Chapter 3. Snippet. Trials Elsewhere.

Fortunately, I was the kind of guy to carry traveller’s cheques and stick to a budget. Nevertheless, it gave me pause when I considered these were my financial reserves, my backup plan, and I was dipping into them less than a week after arriving. Retrieving them from my room, I returned to the bank, passed a new crowd of disgruntled tourists, and presented myself to the counter with $600 in U.S. traveller’s cheques. Six-hundred dollars translated into about 17,000 dalasis. They paid me in hundreds and fifties — mostly fifties. The counting machine was broken, so two tellers counted it out by hand, binding each stack of a thousand. I watched the two bored women work with a sense of shocked fascination. They weren’t really going to hand me a huge grocery bag of cash, were they? Twenty minutes later, 17 bricks of wrinkled notes arranged in six stacks — each almost larger than one of my hands — were slapped down on the counter. I felt like I was on a TV show, some kind of Vegas high-roller crime drama; all I needed was a briefcase to slap the bundles into. I picked one up, studying it like some new, exotic artefact. “Uh, do you have a bag?” They didn’t. My hands couldn’t manage it all, so I pulled the bundles off the counter and hugged them against my chest. As I was leaving, an Englishman sitting near the door pulled himself out of his chair and made his way toward the counter. We didn’t make eye contact, but as we passed he said, 'Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.'

Trials Elsewhere: Stories of life and Development in West Africa