A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

    Join me on my one-hour walk/bus to work in Managua through these 19 photos of the people and sights that I see most days as I walk along. It was a fun exercise collecting the pictures, as I'd never asked people's names before when I passed. Using the excuse that I was doing a "project" for my friends and acquaintances back home also made me feel more confident about just boldly asking people to pose, or letting me take a photo of their watch-goose.     As seen on Facebook. But hey, not everybody's on Facebook. This is Ricardo, one of the two security guys who work the gate outside our little complex of four houses. Ricardo alternates 24-hour shifts with Guillermo. Security work pays really poorly, so Ricardo has two other jobs. The billiard hall next to our house, Pool Ocho. Our landlord told us it was a well-run, non-noisy place with no disturbances, and she was right. It's super-popular and every cabbie in the city knows Pool Ocho, but w...

Photo by fellow bus veteran Paul Willcocks This morning I took the city bus that makes a loud thump somewhere around the rear axle every time it stops. Yesterday I rode home on the one that has three seat backs broken off, which I’m fond of because nobody but me takes those spots and it means I always get a seat. Spend more than an hour on Nicaraguan city buses every work day and you start to get familiar with their idiosyncrasies. Their personalities emerge. They drive up to your stop looking the same, but then the door clatters open and you realize it’s this one or that one, each offering their own distinct experience. There’s the one with padded, comfy seats that must be a retired long-distance bus; I’ve only been on that one once, but its cheerful yellow and black seats come to mind often when I’m being bashed around on one of the more typical molded-plastic ones. Then there’s the bus that always has good tunes playing, and usually a girl curled up on the engine cov...

 My walk to work is quite a bit longer this time in Managua, about an hour each way. It gives me more time to reflect on all the ways I could be killed in traffic.       Managua certainly doesn’t have the craziest traffic I’ve ever had to walk through; I have, after all, lived to tell the tale of crossing the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. But fresh from a summer wandering along the coddled streets of Victoria, Managua is quite enough crazy for me at the moment.     So herewith, a few words of advice for those who would be pedestrians in a busy Central American city: Cars rule. Never assume that any driver is going to slow down for you to cross the road. Never assume that they even see you at all, even if they appear to be looking right at you. Yes, every now and then you are going to spot a crosswalk, but you’d be out of your mind to think it means anything at all.  Do way more than simply looking both ways. Approach e...

  It’s a typical Saturday afternoon at the flashy Metro Centro mall in Managua, Nicaragua, and the joint is jumping. As I watch a young barista crank out $4 iced cappuccinos at the Casa de Café kiosk, I find myself reflecting yet again on the mysterious phrase “developing country.”   To those who don’t know this part of the world, the phrase suggests poverty and deprivation - chicken buses spilling over with skinny peasants making slow progress along dirt roads; neighbourhoods of rickety houses built from bamboo and banana leaves; poor people with seven or eight children scratching out meagre livings in tiny villages.   Paul and I are just beginning our third posting as Cuso International volunteers in Central America. I suspect more than a few of our acquaintances back home imagine us living in just such a country. They assume that working with non-profit organizations in countries like Nicaragua and Honduras means giving up the good life.   Yet the re...

    I'm sure some people can share a house with people they don't know well. After four months of doing just that here in Managua, I'm now very certain that I'm not one of them.     I thought I'd already learned most of the important lessons about life in a foreign land from our Cuso International placement in Honduras during 2012-2014. But it turns out there was one really big one still to come.     I don't mean to suggest that the profound unpleasantness of this period of house-sharing is the fault of the two other Cuso volunteers who Paul and I share the house with. At this point, I'm quite sure they're as dismayed as I am at how it is that perfectly nice people can end up with a negative group energy that sends us all scrambling for our little hidey-holes when it all gets to be too much (which happens with increasing frequency as the Feb. 27 ends of our posts draw near).      As the mother and stepmother of five children and the ho...

  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...

  Why does meat taste better in developing countries?  We'll have been in Managua for a month as of tomorrow, just long enough that I'm no longer getting lost every time I walk out the door but short enough that every day still holds some surprising discovery. Herewith, a small list of things I hadn't been expecting: You can drink the water from the tap in Managua. Who knew? I just presumed we'd be drinking bottled water for the whole time we were here, as was the case for more than two years in Honduras. But I kept hearing from one person after another that Managua gets good-quality water from a lagoon and then treats it. I broke down and started drinking it about a week ago, helped along by the fact that there's no store nearby selling those cheap 20-litre bottles of purified water, and I can't handle the environmental guilt of a giant pile of one-litre plastic bottles piling up.  People like their booze around these parts . Admittedly, the organiza...