Small Change Game

Benin suffers from a chronic small change problem.  Everyone hoards it, which means that when I go to the bank to get money out and they refuse to give me nothing but big bills, I have to strategically break my large bills into smaller ones to buy the things that I need.  This is much easier in a large city such as mine, but for volunteers living in small villages, breaking a bill is all but impossible.  Some volunteers can be fine eating out on less than 50 cents per day; we make all of our own food because prices are considerably steeper in our town.

We have developed strategies for breaking bills, and last week I won.  I broke 3 five mille (5,000 cfa or about $10) bills in the same day.  The best place to break a bill is to find someone selling phone credit, because they always have tons of bills on hand.  Instead, I was downtown so just bought a bunch of vegetables from our regular vegetable maman and she never has a problem breaking bills.  Then I went to a boutique and made a small purchase, then bought oatmeal inside the market.  Basically, if we want to break bills, we have to buy in bulk or purchase Yovo items (which cost more).  If that all fails, we can always give a big bill to our maman at the end of our street and whittle it down as credit as we get our essentials there.