Recent Columns

An open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper about maternal mortality.

Nearing the five-year mark of my family's foray into Uganda, here's a mind-bender from my happy and ever-inquisitive four-year-old, Jonathan: "Daddy, when you grow up, are you going to be dead?"

Hurry up and wait. Why isn't this Uganda's national motto? No, really. Can't someone get it on the flag, on official documents and on television?

In Uganda, communities and individuals are stepping forward like never before as champions for maternal care.

"I commend this university for its tremendous work with safe motherhood; for its training and for its sensitizing the public."

UCU's Health and Safety Committee will clamp down on pets who "wander around the campus." They're to be vaccinated and kept "indoors." Spot checks are coming.

In Berlin, both presidents had watershed moments, and both are revered.

While we need not be entirely cheerful in the face of Armageddon, we can still offer the worried world something different.

OK, so what if Chicken Little was right? Chicken Little is that bird who got hit on the head by a falling acorn and then ran around screaming "The sky is falling!" He got all his forest friends in an alarmist tizzy and, on their way to tell the king, they were summarily fooled and eaten by that Foxy Loxy.

While here in the heart of Africa, I think of Canada often. Fall is no exception.

An early-summer highlight of mine was this comment from a gentleman who stopped me in a London, Ontario church to say, "You know, your book cost me $4,000."

It's hard to know most days what might go through the mind of any three-year-old, let alone an orphan from Africa.

If I have one urgent piece of practical advice for young men today, it's this: Look forward with great hope to the day you marry and have children.

"You're such a Dad-Dad." This phrase, a recent favourite of my three-year-old Jon, has reminded me anew that there's nothing like fatherhood.

KAMPALA, UGANDA – "The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things." From Lewis Carroll's nonsense verse "The Walrus and the Carpenter," this is what comes to mind when I read the newspapers here. Is the world getting madder?