My post office adventures are turning into a bit of a thing! This one is about our local post office, on campus at St John’s not the big one in town. Our campus post office is tiny, with just one worker, and the worker has changed again. First there was […]
The issue of women changing their names when they married resurfaced in 2014 when Amal Alamuddin decided to add George Clooney’s surname to hers when she married him. There are questions of professional and personal identity at stake, as well as the troubling history that changing a woman’s name was […]
Laurinda, Alice Pung Alice Pung’s Laurinda is the brilliant Asian version of Looking for Alibrandi in some ways, and indeed Pung credits Melina Marchetta in the acknowledgements (along with John Marsden — what Aussie reader or writer of our generation wouldn’t?). On the surface, both are about an ‘ethnic’ girl […]
A devotional experience Arthur and I have enjoyed in recent months has been memorising and singing Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart. It’s from Cardiphonia’s Pentecost album. It’s a good prayer heading into the new year too. Spirit of God, descend upon my heart Wean it from earth; through […]
What might be blindingly obvious to a westerner is less clear to a Tanzanian, but it goes back the other way as well. I skyped with a homegroup in Adelaide recently and I was saying that one of the ways in which we are cultural babies in Tanzania is that […]
Christmas is a time of great joy, but not because we ignore the hard and hurtful things. Christmas is a time of great joy because God has not left us in this on our own; he has joined us that he might heal us. Thanks to The Advent Project for […]
The Chinese are everywhere in Tanzania, from mobile phones to Christmas decorations to infrastructure. The University of Dodoma has a whole department dedicated to the study of Chinese language and culture. Richard Dowden says in Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, “Where the West sees Africa as the place to make […]
Meet Jesus at uni 