A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

National Theatre, Tegucigalpa Our Cuso International training continues, launched on this particular day with a heavy morning session with Honduran journalist Iris Mencia. You have to be brave to be a boat-rocking journalist in Honduras, and she fit the bill. She gave us a frank and eye-opening introduction to the rough and tumble history of her country, especially since the 2009 coup that ousted former president Manuel Zelaya.  But Iris also turned out to be lots of fun and a local celebrity to boot, bundling us into a taxi in the afternoon for a walking tour of downtown Tegucigalpa in which she seemed to know virtually everyone we passed. She even convinced the security guard at the 1912 National Theatre to let us wander around the place even though it was closed. And she plays the melodica. How can you not take a shine to anyone who plays the melodica? My partner and I have travelled a  lot in Mexico and had wondered whether Honduras would feel similar. But Tegucig...

We started our in-country training today at the Cuso International office here in Tegucigalpa. Other volunteers had warned me that what we would learn in the "security issues" portion of the day would be scary, and it was. Then again, I've been reading Honduran newspapers on-line for months now to get ready for coming here, and it had dawned on me quite some time ago that things would be a little different in my new land compared to good ol' Victoria. As it turns out, the people who bear the brunt of the violence in Honduras are generally either participants of the drug trade or regular Hondurans trying to go about their daily lives. Attacks on foreigners like us are rare. Sadly, the reason for that is because it's known that foreigners might actually have connections somewhere who could help them or cause trouble for the perpetrators, while the Hondurans really don't have anybody. In practice, what this means is that in the big cities at least, people wh...

Victoria to San Francisco, San Francisco to Houston, Houston to Tegucigalpa. It took a couple days to get here, but we have arrived in the capital of Honduras, to begin what will ultimately be at least a year and more likely two of living and working here. We arrived a mere four hours ago, but already I feel huge relief just to see the place. Few things are worse than reading all the crazy news stories from afar about events in Honduras - it started to feel like we were on a suicide mission. Instead, we arrived at a perfectly nice airport in what appears to be a perfectly nice city, albeit one that even the locals warn us not to go wandering around at night. But we did brave a short walk to the Mas Por Menos supermercado  near our little Hotel Alsacia, a charming blink-and-you-miss-it guest house that Cuso International has put us up at while we take the "in-country" training to get ready for the work I'll be doing with the Comision de Social Accion de Menonita in ...

Loads of fun at last night's farewell party, but the cold light of day brings a disastrous looking house and just three brief days to get things under control. We have grown ruthless in our sorting. I took sleeping bags and blankets to Our Place today, and dropped off old bits and pieces of audio equipment and a dead Mac to the computer recycling place. I've lost track of how many bags of stuff I've hauled out of here, yet more just keep piling up. The ridiculous amount of coat hangers we bagged up this afternoon highlight just how ridiculous an amount of clothes hung in our closets. A young fellow at the bottle depot when I dropped off the electronics rushed over to my little pile like I'd brought gold, and took virtually everything. These seem like hungry times - put anything at the curb, like my partner's mildering and badly neglected golf clubs in their spider-filled bag that's been outside in the shed for the last six years, and they're gone in an ...

Should you ever decide to pack it all in and move to a distant land, let me tell you, the final week of preparation is hell. My partner and I are both tense and strained-looking. We're still talking, but in short, monosyllabic sentences that seem as stripped down as our house, which is somehow devoid of stuff yet more cluttered than it has ever been. All routines have been turned on their end,  and every day is full of a long list of tasks that never seems finished. ("Pots to Rachelle's house"; "Costco run"; "Notify bank so Mom can deposit my paycheque"; "Photos to SD card"; "Clean oven"; "Pick up malaria drugs" - you get the picture.) Of course, my deadline personality hasn't helped. Why, for instance, did we wait until a few weeks before leaving for Honduras to decide to get our wills done? Why did I wait until Jan. 4 to make a video with a friend recovering from cancer, when we could have done it two or three...

