Hello Reader, Just yesterday I heard about a Japanese Shinto ritual known as Misogi. Shinto consists of traditional Japanese religious practices. I suppose it is the closest equivalent to what we might broadly call chivanhu in Shona society. What caught my attention was not only Misogi itself, but how differently it seems to be understood in the West. Traditionally, Misogi is a purification ritual involving the cleansing of the body, often with cold water. Yet what I heard described, a modern...
10 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, I was talking to a friend yesterday about my experience exploring ways to monetize my blog, including my venture into helping children learn Shona. As we spoke, I found myself reflecting on something I did in the beginning, and still do a lot today. I read. I read because I like learning from the stories of others. Thanks to the internet, there is an almost limitless amount of knowledge available to us, shared freely by people from all over the world. So I read I followed...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Not so long ago, I came across the idea that you can outperform 99% of people at almost anything if you can master three things: the shame of rejection, the boredom of repetition, and the pain of feedback. That you can beat almost anyone at almost anything if you are willing to fail 20 times in a row, look stupid in front of the people you care about, and keep going long after it has stopped being convenient. Recent conversations with two of my learners brought this back to...
25 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, I was at a school in Harare this week and, as I hurried absent-mindedly down a corridor, I caught sight of a picture that made me look twice. It was a portrait of Robert Francis Prevost, who was elected Pope in 2025. Then it occurred to me that I was walking through a Catholic school. A picture of the Pope on the wall was, in fact, not unusual at all. I am the sort of person who tends to fixate on things I do not fully understand. Seeing that picture reminded me of a public...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, About two years back, I decided to take up a sport, something to get me more active. For a while, I had been worried I was putting on weight quickly. Well, maybe ‘worried’ is too strong a word. Perhaps it was more that I felt I could look better if I were slimmer. And now that I think about it, seeing runners and walkers every morning on my drive to work probably added to the guilt. It made me feel like I was not taking enough responsibility for my health, or at least for...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, I was having a conversation with one of my Shona learners the other day, and we were talking about him being able to say how he feels in Shona. He said he knew how to express most of his feelings, except that he didn’t know how to say he was busy. I was reminded of this conversation recently when I was listening to something about how people are so busy these days. Even children seem to feel the need to be able to express how busy they are. I would have thought everything is...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Yesterday I asked my daughter a riddle I had heard the other day. The riddle A father and son are driving down a highway when they have a crash and the father dies on the spot. The boy is rushed to hospital. The surgeon who walks into the operating room looks at the boy and says, 'I can’t operate on this boy, he is my son.' How is that possible? I scratched my head for a while and came up with the most embarrassing idea. I won’t even share it here. My daughter, on the other...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, This past weekend, I went to watch the movie Michael. The kids were curious. They wanted to understand the man behind the moonwalk, the music, and the performances that felt larger than life. It took me back. I remembered being in boarding school, still very young, maybe about 7. There was this one girl, and my oh my, was she crazy about the pop star. At the beginning of each new term, we would gather around her bed and listen to her obviously made up, wild stories. She would...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Somewhere along the line, I began to notice a pattern within myself. Whenever the weather turned cloudy, I would too. A heaviness would settle in. I became sad, gloomy, and withdrawn. All I wanted was to hide under the covers and wait it out. And oh, how I longed for the sun to break through, because somehow, I just knew I would feel better when it did. For a long time, I did not question it. It was simply something that happened to me. Then one day, I came across a story about...
2 months ago • 2 min read