’s Daily Dad directs you to this poignant piece about losing a father, by Cathleen Falsani, with an excerpt from the Magnificent Defeat by my writing hero, Frederick Buechner. Thank you Cathleen. http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/12/21/its-end-world-we-know-it-and-i-feel-peace

Speaking of returning to places that are good for the soul, the earth of my elementary school is one such place, one that I bring the kids to when we’re back home in Canada. It’s become an annual affair, a day trip every summer that the three have all joined me on, but one that […]

So we’re on a ferry going from Whidbey Island to the coast of Washington State. His name is Paul and he’s a writing colleague of mine, an American from Chicago who has the same name as my best friend when I was a boy. He and I are students studying an MFA in Creative Writing […]

(Cont’d from  yesterday) To finish the story of Gloria, the little Ugandan girl who is the thief –turned-family-friend, there’s not much more to say except that in the past days we have been robbed of items of far greater import than swimsuits and underwear. Twice. At Christmas in particular, thieves need to get on with […]

(Cont’d from yesterday) … So after spending the night at the precinct, the girls’ families were found and informed of their mischief. We thought this was more or less the end of it, until the one, Gloria, the little Ugandan girl who had previously just about tripped while running away with the stolen clothing falling […]

They were all missing … Liz’s swimsuit (they call them swim ‘costumes’ here), Jean’s shirts, Jon’s underwear and other things that we didn’t even know of. It got increasingly disturbing when that underwear supply got thinner and thinner. This was the situation some time ago at the back of our house, from the clothes rack […]

Really Dad, the birds and the bees? You told Jon about the birds and the bees? This is what Liz asked me. I had obviously made a mistake only a nine-year-old big sister could know. What? I said. I didn’t plan it. It just happened. Jon and I were sitting in his garden with the […]

I dreamed we had a series of skating rinks in our house. We can’t do that, my Bride said when I told her about it. I was skating round and round without a shirt on, I told her. For sure, our kids would also appreciate skating rinks in the house. Deprived of skating most of […]

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.

Walmart is closing all its stores worldwide except for four “life boat” stores. One is in San Francisco. This is what I dreamed last night, sometime after the thunderstorm. In season, it rains hard here. Thus, I suppose, the lifeboats. I told my kids at the breakfast table. Wal Mart is closing. That’s nice, said […]