Ready for an update on the Community Garden that continues to grow and thrive? It has been 10 days since i shared the story about The Little Garden That Could. That feels way too recent to be writing any more about it. And yet so much has happened. If you are following me on Instagram, you will know that i have already made five different posts about the garden, which is a lot in [...]
How does one go about creating Eden? Especially when the story starts something like: Once upon a time there was a wasteland, a dry and barren verge of ugliness in a small corner of Diep River. Well, the first step is to have a dream and my wife Valerie [aka tbV or The Beautiful Val, to me!] and i had been wanting to do something creative and gardeny in our community since we moved [...]
It's time for the Valerie Kondo Experince... i don't really know who Marie Kondo is. i haven't watched her show. Something to do with decluttering your life and home and work space i believe. But this week, when tbV [aka the beautiful Val] shared her latest idea with me, she was the first person to came to mind. Val has decided on an eight week project of clearing out the things, which i wanted [...]
i think this is my most embarrassing photo ever [and for me, that's saying a lot]. i call it my fat face photo and i keep it to remind me of a time when my face was about as wide as it was long. This is me in Umtata in 2002 and clearly it wasn't an epidemic of weighty proportions, because by Umtata 2003 i'm looking pretty healthy and average sized again... [...]
Where do you begin talking about the first ever Justice Conference South Africa? Maybe you start with a huge shout out to your wife, Valerie [aka tbV which stands for The Beautiful Val and is only not awkward when i am the one calling her that] who was in charge of bringing the whole thing together and did an incredible job at that. Or Craig Stewart whose dream it was and who invited Val to [...]
"You can be anything you want to be!" is a lie some parents tell their children. Take a member of the Proteas cricket team for example. There are 11 players on a team. So the moment the 12th enthusiastic parent tells their child, "You can be a member of the Proteas cricket team if you want to be", something has gone wrong, unless they quickly add, "as twelfth man, serving them drinks". Because some things [...]
What a powerful end to 2015! At the end of most normal years, if there is such a thing, i imagine tbV and i would have tried to find a few days off to just chill and recover from what has been a busy, crazy, challenging, great and difficult year. But this year we decided to finish strong. And that has made all the difference. […]
My friend Nkosi has written for me a number of times on this blog and so it was a great privilege to have him around for a special meal on Friday night with some friends, that i wrote about over here, and i asked him to share some of his impressions from the evening: Conversation is an integral part of transformation. It was for this reason that I went to Brett's house together with Monde [...]
So i think i have a different understanding and idea of church than a number of people i know. And my picture of what church is feels a lot bigger, rather than smaller, than some other peoples. i am not saying that the Sunday church local congregation vibe is not church, but i am suggesting that maybe it is more than that. One example for me has always been so-called 'para-church' organisations like Scripture Union and [...]
if you stopped reading after the 'b' this becomes a completely different post... so don't. the beautiful Val, in case you didn't know, and yes only i get to call her that and really mean it in the way i do. [you can of course refer to her as 'tbV' th0ugh, and i love it when other people do, but it has also been fun to me through the years how so many of you have [...]
