Our original Diarist 42 died in 2022 and was replaced by her daughter. The original Diarist was in her 50s when we started with her and was a cook/cleaner in the offices of one of the MFIs that serve our area, with a monthly salary of 2,200 taka plus three meals a day (she took home food from there to feed her husband). She also got tips from MFI clients. Her position in the MFI was insecure because she was often late, and we twice saw her collapse from poor health. She was dismissed, and turned, unsuccessfully, to occasional cooking for building workers and the like before the MFI Branch Manager took pity and reinstated her.
She was illiterate, from a poor background, like her boatman husband who had been off work, disabled, for a decade. He died in late 2019. They owned a small patch of homestead land but no other big assets. They had 2 sons and 4 daughters, mostly married and living elsewhere, but one daughter, with her child, lived with the couple. This daughter, also illiterate, rented a small space to do dressmaking, and mostly paid for her own living expenses, giving a little of her income to her parents, especially for medicine for her father. But that daughter went to work in Saudi Arabia in 2018 (and came back, in poor health, recently). After Diarist 42's husband died her own health further declined and she gave up work.
In Diarist 42's last months another daughter came to live with her, and after the death we took on that daughter as our Diarist. She is also illiterate, and is a widow, and assetless. She now lives rent-free in someone else's compound a few kilometres away. She has several children and was trying to arrange the marriage of one of her two daughters still living with her - she succeeded just after her own mother died. The other daughter remains with her, unemployed. The new Diarist 42 did some housemaid work, but irregularly, and then in early 2024 got a job as a cook at a madrassa (Muslim religious school). In April 2024 her son's rickshaw was stolen and she spent money on bribes to the police and help from a faith-healer but failed to recover it. More recently, especially in 20205, she has spent time in Dhaka staying with a married daughter, and spending very little.
As chart 01 shows, there were times in 2016 and 2017 when income from the original Diarist and her daughter gave them monthly surpluses and allowed them to make repairs to their home. Then there was a downward turn leading to her husband's death, and then even harder times with the onset of COVID, alleviated a little by bonuses from the MFI. After the death of the original Diarist the new Diarist had to find ways to fund the marriage of her daughter and to search, unsuccessfully, for the stolen rickshaw. But there was also income, from cooking at the madrassa, from her third daughter's housemaid work, and from the rickshaw driving. The large housemaid income of 29,000 received in November 2023 was a lump sum because the Diarist had chosen to ask her employer to hold back her wages for a year as a form of 'moneyguard' saving (see the Savings section, below). Strictly speaking, we should have recorded, each month, the income and the saving made from it, but we didn't pick up what was happening at the time. Sorry!
