A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Hungry kids today, leaders tomorrow

2012-03-01T19:00:00.001-08:00

Whether you’re a kid in Canada orHonduras, your school is going to try to convince you to eat better. I attendeda workshop for teachers this week here in Copan Ruinas that was introducing aseven-series program for primary kids that was all about food.

But that’s where the similaritiesend. While the Canadian efforts are aimed at stopping our kids from getting anyfatter, the Honduran course is trying to stave off malnutrition. Listening tothe Honduran group outlining the themes of the nutrition course was yet anotherreminder of just how tough things are in this struggling country.

Like so many other countries,Honduras is a signatory on at least a dozen big international agreementsguaranteeing this or that right for the children of the country. But it’s alljust words on paper. In the second-poorest country in the Americas, bad thingshappen to kids every day, and going hungry isn’t even the worst of it.

Honduras has laws prohibitingchildren from working until they’re 14. But in reality, kids from poor familiestypically start harvesting coffee when they’re seven. Every day on my way home from work, a gianttruck absolutely jammed with 50 or 60 indigenous kids from the poor communitiesaround Copan trundles by, taking the children home after a day cutting coffee. Youjust need a glimpse of those tiny little faces peering out from what looks likea cattle carrier to have a new understanding of child slavery.

But what’s to be done about that?Some 65 per cent of Hondurans live in extreme or relative poverty – and relativepoverty in Honduras is damn poor, that’s for sure. Families send their kids offto the coffee fields because they’re desperate for the money and the seasonalwork pays comparatively well.

If the country ever did get its acttogether enough to enforce its own laws around child labour, it would bedevastating to families. We in the western world could launch a boycott ofcoffee harvested by children, but it would be like signing those kids’ deathsentence in a country without a shred of social support to break a family’sfall. One recent international study identified123,000 Honduran children ages 5 to 14 who were working, including in thedeadly lobster-diving industry that claims hundreds of lives a year in thiscountry.

The school nutrition course delvesinto subjects that Canadian kids never have to think about. Why your mom anddad feed you only beans and corn. Why a body needs more than that to live on. Whereto find wild plants and fruits to bulk up your subsistence diet. Why a householdneeds money as well as land, because it’s just not possible to grow everythingyou need (especially on the sides of mountains with 50-70 per cent slopes, whichis where the poorest families in Copan live). No surprise that almost a thirdof children under age five in Honduras suffer stunted growth from poornutrition.

What’s to be done about all of this?I wish I knew. I’m learning a little more every day about a new, complicatedreality, and every day I’m a little less sure what the answer is. I’ve heardthat old adage about “planting seeds” a thousand times, and yes, I get it. Butwhen you watch those big trucks rolling by with their cargo of children - or hearabout teachers trying to manage classes of 50 or 60 children without desks,school supplies or bathrooms - it’s pretty hard to feel good about plantingseeds.

Still, I watch the organization I’mvolunteering with working hard with children and young people to create a newgeneration of leaders in Honduras. I take great heart from the young faces -some no more than nine or 10 years old – sitting at the various planning tablesof CASM as genuine participants. Real leaders grow out of a process like that,and this country desperately needs them.

Type A in a Type B Land

2012-02-28T15:06:00.002-08:00

The view from my desk

This period in Honduras is a first in so many ways. First extended period outside of Canada. First time as an international volunteer. First time I've stayed put in my travels for more than a few days.
It's also the first time I've worked in another culture, let alone another language. Barely into my second week in my new job with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, I can see quite clearly that this aspect of life in Honduras might just be my biggest adjustment.
People back home have asked me to write more on what kind of work I'll be doing on behalf of Cuso International here in Honduras. I wish I could tell them more. But the truth is, the job description was vague - deliberately so, I suspect, as Cuso warned us all along that everything was likely to change once we actually started our placements. And the reality is in many ways even vaguer, and immensely complicated by a different language and culture.
The rough goal of my time here is to create some written history of CASM, and document the work the agency does in ways that will be useful for funding, Web site upgrades, or just general promotions the non-profit might need to do in other countries. Unlike Canada, non-profits are completely on their own in Honduras, without a scrap of government funding or the deep pockets of some benevolent foundation. Churches do most of the social work in Honduras, and rely on out-of-country funds from specific denominations or international aid organizations.
To achieve that goal, however, I can tell I'm going to have to be pushy. No problem normally, but tough when you don't yet speak the language competently. People in my workplace have no doubt concluded that I'm a quiet type who keeps to herself - far from the truth, but who can blame them when I spend so much of my time sitting mute, desperately trying to comprehend what's being said?
Pushy also isn't easy in a hierarchical work culture where perky suggestions from the floor aren't necessarily welcomed. I'm a strategic type, and that part of me is going to be tested as never before if I hope to convince my bosses to clear a path for me to talk to the people I'll need to talk to in order to gather the stories of the organization. I know that's what they want me to do, but that doesn't mean it will be easy to make it happen.
Then there's the challenges of a very different work ethic. Hot countries are laid back. I'm no Torontonian, but I'm used to a fast-paced workplace and the pressure of endless deadlines. This land just doesn't do its work like that. This afternoon, my co-workers spent a good deal of time in the parking lot trying on jeans that somebody brought over, while I sat alone in the office looking like the workplace nerd.
I can't bear to take a two-hour lunch break and lose valuable work time, so I've had to make up an excuse that eating lunch makes me sleepy (it's true, mind you). I had to force myself into the coffee room today with everybody else for a long, chatty break over cake, just so I wouldn't come across as aloof.
But aside from looking like I'm not a team player, the other problem is that I end up completing my work too fast.
Two days into the work week, I've already finished a 5,000-word document for an upcoming workshop on women's and children's rights, despite all the Internet searches, translating back and forth and protracted periods of flipping through my Spanish-English dictionary required to make that happen.
I reviewed the CASM Web site and sent a document to my boss suggesting changes I could work on. I took information on an upcoming Honduras-Canada student exchange and rewrote it in English and Spanish. (Although there now appears to be no easy way of distributing the damn thing. Most of the people in my workplace don't even have email. How do they function??)
What I should have done was stretched that work out for at least a week, because tomorrow will be here soon and I don't have a clue what I'll do with my time.
Maybe I'll have to take a nice, long lunch break. Or maybe the jeans truck will be back.

No way to hide it - I'm not from around here

2012-02-25T18:59:00.000-08:00

I’m realizing that you never see your own culture andprivilege more clearly than when it’s juxtaposed on another. Take running, forexample.

I’ve never thought of running as a cultural thing. Back inCanada, I just slapped on my runners and headed out the door, figuring I lookedno more or less out of place than anyone else out for a run that morning.

But in Honduras, going out for a run marks you instantly asa gringo - a person from “away,” and one with the leisure time and energy toneed exercise. A hard-working Honduran never thinks about such things, becausea typical day’s long labour is quite sufficient.

“Le gusta caminar?” asked a friendly young fellow as Islowed my pace at the end of my run this morning. Curious about the sweatyolder woman making her way up one of the many steep hills in Copan, he asked mehow much I walked in a day. Maybe an hour, I said, and then asked him the same.“All day - I have to for my work,” he answered. We left it at that.

The baseball hat I wear on my run is culturally distinctive.Women don’t wear hats here, and definitely not baseball hats. My size, myshape, my short hair - all culturally distinctive. I tan up easily and amalready blending in quite nicely in terms of skin colour, but my height andhabits will always distinguish me as a privileged foreigner.

Today I passed a foursome from the American bilingual schoolhere in Copan, and they might as well have had signs taped on their backsdeclaring their heritage. They stood out with their Tilly hats, hiking bootsand expensive day packs in a country where most people count themselves luckyto own one of those little packs made out of string and that weird grocery-bagmaterial. I regularly see whole families of tiny people staggering down fromthe mountainsides with giant bundles of firewood digging into their skinny shoulders;I can’t imagine what they think of us big, fussy foreigners with our waterbottles and light lunches carefully nestled in padded packs, heading out for aneasy stroll.

I’m not suggesting there’s anything shameful in being aWesterner. I’ve got no urge to carry prickly, heavy bundles of firewood on myback, or work hard all day for almost no money. I wouldn’t change my lot forthat of one of the tough, hungry-looking campesinos who I see in town everySunday buying cheap pieces of foam to soften the hard dirt floor they’resleeping on.

But it’s just striking to see how very different we are,forever more. I can come to Honduras as a Cuso International volunteer andcongratulate myself for being willing to live on a tenth of the income I couldearn back home, but the truth is I’m still remarkably comfortable. I’ve got ahot shower whenever I want one and a fridge full of food, not to mention moneyin the bank, a partner with money in the bank, and many different options tofall back on in a pinch.

Even my Honduran home, at $325 a month, is twice asexpensive as what a typical Honduran family can afford in Copan Ruinas - and completely out of reach for those poorsods from the countryside who I see selling firewood door to door to all thepeople who cook their frijoles and tortillas on outdoor stoves. I have thehealthy bones, the good clothes, the solid education and the nutritionallyalert brain of someone who has spent their life benefiting from Westernprivilege.

I try to remember that when I’m out there running down adirt road and wondering why the Chorti people aren’t returning my friendly Canadian smile as they pass by me with babies on their backs and a stack oftortillas they desperately need to sell. I’m playing at living like a poorperson. For them, it’s no game.

The slow awakening

2012-02-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

Workshop participants discuss citizens' rights

I'm with a roomful of people at a conference centre atop one of the crazy, skinny mountain roads they have around Copan. They call this kind of meeting a taller here in Honduras - a workshop. But the term that comes to mymind is “consciousness-raising.”

The people in the room are all too familiar with the many problems facing Honduran families and communities. But they obviously don't get mad easily, and thefacilitator is gently nudging them toward a little more indignation.

Honduras has a constitution, he reminds them. The country’sleaders have signed numerous international agreements recognizing human rights,gender equity, fair processes for its citizens. But that's on paper, not in the way daily life unfolds for most Hondurans.

Today was my first full day on the job with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, and the first chanceI’ve had to see my new boss, Merlin Fuentes, in action. It turns out he’s anexcellent facilitator. And any Canadian old enough to remember the ‘60s - orthe women’s rights movement - would have recognized what he was trying to do atthe workshop. He was waking people up to their own power.

The problems in Honduras are much more extreme than inCanada, but not totally unfamiliar. People feel disconnected from their government andpowerless to effect change. They see money flowing among those who have plenty,but almost none of it trickling down to those on the ground.

Their children receive little or no education. Theirunemployment rate is closing in on 40 per cent. Their murder rate is staggering- 54 times the Canadian rate, and No. 1 in the world right now. Their access tohealth care ranges from minimal to non-existent, and for the most part peoplerely on folk cures and luck.

Unbelievably terrible things happen every day in Honduras. Inthe last week alone, a devastating prison fire killed more than 350 people andan equally devastating fire in a market district near the country’s capital destroyedthe workplaces and the inventory of more than 800 vendors. With not even ashred of a social net to break the fall, those affected will plunge to new lowsof poverty that will virtually ensure their children and their children’schildren remain in a lifelong state of deprivation.

The country’s media deliver a new outrage every day - 200sick babies baking in an non-air-conditioned pediatric emergency ward in SanPedro Sula; a government worker shot to death while riding his motorcycle towork at 5 a.m.; yet another public school trying to get by with no desks, no schoolsupplies and far too few teachers.

You’d think Hondurans would have no need forconsciousness-raising at this point, or for anyone to awaken their sense ofoutrage. But when generation after generation grows up in poverty anddeprivation, it can start to feel like the norm. It’s not that people havegiven up - it’s that they’ve lost sight of there even being an alternative.

What can be done? Aid, sure, and all those nice things thatWestern countries like to do. But real change always has to come from within. Onetaller at a time, more people willfind their voice. For the sake of this lovely but bedeviled country and its people, I will hope for that.

Day 1: The initial panic recedes

2012-02-20T13:28:00.002-08:00

Scene from my morning walk to work

Admittedly, I didn't understand much of the things said at this morning's devotional, a regular Monday-morning feature at my new workplace, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita. But I can't help but think that Truman Capote and Oscar Wilde would have been pleased to know that they were quoted at a gathering of devout Mennonites in Honduras.
Three groups work out of the CASM office, and each of the 15 employees in the building take a turn at preparing a theme for the Monday devotional. Today's theme was about work, with the group invited to reflect on how they define "work" and who they work for (and no, just saying that you worked for God was not sufficient).
I was a quiet observer this time out, but I liked the idea of a set time for employees to reflect on something bigger than just getting that day's job done. And I did manage to sing along with a few stanzas of a song that sounded very much like "Red River Valley." I got the gist of the session - I'm using that expression a lot these days - including the mentions of Capote and Wilde during a reading of various quotes about work.
The person who prepares the theme for the week is also responsible for bringing in food to share after the devotional. Today it was chepas (spelling, anyone?) - frijoles wrapped in a corn mash and steamed in corn husks. Now that I know there's food every Monday, I won't bother eating breakfast at home next time.
As for my actual work today - well, the boss wasn't in and the other staff members didn't know what to do with me.
But they were cheerful about it, and in the end invited me along to a meeting at Copan city hall of local Mayans, who are very upset that some of the artifacts at the famous Mayan ruins in Copan are about to be shipped off to the University of Pennsylvania. The plan is to replace the artifacts on site with reproductions. You can imagine that the idea of losing precious relics to a U.S. university might trouble the Mayan descendants who live here, a population that CASM works with extensively.
Alas, that meeting fell victim to one of the strange circumstances that just seem to happen in Honduras. It turns out that CASM and one of the other organizations it works with, the Organismo Cristiano de Desarrollo Integral de Honduras, had a falling out with someone at city hall last year over something that, when explained to me in rapid Spanish, was beyond my ability to understand. At any rate, both organizations have now been prohibited from entering city hall. I sense that democracy is a bit of a loose concept in Honduras, among all levels of government.
We sat outside city hall for more than an hour, waiting to talk to the Mayan contingent after the meeting. But we eventually gave up. I'm hoping I'll find out more tomorrow when I arrive for Day 2, and at least know now that it's a very pleasant 15-minute stroll to get to work.
The route along the Copan River took me past several flocks of oropendolas, a flashy crow-sized bird with a distinctive ululating song and an intriguing tendency to sing the song while falling forward on its perch. Throw in a few orioles, great-tailed grackles and flocks of little green parrots, and it's a perfect morning walk for a bird enthusiast like myself.
Better still, I heard today there's a women's-rights project at CASM due in June that sounds like a potential fit for my skill set. It may not go smoothly - that doesn't seem to be the way down here. But hey, no problema.

Here goes nothing

2012-02-19T20:30:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow is the first day of my new job. I'm nervous, perhaps not surprising given that none of the people I'll be working with speak the same language as me and I don't really know what I'll be doing.
In theory, I'm here in Honduras to help the Comision de Accion Social Menonita get better at communicating. The non-profit is a Cuso International partner, and communications is what I do.
In reality, I suspect I'm in for one of the most challenging job experiences of my life. And that's saying a lot, what with me being the type to jump into the deep end fairly regularly when it comes to work. It's just sinking in tonight - with mere hours to go before I show up for the Monday-morning devotional tomorrow at 8 a.m. - that this is going to be one heck of a ride.
CASM has been doing good work with impoverished and vulnerable populations in Honduras for more than 40 years, first with El Salvadorean refugees flooding into Honduras during and more recently with indigenous \women and children. But non-governmental organizations - in Honduras and Canada alike - tend to put their heads down and work, without spending too much time documenting either the work or the results.
My role in the next year or two is to help CASM get better at that, using its small Copan Ruinas office as a pilot that could eventually be expanded to its six other office in Honduras.
How will that play out? I have no idea. The language challenges are the most immediate, but it's much bigger than that. I've been to the office twice now, and both times the staff was very welcoming but clearly puzzled at who I was and why I was there. That's a tough opening position.
I'm quite sure my new boss will have plenty of work for me once I settle in - there are only five employees, after all, and dozens of dead-poor Chorti villages in this region alone in need of help. And for at least a couple months, I'll need to follow behind the CASM staff and do what they do anyway, because there's no figuring out communications until you know exactly what it is that needs to be communicated.
But sooner or later things will have to get around to communications, because that's the whole point of the Cuso project. In an organization that has never had time for communications, however, that's a tall order. As I've already learned from various non-profit projects in Canada, it's not just about me coming in with my skill set and voila, we're all communicating. It's actually about going up against a culture of non-communication and trying to convince people that it's important.
And when it's a Spanish-speaking organization in a foreign country that values hierarchical structure and male leadership - well, you can imagine why I might be a tad nervous. I am, after all, an older Canadian woman with a pierced nose, a tattoo, a tentative grasp of Spanish and a lot of years of not having to prove myself to doubtful strangers.
But I will get up tomorrow and walk the half-hour to my new workplace in what will probably be sunshine, and I guess we'll just see. CASM starts every work week with an hour of prayer, and right now that sounds like exactly what I need to be doing.

If Only Corn-Husk Dolls Were All It Took

2012-02-17T10:31:00.000-08:00

We took a horseback ride yesterday up to a little Chortivillage not far from Copan, La Pintada. Before any of us got a foot on theground, children started running toward us from all directions, clutching thecorn-husk dolls that are a common sight for any tourist visiting Copan. In secondsthey had us surrounded.

Once upon a time, somebody with the best of intentionsintroduced to this tiny, impoverished community the concept of making andselling corn-husk dolls to tourists. I recall reading about the projectsomewhere in the various bits and pieces of literature I took in during therun-up to moving to Honduras. On paper, it sounded like a great idea for socialenterprise.

But of course, reality is something different. The corn-huskdolls are charming enough - bright-coloured trinkets that I can imagine a fewtourists might buy, albeit with some concern as to whether they will be able toclear customs without getting hassled about the dusty corn cob at the centre ofeach doll. Unfortunately, there aren’t a heck of a lot of tourists coming toHonduras these days, and the percentage who want a corn-husk doll isconsiderably smaller than the vast numbers of Chorti children really hopingsomeone will buy.

So the whole thing has taken on an air of desperation.Children as young as two or three now wander the streets of Copan trying tohawk corn-husk dolls. The older ones follow the gringos around with sad eyesand urgent pleas, as if their very lives depended on you buying a corn-huskdoll. I fear that in some cases, that might even be true.

I’m presuming the project was intended as communitydevelopment, something that tapped into a “traditional” skill to bring money toan impoverished village. But how many corn-husk dolls does it take to lift a strugglingcommunity out of poverty? If you saw the shoeless, hungry-looking kids who sellthese things - the rough-looking houses that their families live in, withoutrunning water and for the most part without electricity - it’s pretty obvious that all the tourists inHonduras couldn’t buy enough corn-husk dolls to turn these people’s livesaround.

We took a short walk through the handful of dusty littletrails that constitute streets in La Pintada and came across another good ideagone wrong. The women in the village do some beautiful weaving - placemats,table runners, scarves and the like, in dazzling colours. There’s a signoutside the tiny building where they’re sold that proudly points to the “microenterprise” inside.

Alas, you have to come to La Pintada to buy the weaving,because it isn’t sold anywhere else. There are at least a half-dozentourist-oriented stores in Copan Ruinas hawking goods from China, India andelsewhere, but you won’t find the local weaving anywhere other than at the topof a mountain that most tourists will never visit unless they happen to likeriding horses.

It smacks of one of those projects that kind-hearted peoplefrom elsewhere conceive of, but then leave to die on the vine in the hands oflocals who have no idea how to market the goods or get them to town. Everybodypresumes somebody else will take the project to the next level, but no one everdoes.

We have to continue to work toward eradicating poverty. I admire the Westerners who comewith their big hearts and novel projects to underdeveloped countries and try tomake a difference. But unless local people have the capacity, culturalunderstanding and means to sustain and nurture such projects, generations ofChorti children will have little but handfuls of corn-husk dolls and disappointmentto show for their efforts.

Even shopping shakes your self-confidence

2012-02-13T11:10:00.000-08:00

It has been a humbling experience to be a stranger in astrange land. As I posted earlier, the search for housing earlier this monthreduced my partner and I to a pair of puzzled children following behind the variouskind-hearted souls who were willing to help us. This week’s search forhousewares to go in our new casa hasbeen equally baffling.

We are veterans of the Canadian shopping experience - whichis to say, we know how to go into some big mall or giganticstore-with-everything and load up our cart with the things we need. If I werelooking to outfit a house in Victoria with cutlery, towels, pots and pans, acoffee maker and so on, I’d have my choice of many stores where I could geteverything I needed in one swoop.

Not so in Copan Ruinas. For starters, there’s no mall here.There are no big stores, either, or even very many small ones.

Nor is there a single store that specializes in housewares -or anything else for that matter. For the most part, they all sell a little ofthis and a little of that. You really just have to poke your head in the doorand see what’s on the shelves, which often turns out to be a random assortmentof office supplies, brassieres, motorcycles, shoes, used clothing andkitchenware.

I did my first reconnaissance by myself on Thursday andconcluded that much of what we needed wasn’t going to be available in Copan.But then our Spanish teachers kindly took Paul and I on a walkabout the nextday and I realized that I simply hadn’t understood how to look for what weneeded.

For instance, I’d walked right by Zapatos Faby the previousday, having presumed that a shoe store wouldn’t have housewares. But in fact,the store’s name turned out to be just a lingering remnant from a previousincarnation. It actually sold an eclectic mix of toaster ovens, dish sets,dressers, file cabinets and more. I’d also walked past the intimate-apparelstore, Lovables, but a closer look in the company of our teachers revealedshower curtains, cutlery and coffee pots.

The main furniture store in town has a row of shiny newmotorcycles out front that it also sells. I hear the store sells bicycles, too,something I’m considering for my daily commute to the Comision de Accion SocialMenonita. We asked about buying cylinders for our gas stove and it turned outthat every day on our way to Spanish school we’d walked blithely past theunassuming house where the canisters are sold (and fresh tortillas).

I bought a quilt for our bed through the woman who runs ourhomestay, who knew somebody who knew somebody who happened to have a very niceone. We’re shopping for a sofa using the same technique - word of mouth, whichappears to be how virtually everything gets done in this little town.

We’d have never found the cable company office if ourteachers hadn’t walked us down a skinny little dead-end street and a dustyconstruction site to find the entrance. Nor would we have known that the meterman would read our hydro meter a couple times a month, stick a bill on ourdoor, and then we’d go pay it at the bank. The teachers also took us into the mercado and introduced us to theirfavourite vendor, a religious woman known for having quality fruits andvegetables at fair prices.

Our supply of purified water? We’ll buy it off trucks thatdrive around the neighbourhood every day. Our garbage pickup? We’ve beenadvised to ask our neighbours about when the garbage truck comes - not just theday but the exact hour, because garbage left at the curb for any length of timeis quickly ripped apart by the hungry, sick dogs that are everywhere in Copan.

Give us six months or so and we’ll be old hands at all ofthis (maybe). And if learning new things really is the ticket for preventingAlzheimer’s, we’re going to have brains of steel.

Just because they call it a homestay doesn't make it homey

2012-02-09T10:39:00.000-08:00

The primary focus for much of the screening, assessments andtraining my partner and I went through during our Cuso International preparationswas whether we were flexible and adaptable enough for this work.

