Farewell to one of Victoria's most controversial citizens

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 lot beside the Royal Theatre.
Barney Russ, the "wonderful man" who let Christie finish out his articling with him after Christie got ditched by another law firm. E. Davie Fulton, former Tory justice minister. John Diefenbaker, still mourned by Christie as a great loss.
He's sitting here talking about his life and suddenly realizing that they're all dead.
Even his infamous clients are fading away. Anti-Semitic columnist Doug Collins has died. So has white supremacist John Ross Taylor and accused war criminal Imre Finta. Jim Keegstra stays off the public radar as much as possible.
Ernst Zundel, whose anti-Semitic Web site was found in violation last month of federal human-rights laws, has moved to Tennessee and married the woman who runs the site for him. And hate-rock musician George Burdi isn't even in the movement any more.
Christie's no youngster himself, 56 now and surprised to find himself enjoying fatherhood. His children are nine and 11, and a key factor in how he ended up president of the Saanich Water Polo Club. He's had a long, hard run at this life of his, and nearly 20 years of being publicly denounced for some of the company he has kept. It's got Christie wondering if it's time for a change.
He hadn't expected to have children. But now that he does, it makes a difference.
"I worry for the kids," Christie says. "I remember coming down to my office a few years back with my son, then age four, and finding the window smashed in. He couldn't understand why someone would do that to his Daddy."
Christie is top villain among those who fight against hate propaganda in Canada; his skill as a lawyer has helped a number of his controversial clients win their fights before courts and human rights tribunals.
He differentiates himself from his racist clients -- he's merely a libertarian and an ardent proponent of free speech, he contends. But there are many who don't believe him.
"Doug Christie has aligned himself so many times with these perverted monsters that he has to be viewed as one himself," Vancouver radio talk-show host Gary Bannerman said back in 1985. Christie sued him and lost. The judge ruled it was fair comment.
Three years ago, Christie became the first lawyer in Canadian history to be banned from Ottawa's parliamentary precinct because the government didn't like his client, Zundel.
And when the Law Society of Upper Canada went looking for evidence in 1993 that Christie was aligning himself too closely with his clients' causes, it ruled only grudgingly that he was off the hook.
"He has made common cause with a small, lunatic anti-Semitic fringe element in our society," wrote Windsor lawyer Harvey Strosberg. "[But] suffering Mr. Christie's words and opinions is part of the price one pays for upholding and cherishing freedom of speech in a free and democratic society."
Even the politicians run from him. While his politics certainly lean to the right, the Canadian Alliance nearly tied itself in knots trying to distance itself from Christie when he joined the party two years ago.
It's all a bit much, says Christie.
"I'm in a debate with myself whether there's anything to salvage in Canada," he says. "There's definitely no hope in Ottawa. All I can see is slow decline."
Christie was born in Winnipeg, the oldest child of a federal tax collector and a homemaker. He has an arts degree from the University of Winnipeg and a law degree from UBC, having put himself through school with jobs in the oil fields, as a lifeguard and making sandwiches in his university dorm to sell to other students.
He remembers the conversation with his father that led to him choosing law.
"I liked working outside, but I also liked reading through documents and that sort of thing," Christie recalls. "My dad said, 'Well, you could be a farmer or a lawyer.' I figured I could be a lawyer AND a farmer, but not the other way around."
Christie became fascinated with religion during university, and converted to Catholicism when he was 21. It came as something of a surprise to his Presbyterian family. In his early days as a Catholic in Victoria, Christie founded St. Andrew's Refugee Association to aid newly arrived Vietnamese refugees.
His faith remains an important part of his life. The only two images hanging on the walls of his Courtney Street office are Jesus and Civil War leader Robert E. Lee.
Christie's first venture into the public eye was as a Western separatist, a concept that gained him a bit of an audience in the late 1970s and early '80s.
It was at one of those rallies that he met the woman he would eventually marry, Keltie Zubko, on-line publisher of the Freedom Papers and a kindred spirit. Zundel called her "an unsung fighter of freedom of speech in Canada" in one of his Internet "Z-grams" last year. She and Christie celebrated their 20th anniversary on Valentine's Day.
Christie's Western Canada Concept is still a registered political party, although he won only 62 votes when he last ran as the WCC candidate for Saanich South in the 1996 provincial election. And its founder remains committed to his belief that the West should separate, arguing that every new party and attempt at political reform rises out of the West, only to be crushed by the East.
The vision for the West under the WCC is of an English-speaking "genuine national culture true to our existing European heritage and values." Aboriginals would take individual cash settlements and be done with it. Abortions would be restricted, as would immigration. "Capacity to voluntarily assimilate is a prerequisite to all new immigration," notes the party's Web site.
They're not the most popular views to hold, nor were they when the party started. So perhaps it's not surprising that Christie felt the urge in 1984 to call up the Alberta teacher he'd been reading about who held some pretty controversial views as well.
Jim Keegstra was mayor of Eckville, Alta., and a teacher at the local high school. He'd been warned six years earlier to tone it down in the classroom with his criticism of Catholics, but this time he'd been talking about the Jews in Germany. His students lined up to testify that Keegstra's teaching had left them hating Jews and doubting the Holocaust, and he had been fired and charged with promoting hatred.
"I felt sympathy for the guy," says Christie. "I'd been kind of big news for a while in Alberta, and I felt that the media tends to pick on people sometimes. So I phoned him up. I just wanted to say 'Hey, don't be down-hearted.' Keegstra recognized Christie's name from his Western Canada Concept connections and asked if Christie would represent him. "I said OK very slowly, because I knew this would change my life forever."
It did. Keegstra's views on the Holocaust and Jews were so outrageous that many people suspected that no one but a fellow believer would take on such a case.
The Ernst Zundel case was that same year. As Canadian distributor of an ugly little pamphlet out of Britain titled Did Six Million Really Die?, Zundel had been charged with spreading false news. Christie set up his Canadian Free Speech League around that time as a defence fund for Zundel and Keegstra.
There have been many others since Christie was launched down this path. Some have belonged to the Ku Klux Klan or the white-supremacist Church of the Creator. Some were accused of recording hateful phone messages or writing hateful essays, still others with running Internet and telephone hotlines deemed racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or hateful by human rights tribunals and courts across the country.
"Except for Joan of Arc, it's rarely the case that the people a lawyer defends are seen as savoury by others," says Christie about his client list. "I think their views are interesting, that's all, and important because they're different."
As for his own views, Christie considers himself "authentic" for standing up for what he believes in, which for the most part has not yet aligned him with his clients but has certainly placed him close to the pack. He says he's not anti-Semitic.
"I don't mind Jews and they don't usually mind me," contends Christie (although he does recall a long-ago morning in the Y change room when he stood stunned in his three-piece pinstripe suit as local businessman Howie Siegel, Jewish and stark naked, tore a strip off him for taking on the Keegstra case). "I get along well with people in general. I treat them like individuals."
It was around the time of Keegstra, the spring of 1985, that Red Deer College English professor Gary Botting stumbled into Christie's life.
