Diarist 26 in 2025:
Status: divorcee, mother, household manager Household size: 1 (she)
Occupation: brickbreaker (former cook/.cleaner). Education: none
Major assets: hut in father's homestead
Net income 2025: 18,115 taka (USD 150 PPP$ 566, or PPP$ 1.55 per day per person): Income in kind: some relief rice
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 140,315 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: my old age - I have no sons so how will I survive?
An unschooled woman from a poor family, Diarist 26's marriage came to an end after 17 years and two daughters, and she moved back into her parents' home along with the younger daughter. The older daughter has married. When we started tracking Diarist 26 she was already working as the cook/cleaner in the offices where the diary project and the Co-op are based, and the daughter (who reached grade 3 at school) was doing a garments factory job, going to work by bus each day. Things were running relatively smoothly. But in December 2016 the daughter had to quit her job because her father insisted that she should live with a better-off relative in another District where he thought her prospects for marriage would be better. The daughter duly met a cobbler and by the end of 2017 was married to him and now has two children.
Around the time of the Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020 Diarist 26's husband's second wife died, and she visited him for the first time in a long while. Her visits became gradually more and more frequent and she quit her job at our office because she couldn't attend regularly. She took up casual jobs in shops, mud road repair, and brickbreaking, and took gifts from her sons-in-law. But the relationship with her husband soured again, and in late 2023 he died.
She is allowed to buy subsidized 'relief' rice, which is of poor quality. She can readily sell it.
Diarist 26, chart 01, balance
Diarist 26 has never earned much so the gifts she has received have been quite important to her. When her second daughter married in 2017 family, neighbours and staff at our office contributed 20,000 taka. That was passed on to her stepson, since the marriage took place in her husband's home and was arranged by her husband's son by his second marriage.
Diarist 26 made a few family-related gifts after that, for example when her grandchild was born, and has continued to get gifts from her elder daughter and from her two sons in law.
She also takes gift in kind in that she sometimes spends time visiting her daughters, who generally feed and otherwise look after her while she is with them.
Diarist 26, chart 02, gifts
Diarist 26 long ago opened an MFI account at MFI BURO and an account at the Co-operative, but has never borrowed from them. All her loan transactions without exception have been howlats - interest free informal loans from family and friends, and most have been small. We recorded 27 howlats for a total of just over 10,000 taka. The biggest was 2,000, from her brother-in-law (her sister's husband). Other loans have come from her sister-in-law (her brother's wife), her mother, and her sister. During the period under scrutiny she has repaid 6,000 taka of these howlats, so it is possible that some of them are going eventually to turn into gifts.
Note that she didn't take any howlats before her daughter married, nor after she quit her own cook/cleaner job. It is now 5 years she she last took one. She says that "when I had the office cook/cleaning job the regular pay made me less cautious about buying things that were not absolutely essential, so I took howlats and repaid them from my wage. Later when my daughter married, I sometimes needed cash for guests like her husband and his family, so I had to take howlats. Then when I quit my regular waged job I decided not to risk taking howlats any more."
In November 2025 her son-in-law planned to buy homestead land in his village, and Diarist 26 has howlatted him 50,000 towards the cost.
Diarist 26, chart 03, loans
Diarist 26 has been an enthusiastic saver and trusts institutions with her money even if she doesn't like taking loans from them. She has had an account at the MFI BURO since before we started tracking her and has consistently saved there most weeks in small sums. She has never withdrawn any money from BURO, so the almost 40,000 taka she has there remains her nest-egg.
She opened an account at the Co-op as soon as she started work in the office, again saving but not borrowing. She was able to make quite big deposits from her daughter's garments factory wages, and she withdrew 100,000 from the Co-op and put it into a fixed account at Southeast Bank with her daughter named as a nominee to receive the funds when Diarist 26 dies. In that way she 'repaid' her daughter, and the money still sits in the Bank (it will have earned interest but we haven't been able to find out how much). She still has balance of over 60,000 at the Co-op.
Her case is interesting in that she is a poor person but a good saver, and has escaped difficult situations that might have required her to draw down on her substanrtial savings.
Diarist 26, chart 04, savings
We add here an extra chart, chart 05, where we show just the period after the big transfers, so that we can see the regular small deposits (mainly 50 taka a week) into MFI BURO, mixed in with occasional bigger deposits into the Co-op.
Just two withdrawals are shown. These were also small - 700 taka - and taken for a short-term shortfall in resources.
Finally, to give a better idea of her life and spending, here are all of her transactions for December 2024. The only inflows were from selling the sub-standard rice that she got as public relief, and small reward the diary project pays her each month.
Diarist 26, chart 05, zooming in on savings