This Sunday we went back to the broke down Church spot for Sunday service. We didn’t go last week, and our absence was apparently felt. Several people had asked if we were coming this week, so we made every effort to comply. I had mixed feelings about going though. How can I put this delicately? […]
Last night I was watching Malcolm X with Marshall, and there was a portion of the movie that I had never recalled seeing. Little Malcolm was sitting in the classroom of his foster home being admonished by one of his teachers. “Now Malcolm, you’ve written that you want to be a lawyer when you grow […]
Last week one of my girls walked up to me and told me that she was not coming to the SCAB program anymore. My heart dropped. “Why not?” I asked furtively. “Did I do something?” “Oh no, Ms. Malaka.” “Then why?” I pressed. “I’ll tell you afterwards,” she promised. I was on edge for the […]
Move over Cesar Millan! There’s a new canine charmer in town, and his name is Stone Grant. There is only one thing my son loves more than the outdoors, and that’s putting the outdoors in his mouth. Previously I would merely grimace when he put bits of pinecone and rose petals in his mouth, […]
Because it darn well ain’t the classroom of the present, that’s for sure. See this shack? This is an appendage to the YMCA/Church/theater. This is where the kids are supposed to be having lessons, once it’s ‘cleaned up’. Nuh uh. This room doesn’t need cleaning up – it needs a torch set to it. There […]
Eii A-Fri-Ca! Just when I thought South Africa possessed more sophistication than the rest of the continent, The natives have gone and proved me wrong! Now that I have earned the confidence of the women’s inner circle, they give me snippets of what’s really going down in the community. Sadly as fate would have it, […]
It would be a stretch for me to say that I ‘love’ anyone of my South African kids, in the sense that we understand love in the West; but it would certainly be fair however to say that they have arrested my heart. I’d heard the term “arrested heart” before, and never really understood what it meant. […]
American Reader: You know how it is, don’t you? Our country has this innate ‘can do’ spirit that is so formidable that it sometimes comes across as obnoxious. For whatever reason, we largely believe that we can solve the world’s problems…even though we’re hardly able to solve our own. Amazingly, there are just enough people […]
I would never insult your intelligence, Reader, by assuming that you are unfamiliar with South Africa’s apartheid past, so suffice it to say that it was brutal to say the least. Apartheid was a wicked, insidious regime that made portions of America’s civil rights struggle look like a scene from an animated Disney movie. Fortunately, […]