Botting was a Jehovah's Witness, a religion whose followers went through a period in the 1950s of being criminally prosecuted for spreading false news. As a result, he felt strongly about protecting freedom of expression.
So when he heard about an Alberta library banning a Holocaust-denial book, Botting spoke out. Christie was on the phone soon after, and Botting soon found himself bundled onto a plane to Toronto to be an "expert witness" at Zundel's trial.
Botting seems quite baffled today at how it all happened, and how completely his relationship with Christie subsequently unravelled a few years later. He was a friend and fellow traveller -- even articling with Christie during Botting's transition into a lawyer after the two men met.
Botting, now living in Bowser and no longer practising law, says the friendship deteriorated as he grew more worried about the people he found himself keeping company with. When Botting received the debut George Orwell free speech award in 1986, a Christie invention, he was horrified to see the TV news juxtapose his image with that of an ex-Klansman standing beside a burning cross.
The moment that ultimately severed the relationship was at a party 11 years ago at Zundel's Toronto home, says Botting. He'd wandered into Zundel's basement and come upon "a large-screen TV with half a dozen really elderly Nazi types weeping away as Hitler rallied the masses for the 1936 Berlin Games." He began to question whether freedom of expression was the issue at hand.
"I'm all in favour of a free marketplace of ideas," Botting says now. "But Christie always seemed to go that one step farther."
In 1996, humiliated by reports that Zundel was still pointing to Botting's trial testimony as support, Botting wrote a letter to Christie saying his free speech league was in fact a front for an "anti-Semitic agenda." He renounced all ties with Christie and returned his Orwell award.
Does Christie share the views of his clients? He will say only that his clients' opinions are "interesting," and shouldn't be silenced just because people don't want to hear what they have to say.
He has been quoted in the past questioning theories about the Holocaust, telling reporters in 1985, "I can say I've come to have some grave doubts about the exterminationist side." He definitely rubbed federal Citizenship Minister Elinor Caplan the wrong way a couple of months ago with a comment about her "Jewish animosity" toward one of his clients.
Botting recalls driving with Christie while he sang along gustily in German to a tape of war-era German marching music, played at deafening volume for the benefit of an alarmed hitchhiker in the back seat.
"I think the shock appeal is part of it," says Botting. "But there's something very distasteful about using Nazism for its shock value."
George Burdi, the reformed founder of a white-power music distribution company (he now describes himself as "a born-again liberal" and plays in a multi-race band), says it's simplistic to think that there's a single viewpoint shared by everyone on the extreme right.
"It's a bit like Christianity inside the movement in that you hardly find two with the same view," says Burdi, who spent two weeks with Christie in adjoining hotel rooms during a hate trial three years ago.
"You'd be surprised. I remember hearing Ernst Zundel arguing for more immigration from Asia.
"But what's important to understand is that none of them are Dr. Evil, wringing their hands and planning to destroy people. They believe what they're saying."
Christie was Burdi's lawyer in 1999 when the Toronto musician pleaded guilty to spreading racial hatred, having been caught in a sting selling racist CDs to police. Burdi remembers Christie urging him to let the matter proceed to trial, even offering to take the case for free rather than see Burdi plead guilty.
"He was ready to give up three months of his time away from home, and do it pro bono," says Burdi. "I have to call that honour. I think it's a real shame a man like that has spent his life trapped in this bitter battle."
Christie remembers the time when he was sitting in his car outside his office and a truck drove into the side of the building. Had he been inside, the truck would have hit him while he sat at his desk. He doubts it was an accident.
He's since boarded up his office windows in the old Broughton Street jewelry kiosk he leases from the city, the better to avoid the hassle of cleaning up broken glass.
He hesitated for two weeks before agreeing to be interviewed, fearful of another wave of media-generated hassles.
"I'm starting to think I'm running out of friends," he says jokingly.
His name alone is trouble enough. A Toronto lawyer with the same name suffered through 11 death threats in the 1990s before he finally took out a newspaper ad noting that he wasn't that Doug Christie. Life hasn't been any smoother for Victoria's Doug Christie.
"Ultimately, you have to be what you are," he says. "There's never been an easy time to say these things. When people really take time to live authentic lives, it far exceeds in value the compromises made for short-term gains."
Christie has chosen to fight back by suing people, a practice that has raised eyebrows among those who find it strange behaviour for a man who considers himself a champion of free speech. He has sued newspapers, politicians and various individuals over the years, with varying degrees of success.
Financially, Christie says he's done all right for himself, although no one would know it by the look of his office. The carpet is worn, the furniture minimalist and tatty. The lighting is dim. The walls are nearly bare but for Jesus, Robert E. Lee and a handmade poster declaring "Justice is My Hope." Christie says he likes to save on overhead.
There have been lower-profile clients over the years supplementing his freedom-of-expression cases: A Victoria grandmother fighting to have her granddaughter come visit her at her escort agency; the local film festival battling to show a documentary about porn star John Holmes inside St. Ann's Academy; marine engineer Bob Ward in his libel lawsuit against former premier Glen Clark.
But it's never long before the next controversial case emerges. And they invariably have something to do with contentious opinions around Nazis and the Holocaust. The most recent in that long line is the case of Michael Seifert, the convicted war criminal from Vancouver who Ottawa is trying to strip of Canadian citizenship and deport.
The issues Christie has raised around free speech don't sit comfortably with many. It's difficult to support Christie's wide-open version of freedom of expression without appearing to endorse the appalling views of some of his clients.
One who handled the challenge well was Conrad Black. Exhorted by former employee Doug Collins to support his fight to overturn a B.C. Human Rights ruling that found his writing hateful, the newspaper baron replied: "Some of your editorial reflections are such that, while we don't contest your right to your opinions, we are not prepared to publish or underwrite them ourselves."
Warren Kinsella, a Toronto lawyer whose 1994 book Web of Hate includes a chapter on Christie, says Christie is a good lawyer, routinely underestimated by those who come up against him. He is also in demand as a public speaker, travelling around the world at the request of those who like what he has to say. He'll be in Borneo this month on one such engagement, and is popular in Australia.
"He's very dogged, very determined to represent these people," says Kinsella of Christie's standard clientele. "It's just a shame that many of them possess such loathsome opinions."
Burdi says the white-power movement in Canada that Christie has figured so prominently in is "moribund" these days. The old guard has moved on, and the new wave of young and vicious white supremacists that Burdi was briefly part of is languishing.
He figures it was the Internet that did in the movement, the opposite of what everyone predicted. Hate literature is now so readily available that it has lost its thrill.
As for Christie, he isn't likely to abandon his cause, or run out of clients. It's been more than half a century since the Holocaust, but there seems to be no shortage of people still eager to argue over it.
"If you and I disagree, why should one of us have to be silent?" asks Christie. "Every group should be open to criticism if criticism is true, and the way that's determined is through public debate and analysis."
But he's tired these days, and troubled by a bout of asthma that landed him in the hospital recently. He's thinking about new directions, musing over how nice it would be to work in a plant nursery.
"Thirty years. There've been some stressful times in there," says Christie. "I've got to think about slowing down. I think I'll just try to do what I can with whatever is left to me."

