Absence makes the eyes grow sharper

Eight fairly chaotic days on Vancouver Island, and now I'm back in Honduras reflecting on how it feels to be taking holidays in the opposite direction.
They say you can never go home again. I don't know who "they" are or what sparked them to say such things, but it does seem that the things you remember fondly about a place don't hold up well when you go back for a second look.
I did take much pleasure from seeing my family and a few close friends while on the Island. It's top of my list to figure out ways to see them more often, whether by luring them south or doing more of those meet-you-in-the-middle holidays that my cousin in Darwin is so good at making happen with her family. And of course, receiving an honourary doctorate of laws from the University of Victoria was an amazing experience.
But the food and the chocolate and the nature walks I'd been fantasizing about weren't nearly so enticing as I'd remembered. The meals were too rich for my system. The chocolate was tasty, but I really only needed a couple of bites to set things right. I felt like I spent way too much time in cars, houses and restaurants, and missed the hours of outdoor time that comes with the tropical (and carless) life.
The pace was brutal after five months of the mellow life here in Copan. The B.C. government is still doing stupid, stupid things that set my teeth on edge. Victoria is still a little too precious, and I hated being cold all the time. By the time we got on the plane early Monday, I was ready to go "home."
Getting away from the place where you come from is a clarifying experience. I've realized, for instance, that while I treasure time with my family, I've also inherited a healthy dose of my father's anti-social genes. I wondered if I'd be lonely with just my partner for a friend here in Honduras. I'm not.
Others look at Honduras from afar and presume visitors like me would feel a newly heightened sense of gratitude for what we have as Canadians. But what I really see now is how much we've got to lose. Honduras is poor and its systems are almost universally corrupt or broken, but there's a certain honesty here about such things that's missing in Canada, where we're still in denial.
I don't mean to trivialize the differences,  mind you. I doubt Victorians will ever have garbage strewn everywhere, giant holes in the road that never get fixed, and millions of one-room shacks made of mud and corrugated tin - common sights in Honduras. The B.C. education system is taxed but still functional, and nobody is selling teachers' licences or creating fictional jobs so they can get paid twice.
You can still go to a public hospital and get good medical care, and can safely presume that most of the drivers you encounter on your various travels are both licensed and insured. The average Canadian is not going to return home from a holiday - as we just did -  to discover that their phone and Internet provider has vanished and there's absolutely no one to take that problem up with.
But Victoria still has hundreds of people living in the streets, and millions of Canadians - more each year - are living in poverty. Our governments' tendency to sneak in higher wages and sweeter contracts for a favoured few while denying more and more services to people in real need  - well, what other word is there for that except corruption? Honduras does have an excessive number of laws and policies that sound good on paper but are ignored in real life, and  is a signatory on any number of international agreements that it makes little effort to live up to. But that's all true in Canada, too.
And while much is made about the staggeringly high rates of violent crime here in Honduras, the first crime we experienced this year was when we arrived back on the Island to find our storage locker in the "24/7 secure" facility in Saanich that we pay more than $100 a month for had been broken into. While we would have expected to be on our own in dealing with a problem like that in Honduras, it turned out we were on our own in Canada as well.
Lessons learned? The things you remember fondly are perhaps sweeter when kept as memories. The line between a developing country and a developed one is finer than you might think. Corruption comes in varying strengths, but it's still corruption. The risk of being a victim of crime is much higher in Honduras, but that's not to say it won't happen to you right there in your quaint little Canadian town.
I'll always have a heart for Canada. But we're not nearly as worlds apart from Honduras as we ought to be given the depth of our wealth, education and knowledge. Get out of town for a while and I think you'll see what I mean.
Postscript June 21: Woke up this morning and thought gee, I hope I don't sound ungrateful for all the things Canada has done for me. I owe my education, health, career and good salary to Canada, and I wouldn't even be here in Honduras were it not for a Canadian organization, Cuso International. If I didn't care about Canada, I wouldn't worry about it nearly so much.

Social justice doesn't need heroes

Early morning in good old YVR, where we arrived at 6 a.m. today to settle in for our five-hour wait until the next leg of the flight kicks in. Bad connection, but so it goes with points flights.

Had a wonderful but insanely busy eight days on the Island. Great to be back, but I'm still looking forward to the return to Honduras, and not just because it's about 15 degrees warmer than the Island right now. More on that later, but right now I'm posting (most) of the speech I gave at UVic on Friday as I accepted my honourary doctorate, which was a total thrill.

