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Vox Vitae – November’s Renewal
The month began in silence. Not an emptiness, but the deep breath before speech. October had been a field left resting after harvest. The soil was turned, but waiting. Out of that stillness rises a quieter current: Vox Vitae , the voice of life returning. This space, johandutoit.com , was never built for noise. It is a slow work of remembrance, of faith learning to speak again through the layers of history. Its pulse runs through Huguenot teachers, reformers, and wanderers wh
Johan du Toit
Nov 52 min read


October 10 — Happy Heavenly Birthday, Mamma: The Memorial Opens Tonight
Last night, strikes on energy infrastructure silenced much of the city. Generators hum faintly in the distance; the rest is still. Yet...
Johan du Toit
Oct 102 min read


Jacoba: A Name, a Mantle, a Mission
It is just before midnight in Kyiv. The sirens have begun again, that familiar wail that threads its way through every conversation,...
Johan du Toit
Oct 94 min read


October 8 — Retracing Her Footsteps: A Journey Through Ukraine
The two photos say what time cannot conceal:my mother, eighteen, fresh from high school, standing on the edge of her life’s beginning,...
Johan du Toit
Oct 83 min read


A Promise Made, A Journey Begun
Four years ago, I made a promise. It was simple in words, weighty in meaning: to tell my mother’s story. Not as a monument in marble, but...
Johan du Toit
Oct 71 min read


Go Tell It on the Mountain: An October Witness
“The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty” (Psalm 90:10). So prayed Moses, measuring the brevity of days...
Johan du Toit
Oct 33 min read


Living and Writing in Ukraine Today
It is the silence I notice most. Not the quiet of peace, which is open and full of breath, but the held silence between sirens, which is...
Johan du Toit
Oct 22 min read


Memory, Legacy, and a Promise Kept
The moment is etched into the canvas of my consciousness. I stood at a bus stop on the road to Berlin, the anonymous hum of traffic in my...
Johan du Toit
Oct 12 min read


On Resilience: A Refusal to Cede the Last Word
Resilience is not a word I pluck from a textbook, nor a slogan for a poster. It is the sound of sirens that cleaves the night at two in...
Johan du Toit
Oct 12 min read
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