When aid is a crutch and not a solution

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 very eager to talk about what they needed
A new soccer field, for one. A kitchen for the school. Equipment for the people in town who have some marketable skills but can't use them because they didn't have tools. Help starting up a new bread-baking business. A new roof for that church. Better roads. Retaining walls that could be backfilled to create tiny lots for more houses. Latrines for the houses that don't have any. A better way to handle garbage other than just chucking the stuff into the street, which is what happens now.
Good ideas all. The plan now is to pitch some of those projects to international funders to see if somebody wants to put up some money.
But the truth is that you could fund every one of those projects and the community would still be a dirt-poor place with little hope for a diet that goes beyond corn and beans, sustainable infrastructure, or a future for its young people that isn't just more of the same.
Please don't interpret this as me saying we should stop international aid. Countries like Honduras have seen major improvements over time in the health and well-being of their citizens because caring donors and governments in distant lands ponied up for carefully considered interventions.
 International aid also has the potential to shape government policy, and this country could certainly use some of that. My own little organization has done some great work to help individual families lift themselves out of the grind of daily poverty.
But projects alone can't change the future of a community, or of a country. Whatever projects are ultimately realized in that little town we visited yesterday will not change the fact that its residents are poorly equipped for the modern world, unable to sustain their own community, and destined to live ever more marginally while waiting for the next group of well-intended visitors to show up with more project funding.
 Hats off to whatever group got that school built in the village, but where was the money supposed to come from to maintain it in a town where everybody lives virtually without income? And while many would argue that a Grade 6 education is better than none at all, is it anywhere near enough schooling to prepare young people for an increasingly complex and global economy?
If the unemployed seamstresses, mechanics and plumbers in town had the tools they needed to work, where would they find the people to pay them for that work - or the transport to access larger commercial centres? If the local bread-makers were helped to start a business, where would they sell their goods?
And would their business make enough money to cover costs? Or would they end up like the villagers in other towns around here who started raising tilapia through an injection of international funds only to discover they couldn't make enough selling the fish to pay for the cost of feeding them?
Projects are great ways to kick-start a new day. It's smart to use international funds to build schools in countries committed to reforming their education system but too poor to get started. It's caring to put foreign dollars and expertise to work to strengthen health care in a region digging itself out of a crisis. It's an excellent investment to provide seed money for private enterprise in a town where all the ingredients are there to make a new business work.
But stringing a bunch of projects together without ever getting to the root of a problem - well, that's just busy work. Honduras has plenty of that, but will spin its wheels as a country until there's long-term, strategic support for transformation that goes all the way to the top.
Until then, we're really just putting a pretty face on the status quo. I feel for all the Hondurans who know it.

Going buggy

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 have made their way under the door as well. That’s a whole other story - one that will culminate in a few months with a stream of leafcutter ants making their way past our front door, each carrying bits from whatever nearby plant they have decimated to make the special fungus that they eat. They can take a garden plant back to sticks in a night.

We’ve decided that the leafcutter ants who come in our house are from the forager class, sent to check out whether there’s something worthwhile beyond our door. They’re at least 50 times bigger than the bitsy ants that live in our computer keyboards, and quite ferocious-looking with their formidable pincer-legs up front. But they don’t care to walk on your face, for which I am grateful.

Then there are the cockroaches. They come in various sizes, but they’re all kind of creepy with their scuttling movement, dark-of-night habits and ability to survive much abuse, including being launched like a well-played hockey puck toward the brick wall out back when somebody like me inevitably draws the line and sweeps one ferociously hard out the door. 

I don’t like them much. If I thought I could kill every one of them if I just tried harder, I’d probably do it. 

But there’s only so many times you can spray Raid, or try to do something elaborate with your tube of toothpaste so you never again have to flick on your bathroom light to the sight of a giant cockroach enjoying a minty snack.

You can sweep them put the door, stamp them dead, lay towels across every window gap, observe immaculate kitchen habits.  The damn things will just keep coming. Sooner or later, you have to find a kind of peace with them. 

The biting bugs - well, I dislike those guys most of all. We’ve got mosquitoes and nasty biting midges in Canada, too, but down here the sheer variety is impressive.

There are, for instance, the ones that bite your lower legs in the cool season. Those bites swell up, itch like crazy, and take days to go away. 

There’s another kind of biting bug that comes in the rainy season that chomps you maybe 15 times all in one area - the back of your arm, say. You itch like crazy, but then the bites are gone within a couple of hours.

We’ve got very fine screen on our windows and good door-closing habits, but those teeny biters thwart us just the same. Happily, anti-itch creams like Alergil are cheap and readily available here, so I just make sure there’s always a tube nearby.

Spiders tend to be the nightmare of bug-a-phobics. But I made my peace with spiders a few years back, I think after seeing Microcosmos and ending up impressed by their talents despite my misgivings. 

They’ve got a number of fancy spiders in Honduras: some that weave golden webs; some that wear a funny crab’s-shell kind of getup; some that glitter like they’ve been bedazzled. If you can get past the fear factor, the spiders here are actually pretty amazing. 

Then there are the pre-Semana Santa beetles that crunch underfoot in March and April. The cicadas that sing their strange songs from the trees, changing their tune as the seasons pass. The flies with dangly hind legs that insist on hovering near your face, and that can still get me screaming and flailing around despite my best efforts to appear untroubled. 

