Waiting for some medicine at a pharmacy in a large Wal-Mart-type store here in the Dominican Republic I passed the time of day with the school nurse who had come to help me. It was near Christmas so the store was brimming with customers and chaos. She was telling me why we can’t find rolls of wrapping paper here in the DR like we can in the States.
At home we do things on our own … clean our own house, polish our own shoes, wrap our own gifts … but here it is common to have other people do these chores for us … usually for a tip. So the stores have the custom of offering free Christmas wrapping for gifts purchased at the same store. Right next to the pharmacy we could see the long counter where a half dozen young ladies were busy wrapping gifts for people who were standing in lines three or four deep.
So it was only logical for me to ask the people at the towel store if they would wrap nine individual Christmas gifts when I went to pick them up later. Since our daughter was getting married a few days after Christmas, a number of our relatives were spending Christmas with us and we had purchased towels embroidered with their name and a personalized design for gifts.
The lady who had originally taken our order a couple of weeks ago speaks a little English and she was there, so emboldened by this new information I asked if this store offered free wrapping. She said that they did wrap gifts but it would cost a little bit extra since they used a special box instead of wrapping paper. So I asked how much extra.
When she answered, “Seventeen” I quickly multiplied that in my head by nine and figured I could afford an extra 4 or 5 dollars if it meant I didn’t have to do all that wrapping at home … especially since I couldn’t find any wrapping paper anyway.
When I came back 20 minutes later a different lady was at the cash register. She said something in Spanish so I handed her a 500-peso bill expecting 350 pesos in change. She gave me one of those funny looks that I couldn’t interpret and said something else in Spanish. A chunky man with shiny black hair next to me said, “She say she want 630 peso.” When I told him there must be some mistake he shrugged and looked away.
At this point the young woman who knows a little bit of English who helped me before came over to see what the fuss was about. After talking to the cashier lady she turned to me and repeated, “You need more money.” So I told her, “Listen, figure this out for yourself … nine packages times seventeen pesos each is …..”
Interrupting she said, “Seventeen? No, I said Seventy!” Even when she said the two numbers with labored emphasis I could barely tell the difference. As my head quickly tallied the problem I began to feel sick. This small language problem increased my little wrapping project from four dollars to almost twenty dollars, and I knew I was trapped. To their credit, when they discovered the problem they compromised by accepting only the 500 pesos that I had. Their gesture cut my loss by about four dollars, but it still was another hard lesson in the language barrier wars.
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