Diarist 60

Diarist 60 in the year to July 2025:
Status: divorcee, grandmother, household manager Household size: 2 (she, grandson)
Occupation: traditional birth attendant, goat rearing Education: class 8
Major assets: livestock (life claim on marital home)
Net income year to Jul 2025: 79,790 taka (USD 665 PPP$ 2,483, or PPP$ 3.40 per day per person): Income in kind: 12,000 a year from homestead produce
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 40,000 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: protecting my grandson who lives with us from drug addiction and crime

Diarist 60 is a traditional birth attendant - a 'dai'- who has had training to modernise her skills, so that she knows when it is safe for her to complete a delivery and when she should take the patient to the hospital. She gets paid 'tips' by her patients but she also gets an allowance if she takes difficult cases to hospital. She has some government-provided kit. She reckons she has delivered more than 300 babies in her career. She is literate, having reached class 8. She also rears goats (picture).

She had five sons before she was divorced in 2011. Her husband has moved off to live with his new wife while she continues to live in the marital home, a large traditional mud-walled structure which still belongs to the husband but which will be divided among their sons on his death. Diarist 60 has a complex relationship with her sons, four of whom have married of whom one (son number 3) is twice divorced and was living with his mother along with a son,when we took them on in 2017. This 3rd son had been working in Dubai, then moved in with his mother, unemployed, then in mid 2018 remarried and moved to a job in Gazipur leaving his son with Diarist 60. This boy later got a casual job as an assistant in a photo studio/photocopying shop run by his uncle.

Several of the sons have lived at the home intermittently but independently, so Diarist 60's own household has consisted of two or three people depending where the 3rd son is. In mid 2024 she bribes the police to release the third son, who had been charged with marijuana addiction.

In chart 01 Diarist 60's affairs look fairly settled on the income side - she sells goats occasionally, and gets frequent tips for delivering babies. As with many Diarists, there is a sudden dip in April 2020 when the Covid lockdown strikes. On the spending side she buys shares of a cow to sacrifice at the Eid festival, and makes a few other big outgoings for home improvement and family matters. On a monthly basis, she has been in surplus most of the time.

Charts 01 and 02 show a marriage in mid 2024. That was the marriage of her grandson by her first son - not the grandson who lives with her.

Diarist 60 with her goats

Diarist 60, chart 01, balance

Gifts

As we see in chart 02, gifts have been a matter of exchanges, especially at religious festivals, between the members this rather large family.

Diarist 60, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Until Covid, Diarist 60 maintained loan accounts at two MFIs, Grameen Bank and FHP, though the relationships were never comfortable. Her loan at Grameen Bank was taken before our tracking began, so in chart 03 we see just the repayments, which she made regularly and which were completed in March 2018, when she left Grameen Bank after quarrelling with them. At FHP she took two loans (of 20,000 and 10,000 taka in 2018 and 2019) and passed them on to her fifth son for his photo studio. The son repaid OK, through her. When those loans were fully repaid in 2020, she stopped borrowing, though she didn't close her FHP account until August 2021 when she became irritated by their pressuring her to take another loan.

After that she became one of many diarists who reduced or (as in her case) entirely stopped MFI borrowing after the Covid shock, which seems to have made many of them reconsider whether they really needed to take MFI loans. See the page devoted to this phenomenon.

She has lent larger sums to members of her extended family: in the chart we see howlats (interest-free loans) to a son and to a grandson to help them migrate for work, and to her youngest son for his business. These howlats have not yet been repaid: since they have no fixed repayment schedule we may see them repaid in future (especially if remittances start to flow from successful migration), or maybe Diarist 60 will be happy to let these howlats become, effectively, gifts.

Diarist 60, chart 03, loans

Savings

In the period before we started tracking her, and just after we started, Diarist 60 had savings at home that she had built up from gifts from her sons, and from goat sales. In October 2017 she put some of this into an Agroni Bank account that she had earlier opened to received money from overseas. Within a few days she changed her mind and withdrew it, possibly under the influence of a daughter-in-law who is suspicious of banks and MFI savings. However, in July 2019 she deposited 40,000 taka into the Bank and it is still there, kept as a long-term resource.

She also made the usual required weekly savings into her two MFIs, Grameen and FHP. She withdrew the balances when she closed those accounts. See chart 04.

Diarist 60, chart 04, savings

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