Diarist 31

Diarist 31's husband, a farmer with a little over half an acre of land, was disabled following a severe fever some years ago and died a few months after we started tracking them.  They had five daughters. The two eldest married, but the third went to work in Saudi Arabia as a hospital cleaner, and remits. We have recorded more than 2 million taka of remittance receipts from her, at first through a bank but then through the Mobile Money company bKash. In early 2018 Diarist 31 had 80,000 taka in cash stolen from her bag as she was bringing it home from the bank. The daughter's salary was reduced during the Covid crisis but she borrowed money in order to keep the remittances flowing. In September 2022, she came home to marry a fellow Bangladeshi also working in Saudi, then travelled back there with him. The couple bore all the costs.

A year or so after her husband died Diarist 31 started rebuilding their home, as a modern cement-block home with aluminium windows. The five-year endeavour required well over a million taka. The family (she and the two remaining daughters, who have left school and now help with the farming and do some dressmaking) finally moved in in early 2022 and by July of that year she found a tenant for part of the building. Diarist 31, who reached grade 5 in school, has educated her daughters but is concerned that despite several years of effort she has yet to secure a good marriage for the 4th daughter.  

Loans

Diarist 31 borrowing was mostly howlats (interest-free loans from family and friends). She had an account at MFI Grameen Bank that went back many years but she never borrowed more than 10,000 from them, a small amount compared with the howlats she took for her husband's illness and later on for building the house. Grameen tried to persuade her to take more and bigger loans but only managed to irritate her and she closed the account in early 2023 mainly because she was tired of being pressured.

In all she took more than a quarter of a million taka in howlats,  from neighbours and family, principally from her eldest married daughter. After her husband died these were most often used for the building work on the house. But she also took rehan loans on her land - a form of borrowing in which she gave over some land for the use of the lender until and unless the loan was repaid in full. There were two of these in late 2017, of 35,000 and 40,000 taka, repaid two years later. After the building work concluded and she had left Grameen Bank she has been making a big effort to repay many of the howlats, as chart 03 shows (over 300,000 since mid-2023). These payments were funded from remittances, which have been plentiful in the period.