Our Ugandan home

The latest news from this corner is that my wallet, soggy and laden with earth beetles, was found in a neighbour’s rock garden. The phone call came. “Are you Thomas Froese?” “Yes.” “I have your wallet.” It was handed to me in a plastic bag. Hard to say if this is good news or bad. It’s like someone finding a body.

"I see you're aging gracefully." This is what he, an old Canadian friend, now overseas, said after seeing my photo complete with beard and glasses. Oh, come on. Already? Now? So soon? Aging gracefully? Really? In truth, the beard comes and goes like pages of a calendar. I shave. I don't shave. My bride, that is my young

Healing can come in any number of ways, of course, even through a dog. Our dog, Zak – he’s laying a few feet from me right now – has been this for me. If you’ve never met Zak, you can do so here, through these simple pleasures. Yes, Zak has been many things: guard dog, […]

We’re back in Africa (with the cats and dog and everyone else). So is this blog. They, the Ugandans, always call it a holiday. “So how was your holiday?” they’ll ask. It gets too complicated to explain in any great detail that we actually aren’t really holidaying during our annual stretch in Canada, not in […]

Okay, (still catching up here from last time), speaking of watching movies in Uganda, which we were recently with this latest Joseph Fiennes movie, I can report two other things. One relates to the new, (sort of new in Uganda, anyway), Star Wars movie. One is that, similarly to our movie experience in Yemen, around here […]

We’re taking the long way home. Through the UK. More to follow. Before this, through Athens. More to follow from here also. And before this, transiting through Brussels airport. Yes, that Brussels airport. And sure, more to follow from this (now) well-known spot as well. But first, it’s the pool, our final good-bye to Uganda […]

It’s dinner. The vote goes in the kids’ favour for what DVD we will watch this evening. (Dad’s latest find, a biography on Rich Mullins, will wait another night for, uh, Laura Ingills and company.) “Thank God for whoever invented democracy,” says Jon. “The Greeks did,” I noted. (More on this soon: some news from […]

When it’s all over (this two-lives-for-the-price-of-one business, this travel and observing and returning home, then leaving again and looking more and writing at least some of it down), it’s the traffic that I will miss the least. Of all the dangers and perceived dangers of the developing world that were ruminated on to the point […]

I woke up this morning and, as I often do, told my wife what I dreamed. Just a dream. Then I read the morning news. That was the nightmare. Trump continues to … you know. Then another story, another nightmare. Burlington’s Neil Bantleman is going back to jail, for 11 years apparently, this because Indonesia’s […]

It’s morning, just past sunrise, and the youngest, Child #3, gives me a big hug at the door. “Wish me luck, Daddy!” she says. Today is Track and Field Day at her school. She will run and jump and all that. It will be good for her body and her soul too, and I am […]

It’s Monday morning coffee at the kids’ school, a privileged school if for no other reason than it sits in the middle of Africa’s sunshine and offers parents morning coffee. I wonder aloud about sending the kids to Washington. Snow, you know, is healthy for kids, and so is the bitter cold, and the snowier […]

  Today’s post is a wish for a blessed Christmas for you and yours, a wish for peace and joy and all the things that (thank you, Paul) are to be seen at least through a hazy mirror even here and now, imperfectly yes, the sort of things of the heart that one day we […]

‘Where does everyone go at Christmas?’ I asked, and all the African kids yelled ‘Home!’ and that’s how it started, a brief word shared last night from the front of our own home where a few dozen carollers, mostly Ugandans, gathered. It was our annual contribution to Christmas things here at the university that we’ve […]

It’s morning and the sun is up, shining on the mud, and Zak, the dog, has left his bright orange ball to chase Tiblets. Tibs, as Liz is fond of calling him, is the poor cat who just took off into the bush. There is another way, though, and one of our cats, Mister Bubbles, […]

So, the boy arrived home from the school this week wearing his swimsuit. He had lost his shorts. And those other shorts, also. Yes, those other shorts. The conversation went like this. “How was your day at school, son?” “I lost my shorts.” “Oh.” “And my underwear too.” “That’s great Jon.” The swimsuit my son […]