A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

I find it kind of sweet that people still get caught up in a good old-fashioned doomsday prophecy once in a while. It’s difficult to be certain of anything in this world, so I don’t mean to poke fun at those who believe the apocalypse is coming in 2012. It could be. But what’s charming is that the belief has gained so much traction that even the well-regarded Guardian newspaper in London, England felt the need to run a rather serious story this month featuring a German scholar disputing rumours that the end is nigh. I like that.  We seem all sophisticated and rational as a society, but just below the surface is a wide-eyed kid who still believes in things that go bump in the night. Prepare for a good year on that front regardless of what’s up with the apocalypse, seeing as the ancient Mayans aren’t the only ones predicting intense times in 2012. It seems perverse to wish for disaster. But working ourselves up about a possible apocalypse is obviously something humans en...

I don't know what my new life will be like once we get to Honduras, but right now it seems to be about sorting. That and studying Spanish fill what I used to call "spare time" - the blocks of time in my life when I could do fun things like bird-watching or spend a leisurely couple of hours at the gym. Now, there's only sorting and Spanish, although they have their own charms. Newly able to understand at least most of what I read in the Honduran on-line newspaper I've been checking out, I'm very happy to be finally making good on years of empty promises to myself that I would learn Spanish. But I've been hard at it for almost two months now and taking a two-hour private lesson every week as well, so no surprise that my birding time has suffered. So it goes. The demands of sorting are multi-layered. First, you sort just to put like with like - tools over here, art materials over there, miscellaneous (and oh, there's so much miscellaneous) over by th...

I'm reading Honduran newspapers on-line these days, trying to get a sense for the zeitgeist of the place before we land there Jan. 16. I must say, things feel a little gloomy based on the headlines. But I did a Google News search today to check in on what was going on in Canada, and the long list of bad-news stories reminded that gloom is just what media do all around the world. Of the 16 "top stories" Google News had on offer at the time I searched, 14 were about bad things happening somewhere. A guy dressed up as Santa kills a bunch of people. A Surrey man is shot dead on Christmas Day. Suspicious deaths, missing people, falling polls. Such catastrophic events just seem to be what we consider "news," although I often wonder what we're supposed to do with such news. Do visitors interpret the nature of Canada based on what they see in our media, just as I'm trying to do with Honduras? If they do, we surely seem a much more dangerous country than we a...

Merry Christmas, everyone! This is my antepenultimate column for the Times Colonist. I had to search that word out just to have something fancy to say about my third-to-last opinion piece. I've been writing a column for the paper since 1996, so these are momentous times... I’m on the brink of big changes in my life. Just how much that’s rocking my world sunk in this week when I realized that for the first time ever, I wasn’t going to put up a Christmas tree. My partner and I are moving to Honduras on Jan. 15 to do volunteer work with the Canadian non-profit Cuso International. I’m so distracted by all the preparation for the move that the Christmas process has barely registered on me. Yet it’s also going to be one of my most meaningful Christmases, what with so many people to say goodbye to after 22 years here. There’s nothing quite like change to shake up your life. The Honduras placement is for a year, possibly two - not very long in the grand scheme of things. But...

This story out of Orlando could easily be a satire for The Onion - but no, it's real! I mean, you can't have people just going around feeding poor, hungry people whenever they want.  I like the indignant response from the local police force about how the three people who got arrested had deliberately breached the ordinance. God spare us from the day when people refuse to breach petty ordinances and just leave their fellow citizens to go hungry.

Well, here's confirmation of what many of us have already figured out: Something's really wrong with the RCMP. The new "top cop," RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, was in this morning's Globe promising to take extreme action to end the culture of bullying and history of botched investigations inside the RCMP. What the heck happened to these guys, anyway? When I was a kid, being accepted into the RCMP was like a statement that you were smarter, more ethical, in better shape and certainly more dedicated than the average Canadian. I don't know if that was a myth all along that has now been stripped away by one too many media stories about some drunk, violent, misogynist or otherwise disturbed RCMP officer doing something horrible. Or did something bad happen to what was once a noble profession in the intervening years? At any rate, good luck to the changemakers. The concept of a national, well-trained and highly professional police force still appeals. But...

I'm not a huge fan of the festive season at the best of times, what with the endless pressures to buy something for somebody. This year, it really just seems like an added complication to getting ready for our Honduras departure Jan. 15, as I run out to buy Gastrolyte or some other such specific medicinal product for our travels only to find myself at the far end of a long line of anxious holiday shoppers. (That said, I just had a very nice evening making shortbread and homemade Baileys with my youngest daughter Rachelle last night.) My partner and I are going to Copan Ruinas, in the northeast of Honduras near the Guatemala border. We've never been there, but here's a Flickr stream from a kind stranger who heard about our travels and sent a few shots from her own travels. I've really appreciated getting a glimpse of where we're headed, and having some balance to what is mostly dire news coming out of the beleaguered country. Here in Victoria, we are renters, so ...