I felt certain then and now that we would be well-suited tobeing thrust into unfamiliar settings and largely left to our own devices tofigure things out. But this homestay business is definitely proving to be anearly test of our abilities to go with the flow.

The warm and friendly sound of a homestay never did temptme. I don’t like the idea of staying with a houseful of strangers in my ownculture, let alone in a foreign country with a considerably lower standard ofliving. But a nice hotel with a pool wasn’t an option when Cuso booked us infor a month-long homestay in Copan Ruinas while we attend a Spanish-languageschool that’s preparing us for placements here in Honduras.

We’re now in Week 3, and eagerly - maybe even desperately - countingdown the days until we move into our own place next week. I’ve never looked forhousing with such fervor. My instinctive wariness of homestays has now beenconfirmed, and I plan to do anything in my power from this point on to avoidever staying in one again.

I get the concept: That if you’re fully immersed into theculture, language and family life of your new country, you’ll have no choicebut to adapt rapidly and start picking up the language. In a romantic (butmisguided) moment, you might even picture how nice it’s going to be sittingdown for traditional meals with a friendly family who will gently ask you aboutyour day and encourage you to test your fragile language skills.

But I’m just too freakin’ old to get stuffed into a run-downlittle back bedroom in a house overrun by what seems to be a thousand smallchildren and assorted passers-by. As for those family meals, they don’t seem tohave such a thing in this house; dinner last night, for instance, consisted ofthe two of us gulping down our beans and tortillas at the plastic table while ababy bumped into our legs in his walker, the TV blared a bad action moviedubbed in Spanish, and a man we’d never seen before sat on the couch withanother baby while his wife got her hair tinted next door.

There’s not a sound we could make in this 10x10-foot spacethat wouldn’t be completely audible to everyone just outside our (screen) door.And I can assure you that there isn’t a sound they make that isn’t completelyaudible to us. At least I’ve learned to fall asleep to the sound of waterrunning, running, running into the seemingly bottomless stone pila just outsideour (screen) window. The five-year-olds who chase each other around and around,the three-year-old diva who spends most of her days here, the dyspeptic babyand the endless teenage girls who lug him around - all of it was charming for aweek or so, but how much flexibility can one person muster? One night of that is an amusing travel anecdote. Seventeen nights and counting is an endurance test.

Still, the days tick by. And there are warm and fuzzy momentswhen we find ourselves having fun with the family, like last week when I playedaccordion at 5 a.m. for the man of the house so he could mark his birthday intypical Honduran fashion with a firecracker-and-music wakeup call. The familyis endearing in its own way and I expect we’ll stay connected during our timehere. I just don’t want to live with them.

Of course, Cuso’s emphasis on flexibility and adaptabilityis actually about doing well in my placement with the Comision de Social AccionMenonita, which I don’t even start until Feb. 20. But I’ve got no worries aboutthat. After this homestay, it’s going to be a piece of cake. Six more sleeps....

The view from here

2012-02-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

Chorti woman in her very rough kitchen - no electricity

Three weeks into our new life in Honduras, I’d be a fool todeclare myself an expert on the place. Still, I’ve learned some things. So Ioffer up a few observations from the field, in no particular order:

The headlines arescary, but out of context. Yes, the murder rate in Honduras is the highestin the world, and the incidents of violence are so common in the big citiesthat one of the country’s papers now features a map of assaults, robberies andshootings in San Pedro Sula, the craziest city of the lot. But everyday lifefor most Honduran people is full of the ordinary activities of life: Feed thefamily; raise the kids; get the laundry done; go to work. If you removed theviolence of the drug trade from Honduran life - violence that is primarily directedat other people in the drug trade - the picture would change significantly.

That said, I have met an astounding number of “regular folks”who have had someone murdered in their family. Partly that’s because povertybreeds violent robberies here, and partly that’s because....

The drug trade isfully integrated into the Honduran economy. If you needed one more reasonfor why the “war on drugs” is pointless, harmful and doomed to fail, come toHonduras. As long as demand for cocaine continues in the wealthy countries ofthe world, there will be a major industry in Latin American countries affectingevery public institution, every town on the route that cocaine travels, everybrash young man and impoverished family tempted by all that money.

Here in tiny Copan Ruinas, you need only stand on a streetcorner counting late-model deluxe trucks with windows tinted black to realizethat no town on a major transportation route is immune. It’s not something thatpeople here talk about, but it’s certainly a reality they all live with.

Stone pilas reallyget your clothes clean. My light-coloured clothing has never looked betternow that my clothes are being washed on a big block of stone out back. Sure, anautomatic washer is quick and easy, but it’s no match for a straight-upscrubbing by hand and a sunny afternoon of drying on the criss-cross of clotheslines up on the terrazza.

The woman who runs our homestay where we’re living right nowdoes our washing as part of the deal, but I rolled up my sleeves today and did afew items myself, not wanting to look like some pampered gringa. We’ll bemoving into our own place in mid-February and I’m looking forward to testingout my own pila.

You can live withouta hot shower. I never would have thought this to be true back in Canada,where a long hot shower was one of the highlights of my day. But I’ve quicklybecome accustomed to a much shorter rinse in much cooler water that is all youget when using the funny little shower heads-cum-hot water heaters that are themainstays in Honduran homes.

The dogs leaddesperate lives. A dog’s life is rough in any poor country, but I’ve neverseen so many sick, disease-ridden, crippled, neglected creatures as live herein Honduras. Unlike cats, dogs don’t seem to be able to undomesticated easily,so these poor things continue to breed but are left to scrounge for scraps - whicharen’t easy to find in a poor country where most people subsist on a scant dietof beans and corn, with few leftovers. The dogs' sad, sad eyes break my heart. If ever there was a place that needed agood spay/neuter program and a rescue group, this is it.

Hondurans work hard,and the poorest ones work even harder. Walk through any of the littleindigenous communities surrounding Copan Ruinas and you quickly see how hard itis to be poor in a country with zero social supports. We visited a Chortihousehold where the woman divides her day between making clay pots (no kiln, nopottery wheel, just her and her strong arms) for $2.50 a pop and grinding cornfor the tortillas that feed her family. She’s got running water but noelectricity; her kitchen was a pitch-black cave with a dirt floor, with nothingfor light but the fire in the big clay stove where she cooked her tortillas.

Honduran popcornballs are amazing. Corn and beans are the staples here, so no surprise thatpopcorn balls are sold on the street as a cheap treat. Who knew that scruffier,smaller corn kernels and lots of molasses would yield even tastier popcornballs than the ones I remember from Halloweens past? (Ah, those were the days,when nobody freaked out if the neighbour handed out something homemade.)

I try not to thinktoo much about the provenance of my new favourite treats, mind you, Food Safekitchens being something of a rarity here in Honduras. And I definitely don’twant to know what they use to get the pink versions quite so electric-pink. Somethings are best left unexplored.

But what if I never understand this language??

2012-02-03T10:54:00.000-08:00

La ViaVia, Copan Ruinas. Great place to drink!

I met my new boss on Wednesday. He doesn’t speak anyEnglish. Yikes.

I believe I have the heart for the work I’m about to do inHonduras, which involves helping a very good Mennonite organization do its verygood work. But what I don’t have is the language skills.

That fact hit home with a whump Wednesday as I sat in my newworkplace, straining to understand what the heck the kind-faced man who headsup Copan’s Comision de Social Accion Menonita was telling me.

My Spanish has improved significantly in the past fourmonths, thanks to private lessons, many hours of devoted study, and more immediatelya 20-hour-a-week immersion in Spanish at the Ixbalanque Language School here inCopan. But comprehending the spoken language - especially at the speed it’sspoken around these parts - remains a major challenge.

That’s natural, I’m told. But let me tell you, “natural” isof little comfort when you’ve got a scant two weeks before starting your newjob in a workplace that’s all Spanish, all the time. More alarming still, thework of CASM involves the issues of human development, rights, gender equity,poverty - fascinating and important stuff, but not exactly easy subjects totalk about when your language skills are maybe (maybe) at a Grade 3 or 4 level.

Spanish is a beautiful language, and it’s a total thrill forme to find myself able now to have some conversations with people about theirlives, their country, their culture. I’ve been able to conduct haltingexchanges in markets, banks and the like for about 10 years now after muchtravel in Mexico and a year or so of lessons some time ago, but the innerjournalist in me has longed to be able to engage in more meaningfulconversation. It’s all well and good to be able to ask how much the avocadoscost or whether there’s a bathroom nearby, but what I really want whentravelling is to talk to people about what their lives are like, how theirschool and health-care systems work, howtheir governments function and their countries survive.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to get to that point.Big Pharma has yet to come up with a language-acquisition pill (but damn it,sign me up when they do). Having accepted this Cuso International placement inHonduras, I want to be fluent in Spanish RIGHT NOW, but the truth is that all Ican do is keep studying, keep talking, keep straining to understand thoserapid-fire Spanish conversations all around me while the learning processinches along at a much too stately pace.

Me parece it willbe a tough slog. But my boss gave me an encouraging smile after our talk, andtold me that I seemed to comprehend quite a bit. If only he knew that wejournalists are schooled at looking fully engaged even while our baffled brainsare saying What? What? (or in this case, Que?Que?)

At least I won’t be like the California guy we met today,eight years in Honduras and not a word of Spanish to show for it. He’s stilldoing this crazy mime thing to try to communicate with people. Me, I want touse my words.

In search of a place to call our own

2012-02-01T10:38:00.000-08:00

We started looking for a place to rent in Copan Ruinas thisweek. Our homestay ends when we finish our language classes in mid-February,and we’ll need somewhere to live after that.

I’ve been a tenant for a long time, but finding rentalhousing in this little Honduran town is a whole new thing. For starters, there’s no local newspaper, orany version of craigslist Copan. There isn’t even a local laundromat with oneof those message boards covered in homemade ads with little tear-off phonenumbers at the bottom.

So how does it work? Well, it’s basically a door-to-doorkind of thing. We’ve mentioned our need for housing to the handful of peoplewe’ve met in town so far, but their advice has essentially been to go intorandom corner stores - pulperias, asthey’re known here - and start asking people whether they know of any place torent.

That would be a daunting process in our native language, butyou ought to try it in halting Spanish. But I guess it really must be the wayit’s done, because the strangers we’ve approached so far have been surprisinglywilling to put some thought into possible options.

We wandered into a high-end hotel and asked the clerkwhether he knew of any rentals. He called out to his supervisor, who told usshe’d ask her mother whether her house might be suitable. We went into a localrestaurant/bar and asked the owner to keep us in mind should she hear ofanything, then spent a good half an hour sitting with one of the patrons - whoI’d briefly met when he dropped off his laundry with the woman who runs ourhomestay - mapping out possible leads.

One of the teachers from the language school was kind enoughto meet us at our homestay yesterday afternoon and take us walking through someneighbourhoods where she’d seen “Se Renta” signs. We were very grateful, but itwas a peculiar experience to be hanging behind her like hulking kids while sheknocked boldly on doors and inquired on our behalf. One vacant house had a “SeRenta” sign but no contact information, so the teacher popped into theubiquitous pulperia next door and arranged for the store owner to track downthe house owner and give us a call later this week.

As for what we’ll actually end up living in, I guess we’llsee. A couple of the places we toured through yesterday were pretty dumpy - butthen again, what can you expect for $150 a month? Some come furnished - if you can count a plastic table and chairsand somebody else’s old bed as furnished - while others don’t even have afridge or stove.

Some have water all the time. Most have it only every threedays, but with a big stone pila outback that you fill up to get you through the no-water days. Electricity isextra, but they tell us the costs are minuscule. With no heating systems,clothes dryers, air conditioners or hot-water tanks to suck up the juice, youjust don’t need that much power.

Tomorrow, we’re going to hit up the bilingual school thatsome of the kids in town go to, maybe a few more pulperias, and check back inwith that hotel supervisor to see what her mother said. Home sweet home, herewe come.

Life in the loud zone

2012-01-30T13:00:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time - was it really just two weeks ago? - mypartner and I were private people who lived a contained and quiet existence ina little house tucked into a quiet little corner of Esquimalt. We weren’texactly trapped in our routines, but we certainly had plenty of them, and severalcentred around plenty of quiet hours to pursue our various quiet interests.

No more. On this particular night, which is not so differentfrom any other night since we arrived in our Honduran homestay a week ago, I’msitting on the couch under the glare of those nasty (but efficient) twistylight bulbs that are so common in Latin American countries, struggling to writea blog entry amid the many high-speed Spanish conversations going on all aroundme.

Where once we had a whole house to ourselves, now we have aspare bedroom in Esmeralda’s house. She tells us she lives alone - her husbandworks out of town and is here only intermittently - but in fact there’s anever-changing cast of characters who are in and out of this place from morningto night.

Two of Esmeralda’s daughters live with their own families oneither side, and for all intents and purposes this is their house, too. Rightnow, one of the daughters and her husband are sitting on the porch talking, theother daughter is in the kitchen, three small boys are running in and out whilethrowing balls at each other, and the neighbour just wandered in. Aaron,Esmeralda’s youngest grandson, is six months old and spends more time here thanin his mother’s house, and has taken a particular shine to my partner.

There’s also a niece - I think she’s related to the husbandof Esmeralda’s oldest daughters and two other girls of about 15, who appear toshare the bedroom across the hall from us. Esmeralda’s youngest daughter livesabout a block away and is a regular at the house as well, along with herhusband and a sweet three-year-old girl named Nimsi.

Every night around 7 p.m., a young man arrives to eat at thekitchen counter. I wondered if he was a relative, or maybe a boyfriend of oneof the teenage girls. But no, he rents a room in one of the houses and likesEsmeralda’s cooking. Minutes ago, another couple who I’ve never seen beforepassed through the house with a small child; earlier today, a different couplewas sitting on the couch when we came back from a walk.

Like I said, we’ve got our own bedroom, and it’s got alocking door. But a small bedroom in an uninsulated house, with slat windowsthat are virtually always open, is not exactly what you’d call private. Like itor not, we wake up whenever the first member of this three-house complex wakesup, and many nights drift to sleep to the sounds of one woman or anotherscrubbing clothes or washing dishes just outside our window at the stone pila that’s a fixture of every Honduranhousehold. And did I mention the many, many barking dogs that wander the streets at night? I can't even be angry at them, poor sick, skinny, pathetic things that they are.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not complaining. We were due for achange, and damn it, we got one. I can’t think of a better way to get the hangof Honduran culture than to be thrown into it like startled babies into thedeep end of the swimming pool.

The kids on the street are already calling out our names aswe pass now. Our Spanish is improving by leaps and bounds, as you’d expectwhen fragments of it are being called out from one end of the house to theother on a more or less constant basis. By the time we move into our own placein three or four weeks, we’re going to have this thing down.

No, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. But what the heck.

This is why people pray

2012-01-28T15:41:00.000-08:00

I went to church last night - not my usual Friday nightactivity by a long shot. But when in Honduras, why not do as the Hondurans do?Besides, it just didn’t seem right to turn down the invitation of Esmeralda,the bon vivant who owns the house where we’re staying.

Honduras is predominantly Catholic, but evangelical faithsare on the rise. Charismatic churches like the one we attended - the tin-roofedRenovacion Cristiana, filled on this night with a congregation so young as tobe the envy of any traditional church in Canada - are catching on with apopulation that has clearly taken to the warmth of the evangelical movement.

My fragile grasp of Spanish was no match for thefire-and-brimstone style of the pastor. The overheads featuring biblical quotes in Spanish taxed my reading skills to the max. I was baptised in the United Church butnever did see much church-going in my childhood and beyond, so no surprise thata high-speed Spanish sermon from the Book of Apocalypse (I don’t think I evenknew there WAS a Book of Apocalypse) turned out to be virtuallyincomprehensible to me.

But I had no problem feeling the mood in the room. It waschurch Honduran-style - babies wriggling in their mothers’ arms, childrenwandering about, a rapturous woman up front dancing in that limby, freestyleway that I’ve come to associate with music festivals.

Young women knelt with their foreheads on the floor, eyesclenched shut in surrender to whatever private pain gripped them. Muscled youngmen raised their hands in the air in supplication. The songs were melodic andjoyous, with none of that Gregorian chant feel of the standard hymn. When the time came for the collection, peoplewith nothing to give dug lempiras out of their pockets all the same.

Life and death is anything but theoretical in Honduras.Poverty, sorrow and loss are regular visitors at most Honduran homes, a realitythat has shaped the culture into one that lives for the moment.

It would be naive ofme to romanticize this life, or say something trite about how Hondurans beingpoor but happy. Basics like public education, public health care and even consistently cleanand available water are certainties only for Hondurans with money, of whichthere are precious few.

Civic infrastructure is hodge-podge and in many cases absent.Car-eating potholes are common on even the largest of freeways. Books forchildren are a rare treat, and routine dental care is still a dream. Distributing cocaine coming in from South America is a major economic driver, and the violence the industry brings with it has left Hondurans with few certainties around personal security.

Yet there’s something vibrant here. This is a country wherepeople grab life by both hands and hold on tight, because there’s just nosaying how long any of it is going to last.

They praise the Lord because He’s all they’ve got, and itmoves me.

No easy education for Honduran children

2012-01-27T10:24:00.000-08:00

No school for these Copan Ruinas kids

Wouldn’t you know it, a cold followed me down to Honduras.Or was it that sniffly little five-year-old who spends most of his days here at our homestay with his abuela - his grandma? So it goes. It’s always the kids that get you.

Speaking of which, I now see an area where we might be ableto do something significant in Honduras. The public education system here isludicrous; my teacher at the Spanish school, whose husband teaches in thepublic system, tells me he has 90 students in his class (whoa, how would the BCTeachers Federation react to THAT??), ranging in age from 5 to 11. No wonderthe country has got serious problems.

There are private schools here, but it costs $100 to $150 amonth to send your child to one. If you’re a minimum-wage-earner ($200 amonth), obviously that’s not even in the zone. But what if I could help connecta few decently heeled British Columbians to families in Honduras withschool-age children? For less than what it costs to pay for cable and Internet fora month in our land, they could support a Honduran child to get a decenteducation.

I’ll be working with Cuso International and the Comision deAccion Social Menonita here in Copan Ruinas. Educating youngsters isn’t part ofthe plan for my placement - my work with that organization will be aroundcommunications, as they’re a 30-year-old agency with a ton of good work undertheir belt but little written history to show for it.

But as long as I’m here, I sense an opportunity to getinvolved in other interesting projects.And what could be better than trying to help educate the next generation ofHondurans? Educated people earn more, demand more from their governments, andare better able to prepare their own children for more of the same. If mypartner and I can play any role in that, I’d count this year or two in Hondurasas a major success.

My partner and I had already been talking about what wemight do on that front when we met a young Honduran at the fiesta the othernight who has the same idea. He’s an archaeologist with six years of study inthe U.S. under his belt, and a native of Copan Ruinas who really wants to helpthe children of his home town get a better education. With his knowledge of thefamilies in this small town and our connection to people in B.C. who might lovethe chance to contribute to good works in a very direct way, what’s to lose?

At the homestay where we’re camped out in a spare bedroomfor the next month, the nine-year-old grandson of the owner is already speakingpretty good English as a result of being sponsored to attend the Mayatanprivate school, which we passed yesterday morning on our visit to one of thefincas - coffee plantations - that dot the mountainsides around here. Hisfamily could never have afforded that school if it weren’t for a wealthierfamily that stepped up to help young Carlos, whose father was killed in SanPedro Sula two years ago.

But that school is populated by Canadian and Americanteachers. The archaeologist we spoke with sees an opportunity to create similarsponsorship programs at some of the other private schools, creating more stableemployment for Honduran teachers as well as better education for the students.

We’re going to talk with him more about that in the weeks tocome, so stay tuned. Maybe you, too, will see a role for yourself in thisproject.

At the Fiesta

2012-01-25T10:50:00.000-08:00

Esmeralda, our host

I had a moment last night. A young woman who is part of thisbig Honduran family we now find ourselves enfolded in was having her birthday,and I was asked to play my accordion as part of the celebration.

Truth be known, people don’t ask me to play my accordion toooften. But the 20 or so family members stuffed into the little place next doorturned out to be absolutely delighted to hear me play, especially the six orseven children who gathered close to stare at the accordion like a creaturefrom space.

Having read nothing but scary stories about crime andviolence in Honduras in the weeks before our departure, I’d picked up severalmusic books of Latin-American popular music for the accordion, telling myselfthat surely even a tough-guy narco-traficante wouldn’t want to kill a niceCanadian girl playing Sin Ti or someother tune that his old mama knew.

So there I was last night, surrounded by happy LatinAmericans and my music stand groaning under a load of Latin American tunes thatthey actually knew. I played for at least an hour, before and after the cakefestivities, before and after the beautiful birthday girl got her face gentlystuffed into the middle of the cake as she blew out the candles and an endlessstream of cousins, amigos, grandchildren, aunts and uncles arrived to join inthe festivities. Man, it was magic.

Through all those terrifying Honduran headlines leading upto our departure, I tried to hang onto what I feel certain to be true: That peopleare just people, all over the world. Cultures vary, but we have so much incommon. We love our children, seek meaning and purpose, treasure our families,share meals, invent wacky but endearing customs that bond us to each other. Hondurasseemed like a dark, murderous place based on the news stories that made it upto Canada, but I clung to the belief that what we’d mostly find when we gothere was people going about their lives.

And now that we have arrived, I’m so happy to see that it’strue. You can’t soft-pedal the problems of a country that has one of thehighest homicide rates in the world outside of war-torn countries, but Hondurasalso has strong, vibrant families who want better for their children. I hope Ican play a part in that, doing more than just playing the accordion (not thatmusic doesn’t have its own power to transform, of course).

Just before the party last night, I read a chapter of El Leon, La Bruja y El Ropero tofive-year-old Carlos Alberto. He was transfixed, and never mind my haltingSpanish. Later today we’re going to the Copan library to get him some books.One boy, one book, one small act that could someday link to other people’ssmall acts, in ways that change everything.

And until then, there’s always the accordion.

Jan 24 - First day at Spanish school

2012-01-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

For my pal Mr. Pacific Gazetteer! Not quite a video, but soon.

OK, it’s real now. That theoretical day when we would livein Honduras has arrived - we’re here in Copan Ruinas, settling into the homestay that we’ll be living in for the next month while we immerse ourselves inSpanish at the Ixbalanque Language School.

It’s all one gigantic new experience, from this tiny town ofcobblestone streets to this rooming at a sprawling Honduran family’s home. Thematriarch is Esmeralda, a friendly and outgoing woman who has put us up in abedroom in the big house where she lives with her husband (when he’s not out oftown working) and what seems like a couple dozen grandchildren, nieces andvarious other family members who live in the houses adjacent to this one.

Language school promises to be intense: Four hours a day ofone-to-one immersion, and then home to a household that speaks only Spanish. Itreally sunk in for the first time today, as we sat drinking two-for-one pinacoladas at Twisted Tanya’s, the bar on our route home: We live here now. Howthe heck did that happen??

The town itself is the smallest I’ve ever lived in, some7,000 residents in all. There are world-class Mayan ruins about a kilometredown the road, and steep hillsides all round. On our way into town yesterday,we passed house after house with blankets of coffee beans drying in the sun inthe front yard, but tourism is also a big economic driver, and treasured in acountry that has very little.

