Diarist 38

Diarist 38 in the year to July 2025:
Status: wife, mother, household manager Household size: 4 (she, 2 sons, daughter: husband overseas)
Occupation: farmer, remittances from husband overseas Education: grade 10 (husband grade 4)
Major assets: home on father-in-law's homestead and 0.15 acre of farmland, livestock
Net income year to Jul 2025: 432,670 taka (USD 3,606 PPP$ 13,466, or PPP$ 9.22 per day per person): Income in kind: about 30,000 in the year from consumption of own farming produce
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 32,454 taka, Loans 8,218
main worry about her family, May 2025: we still haven't arranged the overseas work migration of our sons

This is another of our least-poor households. The husband has been remitting from Dubai since before we started the project, leaving Diarist 38 to raise a daughter and two sons. The daughter is married but has not yet shifted to her husband's home. The older son is out of school and looking for work. The younger son has been trying to go overseas but has faced a series of mishaps and is still at home. They are generally in good health, and educated.

We watched as first they repaired their home and then started work on a brand new building, a double-fronted 2-storey building where they rent out one side while living in the other. Later still they decide to build a shop for rent on another parcel of land that they own.

As chart 01 shows, remittances came in regularly and in large enough values to give Diarist 38 a surplus most months. But the chart also hints at the problems and costs involved. In the Covid period her husband was off work in Dubai and survived - and continued remitting - out of the savings he had piled up there (not shown in our accounts). As soon as he could, in November 2021, he came home on leave and they planned the construction of the shop, getting a big rent advance from a prospective tenant. In February 2022, at the airport en route back to Dubai, he was found to have Covid. His air ticket became invalid and he bought a new one, finally getting back to Dubai in June. after paying a migration agent to help him through the paperwork. Meanwhile they were trying to get the second son to Singapore and Diarist 38 paid a lot more to the agent. By early 2023 she was desperate and bribed the police in an effort to push the paperwork along. That didn't work and she pleaded, successfully, with the migration agent to give her back her money. Then the son had appendicitis and had an operation. In early 2024 she tried again, paying the agent, and at the end of the year her husband came home, bringing money, and they paid even more to the agent. But he still hasn't gone.

2024 was a busy year. The daughter got married in January but is still with her parents. Diarist 38 gave her son-in-law money to buy land., selling gold to finance it. They also raised more money to buy land from a co-inheritor of family land. As of now, the husband has decided not to go back to Dubai and is working as a lowly mason's assistant. The two sons are at home, not in work: the older one failed his high school-leaving exams.

Diarist 38's new house

Diarist 38's shop for rent

Diarist 38, chart 01, balance

Gifts

We recorded Diarist 38 receiving only 3 gifts, one of them very small. But the biggest was important to them: in July 2022 her father-in-law sold 0.025 acres of his land expressly to give his son and daughter-in-law a gift of 194,000 taka to help finance the shop-building project. He followed up later with a gift for his granddaughter's marriage.

Meanwhile, like several other similarly-placed Diarists she gave many gifts to family, friends and religious entities (we recorded 122 gifts totaling 239,000 taka by the end of 2024, including the gift to the prospective son-in-law).

Diarist 38, chart 02, gifts

Loans

MFI loans and howlats (interest-free loans) from family have both played important parts in how Diarist 38 has managed the money. The biggest loan is a howlat - 200,000 from her own sister for the marriage of her daughter. There have also been 3 loans in excess of 100,000 from the MFIs DSK and BRAC, 2 of them used for migration (one for her husband and the other for her son), and the third for construction work. She has also taken informal interest-bearing loans. Chart 03 shows how these fit in with the big expenditures revealed in the first chart.

Diarist 38, chart 03, loans

Savings

There are two phases to Diarist 38's saving behaviour. In the earlier years (2015-2020) she spent most of the remittances from her husband without banking them, and was content with small-scale deposits into the MFIs Grameen and DSK and the occasional somewhat bigger one into the Co-op. We see in chart 04 how in December 2015 she had withdrawn a fairly large sum from the Co-op for the home repairs, but then for several years she took no big withdrawals. But Covid and the return and troubles of her husband caused that behaviour to change. He had bought money back with him from Dubai, and that money, along with a big gift and the proceeds of loans and the sale of gold and of land, was stored in a formal Bank (Agrani) and from there transferred to their account at the Co-op to manage the many transactions that have been described on this page. There was also, late on, a payment from an insurance policy that matured.

Thus between 2020 and 2024 big savings transactions occurred in connection with remittance inflows, migration agent fees and air tickets, land and gold sales and purchases, building and furnishing the new home and the shop-for-rent, the daughter's marriage and son's appendicitis, for a clothing business that Diarist 38 briefly and unsuccessfully tried to set up and for buying cows to sacrifice at Eid. There is room on the chart for only a few of these to be labelled, but the pattern is clear.

Diarist 38, chart 04, savings

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