A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

        And so it comes to this: Girding my loins for a battle to stop sex work from being declared illegal in Canada. Good grief, my idealistic 30-year-old self would have been gob-smacked to hear she'd grown into a person holding the completely opposite view on prostitution.      It's a long story on how I got from there to here, and you can find more details here if you're curious. But the quick version is that for the last 17 years I've had the pleasure of getting to know many, many people who work in the business. Over time, I learned that my idealistic vision of a world where nobody would ever have to sell access to their bodies was in fact causing violence and suffering against the very people I wanted to help.      For people who share my opinion that the only way to end the violence is to ditch the country's harmful laws around adult, consensual sex work, today is a joyous day. The Supreme Court of Canada has struck dow...

    I just did my first "unfriend" on Facebook. I never would have thought that anybody could get my back up enough to want to unfriend them, because I'm one laid-back person when it comes to allowing people their say. But it turns out that even I have limits.     In my six years on Facebook I've accepted almost anyone as a friend as long as they seemed like a real person. I spent so many years as a "public figure" writing for the Times Colonist that Facebook just seems like an extension of that part of me rather than a fenced-in place that only my genuine friends can access.     I've been completely open to all the wacky ways that my 1,597 pals choose to express themselves on the social media site, and love the whole open-forum feel of the place. I love being connected to a wildly diverse group of people who together represent all points of every spectrum out there.      But I guess that line in the sand was always there even if I did...

  Coquetta    In the wake of the truly awful death of a little dog in our neighbourhood on Sunday, I've had a lot of conversations this week about animal cruelty in Honduras. The poor dog was scalded with boiling water by a restaurant worker trying to shoo her away, and died eight slow, suffering days later from her massive injuries.     The news completely horrified me and virtually all of my Canadian friends, for whom that level of casual animal cruelty is incomprehensible. Were anyone to scald a dog to death in my hometown of Victoria, B.C., I am quite sure there would be something close to riots over the incident, and possibly the need for police protection for the perpetrator.     My Honduran acquaintances, on the other hand, took the scalding as just one of those things that happens sometimes. They made it clear that while they don't endorse such things, they also don't feel moved to do anything about them. One told me his own dog had di...

       Something about being in the capital of Honduras in the runup to Christmas has really brought the income disparity issue home to me. I was in one of the big malls this week looking for books to take back to the Angelitos Felices kids as a gift, and seeing all those shiny $25 children's books that rich Hondurans are buying for their own kids just made me really sad.    The gap between the rich and the poor exists everywhere, of course. In Canada, the average income for the top 20 per cent of the population is 5.5 times as much as the bottom 20 per cent. But in Honduras, the top fifth earn almost 30 times as much as the bottom fifth. (In the U.S. in 2012, incomes for the top 1 per cent grew by 20 per cent compared to a 1 per cent growth for everybody else, creating the biggest income gap since the 1920s.)     Just how much wealth Honduras actually has is never clearer than when you're in Tegucigalpa, where the malls just keep getting bi...

    It’s complicated. I find myself using that phrase a lot these days, pretty much every time a friend from back home asks me my opinion on any of the big issues at play in Honduras.     Were the elections clean? It’s complicated. Which party would best serve Honduras? Complicated. Is it true narco-traficantes are calling all the shots? Well, that’s…complicated. Is the country being ruined by drug trafficking? Sorry, that one’s complicated, too.     You get the picture. I thought I saw the world in shades of grey already, but it took Honduras to introduce me to just how many shades there really are. Even things that I once thought I had nailed in terms of how I felt about them – poverty, child labour, murder, violence – I now find myself rethinking.     A friend sent me an article this week that talked about the vast majority of Hondurans living in “abject poverty." It struck me that while it’s true that millions of people here lack w...

     While we were theoretically confined to the house yesterday due to concerns our organization had about unrest after Sunday's election, we just had to venture out later in the afternoon to see what all the hub-bub was coming from the town square.      Here's a two-minute video  I made of what we saw there, which turned out to be a mix of Nacional supporters celebrating what appears to be a presidential win for the party, and young boys using that as an excuse to light off a whole lot of big firecrackers. Hondurans do love their firecrackers.     The country looks to be a long way from having all the results in even two days after the election. Having seen some TV footage of how they have to do the count, I understand.     Each ballot has to be held up for observers to see who the vote was for and that the back of the ballot has been stamped. And every political position in the country is up for grabs on election day here - t...

