Two resilient characters: The truck driver and the cowboy
Two stories of resilience in Paraguay – a truck driver who takes on the weather and a cowboy who loves his rough life.
Everyone in the Chaco Boreal region of Paraguay knows the truck driver called Michelin, who got his lifelong nickname from the well-known brand of tyre. What people also know is that if no one else is fool enough to take on a seemingly impossible mission during the rainy season, 67-year-old Michelin will do it.
Simply changing a wheel in Chaco is dicing with death. Jaguars lurk in the forest, and Michelin never leaves home without his gun. He has been driving for 50 years and keeps going because he has no real choice, with no pension and three generations in his family, including seven young children to feed.
But even Michelin sometimes has to admit defeat and an assignment to drive 280 kilometres (174 miles) in the mud to pick up fertiliser may just be a trip too far.
Elsewhere, Pedro’s life in the wild is not for everyone. He admits that being separated from his family with only his herd for company can be tough. But he is a cowboy; it is what he has chosen, and given a choice, he would not change a thing – not even for his fiancée waiting for him back home.