Two Percent, Not Nine

Every month for nine years I have walked into the same newsagent on Parnell Street, filled in the same yellow form, and handed over four hundred euro plus a fee that has never once been less than thirty-six. Nine percent. Nine percent of a night shift, gone, every month, to move money from a nurse in Dublin to her mother in Cebu. You accept it. Everyone I know accepts it. It's the cost of being far away. My cousin Jerome did not accept it. Jerome is twenty-nine and works in a call centre in Makati and has a phone that costs more than his rent, and last Christmas, on the video call, he watched me describe the yellow form and started laughing. "Ate, no. No. Let me show you." What he showed me took three weeks and I nearly gave up twice. The idea was this. I buy a stablecoin here, a token that's meant to be worth a dollar and mostly is. I send it to Jerome's wallet. He sells it there for pesos on an app that half of Manila apparently uses, and he hands the pesos to my mother, or sends them to her mobile wallet, which she has, because she's seventy and in the Philippines and that's more normal there than it is here. "Two percent," Jerome said. "Maybe less. And it's there in ten minutes, not two days." The first week I couldn't get verified on the exchange. They wanted a photo of my passport and a photo of me holding my passport and a photo of a utility bill and the bill was in my flatmate's name. The second week I got verified and bought fifty euro worth, as a test, and stared at the screen where it asked me for Jerome's address, a string of letters and numbers longer than a sentence, and I thought about what happens if one of the letters is wrong, and I closed the laptop. I did it on a Sunday night with Jerome on the video call watching me type. I copied and pasted. I checked the first four characters and the last four the way he told me. I pressed send. Fifty euro left my screen and I felt a bit sick.

"Got it," Jerome said. Eight minutes. He sold it. He sent my mother 3,100 pesos to her mobile. On the video call I watched her phone buzz on the kitchen table in a house I hadn't been in for two years, and she picked it up and squinted at it and said, "What is this?" "It's from me, Ma." "From you? Now?" "Now." She looked at the phone. Then at the camera. Then at the phone. "How much did it cost you?" "About a euro." Ma has been a market trader her whole life. She understands margins the way I understand a drug chart. She put the phone down very carefully and said, "Nine years." "I know." "Nine years of that woman at the counter taking thirty-six euro." "I know, Ma." So now I do it every month. The four hundred goes over for about eight euro all in, and it's there before I've finished my tea. I've got a spreadsheet. Since March I've saved the price of a flight. Jerome takes nothing, though I've tried; he says the pesos come out on his side anyway and it's no trouble, and I believe him, and I've also sent him a very nice jacket. I'm not going to tell you it's simple. It isn't. There's a wallet I have to not lose, and a phrase I've written on paper in two places, and a small permanent worry that the dollar-thing will stop being worth a dollar some Tuesday when I'm not looking. Twice the exchange has frozen for "maintenance" on the day I wanted to send, and both times I stood in my kitchen and felt far from home. And there's the other thing, the thing I didn't expect. Two of the girls on my ward are from Kerala, and one is from Nigeria, and they saw me doing it in the break room and now I'm the one on the video call watching them type an address for the first time, telling them to check the first four and the last four. "You're grand," I say. "It'll be there in ten minutes." I don't know if this stuff is the future. I've read the arguments both ways and I'm a nurse, not an economist. I know my mother gets thirty euro a month more than she did. I know what thirty euro is in Cebu. That's the whole of what I know, and it's enough to keep me off the yellow form.