Payday with No Pay!

...is a pisser!!

At the American School Foundation of Chiapas, we get paid twice a month...when there's money. Apparently, it's a little more common than expected in Mexico to show up on payday and find there's no pay.

For the foreign staff it's often not a big deal, as many of us are able to put aside money for savings, travel and student loans. But for the Mexican staff, it's a huge problem, as it would be for me if it was to happen in the States where my place of employment is not paying my rent.

We were NOT promised to have the funds on Monday and were told that this did happen several times at the beginning of last year, but we're staying positive and hoping it only occurs while the ingeniero (engineer in Spanish, but it signifies the owner of the school) is figuring out how to properly manage his various businesses (I don't know why he has to figure this out each year, but to insist on gringo logic is to frustrate oneself).

I haven't actually cashed my last paycheck from two weeks ago; I'm waiting to get my FM3 work permit from the government, so I can open a bank account and deposit the check. I'm hoping when that day comes, there'll be money in Banorte, the local bank in which the owner of our school occasionally has money.

Two weeks ago, we went to a local Banorte and Jen, a co-worker, was told that there was no money in the bank - No hay dinero aqui. Yes the bank, whose main purpose is to hold and distribute money, had no funds ! We were directed to another Banorte bank in town. I had never heard of a bank not having money, but there's a first thing for everything - especially in the international world.

Many of the things we take for granted in the States, I find are not "norms" elsewhere and logic can be a foreign concept across many borders.