I have memories of teaching with my back to a window and all of a sudden a gun battle erupts on the street right behind me.

And I watch my students drop to the floor and roll into the corner to hide from the bullets.

And I'm thinking, no one ever taught me how to respond to this.

Like this was not part of my PhD training.

Like when they teach you how to become a university prof,

they don't tell you what to do in case of gunfire.

Welcome, everybody.

This is Simon Gilbo with Inspired.

It's great to be back for another week.

Another fantastic guest.

Basically, if you're new to inspired, it's all about telling, well, stories of faith in the fire of overcoming through difficult challenges, some of the sucker punches of life.

And we are bombarded with so much bad news and depressing stuff.

So this is fighting that against that.

And it's obviously hitting the spot because so many of you are tuning in and passing on to Mates, which I'm thrilled about because that's what we wanted. And this week I've got a very good buddy. He's been through a lot of stuff. We've shared some of the journey in Burundi and I'm thrilled to have with us, George Watts. Welcome, George. Thank you, Simon. It's a pleasure for me to be here.

Brilliant. And you're talking to me from Kenya right now. And yeah, we're going to get to a whole load of stuff. But why don't we start? What I love about these is I get my friends in is I learn loads because even with good buddies, you don't sort of necessarily say, hey, tell us about your childhood.

So let's go right back, you know, salient moments.

Give us a bit of context, your background.

Sure.

So I was born in Canada.

I'm Canadian.

I was born in a tiny little village way up northern Saskatchewan.

My dad was a pastor at the time.

...