This is the second of our 'student/earners'. We took Diarist 67 on when he was just 18, living with an ailing father and a housekeeping mother, and two sisters (20 and 21) both unmarried and studying in the same class of a 3-year degree course at a local college. Diarist 67 himself was in the first year of an Accountancy course at the same college where he attended for one full day each week. His aim was to get all three of them through their courses, find a good job for himself, and support his parents. He was a travelling salesman for a tobacco company, moving around on a bicycle with its basket full of cigarettes for delivery, to 60 or 70 shops during a very long day. He was getting a monthly wage of 7,000 taka. That was one of the household's main income sources, the other being rent from hiring out an old rickshaw to a driver each day..
One of the two sisters did some private tuition and brought in up to 2,500 taka a month. She was the money manager of the family so Diarist 67 gave his income to her, but they made spending decisions jointly. There had been a history of many difficulties for this family: for example they had sold land at a low price to cleverer cousins, and had got into private interest-bearing and howlat debt. But they had homestead land (.035 of an acre) and a mud walled tin roofed house of two rooms, bought and built after they sold their original land a few kilometres away. There were no other assets besides his bicycle, the rickshaw, and a sewing machine which no-one knew how to use for income generation.
His father had previously driven the rickshaw and wanted to continue, but because he has asthma the youngsters wanted him to stop. However an older married sister and her husband bought a new battery for the rickshaw and in 2022 he started driving it again.
In 2017 Diarist 67 took leave from his job for two months to concentrate on his studies, and in 2018 one of the two sisters landed a job with an NGO and moved to live with another, married, sister in Dhaka. Their mother was trying to get that Dhaka daughter's husband a job overseas and borrowed to that end: he went, failed, and was soon back. In 2019 Diarist 67 borrowed massively on interest from relatives to rebuild their crumbling home. In September of that year he bought a motorbike in the hope of doing more business while he was out on his tobacco rounds. His studying slowed and finally came to an almost complete stop. But the sister who was still at home got a job in a garments factory and managed to start studying for her MA. Covid slowed everything down but they all survived and quickly restarted their respective activities. They bought a refrigerator.
In Nov 2021 he swapped jobs and became a travelling salesman for a cosmetics company. By mid 2022 there were three streams of income: the garments factory, the cosmetics job and his unstoppable father's rickshaw earnings. In May 2022 they bought a new e-rickshaw for him. Not long after that Diarist 67 decided that his father really shouldn't drive any more, and sold the machine, but his father thwarted him - they got another rickshaw and he is still driving it today (May 2025). In mid 2023 the garments-factory sister found a husband and the household size dropped to three: Diarist 67 and his aging parents. The following year he changed jobs once again and became an assistant to a fish agency with a better, if not so regular, wage.
