Welcome to the homepage of Thomas Froese, a Canadian newspaper columnist and storyteller. Writing widely from his experiences in the Middle East and Africa, Froese is a cultural commentator on news, travel and life.

It was shortly after the historic attacks on America, on Sept. 11, 2001, when he left Canada to write from the Arab world, from the ancient Yemeni capital of Sana’a. While writing columns about life in Yemen for various Canadian newspapers – particularly the Hamilton Spectator – he was also an editor at the Yemen Times, the country's only independent English newspaper.

Nine years and three children later, he is based in East Africa, in Uganda’s capital district of Kampala, where he and his family moved in 2005.

Froese's columns touch on a variety of themes from politics and culture to Third World development to spirituality. An educator who can be a provocateur and wry humourist, he often uses a personal and narrative writing style. (He began an MFA in Creative Writing at Seattle Pacific University in 2010).

While he contributes to newspapers in Canada and Uganda, Froese also partners in the work of his wife, Dr. Jean Chamberlain Froese, who is the founding executive director of Save the Mothers International, a charitable organization and leadership program which seeks to save some of the 525,000 mothers and four million children who die in the developing world annually due to unsafe childbirth.

He and Dr. Jean adopted a Ugandan girl – Hannah Laura Mirembe (Peace) Froese – in 2009. (Please click here for related column). They are also parents to Elizabeth Katherine, 6, and Jonathan Thomas, 4. (Please click here for recent family photo.)

Froese's writing life began at the St. Thomas Times-Journal, a community daily newspaper in southwestern Ontario, where he was a reporter from 1989 to 2001 and where he also served as a photographer. He has since photographed and written commentaries from five continents and been awarded numerous journalism honours.

On January 1, 2009, 20 years to the day since he started his reporting career in St. Thomas, 99 of his international columns plus dozens of captivating photographs, were published in the book Ninety-Nine Windows: Reflections of a Reporter From Arabia to Africa and other Roads Less Travelled. To see excerpts, please click here.