I expect this year or two in Honduras to be very surprising.Without exception, the people we have met so far have been warm and welcoming.But we saw a dead body at the side of the road yesterday just outside of SantaRosa de Copan, presumably a victim of some narco-traficante mayhem. I’ve liveda lifetime in Canada with barely a thought for murder, but in this country it’san all too real risk for the young men and women looking for a quick way out ofpoverty.

I couldn’t understand everything said by the man who droveus from Santa Rosa to Copan Ruinas yesterday - he speaks only Spanish, and at thisstage I’m perhaps grasping maybe two-thirds of what people say. But I didunderstand his point about the irony of the drug trade: That Honduras has fewusers - they’re too poor to buy the cocaine coming up from South America tomarkets in the U.S. and Canada - but nonetheless bears the brunt of the hazardsresulting from the distribution end of the business.

Que lastima, asthe Hondurans would say. And indeed, it is a shame, and a great sorrow for theHonduran people.

But I smell something delicious frying in Esmeralda’s cocina, and it’s bringing me back to thenow - the place where Hondurans live almost exclusively. Tomorrow is anotherday.

Jan 23 - The big adventure begins

2012-01-24T10:24:00.001-08:00

We’re on the move again, headed toward the town where we’llbe living during our time in Honduras, Copan Ruinas. Alas, it looks likeInternet access could be more challenging from this point on - we’re at a hotelin Santa Rosa de Copan that in theory has wifi, but it’s not working out thatway so far.

Beautiful drive yesterday, up into mountains that lookedlike they were lifted straight out of one of those Juan Valdez coffee ads fromway back when. I’m well-familiar with that term about “shade-grown coffee” fromall the politically correct bags of fair-trade coffee beans I’ve bought overthe years, but the reality was still surprising. The small coffee plants aredark, dark green and buried deep in the shade of the forests. There areprobably giant plantations somewhere with row upon row of plants growing, butthe ones along our route grew in small patches that looked like backyardgardens.

The towns are small and scattered now that we’re outside ofthe city. But the difficulties of the 21^st century in Honduras stillfind them. We passed through a charming little town, La Entrada, that I’m toldis full of crime due to its key placement on one of the routes that the narco-traficantes use for smugglingcocaine and other drugs north from South America.

I’d heard that the food was bland in Honduras, but obviouslythose people don’t like the same kind of food that I do. I’ve enjoyedeverything so far - the feta-like cheese, the dark frijoles, the crispyplantain that seems to be more of a staple here than tortillas. And the meat!I’ve never understood why meat in poorer countries is always so much tastierthan the meat we get in Canada, but it is. I had a little barbecued chickenlast night that was amazing.

Today we make our way to Copan Ruinas, a couple hours’ drivefrom here. My partner and I will be in a language school there for the nextmonth, getting our Spanish skills down and using that time in a home stay tolook for a more permanent place to live in the little town. Cuso Internationalcovers the cost of housing for its volunteers, up to $400 Cdn a month.

That’s a generous allowance in a country where minimum-wageearners make just half of that in a month, and where most people live on lessthan $1.50 a day. So while we’re looking forward to living more simply in ournew land, we’re well aware that we remain in a position of significantprivilege.

Worn out from all the learning

2012-01-21T07:46:00.000-08:00

A corner store in Tegucigalpa, where robberies are just how it is

They say that babies need to sleep a lot because their poor little brains are overwhelmed by their new world. I know the feeling.
We've just finished four days of orientation with the Cuso International team in Honduras, and have found ourselves staggering back to our little hotel each day worn out from paying attention to all the new things we need to know. New culture, new reality, new language, new way of operating - much, much slower than we're used to, but that can be surprisingly exhausting in these early days.
I catch myself trying to will people to hurry up. I'm not particularly punctual, but I'm positively on time by the standards of our new land. Can't imagine how I will get used to Canadian culture again once I finally succumb to the laid-back pace of Latin America.
Emergency preparedness takes on much more immediacy in a country that really does have emergencies. Cuso program director Cecilia Sanchez noted that during the military coup in Honduras in 2009, people were ordered to remain in their houses for two days, and water and power were cut in some areas. When the devastating Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, more than 10,000 people died and almost 80 per cent of Honduras' infrastructure was wiped out, setting the country back 50 years in the opinion of the leaders of the day.
So while I never quite got around to taking emergency preparedness seriously in Victoria, where the threat of the Big Earthquake always seemed theoretical, I feel quite sure I'll be stashing canned goods and water for just such emergencies once we settle into our new home in Copan Ruinas in another month or so.

Different country, same stores - well, almost

2012-01-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

Went to the mall in Tegucigalpa today. And wouldn't you know, it looked just like every mall in every place I've ever been to, right down to the Dunkin' Donuts kiosk just inside the entrance and all the pretty young girls in tight pants and high-heeled shoes browsing the stores. We had crepes for lunch.
Went to the bank, too, and that was a whole other story. I had to open a Honduran account to be able to access the stipend that Cuso International pays its volunteers, a long and complicated process for which I was very, very glad to have a Spanish-speaking Cuso staffer sitting beside me. The bank asks way more personal questions than any Canadian bank could get away with - like the names of your children, your marital status and your personal health.
Next stop, the local cellphone store for a $30 cellphone and 165 lempiras' worth of free calls. The good news: There's no long-distance charges for calling anywhere within Honduras. The bad news: I don't know anyone here to call and the bonus is only good for a week.
Head hurts from another day of straining to understand what people are saying. Somebody should invent a new-language-acquisition pill.

Hard times for Honduran capital

2012-01-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

National Theatre, Tegucigalpa

Our Cuso International training continues, launched on this particular day with a heavy morning session with Honduran journalist Iris Mencia.
You have to be brave to be a boat-rocking journalist in Honduras, and she fit the bill. She gave us a frank and eye-opening introduction to the rough and tumble history of her country, especially since the 2009 coup that ousted former president Manuel Zelaya.
But Iris also turned out to be lots of fun and a local celebrity to boot, bundling us into a taxi in the afternoon for a walking tour of downtown Tegucigalpa in which she seemed to know virtually everyone we passed. She even convinced the security guard at the 1912 National Theatre to let us wander around the place even though it was closed.
And she plays the melodica. How can you not take a shine to anyone who plays the melodica?
My partner and I have travelled a lot in Mexico and had wondered whether Honduras would feel similar. But Tegucigalpa reminds me most of Havana, where I visited in the mid-1990s. Cuba was in a bleak period back then, having lost the vital support of the Soviet Union as that Communist stronghold fell apart. Havana was essentially a beautiful slum when I was there, its colonial architecture crumbling and impoverished Cubans squatting everywhere.
The Honduran capital isn't quite so desperate-looking as that. But the slow deterioration of everything that was once beautiful is certainly evident. One of the women we were with lives in Tegucigalpa but hadn't been to the centre of the city for years, and she seemed stunned by what had been lost.
We visited the Museum of National Identity and were the only people there for much of the time, although the streets bustled with people with no jobs to go to. The unemployment rate in Honduras is 28 per cent; apparently anyone over the age of 35 can pretty much forget ever finding another job. That's grim news in a country with no social supports.
The heartening thing about people is that they just keep on keeping on. When we walked past a group of fellows who appeared to be in the midst of a hard life, one of them overheard us speaking English and gave us a big smile, calling out "Welcome to Honduras!" as we passed.

There's no preparing for a scary security briefing

2012-01-17T17:45:00.000-08:00

We started our in-country training today at the Cuso International office here in Tegucigalpa. Other volunteers had warned me that what we would learn in the "security issues" portion of the day would be scary, and it was. Then again, I've been reading Honduran newspapers on-line for months now to get ready for coming here, and it had dawned on me quite some time ago that things would be a little different in my new land compared to good ol' Victoria.
As it turns out, the people who bear the brunt of the violence in Honduras are generally either participants of the drug trade or regular Hondurans trying to go about their daily lives. Attacks on foreigners like us are rare. Sadly, the reason for that is because it's known that foreigners might actually have connections somewhere who could help them or cause trouble for the perpetrators, while the Hondurans really don't have anybody.
In practice, what this means is that in the big cities at least, people who can afford it take taxis virtually everywhere (and even then, they first try to establish a relationship with a taxi driver they can trust). They avoid the yellow school-bus-style public transport, because that's courting trouble. They get very familiar with what parts of town you should just stay the heck out of.
When out walking, we were advised not to wear clothes or jewelry that draw attention, and to understand that carrying anything - a purse, a camera, a wallet, a laptop - potentially makes you a target. From this point on, we'll carry a small amount of Honduran currency - 10 or 20 lempiras, about a buck - in a front pocket to give to robbers. And you don't even think about resisting, because guns are commonplace.
It's not that violence happens all the time to everyone, of course. But it was quite clear from the presentation we had that it CAN happen to anyone at any time, and you just have to be prepared for that. Fortunately, I'm a plain dresser with not a whit of jewelry worth anything. But I do hope I never have to test whether I can stay calm during a robbery, and I certainly will take Cuso's advice about not making jokes at times like that.
There's nothing inherently violent about the Honduran people that has created this situation. So far, the ones we've met - the ones we've passed on the streets and seen in the shops - have been universally friendly and welcoming. No, the problem is all about poverty, and a subsequent breakdown in civil society. (Well, that and a thriving cocaine trade originating in South America for markets in the U.S. and Canada.)
Almost half of Honduras's eight million residents live on less than $1.50 a day. Minimum wage is equivalent to $200 a month. Crimes of opportunity happen because people get hungry and desperate. Gangs - Honduras has the Mara - take hold.
The security situation in Honduras is a stark reminder that as the gap grows between a country's richest and poorest citizens, the impact is felt by everyone, regardless of economic status. The richer you are in Honduras, the bigger the razor-wire-topped wall you need around your home, and the higher the risk for your family every time you leave your fortress.
Remember that, Canada. OK, we're no Honduras, but the trends are all in the wrong direction when it comes to that gap.

Let the Honduran blogging begin!

2012-01-16T16:45:00.000-08:00

Victoria to San Francisco, San Francisco to Houston, Houston to Tegucigalpa. It took a couple days to get here, but we have arrived in the capital of Honduras, to begin what will ultimately be at least a year and more likely two of living and working here.
We arrived a mere four hours ago, but already I feel huge relief just to see the place. Few things are worse than reading all the crazy news stories from afar about events in Honduras - it started to feel like we were on a suicide mission. Instead, we arrived at a perfectly nice airport in what appears to be a perfectly nice city, albeit one that even the locals warn us not to go wandering around at night.
But we did brave a short walk to the Mas Por Menos supermercado near our little Hotel Alsacia, a charming blink-and-you-miss-it guest house that Cuso International has put us up at while we take the "in-country" training to get ready for the work I'll be doing with the Comision de Social Accion de Menonita in Copan Ruinas.
We even went to a bank machine and nothing happened. People smiled, we all said friendly holas to each other, and I survived several tentative communications in Spanish, including asking the clerk at the Mas Por Menos whether we could buy a smaller piece of cheese.
We've already sampled the local beer (Barena, pretty good) and marvelled at the prices of packaged goods at the grocery store, many of which were comparable to home. Can't be too many Hondurans shopping at those prices - the minimum wage here is equivalent to $200 a month. There's certainly no escaping North American-style fast food just because you're deep in Central America - we walked past a Wendy's and a McDonald's on our way to the store. Is there no city those guys haven't colonized?
Later I pulled out the accordion - which has spent much of the last two days stuffed into the carry-on bins of our various planes - and played a few tunes later this afternoon in the garden at the hotel. It made me feel like I'd arrived. But it gets dark here early, this close to the equator, so it looks like 6 p.m. will have to be my outdoor-accordion wrapup time in this new homeland.
Paul has found a Spanish version of "Bonanza" on TV. It gives Lorne Green more of an edge.

Three days from Honduras, neck-deep in stuff

2012-01-12T22:09:00.000-08:00

Loads of fun at last night's farewell party, but the cold light of day brings a disastrous looking house and just three brief days to get things under control.
We have grown ruthless in our sorting. I took sleeping bags and blankets to Our Place today, and dropped off old bits and pieces of audio equipment and a dead Mac to the computer recycling place. I've lost track of how many bags of stuff I've hauled out of here, yet more just keep piling up. The ridiculous amount of coat hangers we bagged up this afternoon highlight just how ridiculous an amount of clothes hung in our closets.
A young fellow at the bottle depot when I dropped off the electronics rushed over to my little pile like I'd brought gold, and took virtually everything. These seem like hungry times - put anything at the curb, like my partner's mildering and badly neglected golf clubs in their spider-filled bag that's been outside in the shed for the last six years, and they're gone in an instant. Offer anything for free in the craigslist ads and expect at least a couple dozen responses, from people who seem genuinely delighted even if all you're giving away is a tippy little African-elephant floor lamp.
The next step in our preparation will require ruthlessness with the things we had planned to bring to Honduras, because it's becoming pretty clear that all of what we want will not fit into two 23-kilo allotments. I'm regretting the three bottles of mosquito repellent. In fact, I can't even remember why I was worried about mosquitoes; there seems like far bigger things to worry about now.
TV went today. No lamps left, which has made the house incredibly dim. The better to hide the mess.

The downside of disappearing

2012-01-10T07:18:00.000-08:00

Should you ever decide to pack it all in and move to a distant land, let me tell you, the final week of preparation is hell.
My partner and I are both tense and strained-looking. We're still talking, but in short, monosyllabic sentences that seem as stripped down as our house, which is somehow devoid of stuff yet more cluttered than it has ever been. All routines have been turned on their end, and every day is full of a long list of tasks that never seems finished. ("Pots to Rachelle's house"; "Costco run"; "Notify bank so Mom can deposit my paycheque"; "Photos to SD card"; "Clean oven"; "Pick up malaria drugs" - you get the picture.)
Of course, my deadline personality hasn't helped. Why, for instance, did we wait until a few weeks before leaving for Honduras to decide to get our wills done? Why did I wait until Jan. 4 to make a video with a friend recovering from cancer, when we could have done it two or three months ago? Why am I only now lugging my sheet music into Staples to get it coiled? And why, why, did I think it would be a good idea to hold a Cuso/PEERS fundraiser as our farewell party just days before we leave?
I'm self-employed, so am also having to attend to things like paying my 2011 taxes and HST. The Canadian government doesn't care if you're off to live in a foreign land for a year or two and really, really busy - they want their money. And on top of everything, we are caught in a social whirl, as happens when all your friends and family want one last meal, glass of wine or coffee with you before you leave.
But so it goes. (I can see why Kurt Vonnegut liked that phrase so much - it works.) The one sure thing about a deadline as absolute as this one is that we're going to have to hit it. People are always asking me these days if I'm excited about what lies ahead, but all I can see at the moment is that day's to-do list.
Still, some prickles of excitement break through. Yesterday I pulled out my big ring of keys and thought: Five days from now, I won't need any of these.

Come say goodbye!

2012-01-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Thanks for some very nice comments, blog readers! It was great to hear from people. I hope you hang in with me as my writing shifts to a more Honduran flavour.
Somebody asked about getting in touch with me by email: Please use jodypatersonmobile@gmail.com, as the Shaw address will be gone by the end of next week. Comments on this blog are now coming through that email, so that works too.
Farewell party/fundraiser coming up next Wednesday, Jan. 11 - drop by if you can, 6-10 p.m. at the Garry Oak Room (1335 Thurlow Rd) of Fairfield Community Centre. A very talented, engaging trio of musicians - my daughter Rachelle Reath, her partner Aaron Watson and fabulous trumpet player Alfons Fear - will be providing the music at what I'm figuring will be a great big cocktail party full of people I know. How nice is that? My cousin and her husband Toni and Lee Burton will be tending bar.
We opted to raise a little money on our way out the door for PEERS Victoria and Cuso International (my past and my future!), so it's admission by donation and we're hoping people will throw $10-$15 in the pot if they can afford it. And if you can't, no problem - come on down!

Readers have made all the difference

2012-01-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

My final TC column! Weird. Come to our farewell party/fundraiser next week to say goodbye - Jan. 11, 6-10 p.m. at the Garry Oak Room of Fairfield Community Centre, 1335 Thurlow.

Folks, it has been an amazing ride.

But 14 years have passed since I was first given theprivilege of writing a regular column for the Times Colonist. I’ve written1,800 or so columns, and logged 1.4 million words on a vast number of subjects.

And it’s time to go.

I bless my lucky stars for a series of bosses who let mewrite whatever the heck I wanted all these years. I’m grateful for the sheerluck of living in a time and place where our governments know they have totolerate people like me nipping at them in the name of free speech.

But mostly I’m thankful to you, dear reader. Yourwillingness to share your opinions, criticisms, encouragement and life storieswith me has made all the difference.

Back when I waswriting four times a week, readers’ tips accounted for at least half of mycolumn topics. On my own, I couldn’t possibly have found even a fraction of thecrazy, funny, tragic, inspiring and touching stories that my readers brought meover the years. I’m the medium - the story-teller - but they’re the real deal.

The great joy of journalism is that it bestows on curious peoplelike me the right to ask nosy questions of virtually anyone. There’s nothingsaying that people will answer your questions, but it’s striking how often theydo.

And as they talked, I learned.

About the cruelties of the human condition. The limitations ofour systems. The breaking points and vulnerabilities. The impact of unintendedconsequence.

But I also came to see that most people are good, and that virtuallyeveryone can be brilliant if given the chance to shine. What a wonderful giftthat has been, to know that.

From talking to so many disparate personalities in so manystates of wealth, health, freedom, rage, humour, vulnerability and frustratedpowerlessness, I came to be comfortable with anyone, and happy to hang out inall kinds of scenes. That’s been a whole other blessing.

And now my partner Paul Willcocks and I are off to Honduras,and to new stories yet to be told.

I know I’ll keep writing. Journalism soaks into your bones,and observing the world is now a passion of mine regardless of whether I’mgetting paid for it. It won’t be easy to walk away from work I’ve been doingsince I was 25. But truth be told, I’m ready.

I’ve been in the business long enough to have seen the waynews cycles. A critical issue rises up in the public consciousness, lingers inlimbo for a very long time while people argue about what to do about it, andwith luck ends up “fixed” after much effort on the part of all concerned.

But then budget cuts, public apathy and a heartbreaking lackof institutional memory eventually eat away at the gains. A decade or so later,the original problem re-emerges, and the cycle begins again.

It’s just not possible to muster the same energy for a fightwhen you know how the story ends. I find myself growing cynical and discouraged.But I’ll still miss my front-row seat on all the action, and the doors I’vebeen able to nudge open in the name of people’s right to know.

I’ve loved being a journalist in a free country under six companiesthat all valued a free press. It’sbecome fashionable to make a fuss about corporate media controlling the news, butthat has not been my experience.

Even journalists sometimes forget the significance of that. Suchfreedoms are far from a guarantee in this world, including in the country whereI’m headed. I feel our own governments’ growing reticence to stay open toscrutiny, but I trust Canadians will keep their feet to the fire on this one.

Regrets? I’ve had a few. Sometimes I’ve been too pushy andstrident, other times naive. I thought my writing could play a role in changingthings, but came to see that the readers you most need to attract when strivingfor change are the ones least likely to read you in the first place.

Nor do I get much feedback from readers anymore, perhaps asignal that I’ve overstayed my welcome. It has felt lonely tilting at windmillson my own.

But all in, it’s been a blast. Thank you for being the bestpart of that. Stay in touch.

Soaring CEO salaries are big trouble

2012-01-05T08:36:00.000-08:00

Here I am, posting a Margaret Wente column. Her sheer contrariness, not to mention her privileged viewpoint that she rarely acknowledges, generally rub me the wrong way. But today she wrote on an issue that we obviously share indignation over: The soaring pay of Canada's CEOs.
As she notes in the column, a private company has the right to pay its boss whatever it wants. But tying salaries to stock options has screwed things up. It motivates CEOs to do things for all the wrong reasons. And with governments now tying their own managerial salaries to private-sector salaries, things are getting way out of hand.
And here's the TC's editorial from yesterday on the same subject: Both the editorial and Wente's column are based on a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Rising inequality demands debate

TIMES COLONISTJANUARY 4, 2012

How much is too much? It's time to ask that question about income inequality in our society.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives cleverly frames the issue with an annual New Year's look at the compensation for 100 corporate CEOs compared with the average Canadian.

The CEOs, the centre reported, had earned as much as the average Canadian makes in a year by noon on Tuesday, the second working day of the year.

Their average compensation jumped 27 per cent in 2010, to $8.4 million. The average income for Canadians increased 1.1 per cent, to $44,366.

The increase might reflect improving corporate performance. But the gap has been growing steadily in recent decades. In 1995, for example, the average compensation for the 50 highest-paid Canadian CEOs was $2.66 million, 85 times the pay of the average worker.

By 2010, the average for the 50 was $11.3 million, 255 times the pay of the average worker.

Put another way, the average Canadian salary grew by about 2.4 per cent a year. The average for the 50 CEOs, through good times and bad, was 10.5 per cent a year.

Two arguments have been used to justify the increasing share of corporate revenues claimed by those at the top. The compensation reflects market forces, defenders argue. Just as Robert Luongo can command $6.7 million from the Canucks because he offers scarce and valuable skills, so can top executives demand big pay.

The second claim is that only shareholders should care care about executive compensation, as it's their money.

It's not that simple. Luongo's pay is determined by the market, but free agency rules, team salary caps and other factors all provide checks and balances. The process is, at least, transparent.

Compensation for top executives is supposedly set by market forces. But the market appears rigged. Those who determine pay - boards of directors - tend to benefit themselves as executives' pay increases, because corporations develop pay plans by surveying compensation at other companies. Many directors are in similar positions with other corporations, or directors on several boards. Rising compensation means increases for them as well.

And shareholders are rarely given the chance to protect their interests when it comes to compensation.

Of course, answering the first question - how much is too much - raises a second one. What is to be done if we decide this trend is damaging our society?

There are policy responses which would introduce market discipline without interfering with corporations' ability to set compensation levels. Shareholder rights, both to detailed information on compensation plans and to a direct say, could be strengthened. Shareholders, for example, could be required to approve any compensation plan that provides increases greater than a set percentage. Greater independence for directors could be mandated.

Alternatively, government could use its redistributive powers to level the playing field. The centre notes, for example, that CEOs increasingly take their payment in stock options, taxed at half the rate of income.

The growing inequality demands, at least, a public debate. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported last month that income inequality continues to increase in Canada and around the world. Government policies have ensured that those with high incomes claim a larger share of the country's wealth, while reducing the share earned by the rest of Canadians.

The trickle-down approach hasn't worked, said OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría. "Without a comprehensive strategy for inclusive growth, inequality will continue to rise."

And without such a strategy, the OECD warned, "the social contract is starting to unravel in many countries."

Our ability to function as a society is based on that social contract, which assumes the game is not rigged to favour a fortunate few. When it starts to break down, serious trouble lies ahead.

New hospital policy not much of a fix

2012-01-03T07:21:00.000-08:00

Well, this story from today's Victoria Times Colonist certainly does raise more questions than it answers.

I can't decide which is my favourite outrageous fact - that VIHA thinks things will be fixed now just because its new policy establishes there will be at least two women in any mixed-gender hospital room (how does adding an extra woman prevent a patient from being assaulted by one of the two men who might also be in the same room?), or the revelation that the OLD policy had no provisions for ensuring "patients with known violent behaviour, mental health issues or known tendencies to inappropriate sexual behaviour" weren't being placed in mixed-gender rooms.

