The saga of a shipment

During February, the pace of work at Manos Amigas was drastically different, as one third of the staff – Yannina and Mario – were in Germany at a fair. Roberto was also gone for one of those weeks, visiting one of his churches in Arequipa. All the day-to-day work (minus the packing, which two young women handle) fell to Christina, who did an amazing job of keeping things running at the same time that she put out a number of fires and successfully got a large order shipped off. Being in the office at the same time was fascinating as it was kind of like a soap opera: will all the products be here in time? Will everything be inspected and packed in time? Will the computer and printer talk to each other long enough to print out zillions of labels for the boxes? Tune in tomorrow to find out!


Due to the importance of this order and having fewer hands around to help, we ended up canceling our artisan visits for that week and helped out in different ways instead, like bagging hats and putting earrings on earring cards.

Simon helped put stickers on the boxes, too, which were thankfully easy to remove later.

They don't leave much room between rows of boxes... and Simon couldn't reach the top anyway. 

Two artisans didn’t have their orders in and Christina spent a lot of time trying to track them down. The first artisan told Christina repeatedly that she would be in one day at 3, then the next day she promised to come in by 4, then the following day she promised to be there as soon as possible. She brought her order in several days after the order shipped. The second artisan didn’t answer Christina’s phone calls, and she ended up calling another artisan who lived nearby. “I have a huge favor to ask you; could you please check on your neighbor? I can’t get through to him and it’s urgent that I find out about the status of his order.” The AWOL artisan called Christina half an hour later. As of a week after the order was shipped, he still had not delivered his order yet maintained that it had been completed on time. Christina was understandably frazzled: “If they would just be honest with me, I could handle it. What I can’t handle is when they aren’t telling me the truth.”

They are the exception, of course; almost everyone else delivers their orders on time or early. But the quantity of phone calls, the cajoling, the pleading, the promising, the exasperation, wow, they are exhausting. And I’m just quietly typing on my computer, listening, not even the one making or receiving the phone calls!


It was interesting to see how an order gets ready for shipment. The women who perform quality control on all of the items and then pack them for shipment were working frantically as some artisans brought their items in at the last minute. Other artisans came in to retouch their work.

Jaime, delivering an order of painted glass trays

Lastenia, touching up some picture frames that had been damaged in transport to Manos Amigas

This order, of over 100 boxes, was being shipped to the US via boat, and was slated to be picked up at 9 a.m. on Thursday. On Wednesday, the shipping company called and said that the boat would leave a day later than expected. That extra day was a reprieve for Christina and the packers. Christina had one more day to figure out the details of customs, ordering more boxes, calculating the volume of the shipment. She hadn’t ever shipped an order before, and as everyone else was out of the office, she was on her own. Manos Amigas has no process document that gives step-by-step instructions for the many intricacies of preparing an order for shipment and then actually getting it on the boat, and this situation seemed to scream for it.


The next week, when Roberto was back in the office, he told me stories of times when all of them had to stay up all night doing quality control and packing items that had been dropped off late, to make a morning shipment. I looked at him, horrified. “Have you had to do that much?” Roberto and Christina looked at each other, shrugged. “Maybe 3 or 4 times a year? Not very often,” he said. That sounds often to me! I’m not sure I’ll be able to look at the Peruvian handcrafts in Global Gifts the same way now; I’ll keep thinking about the frantic pace before a shipment and wondering if anyone got any sleep!