A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

My boss was telling me on the long drive back from San Pedro Sula yesterday that there was some funding coming available soon out of Europe for projects targeted at building resilience. I got a (quiet) chuckle out of that, because Hondurans could write the book on resilience. Like the song says: They get knocked down, but they get up again. Resilience has been a popular topic among socially aware types for many years. I think it's a fascinating subject, and applaud all efforts to understand the intangible things that permit one person to hang in despite horrible life circumstance while another in a similar situation is totally destroyed. But a lack of resilience is not the problem in Honduras. Life is incredibly hard here for the majority of people,  and it's true that poverty and violence are worsening in Honduras even while neighbouring countries are seeing improvements. Almost 70 per cent of the country lives in poverty, and some 40 per cent live in extreme poverty. ...

The death of Victoria lawyer Doug Christie last night prompted me to dig out a feature I did on him for the Times Colonist way back in 2002. Everybody's got a strong, strong opinion on the man, and plenty of people just plain hate him. But like most people, he was a complex character. An uneasy peace: At 56, controversial lawyer Douglas Christie now worries for his children Victoria Times Colonist, Monitor section Sun Mar 3 2002 They're dying off, the men who Douglas Christie loved the most. His heroes are dead men and the list is growing every day. It hasn't been easy being the lawyer to the stars of Canada's white-supremacist movement these last two decades, but at least there used to be a few more people who he looked up to, some friends who didn't think he was such a bad guy. Now, they're either dead or gone. Dead: Paul Arsens, the Victoria businessman who first rented Christie this funny little box of an office 23 years ago on the parking l...

I spent an unsettling afternoon yesterday listening as people from a very poor village in this region inadvertently revealed to me one of the major problems with international aid. The village is home to about 100 families, virtually all of them scratching out the most meagre of existences from land that's too steep and too full of clay to be good for farming. Their five-year-old school is looking the worse for wear, but there's no money to fix the screens or stop the water that's making its way into one of the two classrooms. The roof is in danger of collapsing on the local church. There are no jobs or school past Grade 6 for the young people, only four vehicles in the whole town, and no housing options for expanding families other than to squeeze another three or four people into Mom and Dad's teeny adobe home. So as you can imagine, they were happy to see us. My organization was there to help them identify and priorize community projects, and the villagers were...

I often have the feeling these days that small ants are crawling on my face. Unfortunately, that’s because they are.  You have to forge a whole new relationship with insects if you live in a tropical country. There are just so many of them, and so many loosely fit doors and windows for little creatures to squeeze past.  The ants that get on your face - and in your computer keyboard, your e-reader, the cracks in your kitchen table, the cereal that you forgot to put in an air-tight plastic container - are teeny little guys drawn to food crumbs and electronic things (Warm for sleeping? Comforting hum? I don’t know). At times they pass through your kitchen in a long, thin highway of organized ants on a mission, and you recognize you must have dropped something really tasty somewhere. Other times, they wander across your hands and arms as you type at your keyboard, as if your keyboard strikes are shaking them awake.  Lately, a few of the bigger leafcutter ants ...

This fungus-stricken plant has at least some ripe cherries. A Honduras coffee finca is usually a beautiful sight at this time of year.  The leaves are a rich and shiny dark green year-round, so a hillside finca is always attractive. But this is the season when the harvest is finishing up and the plants are even prettier, covered in new growth and small white flowers that herald the coming year’s crop. Sadly, that’s not how it is out there right now. A recent tour I did of several small fincas around Sesesmil, Copan demonstrated just how hard the fungus known as la roya has hit the Honduras coffee industry. The official sources in the country are still playing down the impact of the la roya attack, suggesting losses of 25 per cent for the 2012-13 harvest.  But producers know the true impact is much worse than that - closer to 60 per cent losses this year for many growers. That will be followed by a massive drop in production for the next two years, while the in...