Checked your serial numbers lately?

While in Peru, the team had several devotional times together. We would send out for some food, meet together (in an upper room of the hotel, interestingly enough) eat and share stories of the day's clinic happenings.

One evening as our bus driver was exploring new areas of Lima on our way back to the hotel, our resident interpreter and guide Renzo (known to the single women as "TD&L" - Tall, Dark and Latin) suggested we have a popular roasted chicken - pollo a la brasa - for our meal that evening. Malena gave him a $100 bill to purchase the chicken and he called the place on his cell phone to place the order.

When they heard how much chicken he wanted, they asked how he was going to pay for it. "Dólares," (US dollars) he said. "Qué denominación dólares" they wanted to know. "Cien dólar" he replied, at which point there was a lengthy discussion and the request for the serial number of the bill.

It seems that the $100 bill is popular both with tourists and with counterfeiters and there are a lot of bogus bills floating around. But counterfeited bills tend to have the same serial numbers since they are just duplicated, and any sharp merchant in Peru has a list of these bogus numbers - even the pollo place.

As it turns out, the chicken place canceled our order because of doubt about the bill, but Renzo prevailed, and in the end we did have our pollo a la brasa for our meal that evening.