Banker to the Poor (10 page)

Unlike our managers, our bank workers do not have master's degrees. They have only two years of college education. If they were to enter the government, they might become junior clerks or office helpers, and they would be at the bottom of the office hierarchy. We receive thousands of applications each year for bank worker positions, but unfortunately we can only accept about one in ten applicants.

We make an effort to hire trainees from a wide variety of economic backgrounds. The overwhelming majority of our job applicants (85 percent for men, 97 percent for women) who come to interview with us have never visited Dhaka before. To raise the money necessary to pay for their interview trip, their parents often sell crops, standing trees, cows, goats, or ornaments. The parents of at least half of our applicants borrow money to finance the trip, many from moneylenders. Over half of our candidates arrive in Dhaka on the same day as their interview as they do not have friends or relatives to spend the night with and they cannot afford a hotel or a guest house.

Nearly all our applicants are good persons imbued with a strong sense of traditional values. Most of them pray five times a day, as expected of a Muslim. The bank is hard work, but those we select appreciate the security, respectability, self-confidence, and opportunity it affords them. Their career prospects after working at Grameen are excellent. Though we pay the salary of an entry-level government worker, we find that privately owned commercial banks that offer much higher wages can rarely entice our workers away from us. What makes our staff so committed? Is it the work itself? Their training? The friendships they form? The sense of personal challenge, self-worth, and rectitude they get from helping their country? I suppose that every worker has his or her own reasons. In any case, we encourage our workers to be politically and socially aware. And we trust them to analyze the objective reality and come up with their own conclusions. Above all, we want to build a problem-solving attitude among our workers. We firmly believe that every problem has multiple solutions and that it is our job to select the best one.

Unlike other commercial bank workers, our staff members grow to consider themselves teachers. They are teachers in the sense that they help their borrowers to explore their full potential, to discover their strengths, to extend their capabilities further than ever before. I, too, consider myself a teacher. Many of the senior officials at Grameen were my students at Chittagong University, and I am happy that they consider me more as a teacher than as a boss. With a boss, one has to be formal, but with a teacher the relationship is more informal, even spiritual. One can discuss one's problems and weaknesses more freely. One can admit personal mistakes without fear of triggering an official sanction. Traditional bank officials need their office, their papers, their desk, and their telephone for support. They feel lost without these props. But you can strip everything away from a Grameen employee, and still at heart he or she remains a teacher.

Here is a typical Grameen bank worker, a composite of the 12,000 workers we now employ, and a typical day's work:

 

1. Name: Akhtar Hossain
   
 

2. Age: 27
   
 

3. Monthly salary (1995): 2,200 taka ($66), including housing allowance, medical subsidy, and commuting allowance
   
 

4. Bonus: One month's salary paid during each of the two Eid holidays
   

 

• 6
  A.M
  . Akhtar wakes up, washes, prays, eats breakfast.
  
 

• 7
  A.M
  . Akhtar fetches his bicycle, documents, and carrying bag from the branch and pedals to a center.
  
 

• 7:30
  A.M
  . Forty bank borrowers await Akhtar at the center. They are seated in eight rows, organized according to group. Each group chairperson holds the passbooks of the five group members. Akhtar collects the loan repayments and deposits from each group.
  
 

• 9:30
  A.M
  . Akhtar bicycles to another center for his second meeting. During the course of the week, he attends to ten different centers, meeting with all 400 borrowers he is responsible for and collecting repayments for general loans, seasonal loans, and housing loans, as well as savings deposits.
  
 

• 11
  A.M
  . Akhtar visits borrowers at home and offers advice. This is an important way to keep track of his borrowers' needs and problems.
  
 

• Noon. Back at the branch office, Akhtar fills out all the reporting forms and enters all the records in his ledger. The branch manager signs off.
  
 

• 1:30–2:00
  P.M
  . Akhtar takes a lunch break with his fellow workers.
  
 

• 2
  P.M
  . Funds collected in the morning are disbursed as new loans in the afternoon. All workers help the branch manager with this task.
  
 

• 3
  P.M
  . Once the loan disbursements are finished, Akhtar and his fellow workers record the new loan information in the ledgers.
  
 

• 4:30
  P.M
  . Akhtar takes a tea break and chats with his fellow workers.
  
 

• 5:00–6:30
  P.M
  . Akhtar visits a center that is experiencing difficulties with loans or organizes an educational outreach program for local children.
  
 

• 7:00
  P.M
  . Akhtar returns to the office, finishes some paperwork, and retires for the day.
  

During our Tangail expansion, we also developed a procedure for establishing new bank branches. Whenever Grameen opened a branch in a new location, we made a great effort to work slowly and deliberately. No branch would try to reach more than a hundred borrowers in its first year of operation. Only once a branch successfully received the full repayment of its first one hundred loans was it allowed to speed up operations and recruit more borrowers. Our goal was to liberate the potential of the poor to create better lives for themselves, not to force individuals to do anything they do not want to. Why hurry? Grameen's objective was to develop a system that worked, not to rush out a service that would fail its borrowers. Therefore we started small. The manager, usually accompanied by an associate manager who will eventually take over responsibility for setting up his or her own new branch, arrives in an area where Grameen has decided to establish a branch. They arrive without any formal introduction. They have no office, no place to stay, and no one to get in touch with. Their first assignment is to document everything about the area.

