My life is like a movie sometimes.

I say this because of my return trip from the Chaco. This is a five hour drive in the country side of Paraguay. The driver was Eliseo-- a loud, warm, somewhat crazy Argentinean ADRA employee. The vehicle was his small, white, manual transmission van filled with bedding, supplies, and... an Indian man who speaks only Guarani. Five hours of looking back every once in a while to offer water and make a hesitant thumbs-up signal. This in and of itself would be a bit odd, perhaps, but add to this the fact that the van was experiencing a somewhat major malfunciton. I'm not so mechanically inclined, so I cannot give it a name. But it appeared that the clutch did not work. Eliseo had to start the car in gear, which meant a lot of lurching. To shift gears he just had to pull it out of one gear and try to mash it into the next gear. It sounded terrible. This difficult process meant that stopping was out of the question. We dodged cows, foxes, dogs, stalled trucks, and various debris at high speeds. We passed slower cars with our fingers crossed. In-town driving meant either very fast or very slow, to try and time things properly with the ligts. In five hours we stopped twice: once to pay a toll and once to drop off the Indian man. Craziness.