Money, I discovered, is naught but pretty paper unless someone will take it, but we’ll get to that in a second.
I was surprised to learn it, but the Ukrainian economy functions on American dollars. You see, many Ukrainians lost their life savings when the Soviet Union broke up thirteen years ago and the Russian banks refused to give them their money. So, Ukrainians don’t trust banks. Also, mega-inflation wiped out what little savings Ukrainians had left in 1994, when wheelbarrows of their former currency, the “coupon”, couldn’t bгy a roll of toilet paper (in fact, I’ve heard at least one story where coupons were used as toilet paper). The government has since revalued their currency and introduced the hrivna, but most people still don’t trust Ukrainian currency.
Their solution? They started buying up what, in 1994, was one of the world’s most stable currencies: the American dollar. Now, most people have their life savings in American dollars hidden somewhere in their apartments. There are currency exchanges for American dollars every two blocks in every city, even the small ones.
Just last month, during the Orange Revolution, whean people feared another economic collapse, dollar buying hit an all time high. While the dollar was plunging against every other currency in the world, it was rising against the hrivna in Ukraine, up $0.30 since November. The Ukrainian government had to buy up a ton of hrivnas just to keep the currency from collapsing.
Now, this can be good if you come to Ukraine with dollars and want to exchange them. This can be not good if you’re me and you had decided the safest place to hide your American dollars while traveling was in one of your Doc Martins. Most of the bills in my boot--and this is nasty--got sweaty, absorbed the black leather or whatever from the interior, and came out looking like somebody had brushed them with tar. I then promptly discovered that Ukrainian currency exchanges will only take pristine bills, worried that anything less might not convert back into hrivnas in the future. No one wanted to take my money.
I left the states with $160. Sixty dollars was my own, hurriedly withdrawn from a working ATM in Florida (and that took some searching in the aftermath of Hurricane Jean) before flying to D.C. for staging. In D.C., they gave me my per diem, which was $120 for three days. Since the hurricane made me miss all of staging, I only spent $20 on a nice dinner before I left D.C
In training in Ukraine, I found that our per diem was $12 a week. What you can live on for three days in our nation’s capitol was more than they gave us for a month in Ukraine, and I never felt like I didn’t have enough money..
Now that I am a volunteer, my living allowance is $179 a month, which is still more than three times the national average. That means I am living comfortably, well fed, in an apartment, traveling and well entertained in Ukraine on $2,148 a year. I could easily save twice that much in a year of teaching in Oklahoma, and always did, spending it on travel during my breaks and hi-tech goodies. But here’s the fun thought: I could save $3,000 in a year of working in the states, and then go to Ukraine (or any other country like it) and live comfortably for a year without working. I may do that in the future, for six months or so, in a warmer country, and write a novel or something.
Anyway, here I was in Ukraine, with nearly 650 hrivnas worth of American dollars that turned out to be nothing but expensive paper. My host brother suggested the black market, but Peace Corps has told us so many times not to use it that it wasn’t worth the risk. Over the course of three months, mostly by looking pathetic and visiting dozens of different exchange booths, I was able to exchange all but $60. Each exchange booth usually would take one $20 bill, almost certainly out of pity, and hand the rest back. That money bought my mobile phone and my family their Christmas gifts.
Three different exchange booths rejected the last three bills, the bills that had been on the outside of the stack and looked the worst. Ironically, $60 was the original amount I left Florida with, and after three months in Ukraine I still hadn’t spent a dime of my own money. I finally resigned myself to taking that $60 back to the states, and seeing if anyone would even accept them as legal tender there.
Then another volunteer clued me in that Peace Corps would exchange rough-looking money for pristine bills for us as a courtesy. I went to the Peace Corps cashier in Kiev yesterday, and even though she raised her eyebrows at them, she gave me three brand new $20 bills. A Ukrainian currency exchange took them, and I no longer have an American dollar to my name.