A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

B.C. families need to fight for group homes I remember the exact moment I started to look at people with mental handicaps in a completely different way. It was 1985, not long after the province had closed the huge institution for “retarded” people at Tranquille, an old tuberculosis sanatorium outside Kamloops. I was working at a Kamloops newspaper at the time and the closure was big news, so I’d been part of documenting the hope, fear, anger and anticipation that the closure had sparked. Families had been working for long, long lifetimes by then to move things forward for their mentally handicapped children, who were all ages. They had few choices in those years when it came to finding services or schooling for their children in their own home towns, and often had no option but to send their children hundreds of kilometres away to institutions such as Tranquille, Woodlands and Glendale. The families were mostly over the moon at the thought that Tranquille’s closure would allow th...

Lessons from BP tragedy: Trust is not an option As barrel after barrel of oil pours into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning every living creature that comes in contact with it, I feel again a creeping dread at how little we know about the things we say yes to. I know almost nothing about deep-sea oil drilling. And I see now that I have made a terrible error in not knowing more, because one of the greatest environmental disasters of our time is unfolding and all I can do is stand here bewildered at how this can possibly be happening. As with all things I don’t know enough about, I just thought somebody was taking care of things. I thought people with a lot more smarts than me were considering everything carefully and proceeding with the utmost caution, because it’s in nobody’s interest to kill off our oceans. I presumed - and isn’t that just the saddest word? - that a company drilling an oil well reaching 17,000 feet below the surface of the ocean would have had a backup plan for ever...

Can Trackside Gallery be reborn? (Here's a link to a Barry Barr photo of Trackside art) Not so long ago, Esquimalt’s Trackside Art Gallery was being feted far and wide as an extraordinary achievement. A dark and crime-filled little lane transformed into an urban art gallery that was turning around young, troubled lives - well, that was a story that everybody wanted to tell. There were raves all round for Tom Woods and the non-profit Rock Solid Foundation when the outdoor gallery launched in 2001. But that was then. Today, painting graffiti on the warehouse walls in the 800-block of Hereward Road is once again prohibited, and volunteers with an unlimited amount of beige spray paint work very, very diligently to keep it that way. The ever-changing art that adorned the walls in years past is long gone, as is the dream of an artsy public space where young graffiti artists and the community could happily co-exist. All that remains of the bold experiment are the 48 large murals t...

Living dark in a white world It’s a weird feeling to be travelling in countries where virtually every face is dark-skinned, yet all the images on billboards and TV advertising are resolutely white. Even the storefront mannequins and baby dolls are blond-haired and blue-eyed in Vietnam, where I recently travelled. If dolls are the way a little girl begins to imagine the adult world, what does it mean to an Asian child when no doll looks anything like her? In Hoi An, on the central coast of Vietnam, many of the young women now cover themselves from head to toe to prevent the sun from darkening their skin. Wearing jazzed-up face masks that have become a fashion staple in the country, the girls sweat it out in 35-degree heat wearing jeans, long-sleeved jackets, winter gloves and masks to shield their skin. “It’s very hot!” one young woman told me from behind her flannel face mask. She was working the tourist beach at Hoi An on a scorcher of a day, running out onto the sand every few minute...

Vietnam pictures on Facebook Hi, Blog visitors. I've uploaded my photos from a recent trip to Vietnam onto my Facebook site, if you're interested in taking a look. They're available for anyone to see as long as they're on Facebook. Find them here.