As of this post, Kelley has been in Paraguay for 47
days. Dear Lord…47 days! And I have attempted to mail TWO-(2)-II-dos-deux
items to her. Yes. Just two.
This does not count the phone calls and emails we have exchanged –
goodness, I’m not that bad. We are in
touch!
So, shortly after she departed, I made my first attempt
at sending something. It doesn’t count
as a real attempt because nothing left the country. The pre-attempt
was a box lovingly prepared and would contain what eventually I would discover
to be 60% contraband. She had various
requests of things that she wished she’d brought and I dutifully thought to
send them to her in a box saved from Amazon (we have plenty of those) and padded
with other trinkets. Thinking in my naiveté
I could get it there quickly with FedEx (how bad could it be – I used to ship
stuff overseas all the time for work), I took it to the main hub here in
Crofton. The clerk weighed it for me,
typed a few keys, clicked a few pages on his screen and then announced, “This
box will cost about $260 to ship to Asunción, Paraguay.
Excuse me? How
much? Obviously, I never saw the bills
of the shipments from work!
OK – I dearly love my child but I felt that perhaps the
freshness of her departure had not allowed me enough time to do appropriate
research. I left FedEx hugging the box after
mumbling my thank you to the clerk. UPS
was much the same. OK – DHL, too. They were all OUT of the running.
I went home and then got online. I headed to the Post Office. YES – the US Postal Service. www.usps.com. There is indeed a wealth of information
online there about shipping to everywhere.
One can even find out about the various restrictions on incoming items
in countries around the world. I clicked
on Paraguay. OK – so her favorite granola bars in
the box as treats? Out. The additional Advil and Benadryl that would
be helpful? Out. I would have to have a letter from the Paraguayan
Ministry of Health or something like that in order to send those to her. The box was getting emptier. No candy, either. So much for Valentine's Day.
I finally went to the Post Office in Riva – close in
proximity to work. I LOVE these
people. Seriously – the people that work
in this particular office always help me, always answer questions and always go
out of their way. I was not
disappointed.
There at Riva, my first real attempt was to send a box I purchased there at
the Post Office. I packed it, sealed it,
filled out the customs form (wrong – but they fixed it) and addressed it there. They took care of it. The box was on its way. I was so excited. But, I was soon to be disappointed. I mailed the box more than a month ago. She still doesn’t have it. We think it is stuck in PY Customs.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, Kelley shared in an email that other volunteers that have been receiving things (think me suddenly feeling like crap
here as my kid doesn’t have anything from me yet!) are getting them in big, padded
envelopes, not boxes. Maybe PY Customs
has issues with things sent in boxes.
So, the next package I sent out was in a padded envelope that fit in a
USPS Express Mail envelope and sent with a delivery signature request (couldn’t
hurt, right?) – and it had a tracking number!
SUCCESS! I mailed
it out of the Riva Station on the afternoon of 3/14/12. It was delivered in Asunción, Paraguay on
3/22/12. She has it! That mailing was for the grand total of $43.75. I’m OK with that. It is worth every penny to know that it gets
there. So this is probably the first
mailing of many.
My advice to you if you are mailing something to
Kelley: Big envelope, padded if
necessary, delivery signature, Express to Asunción. See above. And tell the folks at the Riva Post Office that I sent you.
