A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Wishing for a better life for Chantal Dec. 28, 2007 She used to make me cry when she’d go missing for days at a time, back when I was new at this whole tragic business of life on the streets. Now I know just to wait. Chantal will call when her “run” is done, and the next thing you know she’ll be bugging me for $3 for poutine at that little place in Market Square as if nothing had happened. I’ve known her for more than three years now. She can be as endearing and charming as she can be loud and ornery. Those who end up loving her, and there are a number of us, have usually seen enough of the sweet version to counter the times when she’s awful. She’s 23 and has lived on the streets for a hard six years now. Her story is what happens when you give up on kids - most notably, ones with permanent disabilities. Chantal’s brain was damaged long before she was ever born by her mother’s drinking during pregnancy, and the impact on her life has been profound. She was taken into foster care at a...

Gorge boatman looks to small houses to solve homelessness Dec. 21, 2007 The turnout isn’t as good as he’d hoped - four people. He’d been counting on 15. But so it goes, and Roland Lapierre isn’t the kind of guy to let a thing like poor attendance get him down for long. We’re gathered in an upstairs board room at Our Place, where Lapierre is holding forth passionately to a small knot of bemused people from the streets. He’s trying to put together an organizing committee, and so far has three signatures. “It’s dinner hour at Streetlink right now, so that could be why there isn’t more people here,” he tells me. Briefly famous for the graceful one-man raft he built and lived on for a year in the Gorge; Lapierre is back on land now after being rousted from the water by the City of Victoria. He’s found a room at the Fairfield Hotel on Cormorant Street, but hasn’t given up on his dream of a life far from the streets. “I’m just the kind of person who’d rather live in a forest,” says Lapierre, ...

Street memories fresh, and he's not going back Dec. 14, 2007 His name is Brad, and we’ll leave it at that. He told me he doesn’t care about having his full name out there, but I don’t know whether his sisters and teenage children would feel the same way. His is a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, one that Brad hopes he’s finally got a grip on. The 47-year-old has been clean and sober for nine months now, and off the streets after a harrowing year and a half at the bottom of the world. “I know what it’s like to be there. I don’t want to go back,” says the former IKEA store manager. “But trying to get back to where I once was is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.” Brad was on the streets briefly as a teenager while making his way out of a tough childhood, but that didn’t last long. He was soon on his way to the life he’d always envisaged for himself - good job, wife and kids, friends coming by every Friday for a barbecue and a few drinks. But that was then. Brad still marvels at ho...

Enough talk on homelessness - time to act Dec. 7, 2007 Let me tell you, there’s nothing like five weeks of hanging around on the front lines of street issues to leave a person feeling sick at heart. I hope I managed to convey that to readers in the Times-Colonist series I finished up last Sunday. I hope you’re alarmed, aghast and scared for the future. Because I surely am. Going into the series, I figured my intense education running PEERS Victoria for three years had given me insight enough into the issues that lead people to the streets and the scope of the problem. I thought I knew all there was to know about the difficulties people face in trying to access mental health and addiction services. I now realize I was a babe in the woods. Things are so much worse than I ever imagined. The people living on our streets have grown large enough to populate a small town, and they’re leading lawless, generally miserable lives in our streets and parks in conditions that border on feral. The...

Noon on Dec. 2, in a driving rain: I'm just coming out of a five-week stretch of looking at street issues in Victoria's downtown for the Times-Colonist, and am filled with thoughts of the people and the problems I encountered along the way. It's immensely discouraging - as bad as I thought the situation was, which was pretty damn bad, it's actually so much worse. I fear for the future if things don't start to change, and can't bear the thought of where it will all end up by the time my grandchildren grow into adults in another 15 years. Somehow in our misguided attempt at charitable action, we've ended up providing people with just enough of the basics to maintain them in their misery. They have to work so hard to try to get out, and we make it as hard as possible by adding to the difficulty at every step of the way. Consider methadone, for instance, particularly on this rainy and miserable day in December. Methadone is a prescription drug that is used as a ...

Hi, readers. Here's a link to the five-part series I just finished up for the Times-Colonist. I don't know how long it will stay active on the TC Web site, but will post it on this site directly as soon as that happens. The series ran Nov. 4 to Dec. 2. The Street

Across the water is the place for me Oct. 26, 2007 As beautiful as the Capital Region is, it has taken me a long time to click into this place. I’m a Courtenay girl originally, and there’s not much that feels familiar in Greater Victoria if you hail from just about anywhere else on the Island. But then my partner and I moved to Esquimalt in early 2006. And for whatever reason, things just kind of fell into place. All of a sudden, I find myself taking an interest in goings-on in my community. Before I moved here, I wasn’t even sure what my “community” was. I’ve recently caught myself reading with great interest about the proposed redevelopment of the local shopping mall, and pondering what kind of retail mix I’m secretly hoping for. I care about how things will turn out at Kinsmen Gorge Park after new facilities are added, and whether one of my favourite bird-watching fields along one side of the park will be affected. Those are healthy signs. If I live here, I ought to care about what’...