A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

     I’m fascinated by my new boss, the presidenta  of Femuprocan .      She’s a hard-core campesina and colectivista, of an era that would have known the revolutionary years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement . Whenever I see her, she’s standing off to one side of the group, cigarette in hand, observing the scene with an impenetrable gaze. Cue the theme song from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”      She intimidated me when I met her on my first day of work this past Monday, me in my summer dress and sandals with my hair up, her in what I now think of her uniform: jeans; long-sleeved shirt suitable for labouring in the fields; worn sneakers. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and not of the flippy, going-to-the-mall variety.      She gave me a good once-over and declared in a deep, union-president kind of voice that Femuprocan was an organization of el campo – of the countryside, which I understood b...

  Home sweet home for the next four months   Meet new boss: Check. Open Nicaraguan bank account: Check. Find place to live in Managua for the next four months: Check.     And so we are ready, Paul and I, for whatever comes next. As we had expected, we are settling into our Cuso International positions much quicker this time around, having been able to draw on our last experience in Honduras and get things done in a much more efficient fashion. There will be unexpected bumps and frustrations to come; there always are. But how different it feels to be a more seasoned Central American volunteer, not to mention being relatively fluent in Spanish, as compared to the rather stunned and stumbling first-timers we were three years ago.      House-hunting was a breeze this time, what with us knowing that the only way to make it happen is to hit the bricks and ask anyone who passes by whether they know of a place to rent.     We had a free aft...

        Picking the photos for our event tomorrow night has been like a kaleidoscope journey through our two-plus years in Honduras, immersed in all the memories packed into however many hundreds of gigabytes of pictures and videos we collected over that time.    As always, I’m reminded that it’s the people that make a photo. In the moment I’m drawn to the scenics – and we’ll certainly be including a few of those at the Victoria Event Centre tomorrow. But the ones that make me smile are the ones with people: Bustling about in our little town of Copan Ruinas; packing a gun in their back pocket to a farming workshop; lovingly tending the graves of their loved ones; horsing around on the beautiful beaches at Batalla in the Moskitia.    What a place. What an experience. We have been home 2 months now, and I’m really feeling grateful to Cuso International and the Comision de Accion Social Menonita – my placement in Honduras – for such an am...

  “Turn a bit more this way,” my co-worker advised Friday as he arranged a couple of us for a photo while we gathered for a goodbye cappuccino. “I want to make sure the light is behind me.”     Music to my ears, my Copan friend. As I bid farewell to Honduras after more than two years of trying to help my workmates get the hang of good communications, I don’t want to just hear that they’ll miss me. I want to hear that they won’t forget all the things we’ve been working on this whole time.     Better photos was a biggie. All the funders want their projects well-documented through photos, but my workmates are renowned for taking atrociously bad photos. So hearing Edy talking about repositioning himself to get a better photo – well, I feel really good about that, what with all the talks and training around photos during which I was never sure whether any of them were very into it.     We did a lot of work around Facebook, too.  I think it ...