Our Ugandan home

I’m way too sexy for my underwear. Which is why I wear a Speedo into the pool. I expect the same from our new dog. We picked him up yesterday. His name is Zack, which, if you’re a thief, is short for Zack Attack. His birthday, as we’ve discovered, is on My Bride’s and my […]

We are children, all of us, not entirely at home in this world because in a deep place, maybe a forgotten place, we realize there is something else, something more. Which is why crimes against children are especially heinous: they’re an attack on the very nature of innocence. They’re also a reminder of how, in the […]

It was all set, I was told. Chris had invited me over for the night. Which was fine, because Chris was a cool dude, a buddy with a sort of bowl-cut who lived just down the hill, and, after that, just up the hill. We loved to play hockey together, so much that once I […]

As the story goes, she wanted to marry and she wanted to travel too, so she married a man who had a gazillion stamps in his passport — only to discover that he never wanted to move again. This is how it goes with so called Third Culture Kids, or TCKs, the term coined to describe […]

Ten  years ago, in June 2003, my daughter Elizabeth Katherine was born. My life as a father began. And life changed, forever. I immediately wrote about it all, what I thought fatherhood might be about, especially as a travelling family with a foot in two worlds. The Hamilton Spectator published those thoughts at that time. Below is a […]

The truth of the matter is that we choose very little in life. We are born in a certain place to certain parents. We are sent to a certain school. And if we were just one neighbourhood over, if we were just one year older, if that something else had been said to start that […]

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 […]

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 […]

We’ve heard the story so many times – Jesus died, Jesus rose from the dead – that we think we know something about something, and maybe we do know, if nothing else, a profound hope, the hope of eternal life not on some fluffy cloud playing a harp with cherubs floating around, but a hope of […]

‘Daddy, Daddy!’ It’s Jon. He’s really excited. He’s harvested his potatoes. ‘Look at this one. It’s as big as the ones you see on the shelves in the store!’ He stands at the edge of his garden and holds up a potato. I wouldn’t say it’s huge. But it’s not small either. Not like the […]

Jon: Where’s the cat? Me: I don’t know. He’s on one of his long absences. Jon: At his girlfriend’s? Me: Probably Jon: Why doesn’t his girlfriend ever come here? Enough said. +++ The rabbits, meanwhile, have deliverd seven. Liz sold one to her friend at school; another is being taken by a colleague of My […]

We lose things in our family. Swimming goggles. Socks. Our patience with each other. We’ve almost lost Jon twice. The first time was at our Ugandan university home, which is generally safe except for the snakes and wild monkeys and irritating birds that tend to hang around such institutions of higher learning. ‘So, where is […]

We’re at the park that I built across from our house http://www.thomasfroese.com/find-the-unexpected-playgrounds-in-your-life/ She approaches me slowly and notices that I’m having a quiet moment. I’m at the picnic table under the canopy, beside the jungle gym, over from the trampoline. It’s a moment of calm that I like to have in the mornings. She has […]

We have no television in our African home, by choice as much as anything. But there are plenty of DVDs on the living room shelves, including The Waltons, something we watch as a matter of routine on Sunday evenings. Liz and Jon are especially eager to find what happens to their namesakes – Elizabeth and […]

It was Sunday morning. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. Not very conversant in English, he said something that I eventually understood – he was clearing bush to make room to park a car. ‘Oh,’ I said. The space was across from our house here at the university in Uganda. The house itself, built on […]