Speech at UVic, June 15:

They say that the thing that guides a life passion has its roots in your teen years, and certainly that was the case for me. While I wouldn’t have known to call it social justice at the time, I was 14 when a group of us at Lake Trail Junior High in Courtenay stood up for a young classmate – a girl we didn’t know at the time - who was being unfairly judged. I not only got a lifelong friendship out of that, I learned that even when you feel you’ve got zero  power to affect change in any grand kind of way, you always have power over your own actions and choices. The world will go the way the world goes, but you don’t have to go along.

All the twists and turns of a life are preparation for the person you end up being. But some things do shape your path more than others.

For me, one was becoming a mother while I was still a child myself, which means that at the relatively young age of 55 I’ve now had 38 years to experience all the amazing things that motherhood teaches you - to love unconditionally, to be fair, to be respectful without being a complete pushover, to stand up for those who have yet to grow into their power.

Another was becoming a journalist, a perfect prep course for anyone who might someday be given to social activism. You can’t help but know this world is an unfair place when your job is to listen to what’s going on for people, across every possible spectrum.

I feel very lucky to have stumbled onto a profession that not only gave me the privilege to ask anybody questions about anything – and for some reason they would feel beholden to answer - but helped me develop the practical skills I needed to help people fight back.

And for 14 years, through six corporate owners and five managing editors, the Times Colonist gave me the freedom to write a column about whatever the heck I wanted, including one year – 2008 – when every column I wrote profiled the people living homeless in Victoria. It’s popular to say mean things about mainstream media, but much of the work I’ve done as a social activist would not have been possible were it not for the wonderful pulpit the so-called corporate media allowed me for all those years.

It took me a while to accept that I was becoming a social activist. Journalists are supposed to be dispassionate observers of the world, after all. But life just kept on pushing me in that direction, until one day I realized that I didn’t just want to write about the things that were going wrong for people, I wanted to do something about them. The shift came in 1996, the year I met an intense young woman named Cherry Kingsley who made me realize I had much to learn about the maligned, mistreated and profoundly judged people who work in the sex trade.

A year later, I spent an amazing two weeks travelling down the Island with the Tribal Journeys/Vision Quest paddlers and experienced an emotional transformation in my view of aboriginal culture.

In 2001, a group of impoverished people with severe addictions who called the Holiday Court Motel home welcomed me into their lives, and suddenly I started seeing human beings instead of “junkies.” In 2002, a two-month strike at the Times Colonist pushed me as close as I’ve ever come to a nervous breakdown, but at the same time showed me that I could live very comfortably on much less money - something that would ultimately free me up to make some very different decisions in my life.

 In 2004, I came up to UVic on a whim to hear Stephen Lewis speak, and he asked the audience what WE were doing to make a difference. I thought, “What AM I doing?”

A few months later I quit my very comfortable, well-paid job as a full-time columnist and started work with PEERS Victoria, which led to three of the most powerful, enlightening, demanding, heartbreaking, character-building, hope-inducing, world-view-changing years of my life.

In 2007, I had the opportunity to work alongside people living on the edges of homelessness, and got to know some of the committed activists fighting to right one of the most shameful and unnecessary social wrongs in our country. This year, I finally made good on at least a decade of talking about cutting loose to wander the world, and moved to Honduras to experience a whole new set of profound social wrongs in need of righting. The gift of social justice work is that it opens your eyes, and once they’re open you’re going to experience life in any country in a very different way.

Every now and then people will kind of pat the back of my hand and say something along the lines of, “I could never do what you do.” They intend it as a compliment, but I have to tell you, I hear it as a copout. There’s nothing saintly or special about social justice – it’s just work. It’s just rolling up your sleeves and taking a little bit of the time you spend on your own pursuits to put toward the interests of somebody who needs an ally.

You don’t need any special training. So many of us underestimate the tremendous skill set we have just by way of growing up middle-class Canadians in loving families. You don’t need to be a miracle-worker. You just need to be the kind of person who shows up.

Social justice is the work of the collective – of hundreds, of thousands, of millions of people pushing a cause along in what might be heartbreakingly small increments over their lifetimes, recognizing that they could come to the end of their lives without ever knowing how the story ends. It’s not about heroes and saints, it’s about worker bees. 

 Change doesn’t come easily. Prejudice and judgment are quick to develop but incredibly difficult to eradicate. And nothing is harder than confronting your own stereotypes and prejudice, which is where it all begins.

Thank you to all the resisters out there who not only see a better way, but get that it’s up to us to help make it happen. Thank you so much for this tremendous honour. And now, back to work, because there’s still so much to do.