But of course, there are also the butterflies, fluttering past like delicate flower petals in the breeze. Blue, yellow, orange, transparent - you can't believe the variety in the tropics. They’re the payback for the dangly-legged flies, the bug-infested cereal, the mosquito welts on your feet. And how could I forget the glow bugs, glimmering a luminescent green over the farm fields at night? I shared one magical night with my family on Dec. 21 when we sat in the dark amid the Mayan ruins, counting flickering neon specks in the grass. 

That’s the thing with nature - it comes as a package. When I feel that familiar tickle of a tiny ant making its way up my neck, I try to remember that. 

Coffee in crisis

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 infected plants recover from being severely cut back to help them survive the fungus.

It’s a terrifying prospect in a country where the coffee harvest is just about the only thing that generates money for the small rural producers who grow most of the coffee coming out of Honduras. 

La roya - coffee leaf rust - is an old foe for coffee growers, and there are definitely things you can do to stop it. But that’s in some kind of dream world where growers have money and time to spare for the major interventions necessary to stop the fungus, and in a time when the fungus was just an occasional problem and not a wide-spread disaster.

If you have money, you can fight back. 

You can, for instance, spray the plant with a number of fungicides over a certain period of time. You can cut the plant back hard and afford to sit back and wait through the two years before it produces again. You can take preventive action by spraying uninfected plants with copper, or buy new strains of plants genetically resistant to la roya and just start over. 

But the majority of coffee producers in Honduras are small-scale, independent growers, using coffee dollars to smooth the edges from what would otherwise be subsistence living. They’re a long way from well-off, most without money for anything beyond the basics when it comes to keeping their fincas in good working order. 

The bulk of the growers who belong to the COAPROCL coffee co-op in Sesesmil are facing losses of nearly 70 per cent of their crop. And that’s just this year: they’ll also have to weather two more years of dramatically reduced production, presuming they can even achieve the monumental task of cutting back every sick plant on their fincas. 

As recently as October, the growers thought they were heading into a banner year. But then the plants started dropping their leaves. Green, thriving plants turned to leafless, yellowing sticks within a matter of weeks. The ripening coffee cherries stopped ripening, many dying on the branch due to the lack of nutrients coming from the plant. 

The result: The harvest is late and small, with a gloomy forecast until 2016. 

The lines of credit will come due for producers any day now, but they won’t have the money to pay for them - or the money for school, medical needs, clothes for the kids, repairs for anything that might break over the next year, food and care for the animals, or all those other goods and services that families can’t produce on their own.

These cherries shrivelled before they could ripen
after the leaves fell.

I toured the fincas with an Australian couple who have a coffee-roasting company in Melbourne and an affinity for Copan beans. They added a whole new wrinkle to the la roya dilemma, noting that so far, resistant coffee strains just don’t produce as flavourful a bean as the varieties that are currently being decimated in Honduras.

So even a wholesale switch to one of the resistant varieties won’t be the answer. Not if it makes buyers unhappy. COAPROCL  producers are acutely aware that it’s all about the buyers - and satisfying the discriminating coffee drinkers of the world who give the crop its worth. 

Some regions haven’t been hit as hard. Comayagua growers expect to be down just five per cent, presuming they get a handle on the armed criminals stealing their coffee harvests right off the plant. In Lempira, losses are looking to be around 30 per cent. 

But whatever is coming over the next three years is going to hurt everyone. Even the guys loading the trucks at the export companies are bracing for a downturn; they get paid by the bag, and there are going to be far fewer bags around this year. 

Add in the people who cut coffee during the harvest season and we’re talking millions of people, in a country where so many already live right on the knife’s edge. Growers are also worried that if they can’t ship enough coffee to their overseas buyers over the next three years, they’ll lose markets as well. 

In another country, you’d like to think that government authorities would be all over this natural disaster. But that’s a whole other sad story. Brace for the hurricane. 

The best giving starts with knowing what's needed

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 at one end. Weird plastic gee-gaws and unknowable objects, scraped from somebody’s pile of discards and packaged up for transport to orphans in Honduras.

I know, I know – people living in poverty are supposed to be grateful for all things, whether it’s another damn tin of tuna for the local food bank or an out-of-date calendar in English for poor families in Latin America. It’s more or less an unspoken rule that anyone who gives away anything is doing a good deed, even if their motivation is less about helping an unfortunate soul and more about ditching something they don’t want.

But really, feeling good about giving away things that you don’t want and have no use to the person receiving them – well, that’s a little lame.  That’s a “gift” designed to make the giver feel good without having put a moment’s thought into what might genuinely be of value to the person receiving it. That’s a gift that ends up stacked on a big shelf of useless stuff at an orphanage where so many real needs go unmet.

So how can givers be more effective? It starts with taking the time to find out what the needs are for the group you want to help – or alternatively, assessing what you’ve got to give away and thinking about a group that could really use those items.  

When I worked with street-entrenched sex workers at PEERS Victoria, I was ever so grateful to the people who would call first to ask what we needed, and then arrive at our door with the exact things we asked for.  I was less grateful to those who arrived with several boxfuls of their late father’s used clothes hidden beneath a thin layer of women’s clothes, as if there might be a hidden population of poorly clothed 80-year-old men working in the Victoria sex trade.

For those who want to give to the developing world, it’s a little more challenging. It might not be as easy as picking up a phone to call someone working at the grassroots level to verify what’s needed. It’s much harder to get your goods to the people who need them. To be effective in a foreign land requires more work.

Work to track down information on who’s doing what, and where, and how much they’re spending on administration to achieve their objectives. Work to ascertain whether it’s better to ship goods because there’s a scarcity in the country, or if the real problem isn’t stuff but a lack of money to buy it. Work to find a contact in the country who you can trust, or a proven organization that’s doing something you really want to support.

But the payback for that initial investigative work is the warm feeling that you’ve donated something that people really need.

Instead of digging out your worn ski jacket and wool pants for your church to ship off to children in the tropics, perhaps you and the rest of the congregation write a small cheque to a non-profit in that country that instead covers the costs of the new shoes the children need a whole lot more. Instead of collecting a few notebooks and pencils to send at great cost to students in a faraway land, you find a way to buy those goods directly in the country – and end up being able to buy even more with the money you save on shipping.

 Instead of rummaging around at the back of your pantry for your outdated tins of tomato paste to give to the homeless guy who has neither a can opener or a kitchen, you take fresh fruits and veggies to the local soup kitchen. (And your ski jacket and wool pants, because those guys really could use them.)

