One For the Money

A page turning mystery novel, with quite a lot of humor. It regales us with the story of a recently unemployed individual who finds herself in a bounty hunting job because the money has started to run dangerously low. My rendition also involves money and mystery, but I am not sure I can manage to resolve my mysteries.

My story begins with a Peace Corps volunteer who has just recently arrived at his site. He is newly prepared to face the wide world of northern Mozambique. Little did he know that he could no longer remember the pin of his bank card. And so began his epic of reacquiring a means to withdraw money.

I began first by going to Nampula to speak with my bank to retrieve my pin. I very quickly was told that they could not retrieve it, and therefore could only block that card and issue me a new one… only one problem with this solution. I needed my official passport to commence this process. Since we had not yet received our year-long visas, our passports were still in Maputo, and we traveled with certified copies.  So I waited the allotted two and a half weeks for our passports to arrive. I then promptly returned, and got the process going after filling out endless amounts of paperwork. I didn’t know that requesting a new bank card required only slightly less paperwork than applying for to Peace Corps. But after copious repetitions of signing my life away, the forms were completed and my request finalized. The nice man I worked with told me to come back in a week, and they would have my new card. Hooray!

…Not so. I return. It has not arrived. Any friend that passed through Nampula I asked to stop by the bank just to check if it was there… three weeks. Nothing. Four weeks. Five. I lost count exactly how many weeks it would take. Peace Corps staff checked for me. Approximately a month and a half after my request, my card had still not even been made… Because my bank account was opened in Maputo, the card had to be issued in Maputo; and Maputo was out of stock on bank cards. Naturally, I had to wait a wee bit longer (note: all this time I was running on the $200 I exchanged right before arriving at site, and eventually running up a hefty tab to pay back to my roommate). After a couple more weeks, I went into Nampula, and magically the bank realized that they could actually issue my card directly from the Nampula branch. Amazing, miraculous, a veritable deus ex machina! …wait why did it take them 2 months to achieve this epiphany? The world may never know.

So after several hours of waiting around the bank, I emerged victorious, once again able to withdraw money from any atm! Three months- nearly to the day- of being a volunteer, I could access my living allowance.

But the saga does not end there. Just this past week, I needed to withdraw some money. So I went to the bank in town to use the atm. This was to be the maiden voyage of my bank card. I proudly entered my new (and remembered) pin, entered the amount, and promptly received a message from the atm saying it had captured (the atm’s words, not mine) my card…. So I entered the bank to talk with the nice folks. They told me they could not give me my card because it was from a different bank, so I needed to go to Nampula and get it sent there. Good grief, I live in Nametil. Why on earth would I want to go to Nampula to talk with my bank so that the bank in Nametil could send it there, only so I would have to go back to Nampula again to retrieve it? The logic of this country astounds me at times. But after some pleading and puppy dog eyes, I managed to convince them to return my card directly.

But the question remains: will I ever be able to use an atm in Mozambique? I certainly do not yet have the answer.