The banks here in Antigua have ATM machines, but the machines are owned by third parties. If you go into a Citibank, for example, there is no Citibank ATM machine. I needed some money even though I’d read about some problems a particular bank was having with people getting their debit card numbers and pins stolen. I purposely avoided this bank and chose Citibank first because it was familiar and second because the ATM machine is located inside the bank with 2 heavily-armed guards standing in the doorway every day. I figured it would be nearly impossible for someone to install the scanning devices (or whatever they use to capture this information) in this particular machine, so I felt safe. The next day my bank called saying someone in New York had withdrawn $500 from my account using a copied ATM card. I was very lucky that Chase caught it so quickly and returned every cent within a week. Since I have to talk to Mirna for 6 hours every day, and I figured she could help spread the word so others don’t go to the same bank, I told her the story. In response to my story, this is what she told me:
Her brother used to own a tienda selling typical artisan things, but the economy hit him hard a few years ago. He needed to sell all of his inventory and other things in the business, so he advertised a going-out-of-business sale. It wasn’t very long until he found a buyer who wanted to buy everything. Her brother had a strict “no checks allowed” policy, but in this one particular instance, the guy hypnotized her brother so he would accept his check. When he went to deposit the check, there was no money to back it up, and the guy had already taken all of his things. He lost everything, and it was all because this other guy hypnotized her poor brother into accepting a check. The moral of the story is never trust anyone, according to Mirna. It’s getting more and more difficult not to laugh when she says with all seriousness things like her brother was hypnotized. I promise you, she really believes this.
The other thing that surprised me was the lack of care shown by both the teachers and the banks themselves. We talked about this in one of our afternoon conversation activities, and the teachers basically told me not to go to any ATM machine at a bank around the central park in Antigua because they’re purposely targeting “rich” tourists. Apparently this is common. I think I’ve said before that Antigua is a very international city with a lot of Europeans and North Americans either passing through or staying a while to study Spanish. They couldn’t seem to understand my point that this really isn’t a solution. Maybe I’m too much of an idealist, but I was surprised at the ambivalence and willingness to accept a bad situation as it is. I explained that back in the States if a similar situation had occurred, the bank would begin a new PR campaign demonstrating “sincere” lament for what happened and exactly what they would be doing differently in the future to correct it. That doesn’t happen here. The government here is wrought with corruption, which in turn gives the rest of the population a license to do the same.
The other thing that is very different is that people go to the bank for almost everything financial. The lines wrap around the block, and I dread it when I have to go to change some dollars into quetzales, the local currency. People go to the bank to pay their rent, school tuition, electricity and other utilities, deposit their salary checks, pay their credit cards, and of course perform currency exchanges. Mirna is surprised when I tell her I can deposit a check by taking a picture of it with my phone. She is amazed at technology, and I am teaching her a lot. She thinks my iPhone is magical, but then again it really is. I guess I will have to get used to going to banks again to conduct transactions, which isn’t the end of the world. I think I will still be able to pay my cell phone bill over the internet…boy I hope so! We’ll have to see. Right now I’m just using pre-paid, which is a new experience too 
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