Welcome home! Are you back in the Bay Area now? Sounds like you had a great opportunity in Cameroon.
See if your local paper has a consumer complaints person, and maybe they can help. I know the Mercury News has one, and they’re really good at getting this type of stuff taken care of. No business wants that bad press they can get over something they can fix pretty easily.
I had to get my taxes fixed with Revenue Canada a few years ago (our version of the IRS) - it took about six months, many phone calls, and many layers of bureaucracy, but I finally reached a person who could fix things for me (they were implementing a new tax program, and for some reason my tax return got stuck in the system). If I can get Revenue Canada to fix my tax return, you can get a bank to return your fees charged in error. It will just take time, patience, and dogged persistence. Oh, document everything - write down the name of every person you talk to and when you talked to them and what they said. Bank clerks are notorious for, “Who told you that? No one would ever tell you that.”
They seem to think straight form letters are the answer to my problem. Since I’ve had no response, I’ve stepped up to wanting the account fees reversed.
Are you back in the country? Can you walk into a local branch?
That sounds laughably exorbitant—which is to say, perfectly in line with what I have come to expect from major banks.
I can appreciate the bitterness that must develop on your end, which is an unavoidable consequence of working in any service industry. But if you’re curious why people hate dealing with banks, this, and the “blame the victim” theme implied in your comments, are two prime reasons why.
Now please close my account; I will be taking my $17.24 elsewhere.
I love my credit union.
Eat it, big-ass [del]fee-generators[/del] banks! 
I’ve never been a BofA customer, and never will, thanks to a situation I was party to several years ago.
My BIL had a BofA account. We wrote him a check (I forget what it was for). Several weeks later, he called us, saying our check had bounced and had set off a string of bounced checks for him. WTF? Not that we’ve never bounced a check, but we certainly hadn’t gotten notice of doing so. So I dig out our latest statement from our bank, and there’s the check listed, as paid. BIL called BofA, and they said we had to fax them the bank statement that listed the check as paid.
It was a PITA, and we had to pay to fax it to them, but we did it. Then they said they needed us to fax the check itself. And we did. Then they said that wasn’t good enough, because we had failed to fax the front and back of the check (we had only faxed the front, which had the check number, the amount paid, and a rubber stamp that said “PAID” on it. So we did that.
All of this took probably three weeks. They finally admitted that the mistake was theres, but the only fees my BIL could get them to reverse (granted, he’s not much of a hard-ass) was the original bounced check fee for that one check. The string of fees that happened as a result of their fuck-up? Yeah, he ended up paying them.
Bastards.
My hubby and I, OTOH, deal with a credit union and love it.
One time they called me to verify a check I had written because they said the signature didn’t look “quite right”. I really had written the check, but I guess my signature was “off” that day.
Several months ago, they called my hubby and told him that our Visa debit card number had been found in a list of stolen numbers online. The number hadn’t yet been used to make any purchases. They immediately canceled it and sent us new cards with new numbers.
I like our credit union. 
I had a similar situation occur with Wells Fargo. I ordered new checks from them that were delivered to the wrong address. After calling them, they told me that it would be best to close that account and open a new one. What they didn’t tell me is that they still allowed charges to go through that old account a month later, making it overdrawn without my knowledge. Then, they reported me to chexsystems, which basically makes it impossible to open a new account anywhere.
I tried for over a year to get them to remove my name with no luck. I went that whole time without a bank account, which totally sucked. Then, one day I’m in a B of A to cash a check and they ask me if I would like to open an account. I respond that I would love to except that I’m on chexsystems. They looked into it and told my that, actually, I wasn’t on chexsystems and let me open the account. Apparently, Wells saw no reason to let me know that they actually had removed me.
I hate banks.
This is a reason I like being with a large bank. I sometimes sign checks from my SO’s account and they never get questioned. Makes life so nice.
I can see that as an upside (and am actually quite good at forging my hubby’s signature), but I am glad to have a bank that’s looking out for me.
Different strokes and all that.
We don’t use a traditional bank, nor do we use a credit union anymore (we still have the accounts, though, just in case). We use our brokerage house as our financial institution (it rhymes with Smith Barney- oops…). Pretty good service, but that may because hubby is the one in charge of about a dozen accounts (our family members, our businesses) that total well over $2 million US in deposits at any one time, so we don’t have many fees and they seem to be happy to help when I have a problem.
You lack imagination, my friend.
Ruining a BofA VP’s day seems like a worthier goal. So let’s get started.
Document everything. Take copious notes of everything. And learn the cc trick: send copies of your letters to interested parties such as regulators and consumer watchdogs.
eg
California Department of Consumer Affairs
1625 North Market Blvd.
Sacramento, CA 95834
Office of the Attorney General
Public Inquiry Unit
PO Box 944255
Sacramento, CA 94244-2550
Consumer and Environmental Protection Unit
San Francisco County District Attorney’s Office
732 Brannan St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
…or the ones pertaining to your former or current US residence.
Don’t forget their regulators:
Oh and check out these ambulance chasers:
http://www.bofalitigation.com/
Perhaps this organization could give you advice:
They helped me out once with a misunderstanding that I had with Wells Fargo.
As for choosing banks:
The big boys have big ATM networks. But State Farm Bank, USAA bank and I believe Charles Schwab offer an ATM card which will pay foreign ATM fees up to a certain amount. It’s worth looking into, though you may no longer have a local checking account.
Oh, and be sure to get overdraft protection…
Our Smith Barney Financial Management Account (FMA- it means frigging checking…) refunds all ATM fees (Citi owns SB, so there are no fees for Citibank ATMs anyway), both domestic and international. Sure came in handy when we wanted cash from an ATM in a casino in Aruba, and the fee was something like $7 US!
There, I bolded the reason for you. 
Yeah, you’re right. Feels kind of cool to be the capitalist exploiter for once, though.