Diarist 72

Diarist 72 in the year to March 2026:
Status: son, husband, household manager Household size: 5 (he, his wife and child, mother, sister: a brother overseas)
Occupation: painter, teashop owner Education: class 5
Major assets: new home on homestead land, some farmland leased out
Net income in the year to March 2026: 270,199 taka (USD 2,233 PPP$ 8,444, or PPP$ 4.63 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 18,237 taka, Loans 40,000
main worry about his family, May 2025: I can't run my shop properly because of poor health

Diarist 72 was a 26-year old unmarried house painter when we met him. He was living on his inherited property, his father having died, with his mother and disabled younger sister. There is, in addition to the homestead land, farmland of 0.2 acres which has been leased out on 'rehan' terms to others to farm. A brother, 24, also unmarried, was working on construction sites in Dubai, and was remitting. The debts incurred to send him there had yet to be fully paid off. Both brothers were in school to class five. Diarist 72 was overseeing the building of a modern new family home which the two brothers were to share, financed in part by the rehan lease money.

The painting business was mostly a one-man affair, with labour hired casually when needed (Diarist 72 prefers clients to pay such labour directly). He works for private clients and gets work as and when he can, mostly by recommendation.

Around March 2018 a nephew arrived to live with them, raising the household size to four. The next year, 2019, Diarist 72 married and brought his wife (then aged 20, with ten years schooling) home, and a child arrived the following year. That is the Covid year and he spent it mostly couped up at home, watching TV and praying. In Dubai the brother was laid off for two months without pay or food or housing: he survived on savings, meaning he was able to remit less. It was around that time that Diarist 72 started thinking he might abandon the painting business in favour of something more reliable and easier to run. We wrote an article about this kind of thinking, called 'Why do poor people settle for low-reward jobs?' featuring this Diarist (where we call him Shiraz). See the picture.

Sure enough, in early January 2021 he started planning to set up a tea shop. After Some delays he opened one, but then found many reasons not to look after it, and we concluded he wasn't serious. We found out that he was planning to go abroad: he paid a middleman 100,000 taka. Time passed and the migration plan didn't mature, and he returned a howlat he had taken for it to a friend. In late November 2022 the brother came back on leave from Dubai, got married, and returned in the middle of 2023. At that time our Diarist was still doing some painting but gradually he turned to the teashop and started working on it seriously. It is now his main source of income.

2025 was not a good year. In May his wife had appendicitis and in August gave up her garments job.. Then his mother was found to have cancer: after some treatment in Dhaka she died in September.

Why do poor people settle for low-reward jobs.pdf

Why do poor people settle for low-reward jobs?' features Diarist 72

Diarist 72 building their new home, 2018

Diarist 72, chart 01, balance

Gifts

Diarist 72 was planning to go abroad and his father-in-law gifted him some money for this. Later, family members gave him money when his mother was sick. He gave gifts to his mother-in-law, smaller ones to other relatives, and even smaller ones to the mosque and its adherents and officers.

Diarist 72, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 72 took plentiful loans. As chart 03 shows, there is an array of them at short intervals. We reported, up to the end of 2024, 137,000 taka taken in 18 howlat loans from a married sister, to finance loan repayments and to buy a sacrificial animal for the Eid festival. We note that 138,500 has been repaid to that family.

His mother twice borrowed from her MFI, Grameen Bank, once for building materials for the home rebuilding, and once to let Diarist 72 repay some savings he had accepted from an uncle (see below).

He has been a long-time client of the Co-op (which is very close-by) and has borrowed 665,000 in 16 loans. There were many uses: a fridge for the shop, repaying howlats, his mother's medicines, his brother's marriage, for his mother-in-law's house repair, to buy a sacrificial animal, to buy shop stock, and to give a howlat to a friend.

He dealt with these systematically, repaying whenever he could. In all, during the time we have tracked him up to the end of 2024, he had borrowed 955,850 taka and repaid 1,096,435.

Diarist 72, chart 03, loans

Savings

Although his loans were centred mainly on his own affairs, Diarist 72 has used his savings accounts mainly to help others manage their money. He is his brother's banker, for example, looking after the remittances his brother sends home.

Then he is a 'moneyguard', looking after a series of sums for an uncle then returning the money when it was needed (on chart 04 in 2019).

As a respected member of the local mosque, he has also helped with the savings club which allows members of the congregation to save up to buy a sacrificial animal (it is known as a cow samity and Diarist 72 is himself a member). The club had its own treasurer who collected the money (200 taka a week from each member) and a month before Eid he handed the whole fund to our Diarist who banked it (in the Co-op). At Eid he took it out and it was his responsibility to select and buy the cow.

Meanwhile his mother had been running two savings account at MFI Grameen Bank, a regular passbook savings account and the higher-interest accumulating type, the GPS. One GPS matured in mid 2023, at 220,000 taka, a large sum. They took it, and it was more than enough to pay off the migration costs of the brother. They closed the account when his mother died.

Diarist 72, chart 04, savings

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