The Biscuit Tin Of Cash Under My Desk, And The Night I Drove Home With It On My Lap

What I thought the job was

When I opened the aftercare, I thought the job was children.

I thought it was homework and cheese sandwiches and breaking up an argument about a soccer ball and phoning a mother to say your son has a temperature. I thought it was learning which child needs to be spoken to loudly and which child will fold in half if you raise your voice at all. I was a teacher for eleven years before this, so I knew that job, and I was good at it, and I loved it.

The job turned out to be money.

Not big money. That is the thing that would surprise people. Nobody gets rich running an aftercare in Vereeniging for thirty two children. I am talking about small money, arriving in small amounts, from thirty two different directions, on thirty two different unpredictable days of the month, in cash, in envelopes, in the pockets of eight year olds.

The tin

It was an old Bakers biscuit tin, the round kind with a picture of a Christmas scene on the lid that had mostly rubbed off. It had belonged to my mother and it had held her buttons and now it held about six thousand rand at the busy end of the month.

It lived under my desk, at the back, behind a box of paper.

I would like to tell you I had a system. I had a book, which is not a system, it is a book. A hardcover exercise book with a column for names and a column for the date and a column for the amount, and a column at the end where I wrote things like "will bring rest Fri" and "R200 short, spoke to mum".

The children brought the money. That is the part I have trouble explaining to people who did not grow up here. A parent would send a child to school in the morning with the fee folded in a piece of paper in a school shoe or a pencil case, and that child would go through a whole day of school and then walk to my gate, and hand me a warm, creased envelope, and I would sign a slip, and the child would go and play.

Anything can happen to money in a day. I have had a child lose it. I have had a child buy chips with it and cry about it. I have had a child give it to his older brother to hold and the older brother is fifteen and I do not want to say what happened to it.

And each time, a parent who was already stretched had to find that money twice.

Friday afternoons

The cash had to get to the bank, and the bank was a fifteen minute drive, and I could only go once the last child was fetched, which some Fridays was half past five and once was quarter to seven because a mother's taxi broke down on the R59.

So there I would be, on a Friday evening, a woman on her own, driving through a town where everybody knows what a Friday evening is, with a biscuit tin on the passenger seat, or, if I was being clever, with the money in a shoe under a jersey in the footwell, which is not clever at all, it is theatre.

I never got robbed. I want to say that clearly because I do not want anybody thinking this is a story with a mugging in it. Nothing happened to me.

But I want to describe what it did to me anyway, because that is the part people miss. For four years I carried a low, constant hum of fear about a tin. I checked my rear view mirror at robots for reasons that had nothing to do with driving. I did not stop for petrol on those evenings. I asked my husband to stand in the driveway when I came home. Once, when a car sat behind me for three turns, I drove past my own house and went around the block, and then I sat in my own driveway for ten minutes with the engine off, telling myself I was being ridiculous, and my heart was going like a bird in a box.

You do not get that back. Those four years of Friday evenings are just gone.

Why I did not fix it sooner

People always ask this, and they ask it with a slightly impatient face, and I understand, because from the outside the answer is obvious. Take EFTs. Send them a bank account number. Done.

Here is why that did not work, and I need to say it properly, because I think it is the single most misunderstood thing about running a small business in this country.

About a third of my parents did pay by EFT, and those were the easiest and also, strangely, the messiest. They paid with references like "school" or "payment" or, my favourite, their own surname, which is only useful if you happen to be the only Mokoena I have ever met, and I have met a lot of Mokoenas. I once spent an entire Sunday reconciling a bank statement to my exercise book with a ruler, trying to work out which of two identical R650 deposits belonged to which child, and I got it wrong, and I chased a woman for money she had already paid, and I have never been so ashamed of anything in my working life.

Another third had accounts but hated data costs, or shared a phone, or did their banking at a branch and were not going to make a special trip.

