My New Dresser

Christie & I headed out yesterday morning in search of a dresser for my room. Since we don’t have a vehicle right now, we had to make sure we found a place that would deliver. So we walked to the closest furniture store. The guy there was pretty young. Christie, who’s excellent at speaking Spanish, couldn’t understand a lot of what he was saying. She said he was speaking a lot of Guarani, the other language spoken here in Paraguay. The furniture was just all stacked in this little room. You couldn’t really tell what you were looking at. We asked about one of the dressers on top. The guy starts climbing over all the furniture, all the way up toward the ceiling, to see how much the dresser is. We ended up getting the one that was already sitting on the floor. The little guy climbed back down all the furniture. We asked (every time I say that, I mean Christie asked) if they would deliver it. He said his uncle would but we would have to go talk to him. He told us he was at a hardware store just down the road and that his name was Damien.

So we walk….and walk….and walk. We ask a few people on the way and they all act like they know where this Damien guy is. So we just walk in the direction they tell us to. We found a hardware store but no one named Damien. We asked a lady across the street from the hardware store. She points us in another direction. We asked the men at the vegetable market and they said, “Yes, Damien. He’ll be back here in a few minutes.” The vegetable market is not a hardware store. The nephew must have been a little confused. The men pull up chairs for us to sit in. So here we are sitting, literally right on the street corner, in front of a ton of onions. We sat there for over an hour, while motorcycles and buses zoomed past us, and a man stood behind us pealing carrots.

One of the men offered to bring us some terere. Christie, being great, as usual, just smiled and said, “Oh gracias!” Then she tells me, “You probably want to pass on this one. It looks like water from the tap. Oh! And he just pulled grass out of the tree and stuck in it!” She sat there drinking her terere, probably looking bad because she wasn’t serving any to me. Occasionally, she would just pretend to pour the water in and drink it.

I know a few people who would do great here because time means nothing. If they say they’ll be right back, it could be hours. If church starts at 6, it could be 7 or later when it actually starts. After sitting there for what seemed like all day, Damien showed up. Right before we left, I looked over at the water pitcher for the terere and a big spider was climbing out of it. I guess it lived in the grass that the man pulled off the tree. I’m very glad I passed on that! We climbed in the huge delivery truck with him and rode back to the furniture store.

During the conversation with the nephew, hours earlier, there was some confusion on the price. When we got back, he had put a sticker on it with a price and had also carved it into the top of the dresser. Nice! Now, across the top of the dresser is “220000,” which is $44. There were also no knobs on it yet. Christie told him, in both Spanish and Guarani, that I wanted the white knobs, as he continued to put the pinkish-maroon ones on. Oh well! Finally, we climbed back into the truck and Damien drove us home, along with my new dresser.

It’s nothing spectacular but I’m very thankful for it! Somehow I was able to fit all my clothes in it, except for my PJs.