A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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...

Confession time: Have you ever had to come up with a fast donation for a food drive and solved the problem by digging around in the back of your cupboards for tins and packets of things you never use?  I used to do it, despite nagging feelings of shame that all I was really doing was dumping things I didn’t want in the first place – cans of kidney beans, stewed tomatoes, cream corn.  After I worked at a non-profit and saw just how much unwanted crap got dumped at our door in the name of donations, I put that practice away once and for all. I was reminded of that today when I poked my head into the storage room at Angelitos Felices children’s home and saw the piles of strange, strange things that people had donated to “help” the kids.  Like stacks of refill pages for those three-ring personal organizers that people used to use back before Blackberries. Homemade scratch pads made from recycled office posters flipped over to their blank sides and glued together ...

I´m having one of those days that Cuso International warns its volunteers about - one where the frustrations of life in a new country and culture build up to the point that you´re at risk of snapping rudely to just about anyone, "Come on, you people, get your freakin´act together!" Admittedly, some of the frustration is petty. Everything seems to break here, including the kitchen clock we bought after we arrived  that has now developed the habit of stopping every time the hour hand passes "1." The electrical current is so irregular that I´ve burned through an expensive electric toothbrush, a Kobo reader, and no less than three power cords for my laptop. One of those cords was dead within an hour of me buying it despite being plugged into the pricey new voltage regulator that the store vowed would solve all my problems. Maybe I had broken the regulator, the clerk suggested helpfully. Which leads to another point of frustration: poor-quality goods and services. ...

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...

It will soon be a year since I began doing projects at the Angelitos Felices children's home here in Copan. The needs are so vast for children in Honduras that at times it's difficult to gauge whether anything you do is having any impact, but at least I can take in the completed capital projects at Angelitos on days like that and think, yeah, that's a little better. This photo from one of my first visits to Angelitos serves to remind me that the walls are now repainted, the filthy concrete floor is now nice, bright ceramic, and little Jesus has new clothes and shoes that fit The kids have hot showers, the place no longer smells like sewage, the water (mostly) flows. The toilets flush, the new ceramic floors at least have the potential of looking clean. OK, the interior walls already look almost as bad as they did before we painted the place just two short months ago, but you can't win 'em all.  While I was away over Christmas, a U.S. traveller had ceili...

A major funder was in town this week for its annual perforance evaluation of the Honduran non-profit that I work for. So off we all went to the little town of La Cumbre, where 30 or so people from a dozen neighbouring villages had gathered to share their stories. As always, I was struck by how little margin for error there is in the lives of these people. One misstep, one bad harvest, one unexpected turn of events can sink a family. Rural Hondurans are exceptionally resilient, but I do have to wonder how they're going to manage with climate change. In Canada and the U.S., climate change tends to be one of those off-in-the-distance kind of things - something you know you'll have to worry about one day but that right now just means you think more about turning off your idling car or buying reusable shopping bags. That's not the case in Honduras. In a country full of subsistence farmers who rely on seasonal rains to water their food crops, the impact of climate change is...

Somebody posted the following comment under my recent blog about job insecurity in Honduras. I wanted to repost it here because the writer does make the very valid point that there's much about Honduran employment practices that I don't know. "While your comments about CASM having one year contracts are technically true, the fact is they still do pay out the benefits at the end of every year. Many employees actually prefer that, so that they get their retirement money at the end of each year and can do with it as they like rather than wait until they finish employment at an organization to get it. Most people would rather control their own retirement money than have an NGO or company have it, and if the NGO flops then they are out their money. There are also annual certified audits and turn in financial & activity reports to the government which would catch if any of the benefits are not being paid. You might want to ask your CASM co-workers more about this, you mig...

Somebody told me a few months after we moved here that Honduran women often long to have their own corner store. I thought it a strange thing to say at the time. But it makes more sense now that I see how impermanent the work culture is here. I’m betting that it’s not racks of little chip bags or a cooler full of giant bottles of Coke that gets a Honduran woman hankering to open her own pulperia . It’s economic stability. The days of 35 years and a gold watch have been over for a while now in virtually every country, what with free trade having unleashed a new kind of work culture that just moves around the globe to whatever country has the hungriest workers willing to work for the cheapest wages. No job is a sure thing anymore, wherever you live. But the sheer uncertainty of any job in Honduras - well, that would set me to dreaming of economic stability as well were I a Honduran woman trying to keep my bills paid and my kids fed, clothed and educated over the long term. Even t...

Sesemil producers pack coffee beans for sale in Copan There’s no avoiding the earthy, acrid smell of wet coffee cherries these days if you’re walking any of the dirt roads winding through the hills of Copan.  It’s the smell of money for Hondurans, who count on the annual coffee harvest from their small plots of land to provide their families with enough money to get them through the year.    That’s a risky dependency any time you’ve got a commodity whose prices bob up and down as much as coffee. But climate change is adding a whole new layer of risk, bringing plagues and uncertain growing conditions to torment small coffee producers with little ability to ride out rough times. Producers knew going into the current harvest season that they were up against a persistent fungus that has been spreading with abandon through a widely grown strain of coffee plant, says the administrator of an agricultural co-operative of organic coffee growers based in Copan R...

This time last year, I was in one of the most stressful periods of my life as we stripped away all that was familiar and beloved to prepare for our move to Honduras. I was stepping into a new job in a strange land where I'd have to work in a language I barely knew, leaving behind friends, family and the security of a comfortable and fulfilling 30-year career. I was unsettled by the constant reports of violence and murder coming out of Honduras, and wondering just what my spouse and I had gotten ourselves into with our decision to volunteer for Cuso International. But it felt like the right thing to do even so. And with a challenging, exhilarating year now under our belts, I'm happy to report that it was. We had no idea what  to expect when we boarded the plane for San Pedro Sula on a cold, damp January day. More than 50 years of middle-class accumulation had been reduced to a small storage locker of largely worthless personal possessions and 40 kilos of baggage we were t...