    The scene in Tegucigalpa after the 2009 coup Tomorrow is Election Day in Honduras. They have this odd system where every elected position in the entire country is up for grabs on the same day every four years, and I don’t think I’m just imagining that today feels kind of ramped-up and tense, even in quiet little Copan Ruinas.     Politics are politics all over the world, and the strutting and throwing around of money in the runup to the election has been familiar. Canadian parties might not drive hooting and hollering supporters around in the backs of honking trucks playing the party song at top volume, but the pageantry is similar.     But unlike Canada, Honduras has a recent history of playing a little rough in its elections. People have advised us to stay home Monday, the day after the election, just in case things get intense. Cuso International has in fact ordered all of us to stay home, and even the Honduran organization I work for is cl...

    I was having one of those days today that I recognize as the start of my “What is wrong with you people?” stage that I reach sooner or later in every job.     I’m not exactly sure what the triggers are, but I know that once it starts, I find it harder to be Nice Jody and get increasingly intense in all my workplace and social interactions. Paul calls it my “looming” stage, based on my habit of projecting my intensity onto whoever I might be talking with. Usually it makes them quite nervous.     I think the mood starts to kick in when I've been long enough in a job that I can see where mistakes are being made while also recognizing my inability to do anything about that. Twenty years ago when I experienced my first intensity surge, it drove me into management in the belief that I could affect change by getting higher up the ladder. I quickly learned that things are even more intense in the higher ranks and you still don’t have the power to chang...

    New biodigester in Aceituno, Lempira Should the apocalypse come one day, we'd all be well-advised to ride it out with a Honduran campesino.     Picture a typical Canadian in the event of an apocalypse – electricity gone, supermarkets empty, no gas for the car, that sort of thing. We'd be hooped.     Sure, some of us keep backyard gardens, maybe even a few chickens. But it’d be a rare Canadian who could feed themselves even through a short-lived apocalypse. Our country talks a good game about 100-mile diets, but almost a third of our food comes from outside the country and most of us would have a heck of a time accessing the other 70 per cent without transportation and refrigeration.     Not so a rural Honduran. Their diet may not be the most exciting in the world, but virtually all of it is grown a few steps away from their home. And speaking of that home, they can build one out of dirt. Yesterday I visited a woman in her comfy and...

    With less than five months left in my Cuso posting, I'm reflecting more and more on how I'm doing. I have the rather challenging and nebulous task of building capacity in communications for the Honduran non-profit that I work for, and as the end draws nearer I am thinking a lot about how it's gone.      In all honesty, I had only the vaguest idea of what I was supposed to be doing when we arrived in Honduras in January 2012. I had a great title - Communications and Knowledge Management Facilitator - and an idea that I would be doing work similar to what I'd been doing in B.C. for non-profit clients. But everyone with Cuso International had stressed to me that the job would really only become clear after I started working in the country and saw what was needed (and possible).     That certainly turned out to be true, although what I didn't know at the time was that even the organization I would be working with in Honduras would have no real id...

Here's a little video of the scene in the Copan Ruinas cemetery yesterday, Dia de Los Difuntos. This is my favourite Honduran celebration, as it's wonderful to see the graves all painted and decorated, and everyone in such a festive mood as they remember their loved ones. Nothing sombre about Day of the Departed.

    I for one will be very glad when this Rob Ford business is over. He has been an embarrassing and poorly considered choice for Toronto mayor on all kinds of fronts, and whether he did or didn't smoke crack on video is really just one small detail in the long Ford story.     What to do with morally errant politicians? We're all over the map on that one, but for me it mostly comes down to putting the various specifics in context and deciding if the picture of the person who emerges is the kind of person you want running your town, province or country.     For instance, politicians cheating on their spouses. All kinds of factors have to be considered before a voter can conclude there's cause for alarm.     If it's a garden-variety cheat, I'm probably going to be OK with it. Sure, I dream of a world where garden-variety cheating is unnecessary because we're all so happy in our relationships, but for now, I don't think it indicates anything a...