And the last third did not have the kind of banking relationship where an EFT is a casual thing you do from the couch. They had cash. They were paid in cash. Their whole economy was cash. To tell those mothers "just do an EFT" is to tell them, politely, that their money is the wrong shape and they should go and change it before they are allowed to buy something from me.

I was not going to do that. Half my families were doing something remarkable just to keep a child in aftercare at all.

The woman at the till

The way out came from a completely ordinary Saturday.

I was standing in a queue at a supermarket in the Vaal, buying nothing exciting, and the woman in front of me put her groceries down and then paid her electricity, her DStv and something else at the same till, off a printed slip with a barcode on it, and got a printed receipt for each one.

I stood there like an idiot with a basket on my arm.

She was doing, in ninety seconds, at a till she was standing at anyway, the exact thing that was costing my parents a special trip, a lost envelope, and me a Friday night of fear.

I asked her about it, right there. She was very kind about being asked a strange question by a stranger. She said, "Everything I pay, I pay here. Why must I go somewhere else?"

What I did about it

It took me about six months to sort out, mostly because I did not know what I was looking for or what to call it. I did not have the words. I kept describing what I wanted to people and they kept telling me about card machines, which was not the problem. A card machine is for a person standing in front of you. My problem was a person who is not standing in front of me and who has cash and who is going to Shoprite anyway.

What I eventually learned is that this is a whole category, and that the thing I wanted was to become a biller. To have my aftercare's fees be something a parent could settle at a till point, in cash, with a reference that was actually the child's reference, and to have that land in my account with the child's name attached to it instead of the word "payment".

When I finally sat down with a payment solutions provider and explained what I actually needed, which was not a machine but a way for a mother with cash and no data to pay a small school in a way that both of us could see, I remember the relief of being understood on the first try. I had spent months feeling like the stupidest woman in the Vaal for not being able to explain my own problem.

What changed, and what did not

The tin went. That is the headline.

There is no cash under my desk now and there is no Friday drive, and my husband no longer stands in the driveway, and I no longer take a long way home. That is worth more to me than every other efficiency I could list, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The reconciliation changed too. My exercise book still exists, because I am not going to stop being who I am at fifty seven, but it is now a record of what I already know rather than my only defence against chaos. The names come through with the money. Two identical amounts on the same day are no longer a mystery I have to solve on a Sunday with a ruler.

What did not change is the parents. That is the part I feel most strongly about. I did not force anybody to modernise. The mother who pays in cash still pays in cash. She just pays it at a till she was standing at anyway, on a Saturday morning, with her groceries, instead of folding it into her son's shoe and hoping. She did not have to get a smartphone or a data bundle or an app or a bank she does not trust. She kept her cash and I got my reference number, and everybody was allowed to stay who they are.

That is what nobody told me about payment solutions when I started out, and it is the only thing I really want to say. I thought the choice was between being modern and being kind. It was not. It was between a system that only worked for people who already had everything, and one that also worked for the mother who catches two taxis.

The last thing

There was a boy at the centre, one of my originals, who is at university now, and who came to see me last year in the way that young men do, awkwardly, standing too tall in my doorway.

He said he remembered bringing the money. He said his mother used to put it in a Checkers packet, folded very small, and put it in his lunchbox under the sandwich, and tell him not to open the lunchbox until he was inside my gate.

I did not know that. Ten years I knew that boy and I did not know that his mother had built a whole ritual around getting me my four hundred rand.

He said it like it was funny, and we laughed. And then I went and sat in my office, where there is no tin under the desk anymore, and I thought about how much of other people's lives is going on quietly underneath the small transactions we treat as nothing.

I am not the right person to explain what a payment provider does at a technical level. I never learned it properly and I do not need to. What I know is what it did in my life, which is that it took a sandwich box, and a shoe, and a biscuit tin, and a fifteen minute drive in the dark, and it made all of them unnecessary.

That is not a small thing. It only sounds small when it is somebody else's Friday night.