Fun to be home, but harried

I'm feeling like the blog's just a little too much "all about me" lately, but hey, it's a big week. The Times Colonist team I was part of won the Michener Award on Wednesday for its coverage over two years of the plight of families dealing with Community Living B.C., and today's my big day at the University of Victoria, when I receive an honourary doctorate of laws.
So allow me one more indulgence: A link to Jack Knox's very kind column on me in the TC this morning. Nice thing to wake up to in this rushed and harried week back home, and such things certainly do make my mother happy.
We'll be returning to Copan Ruinas bright and early Monday. I'm enjoying all the food and friends here in Victoria but I have to admit, it's a bit of a culture shock coming back and I'm looking forward to our rather quiet, simple life in Honduras. But first, a big party and lots of great, greasy snacks.

Safe in Honduras, victimized in Victoria

Back in Victoria for a week and here's an irony - we went to our storage locker yesterday only to discover that  things are missing and somebody had put a different lock on. So we come back to sleepy Victoria after six crime-free months in one of the most "dangerous" countries in the world to find ourselves victimized at a storage place we picked expressly because it was supposed to be safe.
We were dealing with an 18-year-old alarmed-looking clerk yesterday and had arrived 45 minutes before closing, so we still don't know anything about how this could have happened. She called the manager and he said he'd meet us there this morning, which is kind of alarming in itself when you think that he couldn't be bothered to deal with a troubling turn of events at that very moment.
At any rate, we're going back today at the moment the place opens, and I'll be in full-on indignation mode. Here's hoping that "24/7 video surveillance" they promise turns out to be true, although I fear that all we're going to see is somebody breaking into our locker. Video footage won't bring back our stuff.
Let me tell you, there's nothing more disorienting than opening a combination lock that you've never seen before (with the combination still handily taped on the back, just to make it easier) to find that indeed, that IS your stuff in there behind the door - and yes, some of it is missing. The most obvious is our bed mattress and two bags of all our favourite clothes, which is completely inexplicable and part of the reason why my partner Paul thinks there has to be a logical explanation. Here's hoping.
Double-checked the self-storage Web site this morning just to make sure that security was one of the things they promised, and found this promise on every page of the site: "Your valuables are safe with us!" Particularly galling is a rather smug line about how they look after your stuff as if it was their own, adding: "This isn't a friend's basement."
Alas, we would have been better off if it had been.
Who knows, maybe I'll be happily deleting this post a few hours from now because it turns out there was a good reason why somebody cut our lock off, took our mattress and God knows what else out of there, and put on a new combination lock that allowed anyone with the sense to flip the thing over to be able to break in again. (Does rather seem like the point, doesn't it?)
Like I say, here's hoping.

The storm before the calm

Storms come slowly here. This is my first rainy season in a tropical country, and it's taken me a while to understand that there's no need to hurry if you find yourself outside when the clouds start building over the mountains and the first ripples of thunder rumble overhead.

It's not like Kamloops or the Prairies, where storms roll in so fast you can barely get the picnic supplies packed up fast enough. Here, hours might pass in between the start of the thunder and the first drops of rain. It gives you plenty of time to admire the gorgeous clouds that develop as the heat of the day builds into the storms that come every night.
I'm liking this season, with the foliage vivid green from all the rain and the river - barely a trickle three weeks ago - now running fast and furious. This must be the time for lizards to breed, because I hear them skittering like crazy in the leaves at the side of the road as I walk along. Unfortunately, it's also a happy time of year for mosquitos, so I'm back to using bug repellent as my morning skin cream.
I've learned to get up early and get the wash out on the line before 8 a.m., to make sure it dries before the daily rains set in. I know to get my walks in before 3 or 4 p.m., because it's almost certainly going to start raining right around then.  I've never liked umbrellas, but I don't leave home without one anymore. One day when the rain was particularly fierce, we saw a young boy running past our house crying, and I could sympathize; it's the kind of rain that hurts.
Most nights, I awake to the sound of rain pounding down, lightning flashing bright in the night sky. Sometimes we went to bed having forgotten to close up a couple of the more vulnerable windows, which means I have to jump up to do that before the water starts pouring in through the screens and down the walls. When the rain's really heavy, the water comes in through the windows even if they're closed, and in one particularly big storm came in under the doors as well.
And then the morning comes and it's sunny and clear again, and the only hint of the storm that came and went in the night are bigger and bigger puddles for me to manouevre past on my walk to work.