A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Christmas Eve 2012, Utila, Honduras     Today is my birthday, my third one in a row celebrated outside Canada. I wouldn't dream of whining about the lack of good birthday cake in Central America when I'm sitting here on a balmy 32-degree day with a fan blowing on me to keep me cool, but I do want to note that living away does require the reinvention of how you celebrate.     Christmas, for instance. We've been gone from Canada and our families for the last three Christmases as well, and I admit to being piney sometimes for things like the family breakfast where I'd make cinnamon buns and we'd all drink champagne and orange juice, or the whirl of festive parties we'd go to at this time of year. We moved past the whole gift-giving insanity a while ago, but I still really liked the tradition of making up a stocking for family members.      But Paul and I have developed our own Christmas travelling tradition now, and I quite like it. In 2012 - my...

  Horse cart man  and cotton candy vendor at the end of their day, Managua     Oh, for a good newspaper that had an appetite for day-in-the-life stories from Nicaragua. I can't walk a block without being intrigued by yet another person scratching out what passes for a living in some unusual way, and would love an excuse to be talking to each of them about what their work days are like.     There are the fire jugglers and the windshield washer guys at the big intersections, for instance. Are they putting in long days scratching for one or two cordobas from the handful of drivers who seem inclined to roll down their window long enough to pass along a coin? And what must it be like to be those women who spend their days walking right down the middle of the lanes of traffic whizzing by, selling oranges and little bags of fruit juice?      Then there's the fellow who sells woven or wooden car-seat liners that people buy if they have a bad...

 On this day of mourning marking the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, another reason to mourn: Bill C36, Canada's flawed and tragic anti-sex work law, takes effect on this very day.     It will be struck down eventually. It's so clearly unconstitutional, not to mention poorly informed and misguided, and in direct contravention of the research around what actually makes life better and safer for those in the sex industry.     But in the meantime, people will suffer. Women will suffer. The Harper government took bad law and made it worse, criminalizing the purchase of sex for the first time in Canadian history and virtually guaranteeing that vulnerable sex workers will now be that much more vulnerable, and never mind the platitudes about how this law decriminalizes workers while criminalizing purchasers and thus makes everything better.        What it actually does is push sex work even deeper into the shadows. And we all know that ...

  Why does meat taste better in developing countries?  We'll have been in Managua for a month as of tomorrow, just long enough that I'm no longer getting lost every time I walk out the door but short enough that every day still holds some surprising discovery. Herewith, a small list of things I hadn't been expecting: You can drink the water from the tap in Managua. Who knew? I just presumed we'd be drinking bottled water for the whole time we were here, as was the case for more than two years in Honduras. But I kept hearing from one person after another that Managua gets good-quality water from a lagoon and then treats it. I broke down and started drinking it about a week ago, helped along by the fact that there's no store nearby selling those cheap 20-litre bottles of purified water, and I can't handle the environmental guilt of a giant pile of one-litre plastic bottles piling up.  People like their booze around these parts . Admittedly, the organiza...

    I love that my new organization has a weekly radio program. Radio remains one of the most effective ways of communicating in countries like Nicaragua. While my previous work experience with Cuso International in Honduras has probably given me a jump-start of close to a year for this latest position in Nicaragua, that’s not to say things are humming along just yet. But at least this time I've been prepared to have nothing go according to plan.      International work placements have a lot in common with onions. You might think you know what what you're looking at after a few days of asking questions and reading through stacks of your organization’s reports. But be prepared to discover layer after layer of complicating factors once you get to the point of knowing just enough to realize how much you don't know.        For instance: Charged with helping non-profit organizations in the country where you're working improve t...

     Enjoy this little sample of Nicaraguan culture, my video of the hipico  held yesterday in the streets of Managua not far from our house in the Bolonia district.      Apparently the display of dancing horses has become associated with celebrations in August that recognize Managua's patron saint, Santo Domingo de Guzman. But this is November, and I never could find anyone who could explain why there was a dancing-horse parade on at this particular time.     But what the heck. It was pretty cool to watch, and never mind that events started about two hours late and the light was fading fast by the time the parade ended (the sun sets at around 5:30 p.m. in this part of the world). Or that nobody seemed much moved to stop the flow of cars during the parade, which meant the prancing horses were intermingled with motorcycles and only slightly sheepish looking drivers throughout the event.      An impressive number of booths w...

     I’m fascinated by my new boss, the presidenta  of Femuprocan .      She’s a hard-core campesina and colectivista, of an era that would have known the revolutionary years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement . Whenever I see her, she’s standing off to one side of the group, cigarette in hand, observing the scene with an impenetrable gaze. Cue the theme song from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”      She intimidated me when I met her on my first day of work this past Monday, me in my summer dress and sandals with my hair up, her in what I now think of her uniform: jeans; long-sleeved shirt suitable for labouring in the fields; worn sneakers. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and not of the flippy, going-to-the-mall variety.      She gave me a good once-over and declared in a deep, union-president kind of voice that Femuprocan was an organization of el campo – of the countryside, which I understood b...