A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Tearing apart the old bathroom  I once made the horrible mistake of buying glue traps to deal with a mouse problem. I got up the next morning to the unforgettable sight of a poor dead mouse that had gotten his little paw stuck first, then another paw, then the side of his face. I'm starting to suspect the water project at the children's home here in Copan might be angry mouse spirits getting back at me for that wrong deed. Every thing I touch up there just seems to stick me tighter into the glue. The plan was for new bathrooms and a big new water tank so that the Angelitos Felices foster home had decent basic services for the 30 or so children who live there. The mason who took on the project told me he'd have it done in 15 days. A little over three weeks into the project, the bathrooms are done and the tank's in place, sitting atop a nicely reinforced concrete floor to avoid any risk of 5,000 pounds of water crashing down on sleeping children in the room below...

I come from a land where you get a parking ticket if your tires are deemed to be too far from the curb. For a while it was illegal to make balloon animals in downtown Victoria, and just this summer the city launched a court battle to stop a woman from taping little posters to telephone poles advertising her cleaning service.  So it has been very enlightening to move to a place where you are essentially free to do whatever you want.  The street dogs howl at midnight. The possibly deaf neighbour across the way blasts his radio into the street at 5 a.m.The sidewalk food vendors sell their wares with no fear that a health inspector will ever come by.  One day I watched a kid digging a huge hole in the asphalt road in front of his house - the main road into town - to get at a broken water pipe. Nobody blinked. You can herd your cattle along the highway, stop your car dead in the middle of a skinny side street to have a conversation with an acquaintance, and make bal...

Corn-field clearcuts around Santa Rita, Copan What would bring 20 busy coffee producers out to a mid-day meeting on watersheds? The realization that if there's a solution for what's happening to the water supply on their fincas, it will have to come from them. The meeting was the first in what sounds like a long, slow process to have the Marroquin watershed in the hills above Santa Rita, Copan, declared a protected area. Some 16,000 families rely on the water that flows from this area. But climate change and the dramatic loss of forest has taken a toll. One producer at the meeting - organized by Honduran NGOs and regional groups working on such problems -  figures his water supply is half of what it was a few years ago. That's a scary development in a country where access to water for crops and consumption is still far from a given in rural communities. Much has been made in the international press about the loss of forests in Honduras. In the last four years the co...

The road that convinced me to get out and walk Before we left Canada in January, Cuso International asked us to watch a 90-minute video presentation on health concerns put together by Dr. Mark Wise, Cuso's doctor in residence. He listed what seemed like a hundred different health problems to watch out for in our international placements, from malaria and dengue fever to chagas and rabid dogs. He ended it with a humorous little lecture noting that even if we couldn't be bothered to wear mosquito repellent - even if we insisted on patting stray dogs -  at the very least we should always use a seatbelt when riding in a vehicle, because car accidents are by far the most common bad things to happen to Cuso volunteers. I think back on his advice with a rueful smile whenever I'm jouncing along any of the truly terrible roads in Honduras. If only it were that easy, Dr. Wise. Sure, I do up my seatbelt if I happen to be sitting in the front seat of somebody's vehicle. B...

My new best friends: Nelson Rodriguez, right, the man doing the work at Angelitos; and Ovidio Mayorga of Casa Constructor, where I just bought $2500 worth of materials Sometimes you just have to sit back and wonder how the heck you got yourself into something. I had one such moment at about 8 p.m. last night, shortly after a halting phone conversation in Spanish with a plumbing contractor trying to sort out how and when I would be paying for the materials he needed to build new bathrooms and replace the water system at a rundown children's home here in Copan. I've lived a fine, long life without ever feeling the need to do home renovations. I know nothing about plumbing, water systems, urinal sturdiness or bombas , the mysterious and apparently pricey pumps that shoot water from cistern to holding tank to bathroom in countries like this one. I've never considered what kind of ceramic tile I like in a bathroom, or whether the grout should be white or black. Up until f...