What you might not know, because we're drifting apart and that's only because you want to.

My hands smell like tomato plants, the taste of peaches lingers on my tongue and hot Dominican coffee is probably not the best thing for a post nap-in-a-hot-room dehydration headache... but it is delicious.

Manuel Zelaya is the ousted president of Honduras. The man is friends with Hugo Chavez. Earlier this summer, he (Zelaya) organized what he claims was merely a poll on whether the president should be allowed to serve additional terms than the current one. It wasn't official. Its outcome was not supposed to be a deciding factor, but perhaps a note for future motions. Chavez pulled it off, but he is apparently more popular. Anyway, the Honduran Congress ordered the army to confiscate the elections materials (ballots and so forth). They did so, which led Zelaya to lead a mob to retrieve said materials from... was it an army barracks? I don't think so, but something very exciting like that. In the morning of the election, one hour before the ballots were to open, masked soldiers apprehended Zelaya at gunpoint (reportedly, he was still in his pajamas) and flew him to Costa Rica in exile. The Honduran people are more than split on this... some support Zelaya and are protesting the Congress and their actions, some don't necessarily support him, but are concerned about the (illegal) coup, others are all, "Zelaya was a tyrant anyway, let's move on."

I know this from BBC, CNN and Time and not because I went with Dr. Woodbury, Bekah Ahrenholz, Megan Pothoven and a few other Dordt girls to Tegucigalpa for GEN 251: History and Culture of Honduras, as was planned. We were to depart the Friday after the coup took place, which was Sunday and perhaps the deciding factor was that the US Embassy advised against any "unnecessary travel" into the country.

The housing assignments - details of the families, pets, etc. - were sent out and all the speakers/seminars were finalized. I had a not-very-rough outline for the video written out... loosely inspired by Matthew Gray Grubler's video intern work on The Life Aquatic dvd (hilarious AND informative). The texts for the course were purchased and read and marked, our bodies were getting adjusted to the chloroquine.

Instead of all that, there's a wedding in Chicago, a farm to take residence and put weeding hours in near the Bellingham area in Washington State... a winery and a restaurant just a few miles from the property that needs summer help, a guy with a beard to live/work with (who gave me permission to fall in love with the women), friends who live SURPRISINGLY close to the area, other friends who are deciding whether to drive up and spend the rest of summer there. Video, photo and fiction can still be had. It would have been very exciting to be in a country that could almost be following some of the recent steps of the Irani people. But we're not.