A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

    One summer day when I was a young reporter in Kamloops, my bosses at the newspaper sent me off to pretend I wanted to get hired as a lingerie model.     The advertising department at the paper had been running classified ads seeking young women interested in working as lingerie models. The paper wanted the advertising revenue, but was worried the real nature of the business was prostitution. So they sent me off to pretend to be a job applicant so I could report back to them, a task that I accepted without hesitation.      The interview was in a hotel room at The Dome, a fairly popular place in mid-1980s Kamloops. I can’t remember what I wore. An average man of average age – 35, maybe, with the everyman feel of someone who, like myself, had known life in a B.C. resource town – invited me to sit down. A few minutes later, a woman of about the same age joined us.     My managers back at the paper had sent me to the job interview i...

The Washington Post is doing some great work these days with their Fact Checker feature , which is digging into all kinds of "statistics" being thrown around out there to see where the figures come from and whether there's any truth to them. Think of it as the rhetoric version of that TV show Mythbusters. Today's myth-busting was around the "fact" that 300,000 U.S. children are at risk of sexual exploitation. Take a look at how they tested those figures and what they found out - fascinating stuff, and all of it underlining that we need to be very, very careful in deciding what to believe when topics are highly emotional and potentially divisive. That old adage about believing half of what you see and none of what you hear has never been truer.

     Found myself making a long, ranty comment on a Facebook thread this morning and realized, hey, that could be a blog post. Those of us who write for food appreciate writing that lends itself to more than one application.       So here's the article that started everything, a Washington Post piece on the vast and profoundly misleading inflation of human-trafficking figures around the world, and why that has happened.       Posting it on Facebook brought out some interesting comments from people I don't usually interact with, but in the end I feel like we had the chance for a good conversation, each of us writing in our little boxes one after the other. Here's the thread if you want to take a look at how it went.       Talk of human trafficking has become something of a flash point for me in the last couple of years, as it was wrongly used and amply abused to justify the terrible injustice enacted...

          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...