A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Imagine the garbage ethos of 1950s-North America overlaid with the acute environmental sensitivity of the modern-day world, and you've got the Honduras dilemma. People are still  dropping garbage on the streets here. They're chucking it out of the windows of their cars. Shredded plastic, rusted tin cans, chip bags and pop bottles are common sights along rivers and creeks, as are garbage-strewn spots along the road that residents without municipal garbage services have turned into dumps. Yet the country also has educated, affluent citizens influenced by the Internet, television and all those other forms of media that carry word of global campaigns to reduce, reuse and recycle. Pushed by countries with 50 or more years of garbage awareness under their belts, the arrival of such campaigns in a pre-Litterbug country creates a confused response. So it is that twice in the last week, I've found myself listening to presentations about reducing the use of plastic bags in Hon...

Celeste, a new arrival at Angelitos I wanted to share the Christmas letter of the young Philadelphia woman who is trying to start a better  foster home/orphanage for the children in Copan. My heart is with the kids at the current children's home,  Angelitos Felices, but my dreams are pinned on Emily Monroe, as her project would definitely be the long-term solution to the endless problems at Angelitos. Orphanages and foster homes are all run in different ways in Honduras - from essentially private operations like Angelitos, which scratches up centavos wherever it can to provide basic care, to well-supported facilities that see the kids through various life stages and even get them into vocational training. The Honduran government has its own orphanages as well, but the media reports on these homes make it clear that they have even more problems than Angelitos. Emily is going about things in all the right ways. She started a day care for impoverished working mother...

You haven't really tested your inner fortitude until you've done a few Honduran meetings. I mean, we're talking a serious endurance test. Fresh from a three-day retreat for the non-profit I work for in Copan Ruinas, I'm newly reminded of the Honduran capacity to just hang in there at meetings and presentations that just go on and on. I even think the people here like it that way. I can't tell you the number of meetings I've been to here at which the fourth or fifth straight hour rolls around and things seem to be finally wrapping up, and just as I presume every participant is as twitchy, inattentive and restless as me, they launch into an enthusiastic question-and-answer session that keeps the meeting going for another hour or more. I found myself grousing quietly to one of my co-workers at the retreat that in Canada, our presenters believe that people need breaks every 90 minutes or their exhausted brains will go on presentation overload and they won'...

The doctor is in at Angelitos Felices I’ve known for a while now that accessing medical care was a challenge for the majority of Hondurans who have to rely on the public system. But it wasn’t until I put in a couple of days as an ad-hoc translator for a U.S. doctor in the villages this week that I fully understood that medical care is as good as non-existent for a whole lot of people. The doctor was part of a faith-based group out of Illinois and Tennessee who were here to build fuel-efficient stoves in three villages around Copan. She hadn’t planned on seeing patients, but word got out fast that there was a doctor among the group and she graciously agreed to see a few people. And they jumped at the chance. On Monday and Tuesday we were in Guarumal, Cabanas, a village of 15 families, and at least nine of those families were in the lineup within 10 minutes of the doctor pulling up a chair on the patio outside a resident’s house. I suspect the other six families would have b...

My boss Merlin Fuentes demonstrates a  miniature version of a fuel-efficient fogon at the Feria Ambiental Oh, what a week it has been - freshly back from a fast holiday in Las Vegas with a couple  of my daughters, now plunged into a week of acting as a kind of tour co-ordinator to a group of 15 Americans who have come to Copan on a mission to help my organization build fuel-efficient  stoves. And just to add to the over-stimulation, it's election day in Honduras today. People have already started streaming into local schools and other polling stations to participate in what is essentially the primaries for the 2013 election. Rumour has it that things get interesting on days like today, when political opinions tend to heat up. Cuso Honduras actually told us volunteers to stay indoors today and stock up on emergency rations, advice that the locals got quite a kick out of when I told them. At any rate, my American friends are counting on me to lead them on a tour of t...