I’m now accepting but not expecting donations with PayPal. It’s not what you think. Whenever I travel abroad, I bring my PayPal debit card.
My reasoning: If there was an emergency and someone needed to wire money to me, it would be a lot less painful for them to PayPal me online than Western Union. Transferring cash with Western Union can be a drag, and if someone were sending cash to bail me out of a crisis, I’d want to keep them as happy as possible.
Then I could get the money from an ATM almost immediately, instead of waiting up to 24 hours or even three days. I assume that finding a Western Union agent in another country and waiting in line there would take less than 24 hours, but who knows?