A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

          I crossed back into Nicaragua from Honduras yesterday at dusty, dry Guasaule, on my way back home to Leon after a work trip.       Crossing a Central American border by bus is often a mysterious, confusing process that involves everyone getting out of the bus in a big herd and wandering to and from various unmarked buildings. So it was kind of nice to see the familiar face of Carmen the Cashew Girl as I descended the Tica Bus stairs yesterday.      She was wearing the brilliantly coloured eye shadow and matching shirt that the Cashew Girls clearly favour as a strategy for getting groggy, overheated bus travellers to remember them. There is something of the sex worker in the visage of the brightly painted and sexily dressed Cashew Girl, who like a worker on stroll has only minutes to get you to take note of her and decide to buy her wares rather than those of her (friendly) rivals.      Ca...

    I’m raking leaves outside our house when she approaches me, carrying an empty garbage can that she says will make it easier to gather the leaves for garbage pickup the next day. Paul and I are renting a house for the month of March in Leon, Nicaragua, and the woman and her family live next door.     At first, I think she has come over just to be nice, because she has lived a long time near this giant tree that constantly sheds leaves and branches and knows how to make the near-daily task of raking a little easier. But she later tells me that she always tries to engage extranjeras like me in conversation. Too many of us arrive in her country with no knowledge of Nicaragua’s troubled history, she says. She is on a one-woman campaign to change that.     I don’t know how old she is – mid-50s, maybe? That would make her around 19 on the terrible night of May 4, 1979 when the Nicaraguan National Guard, under the direction of the corrupt and vicious p...

The loads are heavier in countries like Nicaragua, but the backs are stronger A troubling aspect of life: You don’t know what you don’t know. As a person driven to know everything, I don’t like that. I didn't  consciously grasp when we started this Cuso International work in Central America three years ago that I was longing to know more about what I didn't know. But I was. What stands out most as I wrap up my second Cuso posting is how exciting it feels to be learning again. The role of a Cuso volunteer is essentially to take your professional show on the road and share your skills with people in less-advantaged countries, helping them improve their systems or their training or their processes in ways that ultimately address poverty and inequality. But never mind the task. The bigger challenge is dropping in cold to another world in the employ of an organization that is happy to see you, but uncertain what to do with you. They will have no real idea or interest in...

    I'm sure some people can share a house with people they don't know well. After four months of doing just that here in Managua, I'm now very certain that I'm not one of them.     I thought I'd already learned most of the important lessons about life in a foreign land from our Cuso International placement in Honduras during 2012-2014. But it turns out there was one really big one still to come.     I don't mean to suggest that the profound unpleasantness of this period of house-sharing is the fault of the two other Cuso volunteers who Paul and I share the house with. At this point, I'm quite sure they're as dismayed as I am at how it is that perfectly nice people can end up with a negative group energy that sends us all scrambling for our little hidey-holes when it all gets to be too much (which happens with increasing frequency as the Feb. 27 ends of our posts draw near).      As the mother and stepmother of five children and the ho...

     I’m still shaking my head after two and a half enlightening hours yesterday talking with the local sex workers’ organization here in Managua, RedTraSex (Red de Trabajadores Sexuales). I’m not sure whether to be delighted or shattered by how completely identical the issues are for sex workers in Nicaragua as they are back home in Canada.      Had it not been for us talking in Spanish, I could have easily been back in Victoria talking to my pals at Peers Victoria . I fear my new friends at RedTraSex were a little discouraged to hear that everything they identified as problems were also problems for sex workers in Canada – stigma, judgment and misunderstanding at the top of that list. The swag from my RedTraSex visit, including a key chain  designed to fit a condom.  Can't wait to  wear my  "I always use a condom" t-shirt.      Up until we met, the group believed that a country as developed as Canada w...

  My friend and fellow writer Anne Mullens has a very personal connection to this week's Supreme Court of Canada unanimous ruling allowing doctor-assisted suicide.     She wrote a series of articles over five years on Victoria woman Sue Rodriguez's long and brave court fight in the 1990s - ultimately lost - for the right to have a doctor assist her to die when the day came that she'd had enough of the slow and cruel deterioration brought on by amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Anne then went on to write a very difficult book about other Canadians' battles for a more dignified end to their own lives.      So when the court handed down its decision this week, Anne had a lot of herself invested in the issue. Here's her powerful blog post on what it felt like to hear the news, and her memories of some of the most traumatizing years of her life collecting the stories of ill people seeking the right to determine at what point they would draw the line in...

Day after Christmas at Las Penitas beach      Were it up to me to pick a project for Central America, it might be garbage.     In countries with per-capita GDPs somewhere around $4,000, sub-standard education systems and virtually zero social services, I admit that garbage is not the most pressing problem.     But it's the kind of project that is wide open to all ages and classes, in urban and rural areas alike. It provides instant gratification, and possibly economic stimulus as well if you pay attention to which types of garbage have value and set up side projects along the way. (I dream of bringing Vancouver's Ken Lyotier to the region to help the impoverished recyclers here improve their systems.)       It's a perfect project for involving young people, offering the potential for a major change in habits and a much-improved environment in only one generation. Once habits are changed, they stay changed, meaning it's also a pr...