What Guides Me? Not Me!

Sometimes luck is just too crazy to call luck.



For instance...how about the bus driver misunderstanding what I say as "Quiindy" for "Paraguarí?" Not too easy to do in my opinion. That little debacle allowed me to overshoot Quiindy by an hour or so, retrace my steps to arrive there after dark, bump into Lourdes and a friend as I was about to set up my tent on the side of the road, and instead spend the night with a great Paraguayan family on a night when God sent thunder and lightning and rain in such amounts that the pigs got so frightened they had to race through the house (2 rooms) several times just to wake us all up and let us know!



I honestly sometimes feel like I have zero control over the route I take - and it´s wonderful.

My chance happening in Quiindy resulted in spending simply wonderful time with some very humble, energetic and, frankly speaking, poor people. But poverty is something completely different here. To live in this manner in the US would be considered horrific, but it´s just life here.



They are Jonathan David, Angelina, Rodolfo, Lourdes and Ricardo. Jonathan David, his grandmother Angelina, and his aunt Lourdes live in the house. There were other friends and relatives who live nearby and stopped in throughout my time there.



In the two rooms there were two beds in total...and I got one of them. Angelina, Lourdes, and Jonathan David slept together in the other. They said that they always slept like that as I tried to take the floor...and I´ll never know for sure but it doesn´t seem to matter.

Angelina and several of his siblings have brick-making operations of sorts. They are small, family-owned and -worked businesses that help make the ends meet. They were working on about 16,000 bricks while I was there.



Angelina´s oven in the foreground and her sister-in-law´s two in the background. Her sister-in-law has been making bricks for over 25 years. Jonathan David sitting on some pieces drying out more as they are prepared for the oven.







Some almost finished bricks. And several ovens in other fields. The ovens are set up within several hundred feet of the fields from where the mud is brought.



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DON´T SHOOT. ELECT LIFE.



A fun sign in Parque National Ybycuí, where I spent 2 relaxed days camping.