Come to think of it, that last point is much bigger than gender. Is the hospital telling us they don't even consider big stuff like that before packing patients into a four-bed ward with strangers?

I get that the mixed-gender wards are a more effective use of hospital space, and that there's no guarantee of safety anyway just because you're in a room where everyone is the same gender. But people are really vulnerable when they're sick enough to be in the hospital. They need to know that those in charge have thoughtful and realistic policies and practices for keeping them safe.

Assault of 83-year-old woman in Island hospital prompts policy change

Mixed-gender rooms to be limited after elderly woman attacked in bed

BY JUDITH LAVOIE, TIMES COLONISTJANUARY 3, 2012 6:15 AM

Vancouver Island Health Authority has said it will limit mixed-gender rooms after an 83-year-old woman with dementia was sexually assaulted by another patient at Cowichan District Hospital.

The woman, who was taken to hospital Dec. 19 after a fall, was in a fourbed room with two men when she was assaulted.

"I can't say enough about how truly horrified we are that this happened," said VIHA spokeswoman Moira McLean.

"VIHA is doing a full review of the incident. We have no tolerance for any sort of violence and we are absolutely horrified this would happen in one of our facilities."

Staff at Cowichan District Hospital were alerted to the assault after a medication alarm was activated.

The RCMP special victims unit was called by staff and a 48-year-old man was placed under guard in another room. The suspect was released from hospital into police custody.

North Cowichan-Duncan RCMP could not be contacted Monday and it is not yet known if the man has been charged.

As a result of the incident, policies and procedures on mixed-gender rooms are now being formalized, McLean said.

The new rules will require patients in semiprivate rooms with two beds to be the same gender.

Every effort will be made to separate men and women in three-and fourbed rooms, but when mixed-gender rooms are necessary, there will be a minimum of two women per room, said the health authority.

"It will also be required that patients in mixed-gender rooms are alert, oriented, mentally competent and have the ability to appropriately vocalize concerns," McLean said.

Patients with known violent behaviour, mental health issues or known tendencies to inappropriate sexual behaviour will not be placed in mixed-gender rooms under the new policies.

The new rules would have prevented the woman who was assaulted from being placed in a mixed-gender room.

Even though the policies are not yet formalized, efforts are always made to place patients in genderappropriate rooms, McLean said. "But at times, if there is high volume, people are put in mixed-gender rooms. It's not uncommon and it happens in hospitals across the country," she said.

At the new Patient Care Centre at the Royal Jubilee Hospital, 85 per cent of beds are in single rooms and the remainder are twobed rooms.

"As we move to replace facilities, that's what's coming down the road, but when you have older facilities like Cowichan District Hospital, Nanaimo and Victoria General Hospital, some are three-and fourbed rooms and sometimes it's unavoidable to have mixed genders," McLean said.

Pack rats and ditchers: In search of common ground

2012-01-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

A blog reader asked me if I had any advice for finding common ground between pack rat and ditcher, given that is exactly what is being attempted in our house at this moment as we fold the place up.
I'm the ditcher, the one who has no problem getting rid of things. Keep that in mind when reading this, because I fully acknowledge it's from a ditcher's perspective.
And let's presume I'm giving this advice for a pack rat-ditcher couple in which the pack rat does want the end result, even though it's going to be painful getting there.
I've got nothing against pack rats as as general rule, but if you want to fold up your house in order to be able to travel the world freely, then it's pretty clear that a ditcher ethos simply has to prevail. So a motivated pack rat is essential. I have no idea how you'd convince a pack rat to part with their stuff if they'd yet to buy into the concept.
OK, advice.
First, the ditcher has to recognize that it's going to be a struggle all the way, and that they need to prepare themselves mentally for the challenge ahead. If Paul and I had been a new couple going through this process of giving stuff up, I think we might have broken up by now.
But I've known Paul for long enough that I was really aware of how tough this was going to be for him. I knew I'd have to be very, very mellow and non-pushy - not my natural state - through this process.
Step two: Recognize that the ditcher does most of the work of the downsizing. Maybe that's unfair, but it's just the way it is. If you want something more than the other person, you will have to be the one who makes the most effort.
Step three: Give your pack rat some options. There are a lot of different choices available when you're getting rid of stuff, and pack rats seem to feel better about giving away their things if they're not just going to get dumped, but are going on to new lives with family, acquaintances or people in need.
And finally, check your own expectations. Sometimes I catch myself getting heated up over an item too inconsequential to make a whit of difference in terms of the storage space it'll take up. Ditcher, don't sweat the small stuff.
Good luck. With two weeks to go in our household, we are on track to fit the stuff of our lives into a 6x8 storage locker. But I'd be lying if I said it has been easy.

Could be the end of the world as we know it (or not)

2011-12-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

I find it kind of sweet that people still get caught up in agood old-fashioned doomsday prophecy once in a while.

It’s difficult to be certain of anything in this world, so Idon’t mean to poke fun at those who believe the apocalypse is coming in 2012. Itcould be.

But what’s charming is that the belief has gained so muchtraction that even the well-regarded Guardian newspaper in London, England feltthe need to run a rather serious story this month featuring a German scholardisputing rumours that the end is nigh.

I like that. We seemall sophisticated and rational as a society, but just below the surface is awide-eyed kid who still believes in things that go bump in the night. Preparefor a good year on that front regardless of what’s up with the apocalypse,seeing as the ancient Mayans aren’t the only ones predicting intense times in2012.

It seems perverse to wish for disaster. But workingourselves up about a possible apocalypse is obviously something humans enjoyevery now and then, and we do it well. Who can forget Y2K?

The 2012 doomsday prophesy revolves around a stone tablet carvedby an ancient Mayan civilization from the Tortuguero region of Mexico. Thetablet marks 2012 as the end of a 5,125-year cycle of the Mayan long-countcalendar.

Some have taken that as indication that the world will ceaseto exist as of Dec. 21, 2012. Of course, you have to put a lot of faith inancient Mayans to believe that. But that’s the thing about faith - it doesn’tneed to make sense.

At any rate, the scholar quoted in the Dec. 1 Guardianarticle disputed that interpretation of the tablet writings.

Sven Gronemeyer contends the tablet is too damaged to makeout some of the words written on it. He says the legible part in fact says whatlies ahead is a return of the mysterious Mayan god Bolon Yokte. His arrival issaid to mark the end of 13 consecutive periods in the Mayan calendar that eachlasted 400 years.

Oddly enough, my partner and I will have a front-row seatfor whatever action awaits when the fateful day - Dec. 21, 2012 - rolls around.We will have been in Honduras for almost a year by that point, on a placementwith Cuso International in the very town that Honduran President Porfirio Lobohas singled out for a tourism happening tied into the Mayan prediction.

We’ll be in Copan Ruinas, the site of major Mayan ruins. Governmenthopes visitors pour into the town for the “countdown to the end of time,” givingthe flagging Honduras tourism economy a boost along the way. Whatever awaits - BolonYokte, the end of days, or more likely just some big, wild party - we’re goingto be smack-dab in the middle of it.

A B.C. soothsayer warns of other shakeups closer to home in2012. Georgia Nicholls, the Vancouver astrologist who writes a newspaperhoroscope column, says “fiery Mars” will preside over all signs for most of theyear. This is apparently a very unusual development.

She advises us to prepare for much more cosmic energybouncing around next year. That’s neither good nor bad on its own, adds Nicholls,but the challenge is in managing all that extra energy.

Nicholls cautioned Sagittarians like me to ease up in 2012 ontheir tendency to resist authority. I am taking that to heart. It’s a reminder thatI will soon be working in an unfamiliar culture, political structure andlanguage, and will need to be the nicest, most easy-going version of myself.

There does seem to be agreement among the ancient Mayans,the astrologists and the Chinese that 2012 is shaping up to be a corker.

According to Chinese astrology, the 12-month period startingFeb. 4 is the year of the black water dragon. That heralds a year ofuncertainty and unexpected developments.

“You can have either bad luck or good luck in 2012, and willhave a chance to turn it into better or worse luck,” noted one Chinesehoroscope site. Gulp.

But if it’s really all over next December, luck is the leastof our worries anyway. Have a world-shaking year, and maybe Bolon Yokte and Iwill see you in Copan Ruinas.

It's all about the piles

2011-12-28T18:52:00.000-08:00

I don't know what my new life will be like once we get to Honduras, but right now it seems to be about sorting. That and studying Spanish fill what I used to call "spare time" - the blocks of time in my life when I could do fun things like bird-watching or spend a leisurely couple of hours at the gym.
Now, there's only sorting and Spanish, although they have their own charms. Newly able to understand at least most of what I read in the Honduran on-line newspaper I've been checking out, I'm very happy to be finally making good on years of empty promises to myself that I would learn Spanish. But I've been hard at it for almost two months now and taking a two-hour private lesson every week as well, so no surprise that my birding time has suffered. So it goes.
The demands of sorting are multi-layered. First, you sort just to put like with like - tools over here, art materials over there, miscellaneous (and oh, there's so much miscellaneous) over by the wall.
Then you sort the newly sorted stuff into smaller piles: This one to store; this one to give away to family; this one for donation; this one to ditch. I'm an aggressive ditcher and my partner is right on the edge of being a hoarder, so you can imagine how pleasant that aspect of things has been.
The out-bound stuff then gets loaded into the back of my truck and off it goes to whatever the final destination, freeing up space in the basement for the next round of sorting. And on and on it goes. I feel the pressure of our Jan. 15 departure quite acutely at this point, but I've had to be careful not to be too efficient, or the next thing you know I've given away something we'll actually need between now and then.
The cabinet that housed our wine glasses and liquor went on its way today, up-Island to its new home in my son's house. The homeless liquor bottles are stacked on the floor in the dining room now, so much in our way that it's as if they're daring us to drink them up before we fly away. Well, if that's the way it has to be.

It's Bad News Week

2011-12-26T14:35:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Honduran newspapers on-line these days, trying to get a sense for the zeitgeist of the place before we land there Jan. 16. I must say, things feel a little gloomy based on the headlines. But I did a Google News search today to check in on what was going on in Canada, and the long list of bad-news stories reminded that gloom is just what media do all around the world.
Of the 16 "top stories" Google News had on offer at the time I searched, 14 were about bad things happening somewhere.
A guy dressed up as Santa kills a bunch of people. A Surrey man is shot dead on Christmas Day. Suspicious deaths, missing people, falling polls. Such catastrophic events just seem to be what we consider "news," although I often wonder what we're supposed to do with such news.
Do visitors interpret the nature of Canada based on what they see in our media, just as I'm trying to do with Honduras? If they do, we surely seem a much more dangerous country than we actually are. Maybe that's why those U.S. seniors tried to bust through the border at Aldergrove recently packing all those guns for surviving Canada's untamed wilderness and lawless culture.
For once, it pleases me to be reminded of the media's tendency to draw a country's sorrows into a tidy daily-news package, concentrating the feeling that everything is falling apart. Whether here or in Honduras, there's always more to the story.

Times like this reveal what matters most

2011-12-23T07:53:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, everyone! This is my antepenultimate column for the Times Colonist. I had to search that word out just to have something fancy to say about my third-to-last opinion piece. I've been writing a column for the paper since 1996, so these are momentous times...

I’m on the brink of big changes in my life. Just how muchthat’s rocking my world sunk in this week when I realized that for the firsttime ever, I wasn’t going to put up a Christmas tree.

My partner and I are moving to Honduras on Jan. 15 to do volunteerwork with the Canadian non-profit Cuso International.

I’m so distracted by all the preparation for the move that theChristmas process has barely registered on me. Yet it’s also going to be one ofmy most meaningful Christmases, what with so many people to say goodbye toafter 22 years here.

There’s nothing quite like change to shake up your life. TheHonduras placement is for a year, possibly two - not very long in the grandscheme of things. But in fact it changes everything in practical terms, arevelation all on its own.

My ties to the Island are lifelong because I have so muchfamily here. But we don’t own a home in Victoria. So this change basically comesdown to my partner and I collapsing the stuff of our lives into 50 kilos ofluggage between us and a small storage locker.

A person really has to get serious about what itemsconstitute “home” at times like this. We could be on the move in exotic lands forseveral years with any luck. What’s precious enough to keep when you know you’lleither have to carry it with you or pay to store it for a very long time?

Not much, as it turns out.

Photos. Memorabilia from years past, like my journals or thesweet and funny notes my partner and I wrote to each other in the early years. Uselessbut sentimental keepsakes, like the tiny Day of the Dead diorama of Trotsky’smurder we picked up in Mexico City.

I’ve been pawning off pretty much everything else on anyonewho expresses a speck of interest. Our children in particular have been underpressure to take things we don’t want but are resistant to giving up, like thepainted bull’s skull we dragged back from Arizona or the comfy but otherwiseworthless brown chair from Ikea.

The kids eventually drew the line, and I turned toadvertising things for free in the on-line classifieds. It has been way morefun than I would have anticipated.

Sure, I could have held a garage sale and possibly sold the 1970scabinet stereo and the outdated computer desk for a few bucks. But I can tellyou there’s way more pleasure to be had from handing your stuff to happystrangers who show up at your door delighted to be getting what they want forfree.

I like knowing that my stuff is going to a good home.There’s something magical about giving people you don’t even know the verything they’re looking for.

The young guy who took the Nintendo 64 game was thrilledthat it fell into his hands on the very day his old one had broken. The kid whostuffed the cabinet stereo into his Jeep said he’d wanted one for ages. Thefamily who took the computer desk actually wrote us a thank-you note.

I took in a boxful of forgotten knick-knacks to the women atPEERS Victoria and they were all over them. My partner’s excess art suppliesare going to artists from the mental-health community, who are grateful for theabundance.

As for having less stuff - well, that’s just plain freeing. Ithas required much sorting and more than a few squabbles, but we’ll be a lean,mean and mobile unit by the end of it.

Why are we doing this? Why not?

Our lives have brought us to a point where it’s possible.Our needs are met. We have skills that Cuso International can make use of indeveloping countries like Honduras. Our kids and grandkids are cheering us on. Lifeis short.

I’ve still got a couple TC columns left before I’m gone, butafter that you’ll have to catch up with me on my blog orFacebook. We’re throwing a farewell and fundraiser on Jan. 11 with proceeds toPEERS and Cuso - come on by that evening if you can, to the Garry Oak room at Fairfield CommunityCentre.

And if I can interest you in some mismatched dishware or anold love seat, let me know.

Busted in Orlando for feeding the homeless

2011-12-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

This story out of Orlando could easily be a satire for The Onion - but no, it's real! I mean, you can't have people just going around feeding poor, hungry people whenever they want.

I like the indignant response from the local police force about how the three people who got arrested had deliberately breached the ordinance. God spare us from the day when people refuse to breach petty ordinances and just leave their fellow citizens to go hungry.

The Mounties got their man - and he's got their number

2011-12-20T07:52:00.000-08:00

Well, here's confirmation of what many of us have already figured out: Something's really wrong with the RCMP.
The new "top cop," RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, was in this morning's Globe promising to take extreme action to end the culture of bullying and history of botched investigations inside the RCMP.
What the heck happened to these guys, anyway? When I was a kid, being accepted into the RCMP was like a statement that you were smarter, more ethical, in better shape and certainly more dedicated than the average Canadian.
I don't know if that was a myth all along that has now been stripped away by one too many media stories about some drunk, violent, misogynist or otherwise disturbed RCMP officer doing something horrible. Or did something bad happen to what was once a noble profession in the intervening years?
At any rate, good luck to the changemakers. The concept of a national, well-trained and highly professional police force still appeals.
But trying to change culture is an extremely difficult undertaking that requires years of consistent, focused leadership that never wavers. Very few organizations have the long-term vision and stability to be able to pull it off.
You need compelling leadership to make it happen, but it's still bottom-up stuff. There's no way to force a change in culture from the top down. Just ask the Ministry of Children and Family Development about that.
My sympathies to the many good RCMP officers who have been tarred by a rogue culture and a few bad apples. But there's no question that something is deeply off-kilter inside the force.

They say this is Christmas.....

2011-12-18T07:36:00.000-08:00

I'm not a huge fan of the festive season at the best of times, what with the endless pressures to buy something for somebody. This year, it really just seems like an added complication to getting ready for our Honduras departure Jan. 15, as I run out to buy Gastrolyte or some other such specific medicinal product for our travels only to find myself at the far end of a long line of anxious holiday shoppers. (That said, I just had a very nice evening making shortbread and homemade Baileys with my youngest daughter Rachelle last night.)
My partner and I are going to Copan Ruinas, in the northeast of Honduras near the Guatemala border. We've never been there, but here's a Flickr stream from a kind stranger who heard about our travels and sent a few shots from her own travels. I've really appreciated getting a glimpse of where we're headed, and having some balance to what is mostly dire news coming out of the beleaguered country.
Here in Victoria, we are renters, so what this year (or two) in Honduras really means is folding up our lives. We looked around our house and realized that most of our furniture isn't worth keeping, so have farmed out some to our five kids, given some away to people who needed it, and become avid users of the "free"
section on Craigslist to get rid of things like my parents' old cabinet stereo, a Nintendo 64, and a computer desk from another era.
It's interesting to see what things I value enough to keep. For the most part, it's photos and other memorabilia. Our remaining LPs, slimmed down from our last big move, have also made the cut, and will be stashed in what we hope will be a moderately sized storage locker that will await our eventual return.
I have many family ties to the Island, and know I'll be back this way often no matter what happens in the wake of this adventure. But what I hope is that we'll like this year or two so much that we'll keep doing this kind of work for a few years, in different countries.
The work with Cuso International is unpaid, but the organization aims to provide its volunteers with a "neutral" financial year - your housing costs covered, a small living allowance, a little money tucked into your account back home to ease your return. That model makes long-term volunteering much more possible.
And wouldn't that just be so cool - to be living in fascinating countries, sharing my skills with organizations that could really put them to use?

MacKay reveals massive disconnect from Canadians' reality

2011-12-16T08:08:00.000-08:00

It's these kinds of stories that really make me think we're losing our way. When our own government reps don't get how completely offensive it is to Canadians enduring a recession to see their politicians spending like drunken sailors on luxury trips all over the world - well, what does that say?
At the very least, this latest spending revelation makes it clear that Peter MacKay has got to go. As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

One month to departure - yikes!

2011-12-14T09:24:00.000-08:00

Honduras capital Tegucigalpa, where we'll first land.

Just back from an intense five-day training course with Cuso International as we get ready for our departure for Honduras in a month.
I admit, I thought I was pretty culturally aware, but it turns out I still had a ton to learn. It's going to be quite a challenge to be working in a new culture, a different language, different issues, much warmer climate (OK, I'm really looking forward to that part), and in a society where I'm definitely going to have to curb my tendencies to just shoot my mouth off about this or that.
Fortunately, my not-yet-terrific Spanish language skills should help keep that in check, at least initially. And I'm viewing it as a learning opportunity to feel out communications in a country where speaking up about government, politics, etc has to be done much more cautiously.
Part of the Cuso training was a three-hour meeting with a "country resource person," which in our case was a young entrepreneur by the name of Ricardo Juarez, who moved to Canada from Honduras in September. I'll be ever grateful to him for the straight-up information he had for us on life in Honduras, which I now recognize will involve a lot more sightings of guns than I'm used to.
He also filled me in on "Honduran time," in which I will be expected to be punctual but everybody else will arrive maybe 30-45 minutes later than planned. Some of the more seasoned volunteers we met on training suggest I just carry a book everywhere to be able to read while I wait.
We're not down there on a holiday, but Ricardo did give us a great tip about an amazing place to visit during our travels, Cayos Cochinos. Such an opportunity to get to know a part of the world that I have yet to visit! I appreciate connecting with anyone who has travelled in Central America, particularly Honduras, so please send me a note at jodypatersonmobile@gmail.com if you've got tips to share.
If you've ever wondered about folding up the tent and doing some long-term volunteering, I can tell you that our experience with Cuso International so far has been great.
But one point they emphasize regularly is the need to stay flexible and adaptable. So if you're one of those people who likes all the i's dotted and the t's crossed well in advance, you'll need to let that go. We found out at the training session that our visas likely won't be completed until a few days before we leave, and I've been cautioned repeatedly that my job description is likely to change - and possibly change again - once I'm in Honduras. We won't know where we'll be living until a week or two, possibly longer, after our arrival.
Hope you'll stay tuned for what promises to be an amazing adventure. Click on the link just above this post to get to our fundraising page. And I'll be setting up a Shutterfly Web site once we're there so I can share photos with you as well.

Too much power in PM's office

2011-12-11T16:00:00.001-08:00

This Ottawa Citizen story on the Harper government's increasing control over the federal bureaucracy applies equally in B.C. Our ruling political parties don't even make a pretence at keeping the workings of government at arm's length anymore - it's all just one big spin machine as far as they're concerned.
It's a frightening development. The bureaucracy has traditionally kept a steady hand on the wheel of government while the various political parties went about their crazy antics. As pointed out by the author of this report criticizing the centralizing of power in the Prime Minister's Office, corruption is not just a risk but a proven result when political parties treat government like their private resource.

A painful, late truth for young Victoria woman

2011-12-10T04:27:00.001-08:00

Are there some parents so awful that they deserve to never see their child again?
Probably. But we've got a process for that in Canada, and it doesn't include kidnapping your own child against court orders.
I have great sympathy for everyone connected to the saga of the 20-year-old Victoria woman who has just learned that much of what she thought to be true about her life was a lie.
She does not even have the name she thought she had; she hasn't heard her real name since she was taken from Toronto by her mother after a 1993 custody fight.
The courts will sort out the truth of this crime. There's little served by people like me speculating about the mother, Patricia O'Byrne, who has been accused of taking her little girl, or trying to second-guess an Ontario court decision from 18 years ago.
But whatever the details turn out to be, it must be said that a grave injustice has been done to this young woman. What must it feel like, to find out at 20 that the foundations of your life have been built on sand?
She is now learning she has a father. A brother. A whole other extended family in Ontario - one that has been looking all over the world for her for the better part of two decades.
She's got a name she didn't know about, and no doubt some pointed questions for friends and family in Victoria who presumably helped keep her mother's deep, dark secret.
She's got 18 years of catching up with another side of her family who she likely has no memory of, including a brother who is close to her age.
And how unfortunate that she has to experience all these mind-blowing revelations amid the glare of national media interest.
But her father, Joe Chisholm, is over the moon to have finally found his daughter, and the saga makes for one heck of a story.
What makes a parent kidnap their child? Mothers and fathers are equally likely to be the offending parent, says the support organization Victims of Violence.
Often it starts with anger over a court decision around custody. Sometimes it's about fear, or a concern that the child isn't getting good care when with the other parent. Fortunately, most of the 230 or so parental kidnappings in Canada every year are resolved within a week.
Not so in this case. The girl was taken from Toronto after an Ontario court awarded joint custody to O'Byrne and Chisholm in 1993.
Ontario RCMP have had an open file on the kidnapping ever since, but it took a tip to the Missing Children Society of Canada this summer to bring the investigation to Victoria.
Chisholm has maintained a poignant blog on MySpace. There are years of unread Christmas greetings and happy birthdays to his daughter on the site.
"Happy birthday," reads one from Sept. 20, when his daughter turned 20. "Wherever you are and whatever you are doing I am thinking about you and I wish you and your family well. I await the day that we can meet again. Love, Dad."
Chisholm has found his happy ending, it appears. O'Byrne has landed in a nightmare. Being charged with kidnapping might not even be the worst of it, considering how it must feel to be caught out on such a massive lie.
The case is a good reminder that whatever we think is "in place" in our systems to protect us from such crimes is a fiction in itself. The daughter, whose name is now covered by a publication ban, went to school under a false name and nobody noticed. Her mother worked for government for years under an alias, with no one the wiser.
Neither kept a low profile. The mother was an active member of the school community, and well thought of. Yet a desperate dad just four provinces away never caught a whisper of any of it. If it weren't for the tip to Missing Children, this crime might never have been solved.
Who called in that tip? I like to think it was someone who loved this young woman, and couldn't bear to deny her the truth of her life any longer. I'm sure it took a lot of courage to make that call.
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple," opined the playwright Oscar Wilde.
We can only hope it heals this shattered family.

