Gara Doho Village Visit

       Last week I stayed at the Gara Doho Shahajadpur branch office in order to get an up close view of daily bank operations. The first morning I attended a center meeting in one of the nearby villages. All of the borrowers in this village are required to attend the weekly meetings, and pay back their weekly installments at that time. Each group of 5 borrowers comes up one by one to greet the center manager and pay their weekly installments on their loans as well as deposit any money into their savings or pension accounts. Each borrower is required to deposit 20 taka per week into her savings account and 50 per month into her pension account. This compulsory savings program teaches borrowers the importance of saving for the future and provides them with something to fall back on in case they need it. After they reach a minimum of 300 taka in their savings account, they are allowed to withdraw money from their savings accounts at any time and for any reason. Pension accounts mature after 10 years and the borrower receives 12% interest on the total amount deposited. Although only the 50 taka/month pension account is mandatory, many borrowers had other pension accounts and were saving larger amounts of money each week. 

            After the center meeting, I visited one of the oldest borrowers in the center in her home. Joshna was 55 years old and had taken her first loan from Grameen in 1988. Since then she has slowly built several businesses and dug herself and her extended family out of poverty. During the interview she offered us cookies and tea which we politely refused – I didn’t want to take food from her because I knew she couldn’t afford it. When I tried to tell Russel (my translator) why I didn’t want to accept the food, he responded, “Why do you think she is poor? She used to be poor but now she is the richest person in this village!”

            That afternoon we decided to take a walk around the village before dinner and ran into some kids playing soccer. Russel (our translator) convinced us to play even though it was about 100 degrees outside at the time. The kids love to play World Cup and I was on the Argentina team.  I even scored a goal! (even though I am pretty sure the kids were taking it easy on me). After the soccer game bathing was no longer a choice. We didn’t have a shower in the house we were staying in and the idea of showering out of a bucket standing a foot away from the squatty potty was just too much for me so I had been avoiding it for the first 2 days... Instead of facing that fear, Russel suggested that we shower on the terrace instead. After all it was already pretty dark outside and trees surrounded the whole house. So that’s what we did – Showers out of a bucket of questionably clean water on the roof of a Grameen Branch office in the middle of nowhere Bangladesh. In the end we ended up nice and clean with only a few awkwardly placed mosquito bites!