Diarist 12

Diarist 12 in the year to June 2026:
Status: widow, household manager Household size: 1.5*
* we count the son as 0.5 as they live & eat together only intermittently
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 in the year to June2026: 39,880 taka (USD 330, PPP$ 1,246, or PPP$ 1.28 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 8,344 taka, Loans 6,900 taka
main worry about her family, May 2025: I may have to stop work because of my poor health - there's no good affordable 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 quarrelled).

When the daughter married in mid 2018, that was the biggest expenditure so far that we recorded for Diarist 12, followed by home repairs much more recently, and some jewellery for her other daughter in late 2019. At the end of 2025 came her biggest purchase - a rickshaw and battery for her son.

Around the middle of 2019 the son had 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. At the end of 2025 they bought an electric rickshaw for the son, and his earnings became larger and more regular as a result. All these developments help explain the increased volatility and increased volume of their income and expenditure 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 by the end of 2025. 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, it stayed there 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 pay-out.

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 2025 she had 8,344 taka in formal savings, most of it in the Islami MFI/bank where she also had also borrowed for the rickshaw purchase.

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. After that she took 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. Then right at the end of 2025 she joined a new MFI, ASPADA, and borrowed from it and from Islami Bank to buy the rickshaw for her son. This caused her formal loan balance - which had been around 6,900 taka in late September 2025 - to rise .

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 (some of them may 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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