Day 4 - First experience!

Good evening to all our virtual fellows travelers! Today I’d like to begin with a big Thank You to all of you for following us in our adventure, for commenting on it, and for letting us share with someone back home our experience while living it at the same time.


Ok! Enough formalities for today! Let’s get some action going.

I’m sure you’re all very much curious about what we’ve done today. Well, for the first time ourselves, we’ve seeing microcredits in action.

Tough day today…

We woke up at 6.30 which for us is like saying 4.30, cos basically we’re just a bunch of desperately lazy guys! But… we managed to wake up in time, (this time we had set not one but two alarms! Just in case!) got dressed, had our usual powdered milk and cereals for breakfast, and finally left the hotel with our friend (a manager of Grameen Bank) Humayun in a minivan and headed for the villages.

First stop: the Branch office! As you should know, Grameen Bank has a very strict pyramidal organizational structure which sees at its top the Head Office (in which we do our researches every day), then the District offices, then Area offices, then Branch offices, then Groups, Group leaders and eventually individual borrower (97% women).

So we went to the Branch office, met the branch manager, went over some data and examined some basic papers, i.e. the loan proposal form. We also got the chance to ask the branch manager some more detailed questions on how the system works both in “credit-wise” and “debit-wise”.

With the branch manager and our friend Humayun we then headed to the village, which was only a few minutes away from the office.
When we got there, all the women borrowers were reunited and ready for their weekly meeting. We took part in it and through Humayun (who also worked as our interpreter) we asked them some questions on their lives, their conditions (before and after they got in contact with the Bank and started taking out loans), their jobs, investments and savings (Grameen also provides few different kinds of saving plans).

Afterwards we visited three houses owned by women who made their way out of poverty also thanks to Grameen.
It’s been very interesting apart from the fact that they kept on offering us food and water which our stomachs and intestines could not perfectly tolerate.
Another funny part was the very strong accent of our interpreter, which certainly kept us focus on what he was saying!

The village left, we wanted to visit a garment factory, and so we did. There are plenty of these factories in that area north of Dhaka.
This part really interested our young growing entrepreneurial minds and us. The factory employed 200 people but will need 300 more in the next three months. It required an overall investment of 2.500.000 Tk (25.000 €) to set it up (shared by two partners), and at 100% capacity it will generate a profit of about 250.000 Tk (2.500 €).
Grameen Bank also took part in this project as it provided money to the wife of one of the two owners.

After that we just came back to the Hotel and crashed for the whole afternoon as we were completely destroyed! I know that you, reader, are thinking that we are real pussies but… try and then tell us! Just one thing to be mention to justify why anything can be so tiresome here: pollution. Dhaka is one of the world’s most polluted cities.
Breathing here is like taking a deep breath directly from an exhaustion pipe, every single breath.

Lastly… Jacopo is gonna write something about the fun part of the day: nighttime! (by the way... it's almost four in the morning so Jaco might not be delightful! We love him anyways though! yeah?!)

For dinner, we found in the hotel elevator other interns of Grameen Bank.
They invited us to join them for dinner, in the nicest district of Dhaka, "Gusham", at Pizza Hut.
(second time in 5 days - we were a bit tired of the chinese fried rice...)

After dinner, we went for a drink to the Westin Palace
(we found later out that one drink was more expensive than a week worth of meals of our hotel restaurant - whatever - ...)

From 23h to 04h, we have been planning the next week-end trips to Nepal - Katmandu- and to a beach in the south of Bangladesh - St Martin's Island - .
We also finished to write the blog.
The 4 of us would like to read new comments. Thank you!
Good night.