Riding Dirty - or something like that

Here is a picture of our team of med students getting ready to go, and then piling into the back of a pickup truck for the ride. Cars are scarce, so we had to fit 14 people into the truck. It was a little tight. I'm a rookie at riding in the back of pickups, so I was clinging for dear life to whatever little thing I could find to hold on to. Most of the other folks were a bit more relaxed. The roads out in the country are terrible, but that's probably a good thing because it forces the truck to go more slowly. The paved roads have tons of potholes. If they're not paved, they have tons of little ravines, dips, holes, moguls, and other obstacles. I think riding in the back with so many people is like white water rafting. You just hang on through all of the dips, bumps and turns, and hope you don't fall out. The only difference is that you stay dry...except when it starts to pour on you. This happened on the way back to Malpaisillo from Sabaneta, where we went around house-to-house distributing leptospirosis prophalaxis and searching for people who were already presenting symptoms. It was a dark, rainy, bumpy ride at the end of a long day, but I was with some really cool med students. We were all completely soaked, but found the whole situation pretty funny. The whole time I was thinking, "I can't wait to blog about this!"