Thanks for some very nice comments, blog readers! It was great to hear from people. I hope you hang in with me as my writing shifts to a more Honduran flavour. Somebody asked about getting in touch with me by email: Please use jodypatersonmobile@gmail.com, as the Shaw address will be gone by the end of next week. Comments on this blog are now coming through that email, so that works too. Farewell party/fundraiser coming up next Wednesday, Jan. 11 - drop by if you can, 6-10 p.m. at the Garry Oak Room (1335 Thurlow Rd) of Fairfield Community Centre. A very talented, engaging trio of musicians - my daughter Rachelle Reath, her partner Aaron Watson and fabulous trumpet player Alfons Fear - will be providing the music at what I'm figuring will be a great big cocktail party full of people I know. How nice is that? My cousin and her husband Toni and Lee Burton will be tending bar. We opted to raise a little money on our way out the door for PEERS Victoria and Cuso International (my pa...

My final TC column! Weird. Come to our farewell party/fundraiser next week to say goodbye - Jan. 11, 6-10 p.m. at the Garry Oak Room of Fairfield Community Centre, 1335 Thurlow.  Folks, it has been an amazing ride. But 14 years have passed since I was first given the privilege of writing a regular column for the Times Colonist. I’ve written 1,800 or so columns, and logged 1.4 million words on a vast number of subjects. And it’s time to go. I bless my lucky stars for a series of bosses who let me write whatever the heck I wanted all these years. I’m grateful for the sheer luck of living in a time and place where our governments know they have to tolerate people like me nipping at them in the name of free speech. But mostly I’m thankful to you, dear reader. Your willingness to share your opinions, criticisms, encouragement and life stories with me has made all the difference.  Back when I was writing four times a week, readers’ tips accounted for at least half...

Here I am, posting a Margaret Wente column.  Her sheer contrariness, not to mention her privileged viewpoint that she rarely acknowledges, generally rub me the wrong way. But today she wrote on an issue that we obviously share indignation over: The soaring pay of Canada's CEOs. As she notes in the column, a private company has the right to pay its boss whatever it wants. But tying salaries to stock options has screwed things up. It motivates CEOs to do things for all the wrong reasons. And with governments now tying their own managerial salaries to private-sector salaries, things are getting way out of hand. And here's the TC's editorial from yesterday on the same subject: Both the editorial and Wente's column are based on a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.  Rising inequality demands debate     TIMES COLONIST JANUARY 4, 2012     How much is too much? It's time to ask that question about income inequ...

Well, this story from today's Victoria Times Colonist certainly does raise more questions than it answers.  I can't decide which is my favourite outrageous fact - that VIHA thinks things will be fixed now just because its new policy establishes there will be at least two women in any mixed-gender hospital room (how does adding an extra woman prevent a patient from being assaulted by one of the two men who might also be in the same room?), or the revelation that the OLD policy had no provisions for ensuring "patients with known violent behaviour, mental health issues or known tendencies to inappropriate sexual behaviour" weren't being placed in mixed-gender rooms.  Come to think of it, that last point is much bigger than gender. Is the hospital telling us they don't even consider big stuff like that before packing patients into a four-bed ward with strangers?  I get that the mixed-gender wards are a more effective use of hospital space, and tha...

A blog reader asked me if I had any advice for finding common ground between pack rat and ditcher, given that is exactly what is being attempted in our house at this moment as we fold the place up. I'm the ditcher, the one who has no problem getting rid of things. Keep that in mind when reading this, because I fully acknowledge it's from a ditcher's perspective. And let's presume I'm giving this advice for a pack rat-ditcher couple in which the pack rat does want the end result, even though it's going to be painful getting there. I've got nothing against pack rats as as general rule, but if you want to fold up your house in order to be able to travel the world freely, then it's pretty clear that a ditcher ethos simply has to prevail. So a motivated pack rat is essential. I have no idea how you'd convince a pack rat to part with their stuff if they'd yet to buy into the concept. OK, advice. First, the ditcher has to recognize that it's...