Diarist 39

Diarist 39 in 2025:
Status: desertee, mother, grandmother, household manager Household size: varies 1 - 4 (see text below)
Occupation: remittances, childcare. Education: grade 8
Major assets: home on homestead land and 0.3 acres of farmland
Net income 2025: 75,210 taka (USD 622 PPP$ 2,350, (for PPP$ per day per person see text below): Income in kind: about 12,000 in the year from consumption of own farming produce; food offered by sons
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 26,621 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: I have to get my youngest son into overseas work

Diarist 39 is one of our most interesting Diarists, especially in the use she has made of the MFI Grameen Bank. She is from a poor family though she had some schooling. She married a man who runs a small restaurant some 5 km off and with whom she had two sons and a daughter. By the time our project started in 2015 her daughter had married and the older son had been in Malaysia for a decade, remitting regularly. The other son was working as a mason helper and hoping also to go overseas. But her husband had deserted (but not divorced) her, and remarried, though he sometimes visited and gave her money. Diarist 39 was on good terms with his second wife.

Diarist 39 has been a 'member' (a client) of Grameen Bank for several decades, joining soon after it arrived in the area. She liked it. She took several loans and kept her savings there. Grameen liked her, making her the 'Centre Chief' of the group of 40 clients who meet weekly to transact with Grameen. Grameen also once awarded her a regional prize. In the 1990s she and her husband decided to take up Grameen's offer of a housing loan, and built a traditional thick-mud-walled home with supporting concrete pillars and a tin roof supplied by Grameen. At that time, a condition of getting a Grameen housing loan was that the land be registered in the wife's name, and that is what Diarist 39 and her husband, after some discussion, decided to do. As a consequence, when her husband left her, he was obliged to leave her in possession of the home.

By late 2017 the second son was also working in Malaysia and Diarist 39 was receiving substantial remittance income. As we shall see in later sections of this page, she tied her financial life to Grameen, with considerable success. Her big ambition was to replace the mud house with a modern brick-and-concrete one and this she achieved. Building work started in 2018 and she moved into it in 2022.

Meanwhile the sons' lives were rather topsy-turvy. Diarist 39 found a prospective wife for the older one and they were married by phone while he was still in Malaysia. But the girl ran away with her lover before the son could get back to Bangladesh. Diarist 39 hurriedly found a substitute wife for him, who was soon pregnant but had a stillborn child in mid 2019. The two women (Diarist 39 and her new daughter-in-law) quarrelled and the daughter-in-law refused to live with her mother-in-law, again causing Diarist 39 shame and distress. A bit later Diarist 39 relented and restored the relationship. But then the second son had a motorbike accident in Malaysia and was in hospital there until he came home in 2022, having, like his brother, married a woman by phone. They had a son in mid 2023. By 2024 both brothers were back in Bangladesh, but they soon decided to live in the big new house as three separate households, with Diarist 39 eating first with one son and then with the other. The second son was found guilty of theft, again causing Diarist 39 shame and leading her to try to cover things up and to try to bribe the authorities. The son then took a job at a local shoe factory.

In chart 01 we see the steady remittances from the first son giving Diarist 39 a surplus almost every month. Then comes the big splurge on the new home building. Then things are quieter.

Diarist 39: builder's plan-book and the new home during building.
They built two floors so far, on foundations supposedly good for three.

Diarist 39 is another of our Diarists who feature in the book Taking Shelter where she appears on pages 56-58 under the name 'Samita'.

Diarist 39, chart 01, balance

Gifts

The gifts that Diarist 39 gives and receives are small relative to other transactions she makes. She got support from relatives (including her estranged husband's family) when she tried to get the 2nd son overseas, and from a nephew who, like her sons, was working overseas. Other incoming gifts were mainly later, from her two sons after they came home.

The only larger gift she gave was on behalf of her 1st son who wanted her to give some of his remittance money to her estranged husband.

Diarist 39, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 39, a long-time and much valued client of the Grameen bank, was nevertheless not very keen on borrowing from them - what she really wanted to do was save. Of the 11 Grameen loans she took in the time we have tracked her, in 6 cases she specifically told us that she took the loan only to please the Grameen officer. She would typically report "I took that loan only because Grameen insisted on it as a condition for holding savings". She kept these loans as small as possible: the biggest was 50,000 taka but the others were smaller and after 2020, with one tiny exception in 2024, she was able to avoid taking them altogether.

She borrowed from no other formal source. But she was active in informal lending. She gave howlats to family and neighbours, including one to help her grand nephew ('grandson' in her idiom) go overseas. She took just one howlat (interest-free loan) from a brother.

Chart 03 shows how after Covid she lost interest in borrowing altogether.

Diarist 39, chart 03, loans

Savings

It is in savings that Diarist 39's behaviour is remarkable. When we started tracking her she had long been a Grameen Bank 'member' and was early to see the benefits of their accumulating-savings account, the GPS (Grameen Pension Savings) in which one saves a fixed amount monthly for a long (usually 10-year) period and earns good interest. Later, when she'd built up a lot of money through GPS accounts, she also used Fixed Deposit (FD) accounts at Grameen.

We witnessed just the last three years of this behaviour (2016-2018), when her first son, and then both sons, were remitting from Malaysia. In those 3 years she received 1,248,000 taka in remittances, to add to the amounts received previously.

Chart 05 reveals these transactions. In that 2016-2018 period she piled money into FDs and GPS's, and moved money from mature GPSs to FDs. All told, she deposited 1,872,700 taka (worth around USD 23,500 in those days) of which 1,622,550 was into Grameen accounts. It was thus that she was able to make the very large expenditure on the 2nd son's migration costs shown in chart 01, and still maintain a very big balance of savings, as shown in chart 04.

She also used a Co-op account, making over 750 tiny daily deposits of 20 taka as well as some bigger ones. She once joined a savings club (a ghoreya samiti) for a year in 2016 where she saved 7,200 taka and took back a little more, having received her share of interest from borrowing members.

Chart 05 shows how her 'heroic' savings regime was over by the end of 2019. As she herself told us "when my two sons were abroad, I held many GPSs, then I took the cash to build the house. Now my sons are back in Bangladesh, so there are no more remittances, and I no longer have a big ambition like the house building. It's also why I don't borrow."

Diarist 39, chart 04, savings balances

Diarist 39, chart 05, savings transactions

On to Diarist 40

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