Coin Fairy

Once upon a time, a fairy with a seemingly endless supply of coins came to town…

For several years I have been involved in raising money for Operation Smile Thailand, an incredible organisation that raises money to provide free surgery to people with cleft lips and palates.  The doctors and nurses who perform the surgeries do so for free, but the cost of supplies, facilities, and medication still have to be paid for.  Operation Smile raises money to pay for these costs and then to organise the very complicated logistics of getting doctors together with patients.  The surgery is not a particularly complicated one as proven by the fact that most of us never see people who have a cleft lip or palate.  Only children born to very poor parents leave the hospital without it being corrected.

Several years ago, we came up with a truly simple but effective fundraiser in which students competed by class to earn the most 'points'.  Each teacher was given a jar; coins added to the jar were 'positive' numbers and bills 'negative' numbers.  If one of my students put two ten baht coins in my jar, we gained twenty points.  If a student from a competing class dropped a twenty baht bill in my jar, however, we lost twenty points and ended up back at zero.

The fundraiser usually ran for about a week and raised a lot of money.  At the end, we had students count coins by denomination and put them in ziplock bags of 100 coins.  Bills were counted as well.  The winning class - the one with the most points and not the most money - won a free lunch.

There was only one wrinkle in the plan - no one wants coins.  Our cashier's office, which usually handles and deposits all money raised - made it extremely difficult to deposit large amounts of coins.  They didn't do so out of spite but because banks simply do not want coins.  To discourage deposits of large amounts of money in coins, the banks charge a lot of money to handle the coins.  On top of that, the cashier's office asked that we sort and count the coins before handing them over to them (no problem) but then insisted on counting all the coins again while I was there.

When you're talking about thousands of coins, that is a lot of time from a teacher's day standing around waiting while coins are counted.  The times that I did do it usually resulted in most of my prep time spent counting and recounting piles of coins.  Oy.

Luckily the parents of a woman who works at our school own a pharmacy and frequently need coins to make change.  Several years ago, she and I made an arrangement in which I would make sure the coins were counted and sorted and she would buy them.  [No second count was necessary.]  I would then take the bank notes and simply deposit them with the cashier.  It was easier, and she was happy to get the coins.

The only problem?  She couldn't handle the volume of coins that came in, especially the one and two baht coins.  I ended up with a backlog of coins every year that I would tally and deposit cash for (bank notes) with the cashier's office.  I probably could have cleared the backlog by putting a little more time and effort into it, but somehow teaching full time got in the way of my banking duties.  Who knew?

Anyway, this year being my last at my school, I realised I really did have to get rid of all those coins.  When I went through my closets and cupboards at school, however, I knew that this was going to be a bit complicated; there were a lot of coins.  I worked hard get rid of them through the cashier and the woman with the pharmacy.  In addition, I started carrying bags of  5 and 10 baht coins with me wherever I went, paying for everything I could think of with coins.  I probably started tipping quite a bit more too, albeit using coins to make the difference.  Even after redoubling my efforts, in the end I probably had about 30 kilograms of coins to get rid of.

Again, I had already tallied the value of the coins and made out-of-pocket equivalent deposits in the Operation Smile account.  I decided that I would just consider these donations from me and started figuring out how to get rid of the coins.  This was easier said than done.  Thirty kilos of coins is a lot of coins.

By May, I realised that I would have to change tactics.  The value of the coins had already been donated, but my ideal was to donate the coins themselves.  The only thing stopping me was the practicality of getting rid of so many coins.  I could never carry them all in one go and didn't want to ask a friend to help me transport them.  Plus, I wasn't sure where I would transport them anyway.  The first thing to consider was the satang.

those darn satang

Satang are the 'cents' of Thailand.  Simply making them is a money losing venture for the Thai mint.  When 32 baht is more or less a dollar, one baht is about 3 cents.  That makes one satang 1/100th of 3 cents.  Only big stores like grocery stores give satang, and nobody wants them.  Banks have no interest in them, and stores won't receive them.  The only place I could think of that would be happy to take them was a wat, so I went through all the coins, separated out all the satang that weren't already bagged, and put them in a big shopping bag.  

Total weight?  About 6 kilos.

My wife and I had a day trip planned to visit a small river side neighbourhood that included a market, a good restaurant, and a really nice wat that had recently been restored.  We went in the late afternoon, me carrying a green bag full of satang.  We walked through the market to the temple.  I took off my shoes, entered the main part of the temple (which was empty), and went directly to the donation boxes.  My first thought was to dump all the coins out into the boxes, but I realised after the clanging of coins began that this was going to take a long time.  Plus, it was likely to attract attention since it sounded something like a slot machine payout at a Vegas casino.  I put the 6 ziplock bags full of coins on top of the box, quickly retreated to the centre of the floor in front of the very large Buddha, bowed a few times and exited.

