First, a primer on the currency used in Mali: the CFA Franc. The exchange rate is about 450 CFA to the US dollar. It comes in denominations of 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, 250, 500 CFA coins, and 1000, 2000, 5000 and 10000 CFA bills.
I have been able to live comfortably here on a Peace Corps salary, which isn't much compared to home. The cost of living is much cheaper, especially for food. For example, the baguette I buy in the morning for breakfast costs 100 CFA, or about 20 US cents. Sometimes I will buy a brochette, which is a meat sandwich with tomatoes, onions and a delicious sauce, as a mid-morning snack. It costs 250 CFA, or 50 cents. There are street food vendors at dinnertime, selling things like beans, macaroni, salad and meat. You say how much you want of each item, like 200 CFA of macaroni, 200 CFA of meat and 100 CFA of salad (or, in Bambara, "macaroni bi naani, ni sogo bi naani, ni salati mugan"... more on this later). This is plenty of food for me for dinner, and it adds up to a little more than 1 US dollar.
Before I have money to spend, I have to get it out of the bank. Some Peace Corps Volunteers in small villages have to travel to their banking town to get money. But there is conveniently a bank branch in Kenieba, about half a mile from my house. Though the bank is so close to my house, withdrawing money is a chore. First I have to see the bank manager in his office and show him my bank card (a piece of paper with my name and account number) and Peace Corps ID. He then tells me my account balance and asks how much I would like to take out. Then he writes out a check which I have to sign in three places, and hands it to the cashier. After a few minutes, the cashier calls my name and I go to retrieve my money. This is where the fun begins.
I have learned to withdraw an amount like 84,000 CFA. The cashier hands me five 10000 CFA and six 5000 CFA bills, and two 2000 CFA bills. It is impossible to pay for things with these huge bills, so I ask for more smaller bills. He says he can’t give me any more. I get into a little argument, explaining that it is impossible to use 10000 and 5000 bills in the market, nobody has change for them! Sometimes he will reluctantly give me more 2000 CFA bills, but more often than not, I am stuck with a bunch of 10000 CFA and 5000 CFA bills.
When it comes to buying food in the market, from the street food vendors, and other small items at the little butiki shops, there is no way they will take those big bills! There are few shops in town that can make change for a 5000 CFA bill, but you have to buy at least 1000 CFA worth of stuff. The market sellers rarely have change, even if you want something that costs 100 CFA and you have a 500 CFA coin. So you have to come armed with small coins or buy 500 CFA worth of goods.
Even a modern supermarket (just like a supermarket in France or the US) in Bamako doesn’t always have change… one time the cashier wanted to give me some little candies instead of the 50 CFA I was owed in change!
I have some big expenses each month (like paying rent) and can use some of the big bills, but sometimes I end up buying things I don’t really need just to get change that I can use. Oddly enough, it turns out that a reliable place to get change for big bills is at the bars in town. A bottle of beer costs a whopping 500 CFA (yep, one dollar), so they usually have change for the big bills. Go figure!
So it’s a big adventure trying to get small denominations of CFA. It is almost like the smaller denomination coins are worth more than the big bills, just because you can buy so much more with them!
Also, forget about using a credit card outside of the big hotels and tourist traps in the big cities like Kayes and Bamako. All transactions are cash only. When Matt tried to pay for our USB modems at the Orange store in Kayes with a credit card, they couldn't accept it. Orange is one of the major cell phone companies here in Mali, and we bought them in a western-style office, complete with computers at every desk. But nope, we had to pay in cash. Imagine paying for a big expense, like a motorcycle, with a huge wad of cash! But that’s the norm here.
Beyond this whole change issue, they use a weird number system when naming the price of a product. For example, when I ask how much a kilogram of potatoes costs, the seller will say “kemé”. Kemé means 100 in Bambara. The actual price is 500 CFA. So you have to multiply the number they tell you by 5 to get the price of the product. But that’s an easy one… I bought some Obama fabric the other day for 1350 CFA, or “kemé fila ni bi wolonfila”, which translated literally means 270. This makes for some very confusing market shopping. It is hard enough trying to figure out how much something costs, then trying to bargain for a better price! At this point, I’ve started to call the different denominations by their Malian names instead of how much they are actually worth. For example, a 1000 CFA bill is a kemé fila. Kemé fila literally means, (doing the math?), 200. So it’s getting easier to skip all the conversions and translations in my head when I'm buying things.
As much as I have complained about the money, it is nice to use a currency that is fixed to the euro and guaranteed by the French treasury (according to the Rough Guide). So it is not subject to high inflation like other African currencies, namely Zimbabwe’s two hundred million percent inflation. And at the current exchange rate, more than $1.50 for 1 euro the last time I checked, it is nice getting paid in CFA! Another good thing about this currency is that it is used in most francophone West African countries, including neighboring Senegal and Burkina Faso, two countries that I would like to visit on vacation someday. It’s like using the euro around Europe!
