Тепер мрія має номерOn the first Faculty Development Program I created and delivered, a certificate from Lviv, and a dream carried to Nairobi A certificate arrived from Lviv this week. Number 0009790. Visiting Professor Program, Lviv Polytechnic National University, from 23 March 2026 to 23 June 2026, a course of 60 hours for the faculty…

On what people get wrong when they say “AI did it,” and what my students and my mentors taught me instead. People often look at the work and say, “AI did that.” I always answer yes. AI co-creates with me. But then I ask them to read the letters again, because there is a “+”…

On the night I left Kamloops, I had just finished teaching my final in person class of 2026 at TRU. Fall is my non-teaching term, the season I keep for research and service, so this evening carried that particular feeling of one chapter (21 years of in-person teaching in Canada) closing while another quietly begins.…

Earlier I wrote about our small Kamloops safari to Isobel Lake, where the big game was a herd of cattle and the gentle residents were a goose family on the water. The weekend before I fly to Nairobi, we went on a bigger safari still. Mama, Oksana, and Svitlana and I packed up and drove…

This week I fly to Nairobi for a conference, to the land of the true safari. But before any of that, on a Friday after work, I went on a different kind of safari, closer to home, and in many ways closer to my heart. I took Mama Lidia to Isobel Lake. If you have…

On my bed this week, laid out on a checkered cloth, sit the small documents that make a big journey possible: a Canadian passport, a Republic of Kenya eTA, a TMVC International Certificate of Vaccinations, and the familiar yellow International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Looked at one way, it is just paperwork. Looked at…

Sometimes the planet sends a small thank you note back. This time it arrived for all of us at once. A few weeks ago I wrote a story about the 29th annual Trash Bash at TRU. It was a quiet, ordinary morning that turned into a curriculum: bending down again and again near the Science…

This year I had the privilege of serving as Agency Field Instructor for two BSW practicum students whose self-directed research practicum redefined what community-based learning can look like: Brittney Fletcher and Tamarau Bingila.In a self-directed research practicum, students don’t slot into a single agency. They build their own path, mapping community resources, conducting informational interviews…

I spent this spring studying our city’s strengths. Here is what I found, and why it gave me hope. Kamloops takes its name from the Secwépemctsín word for “where the rivers meet,” the confluence of the North and South Thompson at the heart of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc territory. That meeting place is both the city’s…

One year ago, Kamloops gathered in a university classroom to bear witness. We watched Standing Free together, asked Maxim Khomenko our questions, and turned a documentary screening into direct support for Ukraine. That evening, the distance between Kamloops and the frontlines disappeared for two hours. On Friday, June 12, 2026, it disappears again. And this…

Somewhere in Kamloops right now, a student is finishing an assignment between hospital visits. A neighbour is cooking a second dinner to drop off down the street. A son is helping his mother with her medications before heading to his evening shift. A parent is studying for an exam with a toddler asleep on their…

When a firefighter answers an alarm in British Columbia, a paramedic takes a call in Kentucky, or a rescue crew launches into the Black Sea from a Ukrainian port, something deeper than training carries them through. Behind every uniform is a set of values that sustains people through the hardest moments of their work and…