The good thing about traditions is that you can always remake them

Christmas Eve 2012, Utila, Honduras

    Today is my birthday, my third one in a row celebrated outside Canada. I wouldn't dream of whining about the lack of good birthday cake in Central America when I'm sitting here on a balmy 32-degree day with a fan blowing on me to keep me cool, but I do want to note that living away does require the reinvention of how you celebrate.
    Christmas, for instance. We've been gone from Canada and our families for the last three Christmases as well, and I admit to being piney sometimes for things like the family breakfast where I'd make cinnamon buns and we'd all drink champagne and orange juice, or the whirl of festive parties we'd go to at this time of year. We moved past the whole gift-giving insanity a while ago, but I still really liked the tradition of making up a stocking for family members.
     But Paul and I have developed our own Christmas travelling tradition now, and I quite like it. In 2012 - my first ever Christmas spent away from my family - my son and his family came to visit us in Honduras, and we went to the Caribbean island of Utila for an absolutely marvelous, gift-free Christmas. Christmas Eve dinner, once a time of baked ham and scalloped potatoes, gave way to tacos in a beach-front restaurant with a knockout view of the setting sun. Last year, we went to Guatemala and Belize, and ate our Christmas dinner with a random collection of other travellers who had also holed up at the tiny Hotelito Perdido for the holiday.

Christmas Day 2013 at Hotelito Perdido, Guatemala

     This year, we'll be on a Pacific beach near Leon, Nicaragua, when Christmas rolls around. I doubt that there will be anything particularly Canadian Christmas-like about our Dec. 25, but travellers do tend to draw together more on days like that, I guess drawn by an instinct to create "family" in whatever situation they find themselves in. We'll be in a little bed-and-breakfast, and I imagine we'll end up sharing some conversation (and probably a drink) with whoever else is there that day.
    I got thinking about traditions today because a well-wisher said she hoped I'd have lots of cake. I did always look forward to a good cake on my birthdays in Canada, most especially a tuxedo cake from Save-On Foods (seriously, they are really yummy).
    Unfortunately, cakes in Central America just aren't my thing. They've got standard layer cakes, but any that I've tried have been mediocre at best with icing that's some kind of frothy stuff that bears no resemblance to good old butter-cream frosting. Their special-occasion cakes - both in Nicaragua and Honduras - are tres leches (three milk) and Pio Quinto, both of which are wet cakes like a trifle. I hate trifle.
     In fact, I haven't found a dessert in Central America that I like. But is that so bad? I get home often enough to gorge myself on Dutch Bakery nut tarts at least once a year, or maybe a killer danish from Crust. This 58-year-old body doesn't actually need to be tempted by dessert. I'm treating myself to a small bag of Fritos corn chips at this very moment, and Paul brought me a chocolate-covered marshmallow clown head on a stick earlier. Surely that will suffice.
     Tonight, we're going to head down to Avenida Bolivar, where the First Lady of Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo, has indulged her obviously overwhelming love of twinkly lights at Christmas. We're going to walk from one end of the street to the other, taking in every giant twinkly-light camel, Santa Claus, Wise Man and candy cane. Then we're going to go to the movie theatre and watch "The Hobbit" - which, happily, will be sub-titled and not dubbed.
    Happy birthday to me.

There's a million stories in the big city

 

Horse cart man  and cotton candy vendor
at the end of their day, Managua

    Oh, for a good newspaper that had an appetite for day-in-the-life stories from Nicaragua. I can't walk a block without being intrigued by yet another person scratching out what passes for a living in some unusual way, and would love an excuse to be talking to each of them about what their work days are like.
    There are the fire jugglers and the windshield washer guys at the big intersections, for instance. Are they putting in long days scratching for one or two cordobas from the handful of drivers who seem inclined to roll down their window long enough to pass along a coin? And what must it be like to be those women who spend their days walking right down the middle of the lanes of traffic whizzing by, selling oranges and little bags of fruit juice?
     Then there's the fellow who sells woven or wooden car-seat liners that people buy if they have a bad back or to stop their legs from sticking to the hot vinyl. He's set up in one of the boulevards between two lines of constantly moving traffic on one of Managua's busiest streets. I mean, do people actually pull over to buy a seat liner as they're driving along?
     A job that seems to be the lot of some of the poorest people is operating horse-drawn wooden carts. They own a horse, which in our land would signal someone who couldn't be all that poor, but one look at the skinny little creatures dependent on getting turned out in a vacant lot for a skimpy meal once in a while is enough to know that horse ownership is definitely no guarantee of wealth in Nicaragua.
    The carts mostly seem to work doing pickups of landscape and construction waste, with occasional forays into hauling vast bags of plastic pop bottles scrounged out of the garbage to wherever they go to be recycled. The carts weave in and out of the same crazy traffic as the cars in Managua, the drivers remarkably adept at crossing two or three lanes of traffic to make their left-hand turns.
     One of the most abundant jobs for men is working in security. Houses, businesses, even parking lots - they've all got their own security guy. I pass at least 15 every day on my eight-block walk to work.

