South American Journal

On several occasions, I've gone online to order flowers, cakes, liquor and other goodies to be sent to my relatives in Lima. Tried a couple of services, but the one I like best is called Iquiero.com. This is a service that began in Perú but has since expanded to serve Colombia and Bolivia. The premise is simple: there are millions of latinos in the U.S. who besides sending money back to their relatives, want to be able to send the occasional birthday or Christmas gift without a two-month delay or the risk of theft-by-mail-employee. This site lets you send gifts quite easily, and by our economic standards, quite inexpensively.

Best of all, since labor is so inexpensive in the destination country, you get hand-writen confirmation emails and the goodies are hand-delivered by living, breathing human beings who don't ring the doorbell, leave a post-it and run back to their brown trucks. Nice touch: they'll even capture a thank-you message from the recpients, which is promptly emailed to the sender.

What I find fascinating is that besides ordering every kind of consumer product imaginable, you can use Iquiero to stock someone's pantry. They offer baskets of staple ingredients at several price points. The biggest basket costs $52 and includes the items below. (I didn't include the package sizes, but some of the items are indeed family size.)

I wonder what these items would cost in the States, if ordered through an online grocery company? For someone living and working in the U.S., $52 would seem like a pittance, yet it could set up a loved one with enough groceries for a week (remember, big families).

If one could find the name and address of a family that is struggling to feed their kids (and believe me there are lots of them) , it would be a lot of fun to surprise them with a gift like this. It would be the "random acts of kindness" thing, done up e-commerce style. Anyone game? I'm sure I could dig up some names from my friends...


The "Complete" Grocery Basket, from Iquiero.com

• 3 cans of tuna
• 1 pack of soda crackers
• 3 bags of rice
• 2 bags of sugar
• 2 bottles of cooking oil
• 3 bags of beans
• 2 packs of noodles
• 1 bag of oatmeal
• 1 jar of marmelade
• 1 bag of table salt
• 1 jar of mustard
• 1 bottle of ketchup
• 1 bag of flour
• 6 cans of evaporated milk
• 1 large can of coffee
• 1 can of cocoa
• 1 can of peaches
• 1 can of fruit salad
• 1 can of spaghetti sauce
• 1 can of gelatin
• 1 envelope of chicken bullion
• 1 box of chocolate pudding
• 1 envelope of pudding
• 1 bottle of vinegar