The savings club in our alley

Every month, on the evening of the fifth, ten women meet in Mrs Hoa's front room in a small alley in Saigon. They drink tea, eat sunflower seeds and talk about everything under the sun. After that, each of them puts two million dong into an old biscuit tin. This is their hui, a kind of savings club that has existed in Vietnam for generations.

The idea is simple. Each month, one member takes home the whole tin, which holds twenty million dong. The next month, it is someone else's turn. After ten months, everyone has received the money once, and the club starts again. Put simply, it is a way to borrow from friends, not from a bank, without paying any interest.

Why do people still use hui when there are banks on every corner? For one thing, it is fast. Whenever a member needs money for her son's university fees, she can ask to take the tin early. There are no forms to fill in, and nobody checks her salary. For another, it is built on trust. These women have known each other for twenty years, and nobody wants to lose face in front of her neighbours.

On the other hand, hui can go wrong. Sometimes the person who runs the club vanishes into thin air with everyone's money, and a story like this appears in the newspapers every few years. Due to this risk, Mrs Hoa only invites people she knows well, and she keeps a careful record of every payment in a small notebook.

Mrs Hoa's daughter, who works in a bank, thinks the club is old-fashioned. Despite this, she joined it last year. "The money is not the point," she says. "It's the only evening when the whole street sits down together and talks. You can't get that from an app."