A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Hang around Honduras for more than a few days and you're bound to see some group or another staging what I've come to think of as a water-bottle campaign. The fundraising drives are essentially a stepped-up version of passing the hat, using empty 20-litre water bottles - like the kind on the office water cooler - for collecting the money. The campaigns are similar to the Christmas drives that organizations like the Salvation Army put on back home; it's common here to see the bottles set out in public places or clutched in the hands of smiling young people soliciting at the side of the road. But what distinguishes a Honduran maraton are the causes that people are raising money for. In a country with no apparent strategy or funding source for essential public services, passing the hat is really all you've got. For instance, worried families and staff from the main public hospital in San Pedro Sula held a maraton  last week to raise money for basic surgical supplies...

Paul says I've "gone Honduran" with the new blog look. He doesn't mean it as a compliment. We've had many conversations this past year about the crazy colours, unreadable fonts and cutesy designs that are favoured by some of the people we work with here. But I don't know. I was good and sick of that blue-sky-and-puffy-white-clouds theme. I've seen it on other people's blogs, too, which I find very jarring. The idea of someone having a blog that looks just like yours except with different words - well, that's unsettling.  It's much tougher to pick a new design theme than you might think, though. And if you let yourself get caught up in thinking about what a certain theme "says" about you, everything slows to a crawl. (Tried out a fairly attractive autumn-leaves theme, but for the life of me couldn't think of one reason why an autumn-leaf backdrop made any sense.) So yes, the new colours are pretty bold, but I stayed conservativ...

I wouldn’t have thought that a scam targeting Honduran non-profits would be particularly lucrative. Few of them have a discretionary centavo to spare outside of their meticulously itemized project funds. But this scam is a relatively clever appeal to the ego, and I can see how it might trick somebody running an NGO in a developing country like Honduras. It involves an invitation to an international congress on HIV-AIDS ostensibly being organized in Canada at the end of this month by the Ontario Public Health Association. My boss at the Comision de Accion Social Menonita head office in San Pedro Sula received the invitation, forwarding it to me with a request that I verify its legitimacy. Screen shot of the fake invitation The OPHA has yet to respond to an email I sent asking about the scam. But the $620 registration fee to be mailed in U.S. funds to an address in Spain did raise my suspicions from the start. So did the fact that the invitation is in French – one of Canad...

I don’t like David Suzuki. That’s been the case for many years now, ever since I showed up at a book-signing in Victoria to interview him and discovered that the man I had thought of as a kind, wise environmentalist was in fact an obnoxious, rude guy who made no attempt to hide his contempt of the fans gazing at him all fawn-eyed and adoring. I’ve generally kept my opinion of him to myself, however, for fear of seeming un-Canadian. I don’t know what the process is for becoming a beloved Canadian icon, but have long recognized that once someone achieves that status, any Canadian who dares to say otherwise is really in for it. But a story this week from the Sun Media chain was just too good for me to pass up. The story featured a series of emails from John Abbott College in Quebec about Suzuki receiving more than $40,000 in fees and expenses for a speaking engagement at the college in October.  Better still, the emails - obtained through a Freedom of Information request -...

It's not always fun hanging out with the kids at Angelitos children's home. Sometimes it's just a lot of work, and sometimes it's really discouraging. Sometimes they just get on your nerves, the way any kid does. But yesterday was one of the good days. Not sure if that was due to the sun shining for the first time in a couple of weeks, or if the kids were just ready for a free-for-all at el campo , the empty dirt field above the foster home where they can burn off a little energy from time to time. It was a good day for getting some new photos of the kids, and I wanted to share them here. They are a remarkable, resilient and ultimately joyful group of children. Heidi, who is more or less the adopted daughter of the woman who owns/operates Angelitos.  She mostly lives in Dona Daisy's house, as do 3-4 of the kids at any given time, but she comes on all our outings. The kids cut loose in the sunshine at the dirt field above Angelitos. Don't know who o...