Diarist 12

Diarist 12 in the year to July 2025:
Status: widow, household manager Household size: 1.5
Occupation: housemaid, cleaner, market helper; (son earns and contributes when, sometimes, they share a home). Education: none
Major assets: house and homestead plot
Net income year to Jul 2025: 70,235 taka (USD 585 PPP$ 2,186, or PPP$ 3.99* per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 11,463 taka, Loans 7,700 taka
* we count the son as 0.5 as they live & eat together only intermittently
main worry about her family, May 2025: I may have to stop work because of my poor health - there's no good treatment available

Diarist 12 is a bit like Diarist 01. Both are poor illiterate middle-aged women whose main occupation is casual labour in the market. You can see what that entails in this video where we see Diarist 12 sorting onions for a stallholder. In 2015, when we took this video, she would earn not more than 100 taka for a more-or-less full day's work of this sort.

She didn't do it everyday, since she also worked sometimes as a housemaid, and sometimes as a labourer repairing dirt roads. She is Hindu and also got occasional work helping in the temple.

Her husband was in poor health when we met them, and died in early 2016. He had also been a casual labourer.

As we see in chart 01, there have many months when her spending outstripped her income, and we shall see later how she managed to supplement her income.

Diarist 12, chart 01: her primary balance

We can see in chart 01 another resemblance to Diarist 01 - a preoccupation with securing a marriage for a daughter. When we met her, one daughter had died, and one was already married and living away, leaving the youngest still unmarried. There is a surviving son, but another son died in Dec 2014 after a short fever and a failed attempt at a cure by a kabiraz (like Diarist 10): she had taken her son to a faith healer because she thought he was haunted by a recently deceased boy with whom he had quarreled).

When the daughter married in mid 2018, that was the biggest expenditure we recorded for Diarist 12, followed by home repairs much more recently, and some jewelry for her other daughter in late 2019.

Around the middle of 2019 the son started work, first as a helper in a snack shop. Mother and son between them started covering their costs more often. A year later he got occasional casual work in a workshop that fabricates grilles for windows. The following year he went to the capital, Dhaka, to see what work he could find there, and found a job in a garments factory. At the same time, Diarist 12 started spending more and more time at her married daughter's home. There, she contributed a bit to the income, through work and gifts, but was also well supported by the daughter. In early 2023 she decided to join her son in Dhaka, and shared a room with a sister who also had a garments factory job there. But the son didn't like the factory and came back home and started to work at a battery-making factory. That didn't last long either and the end of 2023 found mother and son in Dhaka again, she working as a cleaner in the market, and he back in the garments factory. Then she decided she didn't like Dhaka, saying that it very bad for her health, and as of this write-up she is back home and working again as a housemaid. This work pattern explains the increased volatility and increased volume of their income and expemditure in recent months.

Diarist 12, chart 02: gifts

Soon after we began the diaries we gave a talk on American public radio, PBS, about our work, where we featured Diarist 12's life. An American listener contacted us asking to us to pass on a gift to Diarist 12. That was the biggest gift we saw her receive for she has not been much dependent on gifts to close her income/expenditure gap. But she is a great giver of gifts: she is very family-minded and we have records of 246 cash gifts by her, mostly to extended family members, worth 36,573 taka in all. Many are too small to show clearly in chart 02.

Diarist 12, chart 03: savings

Diarist 12 had her 22,000 taka gift from the American paid into her savings account at the local Cooperative. Perhaps surprisingly, given her fragile household economy, there it stayed for a long time. It wasn't until her daughter's marriage three years later that should took out even a penny of it.

She had second unexpected windfall at the end of 2018 when an insurance policy that she had forgotten about matured and made her a 27,000 taka payout.

Throughout, she continued to pay into her Cooperative account. In the earlier years she also saved a little at MFIs. She continued to withdraw these resources sparingly: they were very helpful to her. At the end of September 2024 she had 11,453 taka in formal savings, most of it in the Islami MFI/bank where she also has a (smaller) loan balance.

Diarist 12, chart 04: loans

Diarist 12 was careful with her savings and has not been profligate with loans. Nor is she a dedicated MFI loan taker. When her husband died she withdrew from the MFI ASA, fearing the burden of repayments. Since then she has taken just two 20,000 taka loans from the MFI/bank Islami (one of them taken on behalf of a son-in-law who made all the repayments) and three smaller ones from the Cooperative. At present her formal loan balance is around 7,500 taka.

She is much more comfortable with informal borrowing, having taken 92 informal loans worth 172,774 taka, the vast majority of them interest-free howlats sourced from family, friends and sometimes employers. They are a testament to her popularity in her home area, and the trust others have in her, despite the fact that she sometimes takes a long time to repay howlats, so that some of them are likely to end up as gifts. For example, from her insurance payout she repaid a long-outstanding howlat from her mother dating from before we began to work with her.

on to Diarist 13

back to Diarist 11

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