How come I don't know what a meme is?

2011-12-08T15:04:00.001-08:00

Gee, I've always had a soft spot for Facebook as a way to connect, but now that I see the list of the top status updates in the past year, I'm not so sure if me and my kind are really much of a presence on the social-media site.
Happily, I'm not completely out as a Facebook trendsetter - I did have a status update involving the death of Amy Winehouse. Other than that, the top-10 list isn't really resonating with me.
As for the listing of the top 10 most-visited fictional character sites, I'm glad to see Bob Esponja made the grade. I might have even visited that site if I'd known it existed. I first saw the Sponge Bob cartoon many years ago while holidaying in Mexico, where he's known as Bob Esponja, and I've never been able to shake my habit of referring to him as Bob the Sponge. My grandkids mock me mercilessly for this. Maybe now they'll think I'm cutting-edge.

Cuso adventure in Honduras coming up

2011-12-06T09:18:00.001-08:00

My partner and I are heading off to Honduras next month (you heard it here first!) to spend a year or possibly longer on a Cuso International volunteer placement.
It's all very exciting, but also a little terrifying what with the abundance of grim statistics and media headlines about Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. But I read this Huffington Post piece this morning with gratitude and relief. It finally adds some humanity to the country and reminds me of the importance of not listening solely to the naysayers.
We leave for the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, in mid-January, and will make our way shortly after that to Copan Ruinas, a small northern town where I'll spend the next year doing communications work for a Honduran agency that partners with Cuso, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita.
I'll be posting regularly to my blog during our travels, and am really looking forward to this experience - not to mention solidifying my Spanish language skills. I can't wait to take everything I've learned through decades of communications work and put it to work helping great organizations like CASM and Cuso International.
Stay tuned for more details as the date of departure draws nearer, and if you find yourself in Victoria on the evening of Jan. 11, please plan to come to our goodbye party/fundraiser at the Fairfield Community Centre! We'll be raising money for my past and my future - PEERS Victoria and Cuso International.

Latest figures show income gap widening even more

2011-12-05T07:09:00.001-08:00

I guess we're accepting that old saying about the rich getting richer as a fact of life, because they definitely are getting richer.
In Canada and around the world, the divide between those with money and those of lesser circumstance continues to grow - as this CBC story points out, the average income of the top 10 per cent of wealthy Canadians is now 10 times that of the bottom 10 per cent, up from 8:1 just a few years ago.
The trend is consistent throughout OECD countries - the gap is now 14:1 in the U.S. You need only go to a developing country to see where this trend leads: To dramatic increases in visible poverty; an even more fragile economy; higher costs for fewer public services; and a significant rise in security issues for the wealthy.
Even the rich lose out when the income gap gets too big, in other words. And yet we continue to bring in government policies (and governments) that worsen this trend, even while our morning newspapers bring us the news of all that is going wrong in countries being turned upside down by the revolts of angry have-nots.
I suspect we think such things can't happen in Canada. I fear we're wrong about that.

If only science was a sure thing

2011-12-02T08:40:00.001-08:00

Science is anuncertain science. That’s been brought home once more this past week with allthe consternation over mammography.

“TheScreening Mammography Program Saves Lives,” says the headline on the B.C.Cancer Agency’s on-line writeup about mammography, a type of x-ray of thebreast that up until days ago was routinely promoted to Canadian women 40 andup as an annual must-have.

But theCanadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has rocked the boat big-time withnew recommendations that reduce the use of mammography.

The taskforce has toned down Canada’s 10-year-old guidelines around when to getmammograms. The revised guidelines suggest routine mammograms only for womenages 50 to 74 and even then no more than once every two or three years.

No big dealin the grand scheme of things. One less medical appointment to schedule.

But it’sdisturbing when something that has been sold to us as an absolutely essentialhealth measure suddenly reveals a dark side. The about-face on mammogramsserves as an excellent reminder that health care can hurt.

In the caseof mammograms, the issue is “false positives.” Mammograms are prone to turningup slow-growing lumps in the breast that look like cancer but in fact do noharm over a lifetime.

That meansyou can end up having surgery, radiation and chemotherapy you didn’t need - treatmentsthat can damage your health permanently and waste precious health-care dollarsto boot. False positives have been a major issue in prostate-cancer screeningfor years now for those very reasons.

Mammogramsprovide “a real benefit,” said task force chair Dr. Marcello Tonelli in mediareports this week on the revised guidelines. “But compared with the risk offalse positives, it’s relatively small. If you look at the numbers, you aremuch more likely to have a false positive result than you are to have your lifesaved with screening.”

New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell sawthis one coming years ago. He wrote a brilliant article back in 2004, “ThePicture Problem,” that detailed the challenges that even the most expertradiologist faces when trying to decipher a mammogram image.

“Looking at a mammogram isconceptually different from looking at images elsewhere in the body,” MemorialSloan-Ketterer Cancer Centre radiologist Dr. David Dershaw told Gladwell inthat piece. “Everything else has anatomy—anatomy that essentially looks thesame from one person to the next. But we don’t have that kind of standardizedinformation on the breast.

“The most difficult decision Ithink anybody needs to make when we’re confronted with a patient is: Is thisperson normal? And we have to decide that without a pattern that is reasonablystable from individual to individual, and sometimes even without a pattern thatis the same from the left side to the right.”

The point of the article was thathumans place too much trust in pictures as revealing “truth.” The picture thatemerges from a mammogram is particularly open to interpretation.

Gladwell highlighted eye-openingfindings from the University of Washington Harborview Medical Centre as to whathappened when 10 radiologists were asked to interpret the same 150 mammograms.

One caught 85 per cent of cancersin the images right away. Another caught 37 per cent. Some saw many things toworry about, others saw none. In one case, three radiologists deemed a lump visiblein the image to be normal, two others saw it as abnormal but probably benign, fourweren’t sure, and one was certain it was cancerous.

Mammography does save lives. Butnot many, as it turns out. If 1,000 women who are age 60 right now have anannual (and let’s presume correctly interpreted) mammogram every year for thenext decade - 10,000 mammograms, with all the expense that entails - breastcancer deaths among the group could be expected to drop from nine to six.

Nobody can blame us for wanting afail-safe test that catches cancer early. Alas, the science isn’t there yet,and at any rate something new will likely be killing us by that point. Such isthe nature of the human condition.

Preventing breast cancer remainsimportant, of course. But so much of prevention comes down to personalresponsibility - for what you eat; how often you exercise; how much you weigh; youralcohol consumption.

The world will rejoice when theycome up with a screening program that corrects for bad habits. Until then, takecare.

Why does the belt only tighten at one end?

2011-11-29T21:49:00.001-08:00

You know, it's really striking how often political parties that shape themselves as being about "small government" in fact spend their time in office growing the business out of all proportions.
Here's the latest news on that front involving the Tories. Keep in mind that all this growth happened at a time when Stephen Harper's government was slashing public services. That's the thing that grates the most - that even while we're losing long-standing public programs due to "belt-tightening," our governments are growing larger, taking ever-bigger salaries, and even paying out bonuses to the senior managers who are most effective at cutting our services.
In ancient times, they would have called this kind of governance a kleptocracy - "rule by thieves." Whatever you want to call it, it's crazy-making. But hey, we keep electing them.

Free parking at our hospitals

2011-11-28T15:18:00.001-08:00

Now here's an idea whose time has come - free parking at hospitals. Maybe now that the Canadian Medical Association Journal is saying it, it will have an impact. How crazy is it to stress people out just that little bit more when they're going through an illness or something worse than by charging them to park?
And once we're offering it free, how about offering more of it, too? Can't believe they built that new parkade at Royal Jubilee hospital at a capacity that was well below what's actually needed.

Occupy movement down but not out

2011-11-25T08:53:00.001-08:00

Having to make way for Santa seems an ignominious end forthe Occupy movement, but that’s how things tend to go in countries that aren’tyet angry enough to get genuinely uncivil.

Still, the public reaction to the Occupy protests over thelast eight weeks has been surprisingly sympathetic. I take that as a hopeful signthat this movement will have legs.

People tolerated the protest camps for much longer than theyusually do when tents appear in public spaces. I think a lot of them quietlyrelated to the issues the movement has raised.

It’s pretty impressive that in just two short months, amixed bag of disaffected citizens around the world took a small protest in NewYork City’s financial district and turned it into a global movement.

Whether it can last long enough to affect change, I guesswe’ll see. But the Occupy protests got a lot more positive attention than most“occupations” get - an indicator that people have a certain sympathy for thecause.

The movement started with a single email that Canada’sAdbusters Foundation sent to people in July.

The foundation is known for publishing an ad-free magazineand holding strong opinions on corporate influence over democracy. But itssuggestion of a peaceful occupation of Wall Street clearly struck a chord thatresonated well beyond the magazine’s usual sphere of influence.

"The idea of Occupy Wall Street is to revive people'sdemocracy," said Adbusters editor Micah White in an interview with theHuffington Post last month. "We are sick of the corporate politicalparties deciding the agenda of America."

That would have bordered on cuckoo talk a decade ago, whenwe were all so certain that our governments were leading us toward the light.

But we’ve learned some hard lessons since then. From the2001 Enron scandal on through an outrageous series of global financialdisasters and government ineptitude that severely shook public confidence, ithas been a tough and discouraging 10 years.

Maybe the average people of the world were just ready forsomebody to issue a call to action. At any rate, one group of sympathizersafter another picked up Adbusters’ call for occupation and spread the word. Aglobal movement was born virtually overnight, with Occupy protests eventually organizedin more than 80 countries.

None of it will change the world, at least not yet. Butlet’s not discount the miracle of such a thing happening at all. Just the factthat a group of protesters kept their camp alive in Centennial Square for morethan two months and city hall was still being nice about it is an astounding turnof events on its own.

The Occupy movement’s catchy slogan - “We are the 99 percent” - is a reference to the growing income disparity in western countries, withwealth concentrating in the hands of the richest one per cent of thepopulation.

In the last three decades, the top one per cent of income earnersin the U.S. saw their incomes rise almost 300 per cent. That’s at least seventimes more than any other income group saw in the same period.

Here in Canada - where the gap between rich and poor hasbeen growing for the last 15 years - the richest 20 per cent now have ninetimes the income of the poorest 20 per cent. That’s the biggest gap we’ve seensince the 1970s.

Income disparity isn’t exactly a hot topic around the officewater cooler. But even people who don’t often think about such things are bynow well aware that crazy problems are manifesting out here in the world.

They didn’t all storm the streets with the Occupy forces.But they did make space in their communities for the protests to happen. It’s abigger win than it might appear, and signals a real shift in the public mood.

Widespread tolerance for something as non-Canadian as publicprotest - in the Christmas season! Right in the heart of the downtown! - says alot about how much the issues raised by the Occupy movement must be resonating.Protesters, you are not alone.

But Santa’s coming and it’s cold outside. Store owners nearthe protest camps are losing patience. Municipalities and their policedepartments are closing in.

It looks like the end. I suspect it’s just the beginning.

Mammography controversy a reminder of screening risks

2011-11-24T08:09:00.001-08:00

Canada's finest health writer, Andre Picard, weighs in with his usual information-laden, clear-eyed view on the fuss about mammographies.
Women are accustomed to cancer screening as a good thing from lifetimes of Pap smears. But as Picard and the larger scientific community points out, screening can have a serious downside when false positives - more common than you'd hope in both mammograms and PSA tests for prostate cancer - lead people to have serious medical procedures and treatments that they didn't need.
Cancer is such an emotionally loaded word. We all know someone who has had it and we're all terrified to get it ourselves, but the truth is that the science of cancer is still something of a mystery. You'd think that highly developed screening tools that can catch the earliest signs of cancer would be a good thing. But now we're learning that some cancers never really get past the starting gate in our bodies, and that there's such a thing as "bad" screening when you end up getting chemotherapy, radiation or surgery you didn't need.

Occupiers didn't have the numbers they needed

2011-11-19T21:41:00.001-08:00

Good try by the Occupiers, but it looks like things are fizzling out across the country. It's cold, for one thing, but probably the bigger problem is that unless a protest gets bigger with each passing day, everybody forgets about it very quickly and just returns to their routines. Then all you've really got is a camp pretty much like any of the other camps of impoverished people we've had in Victoria.
I like the Occupy movement, but I don't know if enough people are feeling the pain yet to give the movement the critical mass it needs. Not in Canada, anyway. The States - well, that's another matter. I think they've got any number of angry-and devastated-citizen protests ahead of them as the country's problems deepen.

WTO police chief cautions against similar response to Occupiers

2011-11-18T10:22:00.001-08:00

A good read from regret-filled former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper. He presided over the disastrous 1999 "Battle in Seattle," when an aggressive police response to World Trade Organization protesters turned the city into a tear gas-laden war zone for several days.
I was there, having been sent south by the Times Colonist on Day 2 of the clash to cover the story. There were 5,000 armed police and military personnel in the city by that point, and it was a terrifying, life-changing experience for me to realize that every citizen is in danger when there's that much police aggression and weaponry around.
Stamper has been talking about his mistakes for a number of years now, and I admire him immensely for it. Who better than those who have already learned the hard lessons to remind us not to repeat the missteps of history?

Red River recall highlights food safety measures

2011-11-18T07:52:00.001-08:00

Aside from an unpleasant period of paranoia brought on byseeing the documentary Food Inc.,I’ve never put much thought into food safety.

But when the food police come for my Red River cereal -well, that certainly gets my attention.

At first I thought there’d just been a run on Red River whenI saw the empty shelf. But after several forays to different stores in aneffort to find my breakfast of choice, I spotted the little recall notices.

It’s unsettling to learn that something you eat every dayhas been recalled. So I went looking for answers this week and discovered howlittle I knew about the whole complicated business of food safety in Canada, letalone the dense regulatory regime that aims to protect Canadians from harmfulfoods.

In the case of the Red River recall, it’s a labelling issue.Soy is in the cereal but isn’t declared on the label. Food allergies havebecome a major focus for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after nationallabelling laws were tightened in February, and soy is apparently a big one.

Companies have until August 2012 to comply with the new labellingrules, which will require a nice, clear caution in plain English warning buyersif a product has soy, coconut or any other of the 14 known allergens CFIAwatches out for.

Smucker Foods of Canada - which makes Red River - opted torecall the Canadian supply of the cereal early while the labelling issue getssorted out. My loss, but probably a good thing for any Red River fans with soyallergies.

Allergens are a common reason for food recalls. We’ve hadalmost 600 recalls to date this year, and many involved various allergens thatturn up in our packaged foods without our knowledge.

Immerse yourself in the very detailed CFIA Web site andyou’ll soon see just how many other worrying things can affect our food anddrink, from ground-glass fragments to botulism, salmonella and paralyticshellfish poisoning.

Fortunately, a third of this year’s recalls were rated Class3, a relatively mild infraction that might just indicate a company hasn’tbrought a certain practice up to code. (The Red River soy mixup is rated Class1, because the potential for harm is significant for those with soy allergies.)

The even better news is that most food recalls in Canada areinitiated by the companies that make the products. That’s a hearteningindicator that they’re paying attention long before their products reach ourtables. Most food recalls happen before anybody gets sick.

And that’s as it should be. We need to be able to trust thatfood manufacturers are doing their best not to harm us. No government body couldever stay on top of all the ingredients in all the food and drink we take in, anda complaints-based approach doesn’t work when a person could actually die inthe process.

But I’d guess thattrying to prevent people from having allergic reactions to food products willturn out to be one of the industry’s more challenging problems, and not justbecause more people seem to be developing such allergies.

Take soy, for instance. Peoplewho are allergic to it presumably know to check the ingredients list on theside of a product before buying packaged or processed foods.

But soy goes by many names, andsoy-based emulsifiers and thickeners go by even more. Knowing whether soy is inthe chewing gum, the tuna or the bread crumbs you’re about to buy isn’t always assimple as reading the label.

The CFIA has a section on itssite encouraging consumer responsibility around food safety, mostly urging usto report to the agency with concerns about food-related problems.

But anyone worried about food allergies mightalso want to spend some time browsing the site just to get to know the manyfaces of their allergen when it comes to packaged foods. There’s a great recallsearch system that links you to all kinds of information - like the 13 Class 1 recallsthat have been initiated in B.C. in the last month.

For all you Red River fans outthere, I’d hoped to have word of a triumphant Canadian return (Note to cross-bordershoppers: no recall in the U.S.) Alas, Smucker’s didn’t get back to me withthat information, so we’re left to wonder.

In the meantime, visitinspection.gc.ca and see what your food supply is up to.

Two B.C. sex-worker organizations shutting doors

2011-11-16T07:18:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, the news was about PEERS Vancouver closing in the spring. Today, the other primary Vancouver organization supporting street-level sex workers has also announced it's done. PACE Vancouver will run out of money to pay its staff in just three weeks.
I'm doing some contract work with PEERS Victoria and can tell you that even though that organization is also going through difficult times, it has a more diverse funding base and is hanging in under a great new executive director, Marion Little. But it will still be facing one of the biggest funding challenges in its 16-year history in the spring, when the same revamped employment contract that is wiping out PEERS Vancouver comes into effect across B.C.
Finding money to help sex workers is an extremely difficult undertaking, as I learned the hard way during my three years leading PEERS Victoria. The reason these groups are struggling is because the citizenry simply doesn't care enough about what happens to the impoverished, marginalized women engaged in survival sex work, and our governments know it.
Please speak up - to your MLA, to the provincial and federal governments. Please make this a personal issue, too, and donate money, warm winter clothing, food for hot soups and stews (PEERS Victoria serves more than 300 "meals" from its outreach van every month to women working our local strolls). Put some time into learning more about the issues so that this isolated, stigmatized population isn't left to suffer at the hands of our massive disinterest.

New resolve around better divorces, or just window-dressing?

2011-11-13T07:54:00.001-08:00

I'm a bit puzzled by this story, on the province's big new initiative to reduce the court fights when people split up. A good idea to do that, of course, but isn't that the case already? Mediation has been the option of preference for divorcing couples for many years now, at least from the court system's point of view. The big sticking point is getting them to take that option.
As for the example of the Lee family and how we need to view violence against a spouse as threatening to a child - well, that's not a new thing either. In fact, for poor families caught up with the Children and Family Development Ministry, parents risk losing their kids into government care if there's any threat of spousal violence. So even when Dad's violent and Mom's not, she can lose her children just for not being able to figure out how to get away from Dad.
The problem in the Lee case is that the family was well-off. We all have a hard time believing that well-off families can be dysfunctional and dangerous. Different decisions get made - by the ministry, by police - when a family's got money. Tightening up the Family Relations Act isn't likely to change that.
But hey, I don't want to sound like Little Nancy Negative. It's just that this story line seems a bit like someone's trying to dress an old issue up in new clothes and sell it to us as change.

Death at the Occupy Vancouver protest

2011-11-06T17:36:00.000-08:00

A timely open letter to the powers that be from a B.C. blogger and activist very worried about what's going to happen at the Occupy protest in Vancouver in the wake of a death at the encampment this past week. He's been a participant up until now, but is urging people to wrap things up before more tragedy occurs.

Fired CLBC boss got $345,000 severance package

2011-11-05T08:04:00.000-07:00

Say it ain't so! After all the heat and problems at CLBC, all the lost services to vulnerable people, we find out that fired (an important distinction - fired, not laid off or downsized or anything softer like that) CLBC chief Rick Mowles got a $345,000 severance package from the Crown corporation when he was axed last month. Yup, 18 months' severance after being on the job just six years.
Wow. Kudos to TC reporter Lindsay Kines for digging up this important story - he's been an ace on the CLBC issues since the start, and was the only reporter in B.C. even doing any meaningful writing about this stuff until things got so noisy that Global TV and now the Vancouver Sun finally took a look.

Fed changes start from frightening premise

2011-11-04T07:45:00.001-07:00

It makes me nervous to read the news stories about plans theCanadian government has for reshaping the non-profit sector.

Sure, the sector needs some work. What sector doesn’t?

But it’s hardly the unaccountable, inefficient system thatthe federal government made it sound like this week in the media coverage aboutthe new Canada Not-For-Profit Corporations Act.

“Right now, we ask [the non-profit sector] to take on thesejobs,” federal Human Resources Minister Diane Finlay said while announcing new effortsto ensure more accountability from Canada’s 161,000 registered non-profits andcharities.

“We give them money to do it. They receive the money whetherthey achieve their objectives or not. Now all we’re saying is all right, westill want you to do this, but you get more money if you actually achieve yourobjectives.”

Unless you’ve been involved with a non-profit having to jumpthrough the many - and often meaningless - accountability requirements offederal funding, you might not appreciate how grating of a statement that is ina sector that works very hard for its money. How can we trust change pushed bya government that doesn’t have a clue?

Canada, Britain and the U.S. are all working very hard thesedays to extricate government from social responsibility. Their efforts tend tofocus on initiatives that download the funding of community work to someoneother than them.

Socially invested municipalitiesand neighbourhoods, new charity hybrids capable of earning their own revenue, mysterious“investors” who are apparently waiting in the wings to pony up for social causes as long as theycan earn a return on investment - all are integral parts of the threecountries’ plans for non-profit reform.

And maybe such strategies will indeed turn out to bebeneficial. But pardon me for noticing that underneath every proposed change isan expectation of offloading the cost of social care.

It’s very popular among the government set these days to talkabout how charities and non-profits should run more like businesses.

For the most part, they already do. And that’s remarkablegiven the nutty processes, procedural hurdles and nonsensical funding cuts theydeal with as a matter of course. If the goal is a healthy community sectorcapable of dealing with increasing social complexity, I’d suggest Ottawa start withsome personal reflection on the many ways its own systems and policies devalue,complicate and compromise efficient community work.

The nature of non-profit work - running child-care centres,looking after old people, supporting challenged families, preventingenvironmental catastrophe, finding God, reconnecting lost souls - doesn’tlend itself easily to standardmeasurement. In an era when “worth” has only one meaning to government, that’sa major disadvantage.

So much of non-profit work comes down to value-based goalslike easing human suffering. Buildingcommunity. Saving the planet for future generations. Alas, governments likethings that show a return on investment before the next election.

