About 17 years ago, when I still lived in Querétaro, my sister came for a visit. I took some money out of my Mexican account and put it, along with my bank card, in a little card-sized wallet.
Before I realized it was truly missing a couple of days later — I was absolutely sure it was in the house somewhere — I got a call. A taxi driver had turned the card and wallet in at a Bancomer branch, and they were holding it for me.
“And the cash?” I said hopefully. I’d taken out a hefty sum of about 4,000 pesos to spend while my sister was visiting (this was back when the dollar was closer to 10 pesos than to 20).
The guy laughed.
“Oh no, of course there was no money in there,” he said. “I’m amazed even the card was returned — you should count yourself lucky!”
I went to get my card and tried not to be too sad about the lost money, which at the time represented almost a full quincena (two weeks of pay) for me. Since then, I’ve been much more attentive to my personal belongings.
Lost in a car wash
I recalled this incident last week when I went to get my driver’s license renewed where I live now in Xalapa — a very cold 3.5 hours of standing in line.
As I got closer to the bank clerk-style windows, I noticed that people were swiping their cards to pay the license fees. “Oh good!” I thought. For once, I wouldn’t have to take a sheet of paper, go to the X24 — a convenience store chain similar to OXXO — pay in cash and then return. Score!
I felt in my purse for my wallet; I then looked down and did some digging. It was not there. Oh no.
I glanced at the friendly-seeming older guy I’d been chatting with in line behind me. Could he have taken it? A quick study of his non-bulging pockets reassured me he hadn’t — my wallet is pretty big, so at least it would have been noticeable.
The next step was to call my partner, who’d dropped me off and then taken the car for a car wash before taking it for verification — Mexico’s equivalent of getting your car’s annual emissions inspection.
This was followed by a fruitless search of car verification centers that actually had the requisite sticker for the car to verify said verification — he was all over the place.
“I don’t see it,” was his first response, and my heart plummeted.
“No, wait!” He looked in the back seat and found it sitting there, having gone through a solo car wash with various workers cleaning the car’s interior.
“Oh no. Check to see if the money’s still there,” I said.
Miraculously, it was — 2,000 pesos — as were all my bank and credit cards. I kept a close eye on my bank account for any unfamiliar transactions, of which there were none.
Thank you, thank you, honest car wash workers! Heads, I win. It could have been so much worse.
A one-in-a-million miracle
Little did I know that a couple weeks before, a friend had had an even more miraculous wallet rescue.
Hers was 100% higher stakes. She took a bus from Xalapa to TAPO, one of Mexico City’s main bus terminals, and a taxi from TAPO to the Mexico City airport — the one that has more than seven passengers a year.
Once at the airport, she had a terrible realization: Her wallet, where she carried her passport as well, was no longer with her. At first, she thought she’d dropped it somewhere in the airport. With her limited Spanish, she proceeded to find every security worker along the way to ask them if they’d seen it. This took a while.
Needless to say, she missed her flight.
Later, she figured she must have left it in the taxi. But how would she get back to TAPO with no money? Luckily, she remembered that she’d stashed about US $40 in her backpack, so she exchanged it for pesos and took the Metrobus back to TAPO. Most of those hearing about her plan were not optimistic.
“Your wallet is long gone,” someone told her. “You’ll never get it back.”
“It would be a miracle,” another said. “Literally a one-in-a-million miracle if you got it back.”
“I have to try,” she kept answering.
Back at TAPO, she approached the window where she’d bought her taxi ticket. She hadn’t looked at the driver’s name, but she remembered the car color: a kind of odd creamy beige.
The dispatcher wasn’t sure which driver it was, but she called around to all the different cabs, one by one, until someone was able to tell her which driver it probably was. Success!
And guess what — one-in-a-million. The driver had the wallet! Another car — my friend never really figured out why — returned her wallet to her. And inside was everything: cash, cards, passport, IDs.
Wow, wow, wow!
During all this, she’d gotten on the phone with the airline to explain the situation.
“You’ll have to pay the difference for a flight tomorrow,” they’d told her. She was looking at a painful US $700 credit card charge.
But guess what: She got to the ticket counter in Mexico City, explained what had happened, and the agent simply printed her another ticket, no charge.
A more honest Mexico?
I tell these two anecdotes here because they’re just so freaking heartwarming. Mexico is famous for many positive things, but let’s be honest: Honesty — see what I did there? — is not one of them. For my friend and me, the honesty and integrity of two ordinary working people saved our butts.
Whether people in general are becoming more honest or the stars simply happened to align for us, I do not know.
But boy am I glad we both got to have one less gigantic problem to deal with.
Sarah DeVries is a writer and translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. She can be reached through her website, sarahedevries.substack.com.
