A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Parque Central decked out for Christmas and the end of the Mayan calendar Feliz Navidad a todos as the festive season closes in. And if the world must end, may it be as sunny and as pleasant as it is right now in Copan. We'll be out at the Copan Ruinas archaeological site tomorrow night with the rest of the crowds just in case there's something to this end-of-the-world business. Might as well have ringside seats. But I'm counting on the experts and the Mayan people to be right about the whole thing being a trumped-up myth. We're leaving on Saturday for two weeks of enjoying the Caribbean beaches of Honduras, so I'd hate to think the world might end before we fit that in. I don't expect to be blogging much in the next while, what with all the travelling, snorkelling, lying around in the sun with a good book and other forms of merriment. My son and his family are here visiting until mid-January and  I want to free up as much time as possible to help them e...

Copan Christmas elves I was sitting by the pool today, sipping a cerveza and thinking about what a very different Christmas I’ll be having this year. This is my first Christmas ever outside of Canada.  I’m not the type to make too big a deal out of Christmas, but I did have a few rituals around the season. The absence of those rituals this year is making me newly aware of the ones I’m missing and the ones I never did take much of a shine to. Cold weather, for instance. Maybe I dreamed of a white Christmas a few times as a kid, but that desire pretty much went away once I started to drive a car and work for a living. Yes, it’s a little harder to summon Christmas feelings while lying poolside, despite the colourful light display at one of the local drinking holes I walked past on the way home and the inflatable snowman on a neighbour’s roof.  But I will be perfectly happy Christmas morning to throw the doors open and breathe in warm, tropical air. I also don’t ...

http://straightfresh.net/editorial-racism-the-war-on-drugs-2/ A good read from the always engaging Richard Branson, this time on the senseless "war on drugs." Hope I live long enough to see us shake off that grand bit of foolishness, but I'm not counting on it. I come from British Columbia, a land where the marijuana grows so abundantly and well that the veteran growers driving that $6-billion-industry would be winning agricultural awards and international acclaim for their products were it any other crop.  Now I live in Honduras, a country situated halfway between the world’s largest cocaine producer and the world’s largest market for cocaine. Could there be two better examples of the utter failure of the war on drugs? We've been hard at it for more than 40 years now, and the result of all that effort is that more people than ever are using drugs, selling drugs, going to jail for drugs,  getting killed over drugs, and making a living from drugs.  Yeah, that...

Imagine the garbage ethos of 1950s-North America overlaid with the acute environmental sensitivity of the modern-day world, and you've got the Honduras dilemma. People are still  dropping garbage on the streets here. They're chucking it out of the windows of their cars. Shredded plastic, rusted tin cans, chip bags and pop bottles are common sights along rivers and creeks, as are garbage-strewn spots along the road that residents without municipal garbage services have turned into dumps. Yet the country also has educated, affluent citizens influenced by the Internet, television and all those other forms of media that carry word of global campaigns to reduce, reuse and recycle. Pushed by countries with 50 or more years of garbage awareness under their belts, the arrival of such campaigns in a pre-Litterbug country creates a confused response. So it is that twice in the last week, I've found myself listening to presentations about reducing the use of plastic bags in Hon...

Celeste, a new arrival at Angelitos I wanted to share the Christmas letter of the young Philadelphia woman who is trying to start a better  foster home/orphanage for the children in Copan. My heart is with the kids at the current children's home,  Angelitos Felices, but my dreams are pinned on Emily Monroe, as her project would definitely be the long-term solution to the endless problems at Angelitos. Orphanages and foster homes are all run in different ways in Honduras - from essentially private operations like Angelitos, which scratches up centavos wherever it can to provide basic care, to well-supported facilities that see the kids through various life stages and even get them into vocational training. The Honduran government has its own orphanages as well, but the media reports on these homes make it clear that they have even more problems than Angelitos. Emily is going about things in all the right ways. She started a day care for impoverished working mother...

