A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Photo:  Rainforest Rescue  I came home from our recent trip to the Moskitia feeling unsettled by the vast, eerie mono-cultures of African palm trees that dominate the coastal landscape of Honduras as you move east toward the Nicaraguan border.  A Google search on the phenomenon provided me with this 2013 quote about the plantations from a web site that tracks Central American business trends: “ Investments of $35 million allowed an increase in planted areas of 17,000 hectares, which are added to the 135,000 already cultivated with oil palm," notes the Business to Business site. " Crude palm oil has been increasing steadily, influenced by an increase in prices in response to increased global demand for the oil from the bio-diesel industry.” We're all familiar by now with the global dream to create a sustainable plant-based fuel that might end our dependency on dwindling fossil fuels. Honduras even has a law around bio-fuel production, which allows the country...

Mirna Ruiz cooks a yucca torta. It’s crazy-hot in the little casita where the Garifuna woman is cooking. It’s even hotter over by the wood cooking stove, where she’s grilling ground yucca into the giant wafer-like tortas that are a mainstay of the Garifuna diet. Mirna Ruiz is chief cook and president of the Binadu Uwenedu women’s cooperative in Ciriboya, Colon. The little co-op produces 2,000 of the crisp wafers every month, most to be packaged for sale in the cities of Honduras to Garifuna people far away from their home communities on the Caribbean coast. In Honduras, Garifuna coastal communities run from Puerto Cortes in the north to the sleepy little village of Plaplaya, in the Moskitia region not far from the Nicaraguan border. We spent a week travelling through coastal Colon and the Moskitia earlier this month; where our first up-close glimpse of Garifuna culture was one of the many pleasures of the trip. The Garifuna are descendants of Caribs, indigenous Arawak...

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...