New Vision

The New Vision is Uganda’s leading national newspaper.

Light and darkness on screen

(The New Vision – Tuesday, March 22, 2016)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It’s the foolish things of this world that can shame the wise and the weak that can upend the strong. This is how it was put a couple of millennia ago by the apostle Paul when he foreshadowed this great reversal, this deep sorting out that will be known only fully in the hereafter.

But it’s the story-tellers in the here-and-now who often say the very same thing, and you’d have to be blind or deaf or both not to see it in the new Star Wars movie, “Episode VII: The Force Awakens,” which recently made it here to Uganda.

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Caught between health care and (the worst parts of) religion

(The New Vision – Saturday, December 12, 2015)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ She questioned if having the surgery was “God’s will,” but the truth is that she was afraid and misguided and besides her own safety, she was leaving her unborn child’s life to hang dangerously in the balance.

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Will life ever change for Uganda’s poor?

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Some days you hardly know how to keep going, how to take even another step.

The hunger pangs gnaw that much at your stomach. But it’s your children and their lack of good food that worries you more, especially these days since they are so sick.

Will life ever change for Uganda’s poor? Read More »

Universities should help pregnant students

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ You’ve worked hard for this your whole life, this, your university career, your education and future, your dreams of a better life. Then it happened. You made a mistake. Now you’re pregnant. You’re pregnant while at a religious university.

You know what happens next. You get thrown out. Everything will be gone. Your hard-earned tuition and your honour and your hope for tomorrow too, all lost. So you got that abortion.

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After Women’s Day, men … wake up!

(The New Vision – Saturday, March 8, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s International Women’s Day and we’re all happy to celebrate women in Uganda and around the world, but the truth of the matter is that it’s the men who need to come to terms with who they are and why they’re around, or it’s all for nothing.

This is the strangeness of this big yearly celebration. Women’s Day largely revolves around the hard times women face because their men are so hopeless. Plenty of husbands and fathers don’t pull their weight and don’t understand or care how desperately their families need them.

Now I am not about to beat-up myself or my brothers everywhere because I have nothing better to do. The Daughters of Eve are just as fallen as the Sons of Adam. But have an honest look into the homes of Uganda. I’m imagining you see what I see. It’s a bloody mess.

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The long rollercoaster ride of one Ugandan adoption

(The New Vision – Saturday, February 15, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ There’s new joy in our Mukono home these days. Our Ugandan daughter, Hannah, is now legally in our family. She danced when we showed her the formal adoption paper.

This, after waiting more than 500 days. That’s five hundred. Welcome to the world of international adoptions where you need the patience of Job to slog through it all. Adopting a child, especially in Uganda, can be this much of a roller coaster ride.

In our case, we’re Canadians in Uganda since 2005. My wife and I met Hannah in 2009, when she was three, in a Jinja orphanage. When she was barely larger than a cat, she had been found abandoned in an Mbarara hospital. Her family? Unknown.

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Mourning in Uganda with a change of clothes

(The New Vision Online – Monday, April 15, 2013)

JINJA, UGANDA ✦ It’s Monday morning and I sit in a Jinja café wearing a bright tie, blue shirt, navy blazer and brown pants, but I’m wishing I could start the day over and wear black from my neck to my feet, everything as black as the black in Uganda’s flag.

This, as I read the latest news report of Black Monday, the growing citizens campaign pointing out what we already know, that Ugandans need to mourn, to grieve, to be saddened for their deepening losses, losses from thefts of public funds that are key to the wellbeing of this nation.

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We’ll always pay for our actions

(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.

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