For some reason I felt like I had to sneak out and breathed a huge sigh of relief that I had not been 'caught'.  As I was putting my shoes back on, a middle-aged couple arrived, and I urged my wife to hurry out of the wat grounds.

The question now was what to do with the remaining 24 kilos of coins.  A bunch of scenarios ran through my head.  Here are a few...

• Giving bags of coins to people on the street: Bangkok does not have a lot of people asking for change on the street, but there are some.  I thought about dropping off bags of coins but had read too many stories about how the people asking were often victims of human traffickers. Giving them money was essentially giving money to traffickers and, at the same time, encouraging trafficking.   OUT
• Cleaning staff: I figured people who work as cleaners were as deserving as anyone of an extra 100-300 baht.  It might not sound like a lot, but the minimum wage in Thailand is 300 baht per day (about USD 10).  An extra hundred baht (one of the smaller bags I had at that point) would be a 'bonus' of about 33%.  One of the bigger bags would be equivalent to more than a day's wage.  The problem was giving the money.  I didn't want to put someone in the position of having to say thank you to some stranger who just happened to have mountains of change lying around.  I also didn't want someone to be insulted.  OUT
• Public bathrooms: This seemed like the perfect solution to my problem.  I could give the money anonymously with no thanks necessary to a target audience that I felt was deserving (people who worked as cleaning staff).  I attempted to do this three times, approaching a urinal and reaching into my messenger bag to pull out coins.  Each time I did so, someone walked into the bathroom.  It's hard to explain to someone that you are leaving a bag of coins for the woman who cleans the bathroom (and I don't mean because of a language barrier).  I felt like I was committing some kind of lewd act, so each time I discreetly put the coins away and left. OUT

I was now at a loss - twenty-four kilos of coins, a few hundred dollars worth, but no outlet for them. I talked about it with my wife but we came up with nothing.  A couple of days later, they erected a giant scaffolding around our apartment building to begin repainting the exterior.  They also drained the pool.  They had begun the summer repair/upgrade projects.  Aside from us, there was only one other family still in the building as all the other teachers had already left for their summer holidays.  The only people around were going to be the security guards, the groundskeepers, and the special workers doing the different projects.

I had my plan.

Two days later on our way out to get lunch, my wife and I dropped a 300 baht bag of coins off by the pile of broken tiles the workers had pulled off the bottom of the freshly drained pool.  I scurried away without looking back, but when we returned later that day, the coins were gone.  Success!

That night, I went out for a walk, bent down to tie my shoes, and tossed a bag of coins into the corner where they kept all the paint cans.  Next morning?  Gone.

For the next two nights, I went down to the empty pool a dropped bags of coins into the bottom.  Each day, the coins disappeared.  

At that point, a couple of new conditions began to emerge.  I wanted to spread the wealth and make sure as many people as possible got coins, and I wanted to come up with a different place to leave the coins each time.  I began to shed bags of coins at every opportunity.

Over the next days and nights - up until our last day in the building - bags of 100-400 baht magically appeared:

• in the garbage room after a mad dash on my bicycle to beat the garbage truck pulling up the drive;
• on the paths and sidewalks at night;
• by the pile of raked leaves and trimmings;
• on the scaffolding where the painters would be working the next day;
• and, in the bushes.     

For the most part, my scheming went as planned.  Once, however, I had a minor freakout when the previous night's deposit was not discovered.  I had left a 250 baht bag in the centre of the steps leading up the elevator.  It was in plain view of anyone who walked by.  I was sure that one of the security guards would find it when he did his rounds at night, but when I woke up and went to take the recycling out, the coins were still there.

I panicked.  Should I pick up the coins?  Should I walk right past them?  If I walked past them and someone saw me, would they realise that I was the one leaving the coins?  If I picked them up, would I look like I was 'finding' and keeping something that did not belong to me.  I ran back up to tell my wife, but she said not to worry about it - someone would find them.  I was at a loss, so I agreed.  Sure enough, when we went out later that day, the bag was gone.

The only other glitch was with the very last bag, a large bag I had left in some bushes.  I left it at night and was sure no one saw me, but the next morning, two women knocked on the door.  When I opened it, there they were with the bag asking me if I had lost a some money coins in the bushes.  One of them had what I was sure was a little sly smile on her face.  I assured her that they were not my coins and that she should just consider herself lucky, but I am pretty sure my cover was blown.

That was our very last day in the apartment and nearly our last day in Thailand.  I had shed about 30 kilos of coins in the last few weeks and felt pretty good about how things had gone.  The coins donated had essentially served double duty with equivalent amounts going to Operation Smile and to people who were not exactly poor but who were definitely not rich either.

If my cover was blown, that's okay, but I prefer to think that people will talk about the 'Coin Fairy' who, once, long ago, used to leave bags of money for good people everywhere.  When I think about it, this was one more small step in leaving Thailand.