Community work builds “infrastructure” as surely asconstruction companies build bridges and roads. So how come nobody has to builda bridge on year-to-year funding or uncertain contracts squeezed whenever thegovernment feels like it? How come we don’t hear about road-builders gettingstiffed as a matter of course on annual cost-of-living increases, as is thecase for hundreds of social service agencies in B.C. doing the same work for alittle less each year?

I do agree with government’s push for more tangible evidenceof the benefits of community work. Improvements to the way outcomes aremeasured and reported would at least settle once and for all that the non-profitsector is doing essential, meaningful work.

The sector could use a new name, too, because “non-profit” and“charitable” instantly bring to mind some pathetic soul who can’t figure outhow to make money and so has to beg.

But what it doesn’t need is a government-led fix that evenin its early days has revealed a biased and negative view of the non-profitsector.

Modern-day western governments are obsessed with the ideathat charities and non-profits are inefficient users of tax dollars. They thinkthe growing social divide in their countries are because non-profits andcommunity members aren’t doing their job well enough, not because they’ve beenhacking apart the social safety net for the better part of 20 years.

They’re wrong. And they won’t set things right with justmore of the same.

Corporate double-speak can't hide Hydro's problems

2011-11-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

You catching all this fast talking coming out of BC Hydro? Takes me back to my old corporate days, with all those interesting interpretations the Big Guys had in order to create the impression of a good bottom line even when there wasn't one. Times Colonist editorial staff did a good analysis of the situation today - it's hard to imagine that any person taking a common-sense look at this thing wouldn't see that we're really just pushing today's problems onto tomorrow's Hydro users.
Also loved the opening to today's TC story on the same issue. BC Hydro can't lose money because the government expects a stable profit for its budget each year, said Hydro's chief financial officer, Charles Reid. Oh, if only that was the way life worked.

History of sorrows and stumbles for CLBC

2011-10-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

All the problems and drama at Community Living B.C. thesedays got me digging through the story archives this week to try to see when itwas that things started going wrong for the Crown corporation.

I was prepared to be outraged. But really, I just felt sad.

I’ve often made mention here of a 1978 book I was introducedto a few years ago, Poor People’sMovements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. I’ve seen so many real-life examplesof the cautionary tales laid out in that fascinating book through my workhelping people with few resources push change.

The heartbreaking story of CLBC just might be the clearest exampleyet.

Poor People’sMovements documents the histories of four protest movements involvinglower-class groups in the U.S. I’d read it in hopes of learning strategies forshaking things up around homelessness and sex-work issues, but happilydiscovered the book was even more valuable for understanding why good intentionsso often go awry in the drive for change.

In B.C.’s community-living movement, the families andadvocates of people with developmental disabilities have always been the onesdriving change. If it weren’t for them, we’d still be back in the day of giant,impersonal institutions for anyone with a mental handicap, because that’scertainly the easiest model from a government perspective.

CLBC was to be the movement’s greatest triumph. For thefirst time, people whose lives had been touched by developmental disabilitywere going to be the ones guiding services. Families, advocates and those withdisabilities would no longer be just another category of “stakeholder,” but wouldactually be making the decisions.

So how sad is it to see where things have ended up a meresix years later?

The situation in B.C. feels more challenging than ever forpeople with developmental disabilities. It’s harder to find services, harder tohold onto them, and the certainty of being housed is no longer a given.

During a recent visitto a local shelter, I was stunned to see how many people with visibledevelopmental disabilities were there for services - the leading edge of a newproblem that will grow much worse in coming years now that we’re giving updesignated housing for this population.

People are being pushed out of their group homes andprograms even while CLBC senior managers take $14,000 bonuses as thanks from governmentfor getting that done.

Such revelations from other parts of government generally bringto mind some opportunistic, cosseted civil servant with no idea of what itfeels like to be in need.

But in the case of CLBC, a number of the senior managers arethe same family members and advocates who led the movement for years - peoplewho know exactly how it feels. How did it come to this?

If only they’d read the book. It turns out there’s a deadlyphase for grassroots movements, and it comes dressed up like success. It’s the point where the government orauthority they’ve been railing at suddenly puts a friendly arm across theirshoulders and invites them closer to work out a “solution.” Talk turns to jointcommittees and partnerships.

Movements must approach such invitations with great care,warns the book. Stepping inside the circle may look like a win, but it’s morelikely to be a takeover. The goals of the movement are soon crushed beneath theweight and wishes of the new “partner,” and soon everybody’s too co-opted tocomplain.

CLBC was also created in total chaos. I’m a big believer inorganizational culture as a determinant of how things will turn out, and bythat measure CLBC never stood a chance.

Firings, investigations, disgraced ministers, delays, painfulmedia stories about funds unaccounted for and sweet-deal contracts - it was amessy, protracted birth. Add in the constant reorgs that have swept throughCLBC since its inception, and I doubt the Crown corporation has known manynormal days.

And that’s not even taking into account the politics. Cuttingsocial services has always been a top priority of the B.C. Liberals, andcommunity living has been in their sites for 10 years now. The cost of housingpeople has been a particular irritant, which is why CLBC execs were up untilrecently being rewarded for moving people out of their group homes.

Families and advocates for this issue know how to fight, andit’s good to see them out there again. They won’t trust as easily next time,but what a discouraging truth that is.

Household income flat-lined for young families

2011-10-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

The people at the Human Early Learning Partnership do good work, like tracking the (rising) vulnerability rate in B.C. Here's a new report from HELP that's full of facts and figures that are good to have around - informative in the moment, but very useful for comparing stats down the line as things undoubtedly worsen for younger generations of Canadians. Who would have thought that the idealistic baby-boomer generation would be the one that would leave behind a world in worse shape than when we arrived? Here's a fact sheet with more info and some proposed solutions from the University of B.C.-based HELP.

Important information or just more nameless dread?

2011-10-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of story that makes me crazy.
I mean, if high levels of BPA really do cause problems in-utero for girl babies, hey, let's ditch the stuff. I'm perfectly happy with my metal water bottle. But stories that just float a little information out there are decidedly unhelpful on issues like this, and mostly just add to all the nameless dread that builds up in us from a steady diet of vague stories like this one.
What exactly ARE "higher levels" of BPA, and why did these women have more in their system than others? In fact, how much BPA is OK to have in your system, and what's a typical amount you'd see in an average person? What are the lessons to be learned for future mothers-to-be so they can avoid hyperactive baby girls - or shall they just add BPA to the long list of possibly bad things to worry about when pregnant?
And note that you'd have to search for the actual study if you wanted to see exactly how many more toddlers got hyperactive due to higher levels of BPA in their moms, or even for a clear definition of the behaviours that researchers saw more of.

Pine beetles a lesson in messing with nature

2011-10-21T08:00:00.001-07:00

It’s 2001 all over again in forestry news these days nowthat those nasty little mountain pine beetles have worked their way intoAlberta.

The story in the Edmonton Journal this week about the beetle infestation could have beenlifted from any B.C. newspaper a decade ago, when the insidious insects first beganupping their game in our own lodgepole-pine forests.

More than 17 million hectares of B.C. pine forest have been affectedsince then. The province has spent more than $750 million so far trying tomitigate the damage.

Here in the land of Douglas fir and cedar, the pine beetleinvasion tends to feel like old news. But forestry-dependent communitieselsewhere in B.C. are all too aware of the ongoing impact the ravenous bug ishaving.

The province gave another $9 million this past spring to thethree community coalitions set up to identify and fund mitigation strategies inthe hardest-hit areas: Cariboo-Chilcotin; Omineca; and Southern Interior.

The beetle explosion created a boom in B.C. forestry for afew years, when the government cleared the way for more intensive logging tomake use of all the dying pine trees.

Government didn’t have much choice about that, asbeetle-killed trees would have rotted on the ground if they hadn’t beenharvested. Might as well make some money and create some jobs from all thatlost forest.

But the short-term bump in harvesting has left a long-termproblem: Much smaller - even non-existent - harvests for many years to come inforestry-dependent communities. They’re left waiting for a new generation ofpine forest to grow large enough to log, which will take 40 years or more.

“Stakes in beetleinvasion are enormous,” said this week’s Journalheadline. Indeed. Having recently travelled through the beautiful pine forestsof the Rockies, I can’t imagine the landscape without them.

Then again, I drove the Princeton highway this summer andnoticed that the devastation of a few years ago is barely visible through thenew growth.

That’s a marked change over the way things looked in aprevious road trip, when red, dead pine trees were all you could see. Theheartening thing about nature is how forgiving it can be of our transgressions.

And the invasion is definitely about our transgressions. Pinebeetles have been infesting pine trees for centuries, but climate change andpast forestry practices created ideal conditions for the bugs.

We planted monocultures - great swaths of nothing but pine,which is not how Nature would have it. We fought forest fires with vigour toprotect forestry revenues, only to discover that by suppressing fires we had weakenedforest health and created dense stands that made it easy for pine beetles tomigrate from tree to tree.

Warmer winters have contributed to the problem. A good, longcold snap is the only real defence against the beetles. But we haven’t seen toomany of those in recent years.

The beetles kill a tree by burrowing into its soft tissueand cutting off the water supply to its upper branches. The bugs also spread ablue fungus (remember “denim pine,” a branding exercise aimed at putting apositive spin on the faded-blue colour of beetle-killed wood?) that also speedsthe tree’s death.

You’d think in this age of a chemical for everything, therewould be a remedy for death by beetle.

But aside from the removal of infected trees and some hastythinning, nobody has come up with a real solution. In the U.S., the pine beetlehas already destroyed 16 million hectares of forest in Idaho national parks. Theforest service is busy in Montana parks right now thinning stands in hopes ofstaving off more devastation.

The lesson learned from all this? Mother Nature knows best. There’sa reason for bio-diversity, and for leaving forest fires to burn. Woe to any culturethat tries to trump nature.

***

Oops. I confused my watts in a column last week on China’sThree Gorges dam. As an astute reader pointed out, it would take five millionprojects the size of Three Gorges to generate the 100 billion megawatts of hydropower I said the dam was capable of.

Make that 100 billion kilowatt hours. Still a heck of a lot,but nowhere near the staggering amount I erroneously suggested. When theproject’s 32 turbines are all up and running (29 are currently in operation),they will in fact generate about 22,400 megawatts.

Bed bugs an expensive house guest for BC Housing

2011-10-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a story to get you itching: A Sun piece on the $720,000 that BC Housing spent in a year fighting bed bugs in the buildings it owns.
The story makes the point that having a bed bug infestation isn't a sign of poverty or poor housekeeping. The little critters are just everywhere now, and extremely hard to get rid of.
My daughter came home covered with bed-bug bites after a stay in a three-star San Francisco hotel. I got bitten down the backs of my legs after sitting in a Mexican cab in shorts; the bugs had set up shop in a rip in the seat fabric.
What's with the seeming epidemic of bed bugs? Turns out we'd all but eradicated the bug by the 1940s, but they came back with a vengeance in the mid-1990s and for all kinds of reasons have now become part of the hotel/housing landscape. Check out the Wikipedia entry on bed bugs for more info, although I'm already scratching just from having to write this.

China's enormous environmental experiment

2011-10-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

One of the many "instant" cities that have sprung up since China flooded out communities for the Three Gorges Dam project. This is Feng Du, now located across the river from the original city.

For better or worse, I’m an experiential learner. I try tostay on top of the current events of the world, but it’s getting up close andpersonal with the issues of distant lands that really works for me.

So it was that I could have a headful of knowledge aboutChina’s massive Three Gorges dam project from years of hearing about it, yetstill find myself gaping at the altered landscape along the Yangtze River from acruise-ship window last week in the realization that I didn’t actually know adamn thing.

I’d read the articles, of course. I’d seen the documentaries.Long before our family trip to China, I got that the Three Gorges project was amighty big deal.

At stake: The promise of 100 billion kilowatt hours of “clean”hydro power for a country still burning coal. The relocation of 1.3 millionpeople flooded out by a dammed river. Anend to the huge seasonal floods that have claimed hundreds of thousands oflives. A potential environmental disaster.

But what it would feel like to sail on a river that had beenso dramatically changed, in a country full of people whose lives were turnedcompletely upside down by the project - well, it just hadn’t hit me before. Wespent three days travelling the Yangtze as part of our tour, and I can’t stopthinking about it.

The cruise departed at Chongqing, a city that has swelled toa staggering 32 million in recent years. It’s a knockout, as were all of thebig cities we visited in our two-week holiday.

Sure, you peer through a haze of air pollution to see any ofthem. But underneath the “fog” (as our guides liked to call it), China’s citiesare feasts of clever, unique architecture; great food; interesting people; anda neon nightscape that’s to die for if you’re a night-light aficionado like me.

A two-week trip ishardly enough time to understand a place, or explore why Communist countriesare invariably hotbeds of capitalism at the level of the people. But anextended stay isn’t required just to notice the impact that economic progress ishaving on China, in ways both good and bad.

We toured a few Chongqing hot spots on the day we arrived, includingan odd little exhibit in a city park featuring a detailed, winding mural of theThree Gorges region painted along a concrete passageway.

The artist had depicted the towns that lined the river’sedge before the dam, and then sketched in the new water line in red. It wasremarkably effective at bringing the issues home.

Our young guide walked us along the painting, her tone ofvoice studiously neutral as she talked about the massive human impact. When we gasped at the sheer number of peopleuprooted, the cities and heritage sites washed away, she observed sagely that“the coin flips both ways.”

She’s right. For China to be an economic leader - for itscitizens to have the same standard of living we enjoy in North America - itneeds the hydro power, the flood control and the huge transportation savingsthat the Three Gorges project created.

But what a price its people paid.

They didn’t just lose their riverside homes, they lost centuries-oldtowns and traditions. Many were relocated to unfamiliar regions and assigned tounfamiliar jobs. The government built them new housing - generally more upscalethan they’d previously lived in - but at a cost of flooding their farm land andfamily histories under more than 150 metres of river water.

Seen from the cruise boat, the new shoreline looksunnatural, especially in the spots where abandoned farmland now runs straightinto the water. Above the new water line, “instant” skyscraper cities andmassive, dazzling bridges have sprung up to accommodate the displaced - they,too, look out of place.

Like so much of what we saw in China, the altered landscapeis beautiful in its own way. You can’t help but feel the energy and growth inChina, the sense of possibility.

But it’s hard to imagine any government getting away with sucha bold manipulation of nature. Reports of environmental degradation since thedam was built bear that out.

As for the toll on the million-plus “emigrants,” China isn’ta country that talks about such things. I can only hope that in the end, thecoin flipped the right way for them.

Paying bonuses to have our services cut

2011-10-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

Back from my travels in China (wow, what a place!), struggling with the muzzy-headed feeling of jet lag. If anyone knows of a cure for jet lag, please send it along. I try this, I try that, but no matter what I still come home to several days of cloudy thinking and weird sleeping habits.
Must admit, I've enjoyed having a break from the news these past two weeks. I woke up to this morning's headlines in the Globe and remembered why I needed the break - so much of the news makes my blood boil, and who needs that first thing in the morning when they can't think straight to begin with?
Here's the one that got me going, detailing the bonuses federal civil servants stand to get if they can cut public services sufficiently. How crazy is it for us to be paying our taxes to government so that they can give themselves handsome bonuses for cutting our services? We can presume this is some strategy taken from the books of the big corporations, but it makes no sense when you're talking about a taxpayer-funded structure.

Travelling through Thanksgiving

2011-09-24T08:16:00.001-07:00

I'm off to China this morning for a family trip with my mother, her sister and six of us cousins. I don't think I can be counted on to keep my blog up-to-date while away, so please check back for more regular postings starting Oct. 10.

My world in 17 syllables

2011-09-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

I’m almost three months into an odd little creative project,writing a daily on-line haiku about some aspect of the day that stands out forme.

I’ve since discovered I’m just one of many people out there usinghaiku in creative, unusual ways.

Maybe it’s a trend. Or maybe a tightly constrained form of writingthat forces you to cut to the chase is simply a relief in a time of too much blah-blah-blah.

Traditional haiku are, of course, exquisite jewels of 17carefully chosen syllables, organized in three lines of five, seven and fivesyllables. They’re most often about nature and the seasons.

My goal was to use the form for journaling rather than to strivefor high- quality haiku. So while I follow the five-seven-five syllable rule,my haiku are less like poetry and more like something you’d write on a Post-it note to remindyourself about the day.

It has been an interesting exercise. Having to come up witha haiku every night means I have to think about what was distinctive about theday. It makes me dig deep for the 17 syllables that I hope will still summonthe feel of a day decades later.

I’ve been a hot-and-cold journal writer for much of my adultlife, alternating between months of pouring out the intimate details of my lifeand years of not writing a single word.

I’m better when I travel, when every day tends to feel likea rich new experience that you want to make note of. I was flipping through onesuch travel diary of mine when it struck me that I wanted to work harder atidentifying those same moments in my daily life.

Growing older unsettles me with the way it compresses time.Each day rolls past just a little faster, often so similar to the previous day inits routines that it’s hard to tell one from the other. I feel the need to makeeach day stand out.

What is it that distinguishes a day for me from the other19,950 days that went before it? That’s the question I reflect on every nightas I try to pull together that day’s haiku. It’s definitely making me much moreaware that even an ordinary day is unique.

My mother has long kept a journal, of the kind that scrupulouslynotes weird weather, special occasions, unusual family illnesses andunprecedented sports scores. If ever there’s dissent in the family about whatthe weather was like in the summer of 1982 or which year Dad came down withpneumonia, out comes the journal.

She encouraged me from a young age to follow suit, but thelargely empty Barbie diary from my girlhood speaks to my early history ofsporadic record-keeping.

Still, there’s something very special about seeing the inanedeclarations of your 11-year-old self, or the angst-ridden entries from yourvarious periods of torment. Your life, in your own words - it’s compelling.

Doing haiku-style journaling came to me while I was flippingthrough an old daytimer that I had maintained off and on as a bare-bones diaryfor three years in the 1970s.

As an actual journal, it’s fairly worthless. My habit was towrite one or two sentences in fairly random fashion, never with muchconsistency.

But when the book surfaced during a recent housecleaning, abrowse through it reminded me of the value of even scant observations from yourown past. It’s all personal history.

July 14, 1975, for instance: The start of a long, painful strikeat the mill where my then-husband worked. August 15, 1977: My first cable-carride in San Francisco. December 14, 1978: The doctor extracts a huge piece ofmouldering bread from the nose of my two-year-old.

They’re not exactly the major events of my life. But theycall up a lot for me in a few words. The haiku form is ideal for doing that, asit leaves room for nothing but the essence of a day.

And making the journal public forces meto write a haiku even on the nights when I’d really rather not. I’m leaving forChina with my mom tomorrow so won’t post those haiku until our return Oct. 10, butI’ve got my travel scribbler packed and remain committed to the discipline.

“We do not remember days, we remember moments,” Italian poetCesare Pavese once said. I’ll hold onto mine syllable by syllable.

Feds get "tough", but what's the real impact?

2011-09-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

Here we go, introducing get-tough-on-crime legislation in a period when we really ought to be celebrating how effective we've been at lowering crime rates these past 20 years. But enough of the public seem to want to believe otherwise that the Conservatives see a political edge in doing this. Time will tell how these laws will translate on the ground, but you do have to wonder about what will happen to people's rights.
Case in point: The Preventing the Trafficking, Abuse and Exploitation of Vulnerable Immigrants Act.
The act sounds good on paper. It gives power to immigration officials to refuse work permits to people if they suspect the person is vulnerable and being brought to Canada to do "humiliating or degrading" work (the nickname for the act is the "anti-stripper law," reports the Globe). Hey, nobody likes human trafficking and exploitation.
But how exactly will an immigration officer decide who's "vulnerable"? What criteria will be used? Who will be deciding whether a job is humiliating or degrading, and whose definitions will they be using? What's the process for assessing someone's "vulnerability"? Where are the protections to ensure powers like these don't end up being used just to block certain categories of people from getting work permits?
And really, if we're so deeply concerned about people's vulnerability, is denying them a work permit the best way to help them?
But of course, helping immigrants was likely never the goal of this act. It's just a new way of being able to say no to more people.

We're failing future generations

2011-09-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

Excellent piece in this morning's Times Colonist from a Toronto doctor who reminds us of all the ways things are growing worse for certain populations of Canadian children. It disturbs me no end to be part of the generation that has made life more difficult for coming generations. Aren't we always supposed to leave the world better than when we arrived?

2011-09-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

Media far from fair in kidnapping coverage

Maybe Randall Hopley really will turn out to be everyparent’s worst nightmare - a scary, creepy predator who snatches children fromtheir beds in the night.

That rough-looking mug shot of Hopley certainly seems toconfirm the image. And how about all the news reports about him being aconvicted sex offender? Surely he’s the guy.

Unless he’s not. What’s striking about all the mediacoverage around Hopley and the kidnapping/return of little Kienan Hebert thispast week is that other than police saying so, no evidence has been put forwardconnecting Hopley to any of it.

I’m stunned by how roundly ignored that fact has been in thereporting of this story. Police have offered no detailed explanation for why they’reconvinced that it’s him. Yet we’re all just so certain.

Hopley has been the featured bogeyman in every news storyfrom the moment three-year-old Kienan Hebert’s disappearance went public. Hisunkempt mug is now known around the world. The make of his vehicle and licenceplate number are public information.

All this on the basis of police comments. Innocent untilproven guilty? Forget it.

The media coverage of Hopley has been downrightinflammatory.

One story quoted a former classmate recalling 46-year-oldHopley as “the dirty, creepy guy who always rode his bike around.” The little boy’sdad lashed out in the national media at “the system” for not doing more to stopa dangerous, damaged guy like Hopley. His conjectures were left to hang there likefacts.

No small wonder that at Hopley’s first court appearanceWednesday, picketers outside were calling for the death penalty.

And yes, Hopley could be the bad guy. But it’s way too soonto say, let alone assert it as fact in the media.

Hopley is routinely referred to as a convicted sex offenderin news coverage, a phrase that brings all kinds of horrifying images to mind whena child goes missing.

But Hopley’s conviction involves a sex assault from 25 yearsago on someone of unknown age, with no suggestions that he has done anythingsimilar since. He got a two-year sentence.

He’s also been reported as having “at least one brush withthe law involving a child.” That refers to an incident in which Hopley says hewas trying to take a 10-year-old away from a foster home on behalf of the boy’sparents. The charge was stayed for lack of evidence.

Hopley’s criminal record - at least for the eight years ofit available in the newly public provincial court database - doesn’t mark himas an obvious child predator. His crimes have been more likely to be break-and-entersand breaches. (He does appear to be fresh out of jail, though, having beensentenced in June to two months for assault.)

Police do what they need to do. I don’t blame them for thetone of the media coverage.

I imagine it makes sense when you’re the police to identify someonelike Hopley - he’s well-known to them, after all, and constantly in trouble - inhopes of enlisting the entire country in finding him. If he turns out to be thewrong guy, that’s a problem for another day.

But media have a different duty. They’re expected to be fairand accurate in their reporting of the news. That’s particularly true whenreporting on crimes, because you can ruin a person’s life and reputation with asingle story that gets things wrong.

Perhaps the news outlets chasing the kidnapping story eachmade a thoughtful decision that obliterating the rights of a possibly innocentman was worth it given that a child was missing. My fear is that they didn’t eventhink twice about it.

