After four and a half months in Paraguay I still find myself struggling with the money. It is not that I don’t understand how much people are telling me, although I have to admit at times I’m not sure I understand, and at others I think I must be wrong because it is just to cheap. No, my problem comes when I actually try to pull out the money to pay. I’ve got the bills down fine. There’s the green 100 mil bill (worth approximately $20) with a picture of the dam on the back. A purplish 50 mil, the blue 20 mil, the brown 10 mil and the red 5 mil. The different colors help to keep it all straight, and the numbers are pretty easy to see. I might not know who the people are on the front side yet (except for the name which is written on it) and I might have trouble keeping small change as no one ever wants to give you change except at the grocery store. No my problem comes from trying to use the coins. There are coins worth 1 mil, 500, 100 and 50 Guarani. That should be four different coins. Not to hard, you think. Not so true when there is two different versions of almost all of the coins. One gold and one silver 500. The same for the 100 and 50. Add in the different thicknesses and you start to see how sorting out coins by touch can be hard. Oh, and did I mention that the silver 50 is almost exactly the same size as the silver 1 mil? Is it any wonder that I get confused? Usually I just end up paying with bills and not worrying about the change, which as you can imagine makes it pile up. The alternative is the pile of coins it takes to pay for something when I decide to actually dig it all out. I wonder if I’ll get it all figured out by the end of two years?
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