Living in a different country requires you to adjust to differences that you are not accustomed to. One of those differences is money. It took some time to get used to the various denominations and coins when we were in France and the demand of the various stores for always wanting exact change. Now we are living in a cash only society, I’m sure Dave Ramsey would love that, and the denominations of the paper money is 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 and 10000. They also have various coins with the largest coin being equal to the smallest bill of 500. Also, the different paper bills are different sizes and each bill is a different color.

We were felling pretty comfortable with the Cameroonian money.  DeAnna was paying for a Taxi the other day and handed the driver a 1000cfa bill and he said, “This is no good!”  The money looked good to us, just like any other 1000cfa bill. So she paid with a different bill. When she got home we examined it and we did see there was a slight difference with a metallic strip missing from the bill and it was slightly smaller than a normal 1000cfa bill. I also took the bill into the finance department and they have a special light to verify the validity of money and I was able to see the difference, I also understood why most taxis have black lights in their cars, since normal money does not reflect the black light but the counterfeit money glows under the black lights.

This lesson on counterfeit money cost us 1000cfa ($2US). My Cameroonian coworker recommended that I take the money back to the store that gave us the money and demand he replace it. I didn’t think it was worth the $2 also he has really good flour, we will just watch our change very closely at his store.