One observer noted before Hopley’s arrest Tuesday that his imagewas so high-profile he was virtually “a caught man walking” in terms of publicrecognition.

In fact, he could have ended up a dead man walking. Imagine ifan intense dad had been the first to spot Hopley and acted on the presumption he’dfound the sick pervert who grabbed the little Sparwood boy.

If Hopley did it and is competent to stand trial, then maythe misery of a lifetime in prison rain down on him. Kidnapping a child isunconscionable, regardless of whether this particular story had a happy ending.

But right now, we don’t know anything. News media have aresponsibility to remember that.

2011-09-15T06:54:00.000-07:00

A fine editorial in today's Times Colonist on the dreadful things happening to people with developmental disabilities in B.C. these days.
Government obviously hoped this announcement of "new" money - a third of it is money that was always supposed to go to Community Living B.C. but had been withheld by the province up until now - would make its critics ease up. That scares me, because it strikes me that government must genuinely have no idea of the scope of the problems in the way we're supporting British Columbians with mental handicaps these days.
Developmental disability is forever. Someone in the system obviously has to focus on cost efficiencies, but not to the point where the exhausted families and advocates of people who will need quality care and support for a lifetime are left to struggle for the most basic services.

2011-09-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

What shall we make of the mysteriously wonderful return of little Kienan Hebert? The stories I've read so far made the alleged kidnapper sound like an unsophisticated fellow with a mental handicap, yet during a period when there was a national manhunt on for him and police everywhere, he sneaked back into the house where Kienan lived to return the boy safe and sound.
At any rate, I will quell the skeptic in me for now, because this really is an incredibly good outcome to the whole sad scenario. But the police certainly haven't made Randall Hopley out to be the kind of clever - and clearly empathetic - man who would do something like this.
I wouldn't have thought it easy for anyone to break into a closed crime scene at 3 a.m., let alone the alleged kidnapper. But perhaps police had let their guard down in the presumption that Kienan's home would be just about the last place that Hopley would return to.
Still, I hope someone's out there digging on this one. The pieces just don't fit. And really, Hopley's life hangs in the balance, because he's exactly the kind of guy to end up gunned down in a confused standoff with police.
But for now, let's just celebrate a genuine happy ending.

2011-09-09T06:50:00.000-07:00

Campbell honour puts political taint to awards

**Note: North Vancouver blogger Norm Farrell pointed out an error in my column around Luigi Aquilini's donation, so that has now been corrected. Thanks, Norm!

You have to feel for all the other 2011 recipients of the Order of B.C., whose many accomplishments have been overshadowed in the public eye by all the din around former premier Gordon Campbell getting the award.

We’ll presume from the time stamp on the government’s news release - late afternoon on a Friday before a long weekend - that it knew from the outset that people wouldn’t be happy that Campbell and three other high-profile B.C. Liberal stalwarts made the list.

That’s a great time to send out a news release if the sender hopes to slide something by unnoticed. The time-tested government communications strategy makes it much less likely that media will be able to find the sources they need to build a big story or have the resources to go after it.

But there’s no hiding an incendiary list like the one government sent out last Friday announcing that Campbell would be honoured with the Order of B.C. And there’s no hiding the growing prowess of B.C.’s political bloggers, who never sleep. Word spread fast.

Campbell’s government wove politics into everything B.C. did during their time in office. So I guess it’s naive to think that the Order of B.C. would somehow remain exempt from all that.

Still, I think there must be people inside the selection process who are very, very unhappy with the way things went this year. The annual awards haven’t really had a political feel up until now. Unfortunately, that’s no longer true.

I mean, think about it. A committee is tasked with selecting 14 fine citizens to be honoured for their hard work, passion and dedication. That’s all, just 14, out of the whole province. You really have to be exemplary to be picked for an honour like that.

But this year, we’re supposed to believe that it’s just a coincidence that four of the 14 recipients happen to be very tightly connected to the B.C. Liberals. They want us to buy that a guy who British Columbians hounded from office because they were so unhappy with his leadership is one of the 14 most exemplary people of 2011.

Could it really be just one of those unfortunate coincidences? Maybe the selection committee concluded completely independently that Gordon Campbell, his former deputy Ken Dobell, fellow politician and Campbell “star” David Emerson, and Liberal Party donor Luigi Aquilini - who has given more than $500,000 to the party - all deserved to be honoured in 2011.

Or not. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s now a taint to an award that up until now had none.

Live long enough and you’re bound to accumulate a few skeletons, so maybe it’s no big deal that someone busted for drunk driving while premier gets named to the Order of B.C. If you had to be a saint to qualify, we’d have run out of eligible nominees long before now.

But having the selection committee declare Campbell a “visionary” whose efforts have made B.C. a better place - well, that’s a bit harder to take. Says who?

Under his leadership, we slashed needed community services, sold off public forest lands for a song, increased poverty, politicized every government decision and greatly enriched the salaries of MLAs and senior government. What’s visionary about that?

And it’s downright disrespectful to have Campbell and his friends shoved at us all at once at a time when so many of us are still fuming about the guy.

The selection committee even appears to have broken its own rules to allow his nomination. No sitting politician is eligible for the award, but Campbell had five days left in his term when nominations closed. So did they stretch the deadline to accommodate him, or ignore the rule about sitting politicians?

If the process really has been neutral up until now, these must be sad days for any non-partisan staff and committee members involved with the Order of B.C. Perhaps it’s just another odd coincidence that last week’s news release was nowhere to be found on the order’s own Web site until late Tuesday afternoon, but I’m choosing to interpret it as a sign that they’re red-faced with shame and protesting in their own small way.

My sympathy to the other recipients of the 2011 order, who really are a very select group picked for all the right reasons. Special congratulations to Crystal Dunahee, a tireless community-builder and fundraiser in our region. Find out more about these worthy recipients here: http://www.newsroom.gov.bc.ca/downloads/OrderofBC2011_Backgrounder.pdf

2011-09-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

How sad that the Order of B.C. has been revealed to be politically influenced. The awards body has done an exceptional job at keeping itself above the political fray, but has clearly thrown that all away with this latest round of nominations, which honour a strangely predictable list of clubby B.C. Liberals and hangers-on including Gordon Campbell, Ken Dobell and David Emerson.
Campbell was even a sitting politician when he was nominated, which ought to put him out of the running right then and there. But no. He's in, and only the second B.C. premier ever to get the award. (Bill Bennett was the other, but only in 2007 - 21 years after leaving office.)
I know Campbell has his fans, but really, what is the "exemplary" behaviour he exhibited that has distinguished him as worthy of the honour? He did great things for all his friends, but little for the rest of us. I'm sure Dobell and Emerson are competent, caring people in their own way, but I suspect their tight ties to the Campbell government played more of a role in their nomination than their actual service to B.C., seeing as many fine civil servants who have done great work on behalf of the province have never received the honour.
The toll his government took on social services will take generations, if ever, to repair. He tore up valid union contracts and privatized health-care support services, and I don't think it's coincidental that food quality and cleanliness plummeted in B.C. hospitals after that. He has created a virtual kleptocracy in government, where senior civil servants make buckets of money and are paid bonuses for cutting public services. He got caught driving drunk while in office, a crime that was suffcient to get Steve Fonyo stripped of his Order of Canada.
Obviously, his award has generated just a little controversy, including an online petition through Facebook that has already garnered almost 3,000 of the 5,000 signatures the organizers are trying for. I'm waiting with eager anticipation to hear what the good folks at the Order of BC have to say about all of this - the story broke over the Labour Day weekend, so none of the stories thus far have had any comment from the office.
Unfortunately, the brouhaha over Campbell's award has overshadowed news coverage of some of the truly worthy recipients, like Crystal Dunahee. Here's the news release issued late Friday by government, which lists all 14 recipients of the 2011 award.
Interesting that the Order of B.C. Web site doesn't have a news release posted, or any listing of the 2011 recipients. Hmmm - could it be there are some people inside that office cringing at Campbell getting the award?

2011-09-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

A case of city envy

Sure, I get the cliché about the grass always being greener somewhere else.

I was in a coffee-shop line in Portland waxing poetic about that fair city just this past weekend, in fact, while up ahead of me a Portland couple enthused about a recent visit to Victoria. There you go.

Still, I wish we could be more like Portland. No city can get everything right, but Portland comes pretty close.

I gave up amalgamation as a column topic years ago, because there’s just no point. It’s not going to happen of its own accord in our region, and the province is never going to step in to force anything. So I’ve let it go.

But then I go to a place like Portland and get thinking about the possibilities.

In a region and climate not that much different from ours, Portland has created a friendly, vibrant city. Whether you’re walking, cycling, using rapid transit or driving a car, it’s an easy place to get around in.

There’s cheap food everywhere, courtesy of the city’s many food carts. There’s a Saturday market packed with local wares, and a huge waterfall fountain downtown that the locals treat like an urban swimming hole.

Portland has a distinct core, but it also has any number of walkable, food-and-drink-laden neighbourhoods nearby - each with an individual feel but still part of a whole. It’s got homeless people and panhandlers, but nobody seems too worried in a city known for its sensible and humane homelessness initiatives.

Could we be that kind of city? Is that achievable in a region segmented into 13 separate municipalities?

Not that I’ve seen. But hey, I’ve only lived here 22 years. That sewage-treatment plant being debated when I first arrived here might actually happen one day, so you never know.

The south Island doesn’t even feel like a region, really - we feel like 13 strikingly different places. Spend a few years here and you’ll soon learn how very hard it is to introduce anything that extends across many municipal boundaries. Strong-minded neighbourhood associations add to the sense of living among individual enclaves each focused on their own thing.

Many locals seem perfectly happy with the way things are, and would probably tell people like me to just go ahead and move to Portland if we like the place so much. People aren’t exactly chafing for better regional governance, let alone a directly elected body like Portland has to handle all land-use planning.

But the incredulity is unmistakeable in the voices of people new to our region when they first find out that fewer than 350,000 people are governed by 13 mayors, councils and distinctly different bureaucracies. Then comes the frustration, after they realize how hard it is to make big things happen in a small region of small, inward-looking towns.

We like to talk about light rail transit for this region, something which Portland has done well. But think about how things would actually play out with an issue like that.

Think of the land-use hurdles. The politics. The conflicting interests and ideologies. Then multiply it by 13. Picture all those overheated public hearings. Imagine trying to secure agreement across 13 sets of taxpayers to pay for it all.

Well, maybe we could start with something simpler than LRT - more food carts, say. You can’t walk far in Portland without bumping into a food-cart cluster, with everything from fried peach pies to po’boys and lavender milk shakes on offer until late into the night.

More cart pods like the little one in Cook Street Village would not only bring much happiness to aficionados like me, but add more jobs and buzz to commercial areas. They would draw people in.

But forming ourselves into 13 tiny towns has also made us a region of many, many rules. Portland’s food-cart experience certainly isn’t a free-for-all, but it doesn’t much resemble the scrubbed-up, tightly regulated way we do things here. Could we ever loosen up enough to try?

We’re a charming place in our own right, as those Portland residents noted. But we could be so much better. If we won’t amalgamate, can we at least find more effective ways to reach past our municipal self-interest and get this region popping?

Until then, there’s always Portland.

2011-08-31T09:56:00.000-07:00

Good column this morning from TC writer Paul Willcocks, who notes the correlation with income levels in the HST vote. It really is unsettling to see what has happened in B.C. - having grown up on the Island, I too share a memory of young people of my generation having much more of a chance of finding a decent-paying job, buying a house and having a "good" life.
I got married for the first time when I was 17, a fact that might signal a life on welfare in this day and age. Happily, my husband had a great job at the Campbell River mill. We had two cars, a cabin that we owned on the beach (!) in Royston, and within a couple of years had moved up to a new house in a nearby subdivision.
My two oldest kids have managed to buy into the housing market in the Comox Valley, but they're 37 and 34, so of a previous generation themselves. And it has certainly stretched them to be homeowners regardless.
My youngest child, in her mid-20s and living in Victoria, doesn't stand a chance of buying here. The ratio between an average British Columbian's income and housing prices has lost all proportion.
It's so discouraging, to be of the generation that did this.

2011-08-29T19:04:00.000-07:00

This study from the Canadian Centre for Police Alternatives puts some figures to a trend that many of us have already figured out - the tax burden has shifted significantly in B.C. in the last 10 years in ways that leave high earners paying less and the poorest paying more. Not too surprising that voters defeated the HST given that reality.
When taxes decrease for people with higher incomes, it also has a disproportionate effect on the tax base. A one or two per cent tax reduction on an income of, say, $300,000 is significantly more of a loss than can ever be made up through a corresponding one or two per cent increase for the province's lowest earners.
What does it mean for the rest of us? Less money for government-funded services, the risk of rising social disorder, government spending at the most expensive end of the scale due to the savings of today morphing into the ballooning costs of tomorrow.
With reduced investment in preventive services and strategies due to sinking tax revenues, future generations can expect to spend much more covering the increased costs for health care, courts, police and jails once all those people who aren't getting the help they need now run into major problems down the line.
Yeah, yeah - heard it all a million times before. But only because it's true.

2011-08-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

A different take on the issue of human trafficking - which, as this professor points out, is a phrase that tends to bring out emotional prose, gigantic numbers and no real evidence that it really is the major problem everyone says it is.
I'd hate to be considered pro-trafficking, because that would be just plain weird, but I do think it's one of those issues we use to justify throwing money into initiatives that sound good until you realize they're not actually helping anyone other than the people paid to do them.
Yes, there are vulnerable people out there trapped in horrible situations. But maybe we should be figuring out how to help them instead of chasing ghosts.

2011-08-22T20:43:00.000-07:00

I know everyone's posting this wonderful letter from the late Jack Layton, but what the heck - I want it on my blog, too. It's just a lovely sentiment to keep close. Bye, Jack.

2011-08-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

Be careful what you wish for around gaming grants

When the New Democrats first turned aggressive about gambling in the mid-1990s, they knew they had to tread lightly.

The public was nervous, as were B.C. charities. With their long history of running bingos, special-event casinos, poker nights and raffles to fund community services, they were worried about government’s plans to turn gambling into a new provincial revenue stream.

The charities put up quite a fight in the late 1990s. But despite those valiant efforts, it’s pretty obvious in 2011 who has won this battle.

When a group of the charities formed the B.C. Association of Charitable Gambling and signed a memorandum of understanding with the province in 1999, charities were guaranteed a third of the pot for distribution as grants to non-profits doing good community work.

That lasted about as long as it took for the government of the day and every government since then to forget that there ever was such an arrangement. Twelve years later, just 12 per cent of net revenues are distributed as grants, and earnings from charity-run gaming events are down more than 60 per cent.

Gaming grossed a record $2 billion in the last fiscal year. Just $159 million went to non-profits, the smallest dollar amount in 10 years.

There’s a review of the community gaming grant process underway in B.C. right now, led by former Kwantlen College president Skip Triplett. He’s looking to hear from people on how they think gaming revenue should be used, and what kinds of non-profit groups should get priority.

It’s not going to be one of those things that will catch much public attention. But I know of at least 6,000 B.C. non-profits that will be riveted. Gaming has become the go-to funding source for community groups in this decade of social famine. They rely heavily on those year-to-year grants for thousands of community services, from food banks and youth outreach services to sports camps for kids with disabilities.

Flipping through the years of gaming data on the Public Safety and Solicitor General’s Web site, I don’t know what to hope for from Triplett’s report, due Oct. 31.

Should we root for a larger share of gaming revenue to go to non-profits? That sounds like a good thing, until you get to thinking about how that could play out.

The province might, for instance, take that to mean that all other avenues of government funding to community groups could be reduced now that charitable groups were being given a larger share of gaming dollars. The current government has been particularly bloody-minded when it comes to cutting the legs out from under community services.

Equally disturbing is the prospect of charities growing so dependent on gaming revenue that they get excited about ways to “grow the business” so they can earn even more.

That’s the position municipalities now find themselves in after government cleverly started cutting them into the profits as a bribe for allowing a casino within their borders.

For community groups, that level of hypocrisy just might be too much. Some are far too familiar with the impact of problem gambling on people’s lives, a not-uncommon scenario on the front lines of B.C.’s social problems.

That’s the thing about gambling as a government revenue stream. We tell ourselves it’s all about happy tourists flooding into our towns and cities for a weekend of fun gambling, but most gambling dollars come straight out of the pockets of British Columbians, many of whom can’t afford to give them up.

Or Triplett could decide after his 14-community tour of B.C. that non-profits shouldn’t have any claim on gaming funds, and that all the money should go into - health care, say, or debt reduction.

Alas, that would be disastrous in a whole other way. Our community services have been left too long to fill in program gaps with gambling revenue to be able to take a hit like that. Gaming grants are the threads holding together an increasingly frayed social safety net.

Triplett wants to hear from British Columbians about their priorities for gambling revenue. I hope he knows what a loaded question that is.

Community groups are already being pitted against each other in a struggle for most-worthy status for the purpose of gaming grants. If there were ever “frill” programs in the mix, they’re long gone.

We’re now talking services for foster kids versus elementary-school sports groups. Parent Advisory Committees against community theatre. Disabled youth against impoverished women. Good luck, Mr. Triplett.

Please take this rare opportunity to share your opinion on community gaming grants. If we have to have government-run gambling, let’s at least help government put more thought into how we use the money.

2011-08-18T06:24:00.000-07:00

Not too surprised to see the Farewell Foundation lost its first attempt to get Canada's assisted-suicide laws struck down. The group clearly has passion for the issue, but the judge made it clear they'll need more than that if they want to proceed - they'll need someone with a terminal illness willing to be their modern-day Sue Rodriguez.
Keep an eye on Joe Arvay's case coming up in November, though. That second assisted-suicide case is much more similar to the Rodriguez one, involving a B.C. woman dying of ALS trying to do the same thing Rodriguez tried in 1993 - to die with dignity when the time comes.

2011-08-15T07:52:00.000-07:00

Thank you, thank you, Warren Buffet, our go-to guy when we need sane comment from the super-rich. It hadn't escaped my attention that sacrifice and belt-tightening are words governments direct only at the lower income classes.
Sure, the rich will be able to afford bigger compounds and better weapons when it all goes sideways for good, but I can't believe they're any happier than the rest of us at where things are going.

2011-08-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

It's rough out there, but don't turn away

I made my way through the grim headlines flooding in from all sources this week, feeling anxious at the sheer abundance of bad news. The unanswered questions leaped out in every direction - no shortage of column fodder. But could I really bear to know more about any of it?

It’s a big question. There are days when it would be so appealing to just shut the door on trying to understand anything about anything.

Why the Air France pilots didn’t hear the “stall” alarm. What it means that the U.S. is falling apart. Why London is beset by violent riots. Why people are starving to death, struggling, hurting each other.

There are cheerier things to think about, so why wouldn’t we? But then I get to thinking about what would happen if we genuinely quit concerning ourselves with the problems of our world.

A lot of people seem to find that an appealing option. I just read about a mega-wealthy U.S. woman noted for the staggering amounts of fans she has attracted with her blog about cowboy life on her mega-ranch, with a spouse she calls the Marlboro Man.

She sells a fantasy, not this gritty, messy and unpredictable thing we call reality. She’s all country living, home-schooling and good food for your man. You won’t find any images of cadaverous Somali toddlers on a blog like that.

Over here in Reality Land, things aren’t so sunny. We live in a fast-flowing tide of world events, fed to us in real time through all the electronic gadgetry that now connects us to the events of this stressed-out, troubled world.

And with all that news comes a feeling: Wouldn’t my life be better if I didn’t know about all of this?

No wonder people check out. I regularly talk to friends who I once considered informed, but who now don’t have a clue about what’s going on outside of their immediate circles. They’re not paying attention at any level unless it directly involves them or their family.

Like I say, I can see the draw of that sometimes. Ignorance really can be bliss, at least until disaster strikes.

But what will happen if too many of us turn away from the pressing issues of the day? Who will be left to solve the problems?

Consider the case of the Air France jet crash, for instance. The inquiry going on right now into that fatal crash in 2009 has the feel of one of those distant stories from a land far away - a tragic event with little relevance to most of our lives.

Except that vast numbers of us rely on jet travel all the time. We put our lives directly into the hands of men just like those poor befuddled souls in the cockpit of Flight AF447. Whatever happened in the cockpit that day, every air traveller in the world has a personal stake in understanding it.

Good-news proponents would point to all the flights that never crashed that day as a better story. And they’ve got a point. Most planes don’t crash.

But this one did. And because the world’s information gatherers jumped on the inquiry as a story, we know much more about what went wrong - with how the pilots were prepared for the unthinkable, the way the stall alarm sounded, the confusion around communications and decision-making in those frightening final moments.

It’s an anxiety-inducing story. You can’t fault any frequent flyer for thinking that news about planeloads of relaxed passengers landing uneventfully would be preferable.

Unfortunately, focusing on what’s going right doesn’t change what’s going wrong. Bad news might be a downer, but it’s how we identify and address problems.

There’s definitely such a thing as too much bad news, mind you.

Crime has been on the decline for years in Canada, particularly among youth. But one-off stories of individual crimes around the world still dominate the news.

The result: We waste our time electing governments that pander to our fears with promises of getting “tough on crime.” Not surprisingly, that just gets us more jails - and none of the social programs of 15 and 20 years ago that actually brought about the current drop in crime.

If you need a break from the gloom, by all means take one. Even cowgirls get the blues.

But please come back when you’re feeling better. The world needs you.

2011-08-11T14:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a strongly worded comment piece from the Guardian on the London riots. It will really be quite a tragedy if government genuinely can't see the role that spending cuts and social policy played on creating the perfect climate for these riots.
Are they so married to their dogma that they'd rather see the riots as a random outburst of criminality among their young citizens - which truly would be a frightening development - instead of the highly predictable, preventable outcome of poverty, disenfranchisement and the absence of hope that it actually was? Now that's sad.

2011-08-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

Could willpower be the missing link in why some succeed and others don't? Check out this intriguing read on the subject. And wouldn't you know it - it's all about those preschool years, and how your genetics combines with your upbringing. But all is not lost if that period of your life wasn't so great, as they've done an experiment briefly detailed here that shows that a couple weeks of brushing your teeth with the wrong hand can kick-start a little willpower.
My partner's singing "Lady Willpower" now due to reading over my shoulder. Alas, that song's just about Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's seeming obsession with songs about trying to guilt young women into making out with him/them.

2011-08-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

The long wait for an easier death

“No consensus can be found in favour of the decriminalization of assisted suicide. To the extent that there is a consensus, it is that human life must be respected.”

With those words, Supreme Court Justice John Sopinka ended any hope Sue Rodriguez had of using her own death to change Canadian laws around assisted suicide. She got the word on Sept. 29, 1993, and less than five months later ended her life the old-fashioned way - illegally, helped along by a doctor who has never been publicly identified.

And for the most part, that has been that. A few criminal cases alleging assisted suicide pop up in the media from time to time, but little has changed. Imagine what the courageous Rodriguez might have to say if she’d lived long enough to see that we’d still be paralyzed over assisted suicide 18 years later.

But suddenly the issue is back in the news, with two different proponents now preparing to push challenges through Canada’s court system.

Lawyer Joe Arvay, acting on behalf of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, is representing Gloria Taylor. Like Rodriguez, the B.C. woman has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and wants the right to have someone assist her with her death when the time comes.