You haven't really tested your inner fortitude until you've done a few Honduran meetings. I mean, we're talking a serious endurance test. Fresh from a three-day retreat for the non-profit I work for in Copan Ruinas, I'm newly reminded of the Honduran capacity to just hang in there at meetings and presentations that just go on and on. I even think the people here like it that way. I can't tell you the number of meetings I've been to here at which the fourth or fifth straight hour rolls around and things seem to be finally wrapping up, and just as I presume every participant is as twitchy, inattentive and restless as me, they launch into an enthusiastic question-and-answer session that keeps the meeting going for another hour or more. I found myself grousing quietly to one of my co-workers at the retreat that in Canada, our presenters believe that people need breaks every 90 minutes or their exhausted brains will go on presentation overload and they won'...

The doctor is in at Angelitos Felices I’ve known for a while now that accessing medical care was a challenge for the majority of Hondurans who have to rely on the public system. But it wasn’t until I put in a couple of days as an ad-hoc translator for a U.S. doctor in the villages this week that I fully understood that medical care is as good as non-existent for a whole lot of people. The doctor was part of a faith-based group out of Illinois and Tennessee who were here to build fuel-efficient stoves in three villages around Copan. She hadn’t planned on seeing patients, but word got out fast that there was a doctor among the group and she graciously agreed to see a few people. And they jumped at the chance. On Monday and Tuesday we were in Guarumal, Cabanas, a village of 15 families, and at least nine of those families were in the lineup within 10 minutes of the doctor pulling up a chair on the patio outside a resident’s house. I suspect the other six families would have b...

My boss Merlin Fuentes demonstrates a  miniature version of a fuel-efficient fogon at the Feria Ambiental Oh, what a week it has been - freshly back from a fast holiday in Las Vegas with a couple  of my daughters, now plunged into a week of acting as a kind of tour co-ordinator to a group of 15 Americans who have come to Copan on a mission to help my organization build fuel-efficient  stoves. And just to add to the over-stimulation, it's election day in Honduras today. People have already started streaming into local schools and other polling stations to participate in what is essentially the primaries for the 2013 election. Rumour has it that things get interesting on days like today, when political opinions tend to heat up. Cuso Honduras actually told us volunteers to stay indoors today and stock up on emergency rations, advice that the locals got quite a kick out of when I told them. At any rate, my American friends are counting on me to lead them on a tour of t...

This is the first time I've lived anywhere other than Canada, let alone in a country with such a ferocious reputation for violence that my friends and family are regularly checking in with concerned voices as to whether everything’s fine down here.  Nothing to worry about, I tell them. And I mean that. Despite the endlessly bleak news about Honduras and a truly formidable murder rate, this country has in fact been a very pleasant place to live these past 10 months. The place needs work, absolutely, but this seemingly global need to portray the country as a random killing zone is both cruelly inaccurate and damaging to the people who live here.  A worried friend back home recently asked me about this comment from the latest newsletter of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. In Honduras, “violence is the main strategy for solving any problem, whether it’s related to drugs or not,” said MSF spokesman Javier Rio Navarro. I don't know about you, but t...

Cuso International brought me to Honduras to do communications work for a Honduran non-profit organization, a job that is both strikingly similar and completely different to communications work in Victoria. On the one hand, communications is ultimately about finding effective ways to talk to the people you need to talk to, whether you’re in Honduras, Canada, East Timor or Uzbekistan.  But in Canada that largely means focusing your efforts on those with money or influence, whereas in Honduras the whole game changes because the country doesn’t have a responsive government or much of a culture of philanthropy. One thing that is identical, however, is proposal-writing. That might not be in the job description when you take a communications position, but trust me, you’ll end up doing it sooner or later if you’re working with non-profits. I’m well familiar with that soul-destroying process after seven years of working with Canadian non-profits, and now have enough proposals und...

It’s not often you’d describe a graveyard as a beehive of activity, but the cemetery here in Copan has been these past couple of days as the locals mark Dia de Los Difuntos . Every Latin American country celebrates the Day of the Dead – or Day of the Deceased, as it’s known here – in their own way.  In Honduras it’s a time for heading down to the cemetery to do a big cleanup of your loved one’s grave. There can’t be much budget in a poor country for maintenance staff at cemeteries, so it’s a chance for family members to spruce things up while honouring the memory of the mothers, fathers, grandparents and children buried there. The Copan cemetery is a five-minute walk from where I live, and I headed over early yesterday morning to check out the activities. Some 15 families were already hard at work. Many more would come over the course of the next two days. Some families just needed to freshen up the flowers a little or clear out a few weeds. But others were in the mids...

