A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Pick a project to move us off the "stuckness" April 25, 2008 We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets. So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to. Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home). “There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to...

Redirect bottles and cans to binners April 18, 2008 We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke. But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one. So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time. Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change. Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic ...

Problems are fixed when people have a place to live April 11, 2008 They call him Ishmael, and he’s OK with that. “Ishmael, the unwanted child,” he explains, pulling a Bible from his backpack as he tells the story of Abraham’s outcast son. He picked up the nickname while living in Toronto’s infamous Tent City a few years ago. He liked that people found it easier to pronounce than his given name, and that they weren’t always asking him how to spell it. So “Ishmael” it was. He built his house in Tent City for the grand total of $200, scrounging most of the materials out of other people’s garbage. As we chat in the coffee shop at the University of Victoria library, he brings out his laptop to show me photos of his little dream house from that period - a tidy, tiny structure complete with granite and marble floors, a woodstove, an outhouse, and a rosemary bush thriving in the front garden (photo above). The media were reporting hundreds of people living in Tent City back in those days, but ...

Thanks for the great feedback on homeless issues! April 4, 2008 Many thanks to everyone who responded to my column last week speculating whether my stories from Victoria’s streets were wearing thin on readers. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and I can’t tell you how nice it was to read so many inspiring and heartfelt stories about people’s own thoughts and experiences around homelessness. All told, I got 226 e-mails, seven letters and a couple of phone calls. That’s easily 20 times the response I’d normally get even for a column that really struck a chord with readers, so the abundance of feedback alone was immensely heartening. Only nine readers wanted me to give up the issue altogether, and I classified another nine as “not sure.” So that leaves 218 who urged me to carry on, all of whom were obviously very passionate about the issue themselves. (Of course, let’s acknowledge the inherent flaws of a poll asking whether people are still reading, in which only those who still...

Banging my head on the homeless wall March 28, 2008 For the 12 years I’ve been a columnist, I’ve worked at trying to keep my topics diverse. I put a lot of importance on variety, having always figured readers tire quickly of a one-trick pony. So it hasn’t been an easy choice to settle exclusively on homelessness these past five months. I’m still not sure what I hoped to accomplish by doing it, or whether anything will change as a result. That last part is probably what worries me the most. What I hoped would happen was that the stories I told would somehow play a part in moving things along around street issues - that people would read them and come to understand how 1,500 people have ended up living on our streets, and how little of it has to do with them being too lazy to get a job. But are people reading? Are the unconvinced being swayed? Has anything changed? Such are the questions that keep a columnist up at night. Those who share my passion for the issue would presumably agree w...

Family devastated by late-life addiction March 21, 2008 We pull up kitchen chairs in her little bachelor suite, and she apologizes for not being able to offer a more comfortable seat. It’s a tight fit for two in the tiny seniors’ apartment. She’ll soon be 77, and up until a couple years ago believed that she’d reached a point in her life where things had more or less settled out. With her seven kids grown up with lives of their own, she was looking forward to an uneventful old age. Her first sense that she might be wrong about that was at the family’s annual campout in 2005. Her 46-year-old son, always a bit of a hothead, flew into a fit of temper of grand proportions. Another son told her the problem was cocaine. She didn’t believe it at first. But then relatives came from Australia to visit that same year, and her son showed up looking sick in a way that really alarmed her. “That’s when I started to wonder,” she acknowledges now. As it turned out, her son had developed a severe addic...

Lessons from Mexico on homelessness March 14, 2008 Mexico has had my heart for the better part of 10 years now, so I’m no longer surprised at a feeling of coming “home” any time I holiday there. But given my current fascination with all things homeless, my most recent holiday down south also brought to my attention the dramatic differences in the way our two countries handle poverty issues. Mexico is on its way up economically, but it’s got a long way to go before its citizens have it as good as a typical Canadian. While the babies aren’t dying as often and people are living much longer, Mexico remains a country with considerable problems. Still, there are lessons to be learned from Mexico around managing homelessness. When a region as privileged as ours has more visible evidence of poverty than a developing nation like Mexico, that’s a sign that something’s seriously amiss. Life is no holiday for a lot of Mexicans, so I want to be careful not to come across as a Pollyanna type w...

"Temporary" food bank sees no end in sight March 7, 2008 Noon is approaching, and the lineups have slowed to a trickle. The little food bank at St. John the Divine Church closes at noon, so the regulars know to come early. Anne Henderson is one of several St. John congregation members who volunteer at the church’s food bank every Tuesday and Friday. A 10-year veteran of the work, Henderson admits to feeling increasingly discouraged. “Seeing the young people is hard,” says Henderson. “They come in looking like relatively nice kids, but they’ve obviously got pain in their lives. They can’t get any income assistance because they have no work history. “Pretty soon, they’re into the drugs because of their pain. Six months later, you see them in here looking so lost.” The food bank was intended as a temporary measure in a time of crisis when it first started. But 15 years on, the need has only grown. “We’ve all gotten a little older, a little more tired, and a little shorter of m...

Recovery sparks drive to do more for others Feb. 29, 2008 By the time Thea dragged herself into the health authority’s drug and alcohol centre on Quadra Street in November, she was drinking so heavily that death was looking like a terrifying possibility. The 35-year-old was knocking back a bottle of vodka, two bottles of wine, a six-pack of coolers and a bottle of Baby Duck every day by that point. “And using heroin and crack on top of that,” Thea recalls. “If that’s not a cry for help, what is?” What she needed was a detox bed. What she got was an appointment for two months down the road to see a drug counsellor, who would then decide whether to refer her to one of the region’s scarce detox placements. “I told the guy I didn’t have two months - hell, I didn’t have two hours,” says Thea. “But it didn’t change anything. I remember crying on the phone to my friend, telling her, ‘They can’t help me.’” That night, Thea called her sister in Chilliwack and begged to use her address in order ...

Respite from the streets Feb. 22, 2008 We’re an unusual group of travellers assembling on this rainy morning outside Our Place street drop-in, and we’re bound for an unlikely destination: A nun’s retreat in East Sooke. We load into the rental van with our morning faces on, some of us just waking up and others so worn out from being up all night that they’re practically asleep in their seats before the van even gets moving. In the driver’s seat: Margaret O’Donnell, the good-hearted woman who is leading us on this adventure. O’Donnell worked with Our Place to launch the monthly retreats to Glenairley last April, moved to action by findings of a regional spiritual-health survey that identified spirituality as the missing piece in the recovery process for people living on or near the streets. Beside her sits Lynn, a newcomer who is clearly anxious about being there. Margaret pats her hand and keeps her close. Fred and Ginette cuddle up in the next row of seats, having become a couple sinc...