Customer service Peruvian style (Peru)

We spent two nights in Nazca, which was quite sufficient for the little place, having done the Cessna flight over the Nazca lines and the little local museums.  

Nick had gone down with a bad tummy — he thought it might’ve been the Chinese roast duck noodles he'd had back in the previous town, Ica, at a chifa (see blog entry Chifa) — so I was appointed to go and get the tickets for the overnight bus to Arequipa.  As I didn’t speak any Spanish, he gave me the list of questions — in Spanish, which I wrote down, to put to the man at the bus terminus.

The bus terminus was housed in the middle of a terraced row on the main street, looking like, and about the size of, a small town shop or restaurant with the whole of the frontage opened up.  As you went in, there was a long counter on the left, running away from you from the front to the back, behind which was the man dealing with ticket sales, among other things.  On the right, against the wall, was a long wooden bench running the length of the room for people to sit on, facing the counter.

As I went in, the man was dealing with someone, then it was my turn.  I started off by asking him if he spoke English, to which he replied, “Muy muy poco.”  So I had to resort to my list in Spanish.

I asked him the first question on my list:  What time was the bus to Arequipa?  He answered it, repeating it when requested to and waiting patiently while I painstakingly converted it — I find numbers in most languages the hardest to grasp for speedy daily use, and because they’re the most basic and frequently used in any language, they’re always very speedy.  

Then someone came in to get a ticket, and as I wasn’t in a hurry, I deferred to that person.  After that person left, back to my list of questions:  What time was it arriving at Arequipa?  He gave me the answer.  Another slow conversion, with the man showing no sign of impatience at all.

A long distance passenger coach arrived, and the man had to hand over the sack of post for it, with all the paperwork it entailed.  I waited to one side.

To my list of questions again:  How much were the tickets each?  He was about to answer the question when another long distance passenger coach arrived, this time with a sackload of post for him to receive and process the paperwork for it.  

As he was doing this, I happened to look up at the wall behind him, on which was written all the information I wanted (which I hadn't noticed before, for some reason — being too short maybe??): which bus went where when and how much the tickets cost.  The man had fielded each of my questions good-naturedly, with courtesy and patience, in spite of all the chores that rightly required his personal attention, coming back to me for the next question and the next, when he could've drawn my attention to the board behind him, which would've saved himself a lot of work.  

Such was my general experience in my three weeks on that trip and a subsequent three-week trip 16 months later.  In spite of their obvious poverty, the Peruvians are very good-natured, when one might expect them to be grumpy and stressed out by the sheer grind of eking out a living, so poverty is no reason, not even excuse, for rude and horrible behaviour.  They make the visitor, even the ignorant ones like me, feel very welcomed.   

I’d never seen them being short, brusque, abrupt and rude with their own kind either, unlike another, much less poverty-stricken, country — that I shall leave unnamed (for now) — where there's constant shouting and yelling, among other things.  They might want to look to Peru for some lessons to be gleaned.

(Event happened 1986)