It's these kinds of stories that really make me think we're losing our way. When our own government reps don't get how completely offensive it is to Canadians enduring a recession to see their politicians spending like drunken sailors on luxury trips all over the world - well, what does that say? At the very least, this latest spending revelation makes it clear that Peter MacKay has got to go. As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. 

Honduras capital Tegucigalpa, where we'll first land. Just back from an intense five-day training course with Cuso International as we get ready for our departure for Honduras in a month. I admit, I thought I was pretty culturally aware, but it turns out I still had a ton to learn. It's going to be quite a challenge to be working in a new culture, a different language, different issues, much warmer climate (OK, I'm really looking forward to that part), and in a society where I'm definitely going to have to curb my tendencies to just shoot my mouth off about this or that. Fortunately, my not-yet-terrific Spanish language skills should help keep that in check, at least initially. And I'm viewing it as a learning opportunity to feel out communications in a country where speaking up about government, politics, etc has to be done much more cautiously. Part of the Cuso training was a three-hour meeting with a "country resource person,"  which in our case...

This Ottawa Citizen story on the Harper government's increasing control over the federal bureaucracy applies equally in B.C. Our ruling political parties don't even make a pretence at keeping the workings of government at arm's length anymore - it's all just one big spin machine as far as they're concerned. It's a frightening development. The bureaucracy has traditionally kept a steady hand on the wheel of government while the various political parties went about their crazy antics. As pointed out by the author of this report criticizing the centralizing of power in the Prime Minister's Office, corruption is not just a risk but a proven result when political parties treat government like their private resource. 

Are there some parents so awful that they deserve to never see their child again? Probably. But we've got a process for that in Canada, and it doesn't include kidnapping your own child against court orders. I have great sympathy for everyone connected to the saga of the 20-year-old Victoria woman who has just learned that much of what she thought to be true about her life was a lie. She does not even have the name she thought she had; she hasn't heard her real name since she was taken from Toronto by her mother after a 1993 custody fight. The courts will sort out the truth of this crime. There's little served by people like me speculating about the mother, Patricia O'Byrne, who has been accused of taking her little girl, or trying to second-guess an Ontario court decision from 18 years ago. But whatever the details turn out to be, it must be said that a grave injustice has been done to this young woman. What must it feel like, to find out at 20 that the found...

Gee, I've always had a soft spot for Facebook as a way to connect, but now that I see the list of the top status updates in the past year, I'm not so sure if me and my kind are really much of a presence on the social-media site. Happily, I'm not completely out as a Facebook trendsetter - I did have a status update involving the death of Amy Winehouse. Other than that, the top-10 list isn't really resonating with me. As for the listing of the top 10 most-visited fictional character sites, I'm glad to see Bob Esponja made the grade. I might have even visited that site if I'd known it existed. I first saw the Sponge Bob cartoon many years ago while holidaying in Mexico, where he's known as Bob Esponja, and I've never been able to shake my habit of referring to him as Bob the Sponge. My grandkids mock me mercilessly for this. Maybe now they'll think I'm cutting-edge.

My partner and I are heading off to Honduras next month (you heard it here first!) to spend a year or possibly longer on a Cuso International volunteer placement. It's all very exciting, but also a little terrifying what with the abundance of grim statistics and media headlines about Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. But I read this Huffington Post piece   this morning with gratitude and relief. It finally adds some humanity to the country and reminds me of the importance of not listening solely to the naysayers. We leave for the Honduran capital,  Tegucigalpa , in mid-January, and will make our way shortly after that to Copan Ruinas , a small northern town where I'll spend the next year doing communications work for a Honduran agency that partners with Cuso, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita. I'll be posting regularly to my blog during our travels, and am really looking forward to this experience - not to mention solidifying my...

I guess we're accepting that old saying about the rich getting richer as a fact of life, because they definitely are getting richer. In Canada and around the world, the divide between those with money and those of lesser circumstance continues to grow - as this CBC story points out, the average income of the top 10 per cent of wealthy Canadians is now 10 times that of the bottom 10 per cent, up from 8:1 just a few years ago. The trend is consistent throughout OECD countries - the gap is now 14:1 in the U.S. You need only go to a developing country to see where this trend leads: To dramatic increases in visible poverty; an even more fragile economy; higher costs for fewer public services; and a significant rise in security issues for the wealthy. Even the rich lose out when the income gap gets too big, in other words. And yet we continue to bring in government policies (and governments) that worsen this trend, even while our morning newspapers bring us the news of all that i...

Science is an uncertain science. That’s been brought home once more this past week with all the consternation over mammography. “The Screening Mammography Program Saves Lives,” says the headline on the B.C. Cancer Agency’s on-line writeup about mammography, a type of x-ray of the breast that up until days ago was routinely promoted to Canadian women 40 and up as an annual must-have. But the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has rocked the boat big-time with new recommendations that reduce the use of mammography.  The task force has toned down Canada’s 10-year-old guidelines around when to get mammograms. The revised guidelines suggest routine mammograms only for women ages 50 to 74 and even then no more than once every two or three years. No big deal in the grand scheme of things. One less medical appointment to schedule. But it’s disturbing when something that has been sold to us as an absolutely essential health measure suddenly reveals a dark side. The...