It’s time

Time is a funny thing. We tend to believe that we have more than we do but wish we had more even when we misuse what we’ve been given. Then there’s that strange sensation of going back in time, at least when flying through time zones from one side of the ocean to the other. […]
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En route to the pages of Anne Frank’s diary

We were all on the big bed – this is how we often watch videos on the computer – and it was a 27-minute feature on Anne Frank, the German-Jewish girl in Holland who wanted more than anything to be a writer and, strangely, became just that after her diary was published sometime after she succumbed […]
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Back-to-school time — in Uganda

We’re in the air again, my family and me and today’s newspaper. This time it’s the Daily Telegraph, dominated on Page 14 by a large ad for the latest iPad. Beside it, a smaller story on how one in four U.K. teachers wouldn’t send their own kids to the schools they teach in. And below, a brief about a Pediatrics Journal study that shows obese youth don’t think so well.
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New hope not to become a moron

SANTA FE, N.M. I’m in America’s oldest state capital, in Café Olé, with a sandwich and drink and new hope to never become a moron. Here for some postgrad studies, I’m also enjoying a recent copy of America’s satirical news tabloid, The Onion. “Nation’s Morons March on Washington State,” is its banner headline. Thousands of morons, the Onion reports, recently marched in Washington State thinking they were actually in Washington, D.C.
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Konymania: this is not Uganda’s reality

LONDON — The world is getting faster. And stranger. Have you noticed? This is what I know. I think. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to know what we know. Take Joseph Kony. He’s someone who, thanks to social media, you likely know. I’m betting you know Kony is that Ugandan warlord with a strangely genteel face, that he’s abducted thousands of Ugandan boys and stole their souls when he made them into so-called soldiers.
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Hands across the oceans

Continents apart, generations and circumstance between them, hands always tell the stories.
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Learning trust in a suspicious world

Your mother is dead. Divorce knocks. Your son is lost. It’s cancer. You’re laid off. You’ve broken up. The car crash. You can’t stomach it all. Trust?
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The joy of reading is a quest for learning

I think of what Saint Augustine said: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
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The JFK-Obama-Messiah factor

In Berlin, both presidents had watershed moments, and both are revered.
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The lessons of the Lunatic Express

It's not the Glacier Express climbing through the Swiss Alps. It's not Vietnam's Reunification Express winding into the more exotic jungles of the world. And it's certainly not the Orient Express, that legendary locomotive of opulence and intrigue immortalized by Agatha Christie.
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A face only a mother could love

Nowadays you just gotta love the skin you re in no matter what it s made of.
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The view from 50,000 feet

SALZBURG, AUSTRIA ✦ I love my daughter, all 15 months of her, for many reasons. One is that she’s more like her mother than me. Especially while flying. My wife Jean and I continue to be aid workers in the Middle East and Africa, so this is often. In fact, diaper-clad Elizabeth Katherine has already been on more than dozen flights and four continents. The Squirt knows one word. Just one. It’s “hello.” But words can be powerful things.
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Somewhere between Hamilton and Sana’a

Today, Jean and I, with our bright-eyed bambino, Elizabeth, are on a jet plane flying back to Yemen. Our condo in Ancaster is again a speck that has disappeared over the horizon.
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A daughter of the world

(The Hamilton Spectator - Friday, June 20, 2003) Nobody knew. Prior to the birth of our first child, two weeks ago today at St. Joseph’s Hospital here in Hamilton, Jean and I kept her name, Elizabeth top-secret from absolutely everyone. “It’s from the Bible and it’s not Dorcas,” is all I would reveal, before adding, “If and when we have a boy, we have a biblical name for him too. And it’s not Nimrod.” So imagine the confirmation we felt when, prior to our return to Canada for the delivery, some western friends in Yemen said good-bye to us by reading the biblical story of Elizabeth.
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