Patience is a Virtue

Patience may be a virtue, but not one of mine, I’ve always said. Today, the realities of international banking made our heads spin. And while it might be a truism that bureaucracies exist to protect themselves, that doesn’t make it any more fun to experience them first hand. The struggle has been to get our money out of the States and into Morocco so we can buy Dar Noury.

Morocco has two kinds of back accounts: regular dihram accounts (available to locals, and good only for holding dihrams within the country) and convertible dihram accounts which foreigners can open and which can be used to wire money into and out of the country. A few weeks ago we opened an account with Hamoud’s help. That was the easy part. The hard part has been getting money into the account. The only way to put money into a convertible account is by wire transfer, so we’re not allowed to withdraw cash at an ATM and then make a token deposit in dihrams.
The trouble is, our American financial institutions want us to come into the office and sign a few forms to execute the wire transfer. I tried telling them that I just can’t pop over to the branch on Fairfax at the moment, but they weren’t convinced.
We don’t have any experience with international wire transfers prior to 9/11, but considering how easy all electronic banking is in the States at the moment, we can’t help but think that somebody in the Bush administration is worried that we’re trying to transfer our money to Al-Quaeda.

The local bankers are pretty hostile in return. Omar, the English-speaking banker at BMCE, told us he knows that American banks all think, “oh, an African Bank, they don’t know what they’re doing.” But he handles billions of dollars of transfers each year with European and American banks and businesses. Unfortunately, since BMCE does not have a Medallion Signature Guarantee stamp, a specific stamp required by our bank to send funds to his bank, we thought we’d open an account elsewhere. A quick tour of other banks in the Medina found that none of them had such a thing, and a call to the US Consulate in Casablanca confirmed that the stamp does not exist in Morocco.



The Consulate, however, wants to help and offers to stamp any form we might have. So, by 10 a.m., we’re off with Hamoud in a rental car for the three-hour drive to Casablanca to visit the Consulate. As we enter through glass doors four inches thick, we can’t help but remember that Casablanca was the target of Al-Quaeda bombings just three years ago, and one of those targets was the Spanish Consulate around the corner.

We get the fanciest embossed stamp possible from the Consul of the United States of America. We fax it to our bank and then call to see if it’s acceptable. While I’m on hold with the bank, Hamoud goes out, scours the neighborhood, finds a mosque for his afternoon prayer, and returns before I’ve gotten through to a live operator. When I get someone on the line, they tell me they’ll happily accept the Consul’s stamp, but only to wire funds to a U.S. bank. Did I hear that right, I ask. Yes: they now refuse to wire funds to any foreign bank, something they’d agreed to for the past three days.




By 5 PM, and feeling defeated, we pile in the car for the long drive home, where I smash my head against the windshield in frustration. We didn’t see any of Casablanca, but we’d love to return. Our lunch at a café was blessed with cool breezes that felt 30 degrees cooler than Marrakech. Casablanca is the butt of so many jokes that we feel a bit sorry for it; surely it can’t be that bad. We tend to think that it might be like Los Angeles, which maintains its reputation as a city of airheads despite having more Nobel laureates than any other city in the world.


Anyway, tomorrow is a new day, and with it the challenge of finding a creative way to get money into Morocco.