Copan kids heading into the coffee fields at harvest time When I stand in my Canadian shoes, I am an ardent supporter of fair trade – comercio justo as it’s known here in Honduras. Count me in for any practices that try to help small producers in under-developed countries make a decent living from their coffee crops and such. But when I look at fair trade from the perspective of Hondurans, things get a little muddy. That’s especially true around the question of prohibiting child labour. Taking steps to stop children from being forced to work to produce goods for the developed world is, understandably, one of the most fundamental principles of fair trade. Back home in Canada, I took pride in paying more for fair-trade coffee, believing that the extra cost was worth it if it ensured that some struggling family somewhere in the world earned a bit more for their coffee crop and didn't have to send their children into the field like tiny slaves. But like I say, it all just ...

    First morning back in Copan Ruinas after more than 2 weeks in the Moskitia. I'm happy to be home, but going through the 44 gigabytes of video footage I brought back from the region has certainly reminded me of how lucky I've been to be able to explore this gorgeous part of Honduras.     I'll be making at least three short videos from the trip - one that highlights the projects in the region of my organization, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita , a second that ties into another CASM project to try to attract tourists and investors to the area, and this 5-minute glimpse of the region that I made this morning to share with my readers and Facebook friends. Hope it whets your appetite for more, because underneath all that astounding beauty there are a lot of problems that the region needs help with.  

    Sunrise at Palacios This place, this place. With each passing day I am astonished by its beauty a little more, and a little more worried for its future. What will ever become of the fabulous and vulnerable Moskitia?     In another life, the Moskitia would be a world-renowned destination sought out by adventure travellers who crave that thing that’s so hard to find in this modern world of ours: An authentic experience. Whether the travel fantasy is vast stretches of empty Caribbean beaches, thriving indigenous cultures, or a world of lagoons, rivers and wildlife to explore, the Moskitia delivers. Monkeys, toucans, orchids, herons, fish dinners straight from the sea – all here.     But this is not another life. And the overwhelming presence of narco-trafico in the region – while not nearly the danger to tourists that it is to those working directly in the business – pretty much guarantees that the Moskitia isn’t going to be seeing a lot of new ...

   Drugs are on my mind, as they often are these days. South American cocaine, to be more specific, 800 tons of which are reportedly moved north every year to eager markets in the U.S. and Canada. And the majority of it passes right through this region where I’m working at the moment - the Moskitia.    Just before I left Copan Ruinas to come down here, I was telling an American friend about how I loved coming to this gorgeous place but at the same time always felt a bit on edge because of the enormous presence of The Business, as I've come to think of it. She was astounded that such a thing could be going on in plain sight without the military and Drug Enforcement Agency being all over it.    But of course, that’s the thing about The Business in a country like Honduras (or anywhere, for that matter): It’s complicated.    One of my co-workers here in the Moskitia was complaining this week about the tendency among people in the scattered,...

    “Flexible and adaptable” is more or less the mantra for a Cuso International volunteer. My experiences yesterday brought that home to me yet again, for about the 254 th time.     For reasons that I think have to do with building relationship, it has taken a very long time for the other regions of the organization I’m working for – the Comision de Accion Social Menonita (CASM) - to call on me for help with various communications issues. It seems that because the practice here is to hire people who you already know, or who someone else in the organization knows, it takes a long time for people to warm up to some random stranger who drops into the country with big ideas about how communications can be improved.     At any rate, the regions didn't really start seeking me out until I’d been here for more than a year, and even then only when I showed up at some big CASM event and they could talk to me face to face. (That’s another thing I've learned...

    Beagley, probably my favourite (but don't tell the others) I grow fonder of free-range dog culture with each passing day. Dogs are so much more civilized and resourceful than I would have expected when left to their own devices, and I love seeing how they organize their world when it's all up to them.      Whether stray or owned, the majority of Copan Ruinas dogs roam the streets as free agents. Unlike the highly regulated dog environment of Victoria, these dogs live largely without human interference. There is no dog catcher, no local SPCA, no enforcement of things like leash use, park access, poo pickup and random canine wandering. It's a dog's world down here.     They organize their territories through rules I can't decipher, but which have the effect of keeping fights to a minimum. They are never aggressive to humans, even though some have every right to be given how they're treated. Some travel great distances in their daily rounds....