A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

   I'm in that giddy state that comes after something you've been dreading is over, and it turned out not nearly as bad as you'd thought. In this case the anxiety-inducing event was a devotional I did this morning for my co-workers on gay tolerance - a subject that is rarely talked about here, and most definitely not in the context of the weekly prayer meeting at our office.    But for a while now I've been thinking that my co-workers are splendid, loving people, and that perhaps they really just needed a gentle push to reconsider some of the kneejerk prejudices against homosexuality that exist in Honduras. I knew I couldn't go at them with a forceful presentation on how wrong it is to deny people the basic right of loving who they choose, but I figured I might be able to just plant a seed or two that might start them thinking differently.    As it turned out, several of them had already been thinking differently. And while I noticed some people shif...

  The ever-changing field near the river.  I have a 15-minute walk to work every morning. Today's was particularly interesting, what with me stepping out the door and immediately getting into a discussion with a neighbour about the swollen vulva of the wandering young dog sleeping on our patio, which he told me meant she was in heat and thus in need of one of the mystery injections they give dogs down here to stop pregnancy. But every day's walk is interesting in its own way.     I make a point to say good morning to everyone I pass, having come to see that gringos are in general not nearly friendly enough for this extroverted and amiable culture. Shop owners getting ready for the day, women out sweeping the street outside their houses, cantina workers, street drunks - all of us exchange greetings, and at times get into spirited conversations about one thing or another.     I walk the dirt road below our house, a favourite haunt of the handful of l...

       My heart is breaking for neighbours of ours here in Copan Ruinas, whose teenage son was kidnapped 21 days ago while Paul and I were holidaying in Canada and the U.S. The family has yet to receive any ransom demand, one of those things that likely signal the worst for the poor boy.    Coincidentally, he drove me to work one morning a few days before we left on vacation. He was a brand-new mototaxi driver and I was his first paying customer. He seemed like a friendly and social guy ready to begin a new life as an adult.     Now I fear he's just another of the thousands of young Honduran men who are gone from this world for reasons that are never talked about, at the hands of criminals who are rarely prosecuted. All his family knows is that people saw him get into a non-descript grey car without licence plates on the dirt road that I walk to work on every morning, and he hasn't been seen since. It is not an unusual scenario here. ...

    I love almost everything about Facebook, from the photo-sharing and the cute-animal videos to the free emoticons you can use in your chats. But God help us if Facebook ends up being a news source for people in a post-newspaper world.     The potential power of a medium like Facebook can’t be overstated in this viral age. Anything I write on my page can be shared in a heartbeat by any of my 1,522 Facebook friends, whose own friends (and their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends) can then spread the word even farther afield in a nano-second.     No harm done if we’re talking about an inspirational saying, an anecdote about our day or an amusing/heartwarming/heartbreaking video about babies, cancer, birth, death, or animals demonstrating human-like behaviour (a very popular category).  Even rude stuff doesn’t rile me up, seeing as that just reflects on the reputation of the person who posted it.     But what passe...

   It almost felt good to experience the righteous rage rising in me this morning when I read that  uninformed column by Licia Corbella in the Calgary Herald trying to draw a link between the overdose death of actor Cory Monteith and Vancouver's supervised injection site. I'd forgotten how much I love to hate lazy, ignorant commentary, so deliciously wide open to being torn apart by anyone with the slightest understanding of the issue at hand.     How long would it have taken for Corbella to have gone to the Insite web site and learned more about the services, the clients, the lives saved - five minutes, maybe? Ah, but she didn't want facts. She wanted to make her very strange case that Cory Monteith overdosed because he was in Vancouver, at a hotel close to the "cancerous lesion" that is the Downtown Eastside, and that he might still be alive today if he'd had the good sense to visit a different Canadian city.     Reasoning that the Glee actor sur...