Trouble in the back

It seems about time to talk about Honduran driving habits in a bit more detain. In particular the abundance of pick up trucks, and the even more abundant habit of riding in the back of them. You see it everywhere, and while this might not seem so odd, try to envision exactly what this for of transportation entails. You are sitting on the edge of the bed (nobody seems to sit IN the bed of the truck, and as a result you feel honor bound to follow suit, or else risk seeming like some cowardly gringo pansy), and you fly along a dirt road which is more pot holes than pavement...and by pavement I mean compacted dirt. The driver attempts to compensate for the Swiss cheesiness of the road by swerving suddenly to try and avoid them; a maneuver which often takes you into the path of on coming traffic!
Now, you want to try and look ahead, to try and prepare for the imminent swerving, bumping, and near-death experiences rapidly hurtling towards you, but whenever you look up you are blinded by all the grit and dust kicked up by the passing vehicles which the driver of this death ride has managed to avoid.
So now you are blind, hanging on for dear life, and wondering if it would have been a better idea to simply walk the five miles back home?
There are only two things which can make this ride worse. That's right, WORSE. One is if it is raining. While this does reduce the blinding dust, it also makes the truck slippery, at which point you are reduced to cowering in the bed of the truck, and hoping that none of the locals spot you for the nancy boy you invariably feel like.
The other is if during the prior night you were rudely awakened at 2am by a vicious call of nature. I'm not sure if it was the fruit I ate the previous day or simply the local bacteria finally having their way with me, but either way, I can now personally attest to just how swift and brutal Moctezuma's revenge can be.
To settle one's stomach after a ride of this sort, the returning volunteers swear by coke and alkaseltzer. The combination is very affective, but one must remember to put the tablet in a glass and then SLOWLY add the coke...not drop half the tablet into the coke bottle. There will follow a few moments of clarity in which you have to act, and if like me, you happen to be sitting in the office of the middle school director, there really isn't much you can do except put your mouth over the bottle and try to drink the ensuing eruption of effervescence. In this situation you are doomed to failure. Anyone else present will be rewarded by a few moments of your cheeks filling up with soda foam like a cartoon character sucking on an air pump, before the inevitable occurs. During this time you can think only one thing...

oh why didn't I pay more attention in chemistry?