globalization is overrated

Multinational corporations get a lot of press, but I have found out that the world is not the gobal village you might think. We're wondering how exactly to do things like pay rent while in Cameroon, and it turns out that moving money over there is not a trivial exercise, at least for one or two individuals. Credit cards are unwelcome in that part of the world because of fraud troubles. More surprising was the discovery that you'll have a hard time finding anyone interested in cashing traveler's checks (thanks to the Bradt travel guide for Cameroon for that tip). But what seemed strangest of all was the completely blank reaction from the banks here when asked how to do this. After all, these are themselves multinational corporations.

Apparently there's a Citigroup office in Yaounde, the capital, where we'll be living. (Like, next week; wow.) So Ann made a call to Citibank today to ask about this. She ended up talking to someone friendly at a desk somewhere in south Asia, who said that her information was that the African branch offices were all in Egypt. She had no further advice. I did even worse asking the friendly people at the neighborhood branch of my bank about this. They had no idea how you get money overseas. And when I called the international desk for my bank, I ended up on someone's voicemail.

Our friends in Yaounde tell us we can use ATMs over there, for a fee of course. The exchange rate you get is supposed to be pretty good, actually; better than a currency exchange. And one of the NGOs will let us open an account with a US check, but we have to cross town to their offices to get our money. So it's not impossible. Just inconvenient and/or expensive.

You'd think this would be a solved problem by now. But maybe there's no money in it.