Diarist 32

Diarist 32 in the year to June 2026:
Status: widow, mother, grandmother, household manager Household size: 3 (she, son and daughter-in-law & grandchild)
Occupation: casual labour. Education: none (sons grade 5)
Major assets: home on homestead land
Net income in the year to June 2026: 570,604 taka (USD 4,716 PPP$ 17,831, or PPP$ 16.28 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 168,889 taka, Loans 83,703
main worry about her family, May 2025: my two sons who live in the same place but quarrel all the time

Here we find another very poor and totally unschooled woman whose widowhood plunges her into the tasks of raising a family and managing their resources. Her case shows how such a background need not stop someone emerging as a shrewd and careful user of money-management services.

Diarist 32's husband died in 2008 after a life as a casual labourer. By then they had had two sons and two daughters and by the time we started the diary one daughter was married, the other was in grade 6 at school, the elder son was running a barber's shop (see picture) and the younger one was a carpenter's assistant.

She herself is illiterate and has done a variety of casual labouring jobs, such as repairing mud roads or farm work. She has had conflicts with the younger children. In 2018 the younger daughter met a boy, ran off with him and married him. Diarist 32 then found he was already married and tried to get a local shalish (informal community court) to annul the marriage (they are Hindus), but the request was refused. Meanwhile she was resisting the plans of her younger son to marry a girl he had met, though in the end the marriage went ahead. She was unhappy. In 2019 she relented and paid a dowry to the daughter's husband's family. She had to pay a 'fine' to the local community leaders for not marrying her son 'properly'.

The elder son's barber's shop was in trouble during the Covid lockdown but survived until he decided to try to go abroad and got a passport. He contributed income to his mother until he and his wife and child started living separately in July 2024. For a while in 2022-23 Diarist 32 took a garments factory job, boosting their income as chart 01 shows. They bought an e-rickshaw for the younger son to drive, then sold it when he got a steady job installing aluminium windows. They have managed to buy land as well as make major repairs to their home in the centre of the Hrishipara settlement. Currently the household consists of Diarist 32, her younger son and his wife and child: but she remains close to the elder son.

She long planned to get at least one son employed overseas and in 2025 she borrows and withdraws savings to pay a migration agent 200,000 to this end. However towards the end of 2025 things started to unravel. An advance they had made to buy more land was returned to them because the deal fell through. Then, the fee they paid a migration agent was returned to them as the agent said he couldn't manage the work. On both counts they want to persevere, and in the case of migration they have succeeded: they paid a second agent and at the end of December the son went to Cambodia as a pipe-fitter and in January 2026 the younger son went to Saudi and quickly starts remitting, boosting income. But the elder son comes back from Cambodia in April 2026 saying there is no work there for him.

The elder son as a barber: he is now in Saudi Arabia.

Diarist 32, chart 01, balance

Gifts

Diarist 32 has received a small number of gifts. They include dowries for her two sons and help from workmates at her garments factory job when she had a road accident coming home from work in 2022.

She has given a good number of small gifts of a family or religious kind (we recorded 43, totaling 75,000 taka), including a dowry payment to the family of her younger daughter's husband.

Diarist 32, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 32 has been good at borrowing for strategic purposes. She is long-time borrower from the big MFI ASA and has taken many loans from them during the time we have been tracking her. Three were for 60,000 taka each - she sensibly resisted taking more even though ASA offers more. Two were for home construction and one for marriage of the younger son. She has repaid with scrupulous weekly regularity.

In the informal market she has taken howlats frequently from her elder married daughter. These include her biggest-ever loan, of 120,000, taken in mid 2023 to help finance the land purchase. Another big one followed in early 2025 as they worked on sending the elder son overseas. In 2026 to help with the ups-and-downs of migration the younger son's wife joined a new MFI, TIFA, borrowed and gave the cash to Diarist 32.

Diarist 32, chart 03, loans

Savings

Diarist 32 is a prolific saver. We have recorded her making daily savings at a community-run 'ghoreya samity' (an annual-closing ASCA*) which has been going for many years, run by a close neighbour. It had to stop during the Covid lockdown in April 2020 and hasn't fully recovered since. In all, from November 2015 to Aril 2020 she saved 21,380 in daily tranches of 20 taka each, and took her savings back each year.

She is also a regular saver at her MFI, ASA, where she saved 50 a week at first then moved up to 100 a week: she is still saving there and has a healthy balance.

She has also had an account at the Co-operative throughout and uses it both to make small (again often daily) deposits but also occasional much bigger ones if she has cash on hand - including using it as a 'safe deposit box' for the temporary storage of other inflows like loans from ASA or howlats from her daughter - whom she has also used as a 'moneyguard'. These resources have been used for buying land and for getting the elder son overseas.

The dream
In March 2019 she told us she had had a dream in which her late husband appeared . She took this as a suggestion that her own death was approaching. This prompted her to tell her astonished son about the large sum of 100,000 taka she had hidden inside a pillow stuffed under her mattress. That money had been saved from her wages as a mud-road- repair labourer while her husband was alive (so, at least 11 years earlier). She feared it would get lost or stolen on her death unless her family were aware of it. She deposited the cash in the Co-op.

an Accumulating Savings and Credit Association, where a group of people save and some of them borrow. The best (like this one) close their books regularly - often after a year - to prevent the mishandling of money.

Diarist 32, chrt 04, savings

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