We give because we care, of course, and I don’t mean to mock those whose intentions are honorable. But the needs are vast out here in this troubled, complex world.  It’s wonderful when people feel the urge to give, but so much more effective when they give the things that truly make a difference. 

When nothing goes right

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. I had to be persistent for an entire week to get that store to replace the power cord, and it was touch and go to the end. Our bedside lamps fell apart within a couple hours of use after the glue used to make the shades sizzled under the heat of the 40-watt bulbs. My spouse bought the wrong kind of extension cord one time and could only get 50 per cent of his money back despite returning it in the original packaging, with the receipt, within minutes of buying it.
In November I bought a new $500 washing machine with a one-year guarantee for the Angelitos children´s home, but we couldn't get it to work. The store took three months to send around a repair man, informed me that the problem was that the digital display drew more power than the neighbourhood had available, then charged me an additional $100 to swap in a non-digital machine because the other one was now "used."
 I took my laptop in to be cleaned a couple days ago and it came back with the keyboard broken. Having lived here a year, I  know there's nothing to be done about that other than to have a good old rant in the kitchen and write a crabby blog post. I bought an external keyboard, but today that´s not working either.
The stuff all comes from the same Chinese factories where Canadians get their goods, and the prices are the same if not higher. There´s no obvious explanation for the inferior quality. But I´m starting to suspect there's a seconds bin in those factories with a big sign saying, "For sale in the developing world only." And like I say, it's not like there are any avenues for complaint in Honduras.
Putting my small gripes aside for a moment, the country´s truly serious problems are handled in similarly cavelier fashion.
I just spent two days walking around coffee plantations in Copan, where farmers are being devastated by an unprecedented attack of coffee fungus that's wiping out as much as 70 per cent of this year's coffee harvest in parts of the country. The news is even bleaker for the coming two years, because those plants will have to be cut back so hard that they won't be producing again until 2016.
Multiply that by the millions of Hondurans who make something of a living from coffee, and you've got a national emergency. From the producers to the truckers to the export companies to the two million hungry people who depend on the four-month harvest season for work, this will be unbelievably bad.
And yet there's the Honduran agriculture minister in the morning paper, assuring everyone that Honduras has the situation under control and the impact will be minimal. That's a lie.
The country - and several other Latin American coffee-growing countries grappling with the same fungus  - is heading into a natural disaster of epic proportions due to the fungus. What the government ought to be doing is jumping into this with a detailed plan of action and enough international support to help everyone in the industry weather this crisis. What it's actually doing is nothing.
Nor is it doing anything effective to curb the staggering amount of criminal activity in the country. People throw around the word "impunity" a lot in Honduras, but impunity is just what happens when you've got a compromised and inadequate police force, an absent court system, vast numbers of unemployed and poorly paid people and a disengaged government.
Those same coffee producers I met with this week told me of their little co-op being robbed of more than $60,000 last year by an unscrupulous Honduran coffee buyer. But there's nothing they can do about that, any more than they can stop the organized criminals who steal into the fields late at night and make off with their coffee crops.
How do you "fix" a country that lives so doggedly in denial of its own role in solving some of its problems? Bad clocks, power surges and lousy customer service are ultimately just irritants that get on a volunteer's nerves, but they symbolize an absence of care and attention that goes right up to the highest levels. 

Passing the hat for basic needs

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. Happily, the drive raised a million lempiras - about $50,000 - and surgeons at Mario Rivas hospital are briefly back in business.
Families at the big public hospital in Santa Rosa, Copan, organized a similar fundraiser a couple of months ago after word got out that newborns were being kept in cardboard boxes for lack of proper beds. No doubt plans are also underway for a maraton on behalf of the public hospital in La Ceiba, which was recently served with an eviction notice due to unpaid rent and electrical bills.
Schools use maratones all the time. The campaigns fund the absolute basics: Desks; a new classroom; decent bathrooms; books and school supplies. And while the government does take responsibility for teachers' salaries, the reality is that they're so bad about paying that teachers are always going on strike. (As are doctors and nurses.) If there hasn't already been a maraton to fund a teacher's salary, I'm sure there soon will be.
This past weekend, people were out in the streets of Copan Ruinas holding a maraton for a young man who was kidnapped last week. The kidnappers are demanding an amount that's way beyond anything the young man's family could hope to pay, so they've been reduced to wandering around town with empty water bottles hoping strangers might throw in a few lempiras for their missing son.
Perhaps the nuttiest thing is that Hondurans don't find any of this odd. It's just the way it is. In theory, they've got a democratic government and a lot of laws and policies around caring for vulnerable citizens and ending inequality, but the truth is that people are almost completely on their own.
Maybe that's not such a bad way to live if you're rich; after all, Honduras has all the bells and whistles of a developed country for those who have the money to access them. You don't notice the rich worrying too much about whether Mario Rivas hospital has surgical supplies, because they're buying their medical care  at the bright and shiny private hospital down the road.
But it's a pretty raw deal for the almost 70 per cent of the population that lives in poverty. They've got the worst of both worlds: a government that taxes them but at the same time feels little responsibility to provide basic services.
Governments are good or bad for all kinds of reasons. One that is largely absent leaves its own cruel mark on a country, and a long line of empty water bottles waiting to be filled.

Shaking things up

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 conservative with the font type. It's called Molengo. I love trying out new fonts, but ultimately share Paul's viewpoint that unless a font is effortless to read, you've kind of lost the point. I redid my haiku site, too, but had a little more fun with the fonts.
Anyway, welcome to the new me. For now.

There's a scammer born every minute

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 Canada’s two official languages, true, but not the one you’d expect an Ontario organization to use when sending out international invitations (or ever, really).

I did a Google search today on the name of the man listed on the invitation as the president of OPHA, M. Jean Paul Merlier. Not only is he not the president, but his name brought up a warning on the Web site of the Union of InternationalAssociations cautioning members about the scam. It also brought up a site that featured that particular invitation and a variety of others for the use of anyone in the business of scamming NGOs.

“An increasing number of email scams are using NGOs, international NGOs, development agencies, meetings, international conferences etc. as the hook to defraud or cheat unsuspecting recipients,” notes the UIA in a message about the OPHA scam, which first surfaced two months ago.

The organization then goes on to list 316 examples of similar scams dating back to 2009. Many invoke the names of internationally renowned groups from the World Health Organization to the Red Cross as a means of luring innocent NGOs into submitting registration fees for non-existent international conferences.

Unlike those Nigerian scams with too many capital letters and a promised payout that’s just way too rich to believe, somebody did put a little thought into the six-page invitation that my boss received.