Meanwhile, the Farewell Foundation for the Right to Die - a New Westminster group headed by a veteran of the right-to-die movement - is using its failed attempt to become a non-profit as reason for a constitutional challenge.

Foundation director and B.C. criminologist Russel Ogden has been in the media off and on for years as an advocate of assisted suicide, pursuing the issue with such intensity that it sometimes lands him in trouble with his college and university bosses. He’s got a clip on YouTube demonstrating how to kill yourself with helium.

He and Arvay both contend that much has changed since Rodriguez’s case, and that a legal challenge will have more traction this time around.

I’m not so sure. Canadians still haven’t had a real conversation about the right to die.

Yes, more countries have changed their laws in the years since Rodriguez’s court fight. Their experiences have demonstrated that legalizing assisted suicide need not tear a society apart. Oregon legalized assisted suicide the same year Rodriguez died, and in almost two decades only a scant 400 Oregonians - mostly older people with cancer - have chosen that option.

But if the incredibly affecting Rodriguez wasn’t enough to galvanize a country, I don’t know what the odds are for a challenge built around non-profit status. Perhaps Arvay will have more luck, although his goal of seeing Taylor’s challenge settled by November seems out of reach.

The Farewell Foundation was denied non-profit status in March by the B.C. Registrar of Companies, which noted in its decision that no organization whose purpose is criminal - in this case, assisting people to die - can be incorporated under the Society Act.

The foundation is leveraging that rejection into a larger fight about the constitutionality of the assisted-suicide laws. Its case in a nutshell: The activities of the Farewell Foundation are in fact lawful because the laws related to assisted suicide are themselves “unlawful.”

(And if that doesn’t work, the foundation also filed a civil suit against the Attorney General of Canada challenging the constitutionality of the assisted-suicide prohibition.)

I watched old CBC footage of Rodriguez this week in news clips from the months before her death. I’d forgotten what an amazing advocate she was - so open and well-spoken, lighting up the screen with her big smile even in the late stages of a disease that was slowly taking away her every function.

If charisma had anything to do with whether justice prevailed, Rodriguez would have won her case hands down. The Farewell Foundation is taking things in a different direction, with an approach that will be a tougher sell with a public that still hasn’t sorted out its feelings around the right to die.

It could be that the concept of dying with dignity will find more traction this time around. The politically powerful baby boomer generation was perhaps too young during Rodriguez’s time to care much about the issues she was raising. That’s no longer the case.

A 2010 poll confirmed what other polls over the years have repeatedly found: That a majority of Canadians want assisted suicide legalized. But the missed opportunity of 1993 still hangs over us, and it seems we never quite want it enough.

2011-08-04T08:36:00.001-07:00

No disrespect intended to Times Colonist reporter Katie DeRosa, but what exactly has B.C.'s human-trafficking office been doing with its $500,000 annual budget, anyway?
What got me the most about this agency back in the days when I was at PEERS (and am again, so maybe that's why I'm so het up) was that it was ostensibly fighting the great scourge of human trafficking in B.C. even while the far greater risk was to the garden-variety outdoor sex workers on B.C.'s strolls and working invisibly in a thousand different venues around the province.
We spent $2.25 million on this office in the last four years, apparently to help 100 people. It kills me to think how that money could have been used for real needs rather than for chasing ghosts.
You'd think that with all the sex workers I'd met over the years in B.C., I might have met one who'd been trafficked at some point in her life. Nope.
Hey, maybe it's just coincidence. Or maybe it just seemed easier to fund an office of civil servants than to actually help vulnerable people, who rarely present as the perfect victims that we conjure when we hear the term "human trafficking."
Don't get me wrong - human trafficking is a terrible thing. But if you've got $500,000 a year to spend on helping vulnerable people in B.C., would this be it? Now we just have to hope the savings from this cut get redirected to helping the many vulnerable people in our province.

2011-08-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

The latest survey from AskMen seems to prove the old adage about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. But really, who would actually expect basic behaviours and attitudes around sex and relationships to have changed that much?
Yes, I suppose it's a little disappointing to see that the men who would consider having office affairs would do so only if the woman was in a lower work position than they were, but were you to ask the same question of women, I suspect they'd mostly be aiming up. Is that better?

2011-07-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

A century of caring for B.C. parks - until now

The B.C. parks system marked its 100^th birthday this spring. So how are things going?

As an enthusiastic camper, I can attest that the campsites are still lovely, the scenery amazing, and the pit toilets tolerable. By the numbers, though, I think British Columbians have cause to be a little concerned.

It’s been a hard 10 years for BC Parks. Park operations were among the first to be targeted for cuts by former premier Gordon Campbell, whose government closed campgrounds, scrapped forest-reserve sites, dumped interpretative programs and jacked up user fees soon after taking office.

Visits fell by almost four million the year after the 2002 cuts. They’ve never fully recovered, and took another turn for the worse this past year.

Some 19.2 million people visited a B.C. park in 2010-11. That’s down a million from the previous year, and not even close to the 25 million visitors of the mid-1990s. Satisfaction ratings are slipping as well, falling below the 80-per-cent mark for the first time in years.

B.C. Liberals have been enthusiastic proponents of handing off public services to the private sector during their tenure. Private interests now run everything from hospital food preparation and health care to children’s group homes, seniors’ care, employment training and parks. The Socreds had dabbled with privatizing some parks functions in the 1980s, but now virtually all park and campground management has been privatized.

Thinking like a B.C. Liberal, I’d probably argue that it doesn’t really matter who’s running things. People could count on pulling into a nice, clean campground back when government was renting the spot, and they still can.

Sure, they’re paying a little more for the experience, but the taxpayer is paying less. Sure, it bugged visitors when they started being charged for parking, but isn’t it nice that a new premier has rescinded that? Everybody’s happy.

Well, almost. As both a taxpayer and a parks user, I’m feeling a bit taken advantage of. What used to be a cheap night in the woods now feels like something of a shakedown.

Might that have anything to do with why park visits have fallen 20 per cent in the last 15 years?

Here’s a summer night of camping at Bamberton Provincial Park as an example.

The place looks like a deal at $16 a night. But you’ll need to add in the $6-a-night reservation fee that you’re probably going to opt for in the high season.

Then there’s the $7-a-night firewood purchase. The $8 a night for a permit for an extra car to park at your site. The $5 to dump your holding tanks if you’re in a trailer or motor home. Oh, and don’t forget the HST.

Camping revenues have risen 27 per cent since 2006-07, even while camping visits have flatlined. The increase is all due to higher fees.

You get access to a beautiful little piece of B.C. for all those fees, absolutely. But what you don’t get is the power, water, swimming pool, video arcade and store, cable TV and horseshoe pit being offered at the private campground up the road for about the same money.

A provincial park does give you a serene camping experience that few private campsites can rival. But falling visitor numbers - now forecast to stall at around 19 million for the next three years - make it pretty clear that more than a few park visitors aren’t feeling the love.

Meanwhile, a decade-long focus on cutting costs has had a serious impact on the development of new park facilities. The Socreds built thousands of vehicle-accessible campsites during their tenure. The New Democrats built 1,500. The Liberals haven’t built a single one.

I admire private enterprise for its amazing ability to find new ways of turning a profit. We couldn’t live without the energy and drive of capitalists. I don’t mean to criticize the work of the private sector, or knock the quality of operations in the parks system.

But really, is this what we want for our parks? The private sector is great at making money, but should that be the primary goal for the B.C. parks system? Where’s the vision?

Some things just aren’t suited to the private sector. Not everything is meant to be a revenue-generating opportunity. After 100 years of public investment, it’s downright shameful to be part of the generation that measures success by how little our government spends on parks.

Happy birthday, BC Parks. At your age, we ought to be showing you more respect.

2011-07-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

If families are first, who's second?

My TC colleague Dave Obee usually writes about history when he's not writing editorials for the paper, but I think I like him best when he gets a little edgy and sarcastic, as he does in today's amusing (and dead-on) riff on Premier Christy Clark's "Families First" slogan.

2011-07-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

Add R&B singer Amy Winehouse to the infamous 27 Club - she was found dead today in London. What a loss - love that woman's voice and musical style. But some people just have too big a monkey on their back, and I always got the impression that Winehouse's was gorilla-size.

2011-07-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, kids, Grandma does drugs

There’s no planning for an event like Grandma’s Big Talk On Drugs, but I’ve been waiting for the opportunity for a while now as my oldest grandchildren close in on the teen years.

The chance came on Monday, while I was driving four of my five grandsons home to the Comox Valley after a couple weeks of Island travel and camping.

The oldest two are 11 and 12, and well familiar with kids not much older than them using alcohol and illegal drugs. I knew there’d be a moment one day soon when I could jump in with a word or two on the subject.

I don’t know how it came up - not at my behest, that’s for sure, because the only hope you’ve got of getting a fledgling adolescent to hear you is if you wait for them to bring something up. At any rate, one of the boys said something about drug use, and all of a sudden the door opened.

As was the case when I was their age, my two oldest grandsons are surrounded by people who drink and use illegal drugs. I was 13 when I smoked my first joint, introduced to it by a school pal whose older brother was a teenage science whiz cranking out acid for eager buyers.

I’d already started drinking to get drunk by that point, which I would continue with great enthusiasm for the next three years. I know my mother will be deeply embarrassed that I’m admitting such a thing, but Mom, it’s not your fault. I just came of age in the ‘70s.

My grandsons’ generation have had the added impact of being completely immersed in cultural references to drug use, from TV shows to movies to Web sites like YouTube. This is the generation that can check out photos of their dopey older cousin with a joint in his mouth just by clicking on his Facebook site. No kid today grows up in a vacuum about drugs.

So I figure the options are to either have a frank conversation to prepare kids for those intense teen years, or assume responsibility for sending the poor little sods into high-risk territory without a lick of sense to fall back on.

I have fairly vivid memories of being that kid, teenage drug use being something that my parents’ generation simply hadn’t considered much. In the end, nothing too bad happened to me. But that was sheer luck.

I always wanted better for my own kids and grandkids - and yours. But I fear that in the 40 years since my generation was being scared with bad-acid movies in guidance class, “just say no” still prevails as the central message to young people. It remains an important message, of course, but hardly the only one.

Years ago a young relative of mine, in Grade 6 at the time, pinned a “Just Say No” poster from a school presentation to his bedroom door, declaring with conviction that he would never use drugs. It hung there for years, through the earnest times and on into irony.

Like me, and maybe you, he has grown into a good and responsible person despite having used drugs as a teen. Most people do. Would it kill us to mention that to our kids once in a while?

My grandsons wanted to know if it was true that crack and crystal meth were addictive after just one use, and whether I agreed that heroin was the worst drug of all. I parsed that first answer carefully, wanting to stress what rotten drugs crack and crystal meth are without portraying them as instant tickets to doom.

Heroin - well, that took a little longer, and gave me the chance to talk about the drug with the most catastrophic potential, alcohol. “Alcohol is a drug?” asked the 11-year-old with much surprise.

As for marijuana, what’s left to say? It’s not a harmless drug, but most B.C. kids over the age of five could probably name that scent what with so many of their parents and grandparents still smoking the stuff. I settled for telling the boys that some studies have found chronic, heavy marijuana use during adolescence is detrimental to brain function.

I doubt they’ll retain much of our talk, but I hope they got my point about making informed choices should it come to that. Kids, just say know.

2011-07-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

How are we doing in B.C. now that government is fixated on getting rock-bottom prices from the private sector for contract work? Not so good, apparently, as these immigrants hung out to dry have found out after being exploited and then stiffed by a silviculture company hired by the province.
This one won't turn out to be such a "deal" for taxpayers by the time lost wages and seriously substandard work standards are accounted for. Have to wonder how it's worked out for the new forest these guys were supposed to be planting, too.

2011-07-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

Two weeks of camping are now behind me, and the hordes of grandsons that I seem to have accumulated (OK, five, but they've got big energy) have made their way back to their respective homes. And isn't it just like the sun to start shining on the very day that I return to my work.
But I've promised myself to quit griping about the bad weather - it's tedious, I'm sure. I've got a new project, to write a daily haiku as a way of detailing some aspect of each day, and am determined to find the "poetry" in life's simple moments for at least as long as I manage to stick to this new discipline of haiku journalling.
Here's the link to the site, should you want to take a look. I wouldn't call it art, but hey, it's authentic.

2011-07-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

Keep the wrinkles

I watched part of “Burlesque” the other night on TV. The movie was quite awful, but never mind - the really terrible part was seeing what beautiful wild-child Cher has done to herself.

With my aging face looking back at me every morning from the mirror, I completely get the pull of cosmetic surgery. A tuck here, a lift there - would that be so wrong?

Fortunately, Cher and a long line of other celebrity beauties who have tried to stave off aging are out there to remind me of the enormous price to be paid for giving up your real face.

I’m as susceptible to wildly overpriced potions as the next person when it comes to promises of firmer skin, fewer wrinkles, more lustre or less droop. I don’t pass judgment on any woman for the crazy things she may try in an attempt to stop a completely unstoppable process.

But cosmetic surgery - that’s just not going to be my thing. And I’m thankful to the celebrities for helping me see that. As much as I hate the aging process, I know from looking at them that I’d hate even more to go through it with a face that didn’t belong to me.

I read a magazine article years ago offering tips for preventing wrinkles. The main advice was to smile less, because every smile pressed wrinkles into the skin.

You can laugh at advice like that, as I did (and wrinkle up a little more). But cosmetic surgery and toxins like Botox take that article’s premise to a whole new level. We’re actually altering our faces’ ability to smile at all.

When Cher smiles now, what you see is a slight lifting at the corners of her mouth, a Mona Lisa version of the great big smile she once had. A heavily altered face like hers is just too tight, too stuffed, too deadened to produce a full-on smile anymore.

I can hear every anti-aging salon and cosmetic surgeon in town - and there are a lot of them - preparing retorts right now declaring that great progress has been made in cosmetic procedures, and that there’s no need to look anything other than “refreshed” if you get the right work at the right time, done by the right people.

And that’s probably true to a point.

But think about this, people: Celebrities have all the money they need to buy the best cosmetic procedures out there. They’ve got access to the latest stuff and the most renowned professionals.

And yet their faces still end up ruined. They get maybe five or 10 more years of looking better than expected for someone their age, but then it’s a hard, rough fall from there.

You think it’s going to be any different for the rest of us?

As the procedures pile up - because really, is one facelift, one eyelid tuck, ever going to be enough? - the price of messing with Mother Nature is revealed.

There are the ridges up high on the cheekbones. The tugged, cat-like eyes. Lips so big and tight they look painful to the touch. A mouth line that pulls horizontally rather than vertically.

Cosmetic surgery doesn’t stop you from feeling emotion, of course. Just don’t expect them to play across your face like they used to. Excess cosmetic work leads to a face so devoid of affect, it wouldn’t be out of place on someone with Parkinson’s disease.

Worse still, everyone starts to look alike. It’s as though Kenny Rogers and Joan Rivers and Dolly Parton were siblings from an odd-looking mannequin family, having given up their former faces for the remarkably similar one that emerges after too much cosmetic surgery.

At this point, I wish I could trot out the old saw about taking pride in each and every one of my hard-won wrinkles. Truthfully, were it really possible to hang on to a firm, fabulous face at 54 through some Benjamin Button-like miracle of science, I’d definitely be checking it out.

So I won’t lie and say I like the two crescent lines that now bracket my mouth. But I do like the thought that they’re there because I smile a lot. I don’t like the furrow between my brows, either. But if that’s what a rich, emotion-filled life with frequent eyebrow contractions leads to, so be it.

Youth is a beautiful thing. But only on youth. Hate the wrinkles, love your face.

2011-07-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

High government salaries create divide

Working ourselves up over the salaries of senior government employees and politicians is something of a tradition in B.C. What surprises me is how little the lather ever leads to.

The Vancouver Sun recently updated its excellent database listing B.C.’s highest paid civil servants, and the statistics highlight a worrying situation we’ve created in this province by paying corporate-level salaries to government employees.

Hundreds of people working for taxpayer-funded government bodies in B.C. now earn salaries of $200,000 or more. The last decade has seen nothing but big, big growth in pay, pensons, benefits and severance packages for government managers.

While average British Columbians have seen their weekly wages inch up a total of 26 per cent since 2001, to $830 a week, senior government managers - in provincial offices, Crown corporations, health services, school districts, universities - have in many cases seen their salaries double in that same period.

While the rest of us were belt-tightening and battening down the hatches over the last two years, the number of public servants earning more than $100,000 a year jumped 22 per cent. Just four per cent of B.C. adults have salaries at that level.

It’s the unseemliness of the thing that troubles me. Children go begging, people with developmental disabilities lose their homes, old people pile up in hospital. And the managers in public service repeatedly get double-digit increases.

Some are even landing bonuses because they’ve cut public services. Think about that. We’re paying extra to be provided with less.

We’ve heard many, many times that these increases are needed to keep B.C. competitive. Running a province/hospital/school district/city is complex. Doesn’t B.C. deserve the best? And don’t we nay-sayers comprehend that the private sector will snap these people up if we don’t compensate them well?

(Never underestimate the power of that argument to jack up salaries. Five managers with B.C. Hydro’s marketing arm saw their salaries skyrocket in 2008-09 after a firm on Wall Street started checking them out for hire. One guy’s salary more than tripled that year, to $629,200.)

I’m sure it must be very hard work to be in a senior government position. Then again, it was very hard work when I ran a small non-profit for a salary of $52,000. I’m not convinced that the public servants earning six-figure salaries are really working two times, four times, even 12 times harder and better than I was in those years.

In a perfect world, everybody would be paid richly for a job well done.

But we’re not talking about a perfect world here. We’re talking about a public system, funded by people who pool their tax money to pay for services that will benefit British Columbians overall. Where’s the rationale for compensating the managers of such a system at ever-increasing amounts while those paying the bills get by on ever-dwindling services?

Is all that expensive governance at least buying us a better province?

As Times Colonist columnist Paul Willcocks noted in a February piece, not really. Citing the most recent report from the government’s own Progress Board, Willcocks found B.C. has at best done a middling job of meeting economic goals in the last decade, and is failing outright on a number of social measures.

Productivity, personal income and exports per capita have all slipped since 2001. University graduation rates have stagnated.

On infant health, B.C. has fallen from second place to eighth in Canada. Where we were once in the middle of the pack on child poverty, we’re now routinely at the bottom, and have been for eight consecutive years.

And yet the generous pay raises continue. The gulf grows wider between average British Columbians and the government that purports to represent them. The big salaries beget other big increases all around them, because that’s how it works. Everyone wins except for the people paying for it.

This issue has no champions.

The pundits - public servants themselves, for the most part - generally come out on the side of higher public salaries, pointing to provinces where other pundits and governments are saying the same thing. Well-paid people compare themselves to other well-paid people, and not surprisingly conclude that everyone is worth every penny.

People in the public service - or wanting to be - certainly aren’t about to jump on any bandwagon aimed at slowing down salary increases. Even if a senior job isn’t in their future, wage inflation at the top has a ripple effect.

And you and I? We’ll just keep paying more for less. It’s what we do.

2011-07-03T08:01:00.000-07:00

I'm on vacation for a couple of weeks, and will return to regular blogging in the week of July 18. In the meantime, I write a column every Friday in the Times Colonist and have left some behind in my absence to run on July 8 and 15 - you'll find them here.

2011-07-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

That something weird is going on with our weather ought to be clear by now, on this July 1 morning that feels more like, what, March? Not exactly what comes to mind when you hear "global warming," but a definite signal that things just aren't like they used to be.
The 2010 State of the Climate report underlines that in a very worrying way. Here's a link to a Nunavut newspaper article that highlights the report's findings, with a link to the report itself at the bottom of the story.

2011-06-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

I'm sharing my blog space today with a Victoria man who is justifiably frustrated with the system in B.C. for people with developmental disabilities, and wonders why Premier Christy Clark's promises to put "families first" doesn't seem to apply to his family:

By Ian McInnes

Families First, a political concept that resonates well if you have 2.3 children, are a member of the middle class and live in urban BC

In fact, it is rather easy to put Families First as a member of these strata of our society; you have the financial strength, community support, and educational opportunities to do just that. And if you vote Liberal you not only get government support but receive a pat on the back from your premier saying “keep up the good work” we’ve got your back.

But if you have a family unit that includes a member with a developmental disability, it is impossible to put family first.

The reality is the family member with the disability comes first at the expense of you, your spouse and the other members of your family.

If the family member needs to be fed because they are unable to feed themselves, they come first.

If they need to be dressed because they cannot accomplish the task, they come first.

If they need to be diapered 5 times a day because of incontinence, they come first.

If they need be turned in the middle of the night, you get up and do it.

Other siblings say, “What about me; don’t I come first sometime?” Your spouse says, “What about me don’t I deserve a little attention sometime?”

And you say, “What about us don’t we deserve a holiday; a break from this 24/7 responsibility; a time to be just us?”

For families with a disabled member, Families First is just empty political rhetoric

A slogan of “Retaining a Semblance of Family” would be a more apt rallying call. Faced with the responsibility and stress of developmental disability, most families just fly apart (over 90 per cent end in divorce).

Being a couple, handling a family member with a disability is extremely difficult. As a single parent, it is impossible without a great deal of external support.

And unlike the conventional family unit there is never an “empty nest” period to look forward to. The responsibility, for those willing to accept the challenge, is for life, either yours or that of the person with the disability.

As a caring community we must support such family units and support them more vigorously than conventional family units. Families First must include those with a disability.

Since 2005, Community Living BC is the crown agency mandated to provide that support. But instead of increasing or at the very least maintaining service, CLBC is cutting and curtailing services to the developmentally disabled.

According to Paul Willcocks, a keen observer of B.C. politics, “the amount of funding per client has fallen every year since it (CLBC) was created six years ago.”

The final irony may be that Harry Bloy, the minister responsible for CLBC, has been made a cabinet committee member of Families First.

He has had the opportunity to improve the lives of the developmentally disability and by extension their families, but to date has chosen to make their lives more difficult.

Families First remains a political rallying cry for the Liberal government but does not apply to families with a member having a developmental disability.

2011-06-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

Great news from Turn off the Blue Light, the anti-criminalization campaign in Ireland launched by sex workers and supporters. Google has changed its mind on prohibiting the group from buying an AdWord, one of those little paid links you see at the top of some Google searches.
I mean, it's a pretty small victory in the grand scheme of things, but what the heck. Take the wins wherever they come, especially when the issue is sex work. You just don't see many wins if that's your cause.
The power of social media and electronic distribution lists were certainly obvious to me after I wrote a column on this subject (it'll be the June 24 blog post below this one) and then used Facebook and two sex-work-friendly researcher-based distribution lists to get the word out as far as possible. I've now got new "friends" in Bangladesh and Thailand as a result.
Of course, none of this is to suggest that my Victoria column was the reason Google changed its mind, prompt and thorough use of Facebook and distribution lists notwithstanding. But maybe it helped a little.
The Blue Light organizers were prepared to protest outside Google's European headquarters in Dublin when they got word from Google that it had taken another look at the group's Web site and approved them to advertise.
Google had deemed that the group was selling sexual services,which it doesn't allow. But when the company took a closer look, it must have seen what Blue Light had been telling them all along: The Web site, and the Blue Light campaign, is strictly about human rights, not selling sex.