I have a new appreciation for the politics of dogs since moving to Honduras. Our beloved dog Jack taught me a lot about the ways of dogs during 14 years of enjoying his company, but I'm seeing a whole new side to them now that I live in a place where they largely set their own rules. The most obvious downside to life as a Copan dog is that virtually all of them look like they're starving to death. Whatever traces of wolf remain in the domesticated dog of today, the ability to hunt down food appears to have been reduced to a desperate rooting through garbage in search of  scant leftovers of tortillas and beans. Cats may  turn feral quite easily in the absence of people, but dogs just end up looking sad and hungry. On the upside, a Copan dog does have its freedom. Street dogs and owned dogs alike wander wherever they like. They roam late into the night, barking and howling whenever the urge strikes them and clearly spending very little time worrying how their human nei...

One of the workshops at the Conference on Honduras last week was on cultural differences, a subject I have much interest in now that I live here. It gave me lots to think about, including if there are times when a country really ought to consider whether certain aspects of its culture are hindering progress. That probably sounds like a very colonial thing to say. History is littered with countries scarred by invasive cultures that arrived uninvited and proceeded to try to change everything. I´m not endorsing that practice. But surely there´s no harm in a population checking in with its culture from time to time to see if it´s still serving the country well. Understanding the less obvious aspects of Honduras culture is still a work in progress for me. I´ve found the country to be surprisingly welcoming and warm to a foreigner who´s only now getting a grip on the language. But I can´t say as I´ve warmed to everything about life in Honduras. What I heard at the workshop reinf...

I've spent most of the last three days at the Conference On Honduras, an annual event that has grown into something of a Copan institution after relocating here from Washington, DC a decade ago. It was a heartening reminder of what people can accomplish when they care. The conferences are  put together by a volunteer board headed up by Marco Caceres, editor of the on-line English-language newspaper Honduras Weekly . The yearly event started out as a way to showcase the many groups and individuals working at the grassroots level to tackle the complex problems of the country, but it works equally well as a forum for sharing stories, miseries and miracles from the front lines. What brings people to a developing country to try to make a difference? Every person working abroad would have a story for how that came about in their own life,. But I'd guess from the stories I heard at the conference that a striking number involve people who come to Honduras not expecting to stay and...

This one's for my mom, who at this moment is at home in Victoria crying after they delayed her hip-replacement surgery for two more months this morning because of her low iron count. I'm sure it seemed like a perfectly logical decision in the mind of hematologist Dr. X, who has never met my mother. And it probably made sense to Dr. Y as well,  the orthopedic surgeon who has also never met my mother. Unfortunately for her, the news was completely devastating. She was supposed to be having her surgery next week, and on Sunday we'd joked about how she only had 11 more sleeps. I'm a guilt-ridden daughter at this distance when my 87-year-old  mother has a setback like this and the best I can do is buy more Claro minutes to make sure I can call her regularly. I have to take that into account when reflecting on how angry I am about how things are playing out for my mother, because it could just be that what's really troubling me is that I'm far away and can't...

The tortilla masters: Carina and Sofia Yesterday I climbed up to the smoky little half-kitchen that's tucked into an attic-size space at the Copan guardaria  to help a couple of the girls make tortillas. I'd had visions of everyone being fed and ready for a fast visit to the playground when I first arrived, seeing as I needed to get back to work. But it was soon obvious that wasn't going to happen. I don't much like the tortilla room, as there's always smoke hanging heavy in the air from the little "eco-friendly" wood stove that I'm sure would be great if it only had a chimney. But it seemed anti-social to say no when invited along. The girls whipped my butt with their tortilla skills. One, age 10, has been making tortillas for more than six years. She smacked the corn dough quickly between her palms and made perfect, smooth-sided circles every time. The other, 15, is already assuming a motherly role at the children's home, as do all the o...