There are some official-looking logos at the top of the page, albeit out-of-focus and strangely stretched-looking, and even a photo of the fictional Mr. Merlier at a podium with a Canadian flag in the background.  The invitation trots out many of the themes popular among the international-NGO set, from caring for the environment to addressing Africa’s poverty.

And while a $620 registration fee is huge money in a country like Honduras, the invitation promises an all-expenses-paid trip to Canada and a $620 per-diem for the five days of the conference. That could be enough to suck in an unsuspecting NGO director or two.

I don’t imagine the Ontario Public Health Association is happy about having its good name sullied in a global scam. But the association can at least get a rueful laugh out of being described in the invitation as “a charitable organization of Canadian law with international aims and objectives among others to assist individuals and organizations around the world through loans for business, education, economic development and environmental protection, especially to support African organizations involved in the social, environmental and economic assistance for humanitarian NGOs...”

As for the poor guy in a suit who’s pictured on the invitation as the fictional Mr. Merlier, I’m sure he’d be deeply unhappy to learn that his photo is being used to scam money from non-profits in developing countries. But at least he’s just got three more weeks to tough it out until the date of the fake HIV-AIDS conference passes and a new scam takes its place. 

What to make of David Suzuki?

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 - featured a juicy little bit about Suzuki requesting that the college also provide attractively dressed female college students to walk alongside him and ward off the advances of all those adoring fans he can’t stand. (The college now says Suzuki made no such request, although the email exchange seems pretty clear. But here's the viewpoint of Halifax Chronicle Herald journalist Paul McLeod, who thinks SunMedia went too far with its allegations. )

I posted the story on Facebook and mentioned the long-ago book signing as my reason for being a bit gleeful at seeing Suzuki in the muck.  Within minutes, dozens of people had posted comments. Within an hour, there were almost 50 comments and 20 “shares” of my link to the story. By this morning, the comments were up to 62 and there’d been 26 shares.

And the people writing the comments were MAD: Mad at Suzuki for being rude and horrible to them at some point as well; mad at me; mad at Sun Media; mad at the Conservatives (not sure how they got dragged into the debate); mad at anyone saying mean things about a man who’d done such great things for environmental awareness.

“WOW! You hit a hotspot here!” noted one Facebook friend.  Clearly.  There was a lot of passion in people’s comments, whether out of love for Suzuki and the work he has done or because others also had lingering feelings of bitter betrayal after being treated roughly and rudely by him.

Ultimately, the heated exchange brings to mind that old saw about whether you can hate the sin but love the sinner. Can we admire Suzuki’s work while also acknowledging that at times he's an arrogant, unpleasant jerk?

I’d guess that all of us have done things in our lives that we’re not proud of. So I’m always pretty careful to avoid assessing the total sum of a person based on the dumb decisions or big mistakes they’ve made.

I think it’s possible to make good presidential decisions while also being a pathetic womanizer, or to be an amazing athlete even while lying blatantly over a very long time about your use of performance-enhancing drugs. You can’t take the measure of a person’s contribution to this world solely by looking at their worst errors in judgment.

That said, there are obviously some acts that tend to knock you right out of everybody’s good books forever – pedophilia, violence against your spouse or children, planning someone’s murder, ripping off vulnerable people or charities, racism. Personally, I find hypocrisy very difficult to forgive as well, which is why I now count as unredeemable fallen stars like Elliot Spitzer, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, and a long list of two-faced pseudo-Christians in the U.S. who foment hatred and judgment while behaving loathsomely in private.

With David Suzuki, that’s a harder call to make. The stories of his rough treatment of people are numerous enough that we can conclude he’s got a real capacity to be a rude, arrogant bastard. But hey, the world is full of guys like that, and mostly I don’t waste a thought on them.

So why does Suzuki’s bad behaviour evoke such passion – in me and all the people on that Facebook thread?

One problem is that he just SEEMS so amiable and kind when we see him on TV that we come to believe that it’s true - that we “know” the man. Then we meet him in person, witness him treating us or his fans rudely, and feel an astonished sense of betrayal that he isn’t who we thought he was.

For others – people who haven’t met him yet, I suspect - Suzuki’s personal “brand” is so synonymous with being a responsible, caring and aware citizen of the natural world that any attack on the man is seen as an attack on environmentalism.  

In this particular case, there was also the fact that Suzuki’s college-girl demands and enormous speaking fees were played up heavily by a controversial media network that’s more or less the Fox News of Canada. It’s a muck-raking, biased network that responsible, caring and aware citizens of the natural world love to hate.

At the end of the day, the story has confirmed rather than changed my opinion of Suzuki.  That he might want pretty young women to walk alongside him to hold all those annoying fans at bay is not much of a surprise to me, because I witnessed his arrogance in Tanner’s Books many years ago and know that arrogant men see themselves as outside the rules that govern the rest of us.

I do feel for the people who are having their rose-coloured glasses torn away for the first time, though.  I remember how that felt.

As for the enormous speaking fees and the fact that Suzuki did indeed get that phalanx of girl bodyguards he requested, that reflects most poorly on the Quebec public college that agreed to those demands. What were they thinking? What truly good works at the college might that $40,000 fee have funded?

That college administrators didn’t hesitate in providing Suzuki with attractively dressed female students also gives the lie to decades of big talk about not objectifying women. Our academic institutions have often led that conversation, and it’s very disappointing to see that the commitment to respectful treatment of women lasts only until a coveted speaker makes a sexist demand.

However, I can separate the personal from the professional. I still love the environment and those who have dedicated their lives to the struggle. I’m thankful for the work of the David Suzuki Foundation and Suzuki himself. I will not let my personal feelings for Suzuki detract from my appreciation of his work.

But I’ll also give my instincts a quiet little high-five for being right all those years ago, when I first caught a glimpse of a very different man underneath that genial smile. 

The happy faces around me

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 owns the field, but nobody bothers us.

The kids are all exceptionally good at climbing
trees, Here's Adolfo and Naun. At one point on
our adventure there were six kids up this tree.

The very sweet Jose Manuel, showing off his new shoes. This little guy
has a lot of trouble walking, and is thrilled by these shoes, which were part
of the new outfits everybody got before Christmas thanks to people like you.

The three children who I suspect have some of the most significant
needs in Angelitos - Chola on the left, Fernando, and Elsy, Chola's sister.

The beautiful Carina, 15, who has two sisters
living at the home and has quickly revealed
herself to be an Alpha Female. 

Rosario and Estrella enjoy the colouring books and pencil crayons
that donations from home continue to buy.

