In Places Where Banks Don't Exist, the Mobile Phone Breaks New Ground

As a schoolgirl in Manila, Vilma Fetesio would stand at the dock each month with her brother and other children, waiting for boatmen to bring them money from their parents on other islands. Sometimes, in rough weather, the boats didn’t come.

“We waited at the port the whole afternoon, at times the whole day,” said Fetesio, now 42 and a teacher back on her native Culion island. “During the typhoon season when no boats sailed, some of us would go hungry.”