6 days later...

It's 2:30 am and as I lay awake with a stomach-ache I started feeling a bit guilty to any faithful family and friend blog readers who might have been checking our blog this week hoping for some insight into the Honduran situation. My apologies. Something about wading through the deluge of blogs, local print, web and television news, international mainstream news, various rights-organization reports, and then finally many Honduran professionals' analysis of the situation - well, it left me a little speechless. And wary. Wary because so many of those sources came across so strikingly one-sided and in some cases downright false that I became struck by the power of words, and the responsibility we all have to be careful with how we use them. From a wary news-reader I have become a downright skeptic in the space of one week. I graduated!!

First for a personal note - the week has been a strange combination of building tension and anxiety, and absolute boredom. Andrew and I have logged in long hours in the casita just reading news and ruminating on what could happen here in the next days or weeks. The colonia we live in is on the edge of the city near the airport, so while we've had an up close and personal view of military plane and helicopter traffic all week, we're pretty far from the increasing (in size and frequency) demonstrations from both sides in the downtown areas. Andrew is much more connected to the goings-on as he commutes to the other end of town for work and has done some work interviewing and gathering information this week (I'll let him fill you all in on the fruits of that later). I, however, have spent most of the week sitting with my co-worker Ivonne in the empty library. Schools are canceled, nobody is coming in - I had to cancel the two new English classes I started this week. Tuesday's first day of class was a total bust as I was frazzled and my poor students had to squint to see the whiteboard during one of several power outages. The upswing of this is my craftiness is back on - I taught Ivonne to knit so together we produced two scarves and one hat during work. Military coup = crafty productivity.

On a less-personal note: tensions are running high as the new Honduran government installed after the military coup (many people calling it an arrest) refuses to back down and allow Pres. Mel Zelaya return. Micheleti declared that if Zelaya came back to the country he would be arrested and tried. As you all know from the international coverage of the situation - the international community, along with the Organization of American States, is backing Zelaya and threatening economic sanctions for Honduras if he isn't re-instated as President. The country is clearly divided and Hondurans supporting the ousted president are being silenced in scary ways. Local and international news sources that cast Zelaya in a positive light have been blocked, Zelaya supporters coming in from rural areas (most of his support lies in poor rural areas) have been denied access to cities by the military (here is footage on cnn.com of soldiers shooting tires out of 4 or 5 buses as protesters stood by), and yesterday we heard several reports from reliable sources that human rights organizations and leaders were arrested and detained by the military.

I think it's human nature to want to know who the good guys and who the bad guys are in situations such as these, so we can take the necessary steps to support the good guys, condemn the bad guys. In this case it's really not that simple. Zelaya is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good guy. He made a lot of empty promises in order to gain the support of the poor. Micheleti is no better. I think this is a case of wealthy people and career politicians doing their best to retain their power and wealth. The ones who will lose in this political clash, as always, already are and will continue to be the poor. As the second poorest nation in the western hemisphere, this situation is the last thing Honduras needed. I keep thinking about people we've met out in the campo; people who were already struggling to get by day to day. The poor people that make up the majority of Honduras' population are the ones that will suffer from economic sanctions that will come if Micheletti and the congress refuse to negotiate and cooperate with the international community. The poor majority are fed promises and faulty information from all sides; they are the least educated with the least access to good information, and the most likely to suffer from this mess.