Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere… Off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are [...]
Frock Coats and Fiddles
Sep 3
Boiling Water
Sep 1
Today feels, for once, what it always has been: the first day of the rest of my life.
Today I squeezed the hands of my second grader and kindergartener as we walked to the big brick school. I calmed their last fears about snack times and bathroom locations, I left them standing silent, eyes soaking in [...]
That story of the boy with the windmills also reminds me of a quote I just added to my favorite quotes page: “If you can talk, you can sing. If you can walk, you can dance.” I came upon the quote in a book in the youth section of the library (now and then I [...]
Get this. A 14-year-old Malawian too poor to have electricity reads a library book with photos of windmills and builds his family one out of a tractor fan, a bicycle wheel, lots of sticks, and I’m not sure what else. And it works. And it now powers his whole home and irrigates his fields. I [...]
Sleeping on your purchases
Aug 27
Yesterday Phoebe bought herself an MP3 player. Six months ago, from a school catalog order, she bought herself a ten-dollar fake phone-slash-radio-slash-personal-organizer, and within 24 hours the radio function malfunctioned. We mailed back the dead electronic gizmo for a full refund, but ever since she’s been searching for a way to play music that’s within [...]
My biggest struggle as a blogger is that I’m a lousy blog-reader myself. Or maybe to put this more positively, I’m extremely good at peeling myself away from the computer to do what I hope pays off better in the long run, like reading library books to my son and playing piano with my daughter.
Now [...]
Sofi has a website!
Aug 20
Here’s how you can directly follow the work of Sofi, profiled in the book. She and many others there in Winterton are hard at work as always, and they finally have a website and newsletters you can subscribe to.
Sofi’s website for the Isibani Community Center
Corina goes to the World Cup
Aug 20
By now the World Cup is old news, and sadly what many people will remember about the world’s biggest soccer tournament being played in Africa is that a bomb went off in Uganda during the final game. For months leading up to the games and during the game, I heard the question, “What difference will [...]
What then should we do?
Aug 18
Advice for…
The Super-Spiritual Dude,
The Local Do-Gooder,
The Security Monger,
The Camera-Tricks Skeptic,
The God-Minimizer,
And The Swamped…
Recognize yourself in any of those posts on our many excuses? What’s your excuse not to care? Or do you care plenty, but feel too swamped to know where to begin? Consider these ideas, and add your own…
Get down on your knees and [...]
In a book review in Prism Magazine, Dr. James Thomas writes the following about Into the Mud: (Click here for the whole review)
…Her stories encourage me with small miracles, but they also confound me with paradoxes and unanswered questions just as life does.This refusal to settle for easy answers and clichés, to walk into the [...]