The (very) young mom who lives across the street from Angelitos, and
her new as-yet-unnamed daughter. Two sisters share a two-room cement-block
house with a tin roof - it was so hot inside yesterday. Whenever I think
that the kids at Angelitos have it rough, I just walk around that neighbourhood
with my eyes open and see all the other people living in equally
challenged circumstances. 

Measuring progress one pair of shoes at a time

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 ceiling fans installed, and that has really improved the air quality in that stale place. 

Other than the twice-monthly swims at the pool with the kids, which I really like, one of the projects I had the most fun with was buying everybody new head-to-toe outfits last month. I swear, some of those kids had never before had a pair of shoes that fit. 

The four-year-old boy who struggles to walk, Jose Manuel, proudly shows me his new shoes every time I go up to Angelitos now. There'd been a time before he got them that he was barely allowed to go outside, let alone on outings, due to not having shoes. 

And the kids' excitement over a new pair of underwear or jeans that don't have to be tied at the waist with string to hold them up was both heart warming and  heartbreaking. The whole thing cost about $600 to outfit 24 children, such a bargain that I think we'll do it all over again in June. Next week, I'm taking the 16 school-age kids downtown to get outfitted for school uniforms before they return to class in February. 

I've been doing fundraising for various causes for almost 10 years and know that people will be generous if a project moves them. But I've still been happily surprised at the amazing support I've had from friends, family and acquaintances back home in B.C. for the projects at Angelitos.
My position with Cuso International has been key to me being able to do this work as well, as the stipend I get for working in communications full-time for the Comision de Accion Social Menonita pays for my new life in Honduras. That means that every cent of the donations for Angelitos can go directly to the work. 

All in, we've raised $16,000 in less than a year and spent about $11,000 of it. That leaves $5,000 for this coming year. And while I'd initially contemplated using it to build an indoor jungle gym at Angelitos, I'm now thinking every kid in Copan would benefit a lot more if I put some of it toward a public playground, something that Copan is decidedly short on. 

There's a scruffy metal playground up at a school on the hill that's locked up tight on weekends and another at the private bilingual school. I know at least a couple other people here in Copan who'd like to be part of a playground project, and hopefully my CASM buddies can give me some ideas around municipal contacts who might have some land to donate. 

There's a lot to be said for the chance to lounge pool-side
when you're living the tough life of an orphan

Travellers continue to visit Angelitos bearing gifts, as the place was renowned as a worrisome, poorly funded, rundown and controversial children's home long before I first laid eyes on it last April. 

The best of those gifts have been things that improve the structure of the place - the ceiling fans, the bed repairs done by a Christian mission out of Illinois in November - or that put better clothes on the backs of those poor, shabbily dressed kids. Gifts of basic medicines are also really helpful.

People have an understandable instinct to want to bring toys for the children. But I've never seen a toy last more than a day or two without somebody either breaking it, hiding it away, or sneaking it out of Angelitos to give to some other child. You can get mad about that latter practice, but the truth is that there are so many Copan children whose lives are no better than the kids at Angelitos. Can you blame somebody for wanting to give them toys too?

I can't even get mad when I hear that some of the older Angelitos girls have taken donated clothing down to the centre to sell. Everybody up there is in survival mode. It's not about being ungrateful, it's about getting by.

I continue to pin a lot of hope on Emily Monroe, the young American woman whose dream to open a better orphanage continues to move forward. Her Casita Copan project has reached a new and exciting stage now that she has taken over a former hostel, fully furnished. 

That gives Emily the ability to expand her daycare into a residence for abandoned or abused children once she jumps through all the legal hoops (and she will). She's determined to start a better children's home, and I continue to be impressed at her commitment and dogged success.

It could be too big a dream to hope that the Angelitos kids will one day be able to move into the series of small family-style group homes that Emily envisages. But at any rate, I believe she's going to pull off her project, and that many other vulnerable Honduran children will benefit from that regardless.

So I'm also looking for ways this year to support her work, while still finding ways to make life a little better for the Angelitos kids. For the moment they don't have the option of relocating to a better children's home. We'll just have to see what we can do to brighten their lives in the meantime. 

Every dry, hot day brings the crisis closer

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 as real as the May rains that start  a little later and end a little earlier each year. Simple agricultural strategies that rural Hondurans have practiced for generations can no longer be counted on to produce enough corn and beans for the family.
In Canada, a dryer growing season forces farmers to rely more on irrigation, which increases costs. It brings new plagues and insects that require more labour-intensive strategies to combat. It reduces yields, which in turn reduces a farmer's already tight profit margin. Climate change complicates the life of a farmer anywhere in the world.
But in Honduras, a bad harvest isn't just a blow to a farmer's profit margin. It's the herald of a famine.
There are no irrigation systems to turn to for backup when the days run long and hot. There are no other sources of income to turn to for buying food. There isn't so much as an extra centavo in most rural Hondurans' households for new treatments that might ward off opportunistic bugs and fungi being unleashed by climate change.
Everybody sees what's coming for Honduras, and they're urging economic diversification before it's too late. There's some real doomsday stuff out there on the impact of climate change on corn, bean and coffee crops in Honduras over the next five years. Nobody's taking those reports lightly.
But few Hondurans have the savings, education or time to explore new ways of keeping their families fed. Nor is there a culture around market development, or any meaningful plans in the country to do something about the hopelessly poor infrastructure that prevents goods from getting to market regardless. There aren't even jobs in the big cities to fall back on; Monday's paper brought news of almost two million Hondurans looking for work, a quarter of the country.
Coffee has been relied upon to put badly needed money into Hondurans' pockets for many years now. But this year, a coffee-leaf fungus known as la roya is causing unprecedented damage, fuelled by hot, dry conditions resulting from climate change.
This year's harvest will be down by as much as 50 per cent as a result. The declines are anticipated to be even more calamitous in the next three years. The older plantations that marginal producers tend to have (coffee plants are ideally replaced every eight years, but poor people can't afford to do that) will likely have to be destroyed. Where will the money come from for new plants, or to get growers through the three long years before a young coffee plant starts producing?
Honduras is no stranger to disaster. But the aftermath of a hurricane is so much easier for the world to get its head around than the slow-motion crisis that's unfolding in the country right now. Whatever has to happen, it needs to happen soon. 

The good, the bad and the uncertain

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 might not have the full story here. I'm not saying it is a great practice but it actually might be better than you lay it out in your article."

