To ship or not to ship

(This post was typed on February 1, but not posted until now.)

I have had a four-day adventure in Honduran shipping practices. In order to send 5 pounds of soil in a box to a laboratory in order to be analyzed, it is best not to use the mail, but the shipping company Expreco. They lost my samples the first time I sent them in November, which I previously mentioned. Last Wednesday, the replacement samples arrived from their respective farms, and on Thursday I was all set to send them. Here is what happened:

Day 1: I was dropped off in Gracias by a colleague, who said that the Expreco truck comes down this road around 1pm. As a Canadian, I was expecting a large-ish truck with the name of the company. After waiting for two hours without seeing this expected truck, I left. Naïveté: too high.

Day 2: With fresh info that it is a red pick-up truck, I waited from 10:30 until 2:30, without encountering it. I still expected some kind of identifier; maybe a uniformed man getting out of the truck? Naïveté: still high.

Day 3: There is a bank on the street where the Expreco truck apparently comes, and there are always 3 or 4 guards standing outside it. At 1pm I approached one guard to ask if the truck had come yet. He said no, and affably gave me more information: it is a red Toyota with a single cab. So I asked the driver of each red Toyota with a single cab if they were with Expreco. No luck. At 3 I asked the guard again, who said that Expreco had arrived shortly after 1. Naïveté: middling.

Day 4: My supervisor had to come into Gracias as well today, but first we went together to talk to an acquaintance of hers who has connections to Expreco. He agreed to call me when the truck arrived. Feeling skeptical, I went at 1pm to the location where I had waited the previous three days, to make sure of things. And, lo and behold, there it was! The red Toyota pickup with one cab; no uniform, no identifier. And my contact who was supposed to call me was still on his lunch break. Naïveté: reasonable.

I think I’ve learned a lesson, but I’m not sure what that lesson is. Be patient? Persistent? Don’t have too much pride to loiter on a street corner for 4 hours? (It’s quite odd for a gringa to do that, although pretty normal to see a Honduran man relaxing on the corner.) It’s funny to feel such a sense of victory over sending 3 soil samples to a laboratory, but I guess that’s all part of life here in Honduras.