A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

My new friend Jose    He got on the bus not long after we left Copan Ruinas, and unlike most passengers opted to sit beside the gringa . I told him I liked having a seatmate because it lets me practice my Spanish. He told me he travels the same 10-hour bus route every three days, going between Guatemala City where he works and La Entrada, Honduras, where he lives.     His name is Jose, 37 years old and still married to the same woman he met as a teenager, when she was 13 and he was 15. They've had their ups and downs but have stuck it out. They have three children, ages 20, 11 and 5. He pulled out his phone to show me photos of his youngest, who is currently feeling a bit mopey due to having some of his bottom teeth pulled out. "Are those your real teeth?" Jose asked me. "They're beautiful!" I didn't even know where to start to try to explain the many reasons why a Canadian's teeth might be better than a Honduran's.      His kids are the ...

       I think I'll have to make some sound files as keepsakes of our time here before we head back to Canada this spring.     The blog posts, the photos, the videos – sure, they’ll all keep the memories alive. But an audio clip of all the noises that go on outside our door every day would probably be the thing that would instantly bring me back to this kitchen table, where the soundtrack of daily life is the rumble of cars a foot away from our front door, the BROO-broo-broo- broo- broo barking of the dog next door, the blaring television from the house across the street where we’re certain a deaf man must live.     It’s the toddler two doors down having one of his usual tantrums, and the stressed mother down the way bellowing “ Callete !” – “Shut up!” – at her worried looking little two-year-old. It’s the snatches of conversation of people passing by, mostly talking in animated Spanish but occasionally in that distinct way that, even wh...

    My journalist friends and I are doing a lot of hand-wringing these days over the death of the Kamloops Daily News, which has a history as a good, strong community newspaper.  The News is not the first nor the last newspaper to die in these difficult times, but that a paper should die that journalists themselves thought of as a good paper perhaps feels weightier to us.     It’s all very sad, of course. A community is losing its long-time local voice. People are losing their jobs. Loyal readers are losing their beloved morning read. But on the other hand, nobody can possibly be surprised that the newspaper industry is finally in the death throes after more than 20 years of being terminally ill.     However you might feel about capitalism, at its essence it’s about producing something that meets a demand and thus earns you a profit. When the profits start falling, that’s a rather clear signal that a company either has to do something to turn ...

   We're newly back from two weeks of travelling on the Caribbean side of Guatemala and through Belize. It's easy travel in Belize, where English is the primary language, and the little country is clearly a popular choice for North American and European travellers. But while I totally get how nice it is to just breeze through a welcoming country with great tourism infrastructure, hopefully we convinced at least a few of the travellers we met to give Honduras a try, too.     The travellers I've met who have been to Honduras always say how much they loved their time here. It's a gorgeous place, and a person can still have the highly prized "authentic" travel experience here. But the poor country's horrible and undeserved reputation as a murderous, thieving land is certainly scaring off travellers who don't yet know the place. Many people we met appeared to be avoiding Honduras entirely as they made their way through Central America.     We did our ...

        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...