Shoe repair outside the Roberto Huembe market, Managua

     One security guard who I chat with regularly works a 12-hour shift, six days a week, getting home to his distant village every night at around 9 p.m. long enough to stuff down a meal, have a quick visit with his family, and hit the sack for maybe 5 hours before he gets up at 4 a.m. to do it all over again. He tells me he's quitting for a new job driving ambulance in January, which makes me happy.
    (But while there's nothing fun about being a security guy in Nicaragua, it's still a good sight better than being a security guy in Honduras. Those poor workers were always the first ones killed when the armed robbers showed up. And they always showed up sooner or later.)
      The market vendors would be fascinating stories, too. Some of them look like they've found a niche - the butchers, for instance. But I do wonder how all the plastics vendors make a living, with their giant stacks of plastic chairs, buckets, basins, stools and Tupperware-style containers. The Roberto Huembe public market has quite a vast section of plastic sellers, but it's a stretch to imagine that there are enough plastic buyers to give them all a decent living.
      And how many customers are there for all the shoe-repair people set up just outside the market? Is there no end to the amount of shoes needing repair? Or are some of these men shoe-repair people by day, security guards by night?
     Same goes for the rosquilla sellers at the market. I'm not a big rosquilla fan myself - they're kind of like a hard little cookie/cracker thing, usually made with cheese - but Nicaraguans do seem to tuck into them with much gusto. Even so, the sheer volume of rosquillas at the market, in the streets, in the baskets of every vendor squeezing down the bus aisles to sell you their wares - well, it just seems to me that there isn't enough rosquilla demand in all the world to provide a fair wage to every one of them.
    In the town square in Leon, I saw a rough-looking old American guy apparently making his living doing levitation tricks and then passing the hat. While he always drew a crowd, I didn't see much evidence of anyone putting money in that hat. But he had a half-empty bottle of red wine tucked away in his big pile of stuff, and maybe that was good enough for him.

Meringue vendor, Leon

Bad sex work law takes effect on the day of a massacre - "How horribly, enragingly appropriate"

 On this day of mourning marking the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, another reason to mourn: Bill C36, Canada's flawed and tragic anti-sex work law, takes effect on this very day.
    It will be struck down eventually. It's so clearly unconstitutional, not to mention poorly informed and misguided, and in direct contravention of the research around what actually makes life better and safer for those in the sex industry.
    But in the meantime, people will suffer. Women will suffer. The Harper government took bad law and made it worse, criminalizing the purchase of sex for the first time in Canadian history and virtually guaranteeing that vulnerable sex workers will now be that much more vulnerable, and never mind the platitudes about how this law decriminalizes workers while criminalizing purchasers and thus makes everything better.
       What it actually does is push sex work even deeper into the shadows. And we all know that bad things happen where the light can't get in.
      Thank you to writer Edward Keenan for this piece in the Toronto Star today.

Toronto Star

By: Edward Keenan Columnist, Published on Fri Dec 05 2014

Today, of all days, the government of Canada brings a new law into effect that will put some Canadian women in danger and likely lead to some of their deaths.

Today, Dec. 6, the anniversary of the slaughter of 14 women by a gunman in Montreal, the day marked as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

It seems grimly appropriate, in a “sick and twisted” way, as activist Valerie Scott told Canadian Press this week, that this should be the day the Conservative government chooses to change Canada’s prostitution laws to make it harder for the women (and men) who work in that business to keep themselves safe. Sadly, it symbolically reflects the approach to “action on violence against women” we, as a country, have taken all too often, all these years after the Montreal Massacre made us swear that things needed to change.

The aftermath and reflection after those killings produced a document called “The War Against Women,” containing recommendations about the changes that needed to be made to reduce the level of violence against women. A quarter-century later, my colleague Catherine Porter’s reflection published in these pages today finds that woefully little has been done to give force to those suggestions.

A year ago this month, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down our laws governing prostitution on the basis that they deprived sex workers of the ability to work safely by screening clients and employing security. It seemed like progress for those who sell sex for money — by choice or circumstance — and who have long had to live in fear, in the shadows of the economy, denied the protections against violence we extend to workers in every other field. Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay responded with a new law, one that doesn’t address the safety issues the court clearly said needed addressing. It’s a new law that sex workers — including Scott, who brought the original Supreme Court case, and some I spoke to immediately after MacKay brought the bill forward — say will leave them even more endangered than before.

This is not some moral parlour game, where we lean back in our chairs and express our disgust at the very concept of putting a price on physical intimacy. This is a very real matter of life and death.

I used to work at Eye Weekly, an alternative paper that made much of its revenue from classified ads placed by sexual service providers. I remember in 2003, when I was still relatively new there, two of our clients, women who’d come into our office to pay for their ads every week, were murdered while working.

Cassandra Do was 32, a former nurse’s aide saving money to pay for sex-reassignment surgery, whose friends said she was notoriously careful about screening clients. She was strangled to death.

Lien Pham was a 39-year-old widow, a mother of two. She was strangled in an escort agency apartment while working alone two months later.

Immediately afterwards, and in the years following, I spoke to many sex workers about the safety issues they faced in their jobs, and how they dealt with them. And almost every one I spoke to talked about the laws criminalizing the operation of sex work businesses as the biggest obstacle to protecting themselves.

That’s why, a decade after those deaths, Scott and her co-applicants brought their court case to the Supreme Court, and finally they seemed to be heard. The highest panel of justices in the country said what those workers had been telling us all along: that to protect sex workers, their business needed to be legalized.

The new law may eventually also get struck down after it winds its way back through the courts. In the meantime, in the years before that likely court decision, it will put prostitutes in even more danger than before.

When I spoke to her about the law this spring, Jean MacDonald of sex worker advocacy organization Maggie’s predicted, “What you’re going to see with this law is a continuation of the epidemic of violence against sex workers in Canada.”

Today, in addition to reflecting on the deaths of the 14 women murdered in Montreal, I’ll think of Cassandra Do and Lien Pham, and the dozens of prostitutes murdered by Robert Pickton, and all the other women who’ve been beaten, raped and killed because of our inaction to protect them, or to allow them to protect themselves — or because, in the case of this new law, of our direct action to endanger them.

Today, of all days. How horribly, enragingly appropriate.