I've since talked to my CASM co-workers more on this subject, as suggested in the comment. They get paid a half a month's additional salary in June and the other half in December, as required under Honduran law. They also receive a little more money for one month of the year in lieu of prestaciones, the health, disability and social benefits that Honduras employers are also required to pay for full-time employees.
So nobody's breaking the law around benefits. And it could be that people do indeed appreciate having the money paid out every year rather than gambling that their employer - and their benefits - will be there when they need them. But that still doesn't address job security.
At any rate, I hadn't intended to disparage CASM's employment practices in my post - I just wanted to make the point out that even when you land a pretty good job here, you still have no job security. I do know that my co-workers don't like going into every single December wondering whether they'll have a job to return to in January.
But I appreciate this comment and all others -  I like feedback, and the chance to pick up new information from those who know more than I do.  

Pulperia dreamin'

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 the “good” jobs here are often year-to-year at best, and there’s a lot of work that’s literally one day at a time.

An example: The situation for my Honduran co-workers at the non-profit where I volunteer. Their jobs are the envy of many, seeing as they earn the equivalent of $500-700 a month and enjoy comfortable working conditions. But they’re still working year to year under contracts that never go past Dec. 31.

I didn’t know that until last month, when I went to the annual spiritual retreat for the organization and watched everybody getting handed the standard form letter that all employees get in December. It’s more or less a “Dear John” letter: Thanks for your service, your contract’s done.  Apparently it’s common practice among many Honduran non-profits, many of which opt to meet the letter of the law by giving people an additional month's pay every year without having to keep them on longer-term contracts.

The lucky ones end up getting their contracts renewed. But there are no guarantees.  A person could work for the same organization for 10 years and still be gone just like that in Year 11.

Nor are you treated gently when the end comes. One woman who works out of the same office as me got a terse email at 5 p.m. on the final day before the Christmas holiday informing her that she was done after three years on the job. Her project continues for another year or two, but she’s no longer the one leading it.

And those are the good jobs. Two million Hondurans count on seasonal income from the coffee harvest, but that work is brief, frequently involves travelling long distances, and pits you against the nimble fingers of legions of children whose parents send them into the coffee fields every year in hopes of boosting the paltry family income.

Move to the city and you might land a job in one of the maquilas – the international factories that have benefited the most from free trade. But those employers get a special exemption so they don't have to pay the minimum wage (which is damn minimal in Honduras, as little as $1 an hour). Maybe you can find a service job, but prepare for long hours, low pay, and more of that chronic insecurity. The young man who manages the pool where I like to swim works at least nine hours a day, seven days a week. Christmas came and went for him without so much as an afternoon off.

Back in Canada, we tend to think of “good” jobs as being the due of those who are focused, flexible and attentive to their studies. Here, you can be all those things and still get nowhere. 

One young friend who works in administration has spent every weekend for the last four years going to college in a town that’s a slow two-hour bus ride away. She figures she needs at least two more years of study before she has enough qualifications to land a better job. And it could very likely be a year-to-year job even then. 

One of these days, she might just wake up to find herself ready to give it all up and open a pulperia. Who’d blame her?

Hard times coming as coffee production falls by half

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 Ruinas, Wilson Colindres. Work is already underway to develop and plant more resistant strains to slow the spread of la roya.

 But the impact is turning out to be much worse than anyone expected, Colindres said when I talked to him last week at the co-operative's offices in Sesesmil, Copan.  He fears the 2012-13 harvest season will be the worst in the co-operative’s history, with production down by half for the 39 Copan and Comayagua growers who belong to the 12-year-old co-op.

Coffee has been a very good fit for the country up until now.  Honduras’s legions of small producers operate with little margin for error, but coffee thrives on Honduras’s forested slopes without the need for costly irrigation systems or major interventions as long as a grower pays attention to soil quality and plant regeneration. The clockwork nature of Honduras’s rainy season was also good for coffee-growing, as it always started in early May and continued with heavy daily afternoon rains right through June. Coffee plants set a lot of fruit when they’re getting both heat and plenty of rain.

The healthy plant on the left looks strikingly different than
the defoliated plants all around it

But all that’s changing, says Colindres. Now, the country’s rainy season starts later and ends earlier every year. What used to be a daily rain has now diminished to rain every third or fourth day.  With the soil now drying out in between rains, conditions are ideal for the spread of la roya spores.  The fungus kills off the leaves of coffee plants, which stunts growth and decreases yields.

This year’s yields have been dramatically affected, says Colindres. But it’s a problem for coming years as well, as the sick, spindly plants don’t recover quickly.

And while growers are already planting more fungus-resistant varieties to try to reduce their losses, Colindres says the flavour of the beans isn’t as good from those strains. The world’s coffee drinkers are a notoriously finicky lot when it comes to the taste of their favourite brew, so that’s worrying producers as well.

What can be done? COAPROCL has just started into a new project with my organization, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, to improve soil quality at organic fincas and increase plant health. Healthy plants are better able to resist la roya. Other projects  are striving to increase the amount and quality of ground water in the region through better watershed management.

Some growers are planting resistant strains and hoping that flavour concerns will take care of themselves.  Coffee plants produce in their third year and are ideally replaced every eight or so years for maximum productivity (although that's often not the case among Honduras's small producers), so many growers are accustomed to adding new plants every season anyway.

 I walked the Sesemil finca of Alfredo Morales, president of the co-operative, and noted a few “survivor” plants thriving amid their defoliated brethren, despite being from the same vulnerable strain. No doubt scientists are studying such examples of natural resistance as well.

Coffee beans drying at the coffee cooperative
in Sesemil, Copan

Natural fungicides exist for organic producers, but Colindres notes that plants are already showing resistance. Growers often have to resort to three applications of three different fungicides now – an added cost for a marginal producer.

In the short term, the next couple of months are still a happy time for Hondurans. Some two million men, women and children participate in the annual coffee harvest, counting on it to provide money for all the things they aren’t able to afford at any other time of year. 
This is a time of buying new clothes for the kids; finishing off the community water tank; paying off the loans and store credits that got the family through the last half of the year; adding another room on the house.

But in the longer term, Honduras is up against a global change in weather that is expected to wreak havoc within as little as five years with many of the crops grown in the country, including essential food crops such as beans and corn. The emergence of a devastating coffee fungus is not just a stroke of bad luck for a country that has certainly known no shortage of it, but a mere sample of what’s to come if the country can’t adapt to a rapidly changing environment.

Dryer, hotter weather is not just the problem of the moment. It’s a permanent change that puts the country at grave risk of slipping even further in world rankings for malnutrition, poverty, maternal/child health and more.  Efforts to help Honduran producers adapt, mitigate and diversify can’t come soon enough.