Diarist 50

Diarist 50 in the year to July 2025:
Status: wife, mother, household manager Household size: 3 (she, husband, daughter: two sons overseas)
Occupation: farmer, remittances Education: none (husband also none)
Major assets: home on homestead land and 0.35 acre of farmland, livestock
Net income year to Jul 2025: 609,815 taka (USD 5,082 PPP$ 18,980, or PPP$ 17.33 per day per person): Income in kind: about 40,000 in the year from consumption of own farming produce
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 17,800 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: I worry about my two sons working in Saudi Arabia

We met our first Diarist 50 when he was 24. He was from a poorer northern District but had passed his High School graduating exam before coming to our area about 4 years previously looking for work. All he found was a job as a helper in a small snack restaurant. He slept in the workroom at the back of the shop, ate shop food for free, and saved most of his small wage. His parents are illiterate but have a third of an acre of farmland. There was a younger brother, in school, whom Diarist 50 supported by sending money home via the Mobile Money company bKash. An older sister had married but not properly formalised the marriage and Diarist 50 was also eager to rectify that.

His ambition was to go abroad, and he was preparing for this. By late 2016 he had acquired a passport. A year later, in October 2017, the family sold some land at a low price because there were other claimants to the title. They also sold a cow. The sister's husband's family was paid a dowry and the marriage formalised, and building supplies were bought to rebuild the dilapidated family home. The next month they paid a migration agent and in April 2018 he flew to Saudi Arabia. Details of this story are given in a blog we published at the time (pictured).

Initially we had trouble contacting him by phone, and we decided to ask his very cooperative mother, back in the village, to become our Diarist. Their story then becomes one of a poor rural family farming and getting remittances from their son. Remittances were slow to start as the original Diarist had trouble finding a job that he liked in Saudi Arabia. But the debts taken to send him there are paid off and leased-out land recovered. They get for the first time an electricity connection. The job in Saudi is suspended during the Covid crisis but then resumes.

In 2022 they succeed in sending their second son to Saudi, too, and in late 2024 the original Diarist comes home on extended leave and gets married in April 2025.

Chart 01 shows how occasional remittances allow the household to weather deficit months in their farming life.

Getting to the Gulf.pdf

The story of Diarist 50's struggle to support his family and get to a job in Saudi Arabia is told in this blog

Diarist 50, chart 02, balance

Gifts

We show chart 02, gifts, mainly to identify the 50,000 taka dowry payment that rectified the sister's marriage (by convention we show dowry payments as gifts, though they are more like payments to fulfill a marriage contract). Other gifts out are small ones to family and to the mosque. There is just one small gift received.

Diarist 50, chart 02, gifts

Loans

The original Diarist 50 had hoped that the land sale would also fund his trip to Saudi Arabia but that was not to be. In a frantic few days in 2018 just before he was due to leave (the story is told in the blog) they used land to secure a large bank loan and took a howlat (intertest-free loan) from a cousin. He was able to repay the howlat the day before he flew, but the Bank loan (from BRAC Bank*) was repaid from remittances on a monthly basis, as were the repayments to the MFI BRAC for a 100,000 taka loan in 2019 to buy back land that had changed hands in a sequence of complicated land deals.

Later, there were few very loan transactions, consisting of small local howlats in the course of the farming business.

BRAC Bank is a formal bank licensed by the central bank, while BRAC Microfinance is registered with the Microfinance Regulatory Authority (MRA): both are owned by BRAC a major Bangladeshi development-oriented not-for-profit entity. BRAC MFI has developed a loan designed to help people get jobs overseas, though it was not used in this story.

Diarist 50, chart 03, loans

Savings

Their savings activities were mostly informal. Our chart 04 shows the few times they used a formal partner for saving.

The original Diarist 50 had, even before he moved to our area and got a job, been a saver, storing the money with his mother in the village home. All along they had their eye on his getting work overseas. When he lived very simply in the snack shop store-room and sent most of wage home by bKash his mother stored most of it in a cupboard. By late 2017 there was 180,000 taka there and they got nervous about security, so they opened a formal bank savings account and placed it there. Within a few months they took most of it out to pay the migration agent. Some of it remains in the bank to this day and our new Diarist 50 (the original one's mother) still keeps money at home.

Having developed a relationship with the MFI BRAC by taking aloan (chart 03) our new Diarist (the mother) has continued to use BRAC to save 500 taka month, ever since, without withdrawing.

Diarist 50, chart 04, savings

On to Diarist 51

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