Why do we provide them with so little orientation? We want them to appear as different as possible from the usual government officials who arrive in the villages with great pomp, expecting delicious meals and comfortable accommodations at the rich villagers' houses. Grameen tries to create a new breed of "officials" with fresh ideas and modest ways. Therefore our managers and associates must pay for a room and are not permitted to stay in fancy surroundings. They may find shelter at some abandoned house, school hostel, or local council office. They must decline offers of food from the well-to-do, explaining that this is against Grameen rules.

Every day, the new branch manager and associate manager walk for miles to meet with villagers and explain the procedures for forming credit groups and our policy of accepting only the most disadvantaged—women who are located the farthest away from the proposed location of the branch. Come rain or shine, they never stop visiting the poor. They are not allowed to take shortcuts by appointing villagers as agents, the usual practice of government officials. And ultimately, it is not their words but their hard work that softens the attitude of the villagers.

Still, it can be a battle. Often the villagers do not believe these modest visitors are bank officials at all. The local schoolteachers are usually the first ones to recognize the visitors' educational status. But none of these teachers have ever made it to university, and they find it hard to believe that anyone with a master's degree would ever work in such a miserable village with such poor people, walking several miles every day. Often new managers face skepticism from religious and political leaders in the villages. It was in Tangail that we first encountered large-scale opposition from conservative clerics. In numerous cases these figures tried to scare uneducated villagers by telling them that a woman who takes loans from Grameen is trespassing into an evil area, forbidden to women. They warn her that as punishment for joining Grameen, she will not be given a proper Islamic burial when she dies—a terrifying prospect for a woman who has nothing.

Other rumors, which can be as frightening to a poor woman as they seem ludicrous to Grameen staff, often surface in the villages. Maharani Das, age thirty-five, from the coastal region of Pathuakali, was told that contact with Grameen would turn her into a Christian. Her family beat her repeatedly to prevent her from joining. Musammat Kuti Begum, age twenty, from Faridpur, joined Grameen in spite of being warned that the bank would take her to the Middle East and sell her to a slave trader. Mosammat Manikjan Bibi, age thirty-five, from Paipara, said, "The moneylenders and the rich people told me that if I joined Grameen, I was a bad Muslim, and the bank would take me out to sea and drop me to the bottom of the ocean." Manzira Khatun, age thirty-eight, from the Rajshahi District, heard she would be tortured, have a number tattooed on her arm, and be sold into prostitution. Grameen was said to convert women to Christianity, to destroy Islam by taking women out of
purdah,
to steal houses and property, to kidnap women borrowers, to run away with any repaid loans, and to belong to an international smuggling ring or a new East India Company that would recolonize Bangladesh as the British had done two and a half centuries ago.

As soon as such rumors start—and the above list is by no means exhaustive—the situation can become tense very quickly. In one particular village in Tangail, for example, our Grameen manager was physically threatened by a religious leader. When the manager saw there was no way to reason with the mullah, he quietly closed the branch and left the village. He told potential members that his life had been threatened and that they would have to go through orientation meetings in the neighboring village. Some women made the daily trek to the neighboring village to form groups and join Grameen. But others, inspired by the way Grameen had bettered the lives of their neighbors in other villages, visited the religious leader and argued with him.

"Why did you threaten that Grameen manager?" they asked. "Grameen was coming here to our village to do nothing but good."

"Do you want to go to hell?" answered the mullah. "Grameen is a Christian organization! It wants to destroy the rules of
purdah
. That is why it has come."

"The Grameen manager is a Muslim, and he knows the Quran better than you! Besides, Grameen allows us to work at home, husking rice, weaving mats, or making bamboo stools, without ever going out. The bank comes to our house. How is that against
purdah
? The only one who is against
purdah
here is you, by making us travel miles to a neighboring village to get relief. You are the one who is destroying our lifestyle, not Grameen."

"Go to the moneylender, he is a good Muslim," answered the confused mullah.

"He charges 10 percent a week! If you don't want us to borrow from Grameen, then you lend us the money."

"Leave me alone. I have had enough of your harassing me day and night."

"It is you who harasses us by not letting Grameen come here," answered the women. "We will only go when you let Grameen into our village. We will come every day and harass you until you let the bank in."

"Oh, okay then, to hell with you all. If you want to damn yourselves to perdition forever, go ahead, join Grameen. I have tried my best to save you. No one can say I didn't try my best to warn you. So go, borrow, and be damned!"

The women were overjoyed. They rushed in a group to the neighboring village and told the Grameen manager that he could come back now that they had talked to the mullah and that he no longer had any objection. The manager thanked them for their persistence on his behalf but said that he would return only if the man who threatened him came and requested his return. He did not want any misunderstanding or any physical threats hanging over him and his Grameen colleagues.

And so the women returned to their village. Again they went and confronted their mullah. Again they argued with him, until he was so disgusted and tired of the whole matter he wished he had never gotten involved. Finally, at his wit's end, he agreed to invite the manager back into his village. It was not an extremely courteous invitation, but everyone heard it. That was the important part.

The women who are the most desperate, who have nothing to eat, who have been abandoned by their husbands and are trying to feed their children by begging, usually stand by their decision to join Grameen Bank no matter who threatens them. They have no other choice. In some cases they must either borrow from us or watch their children die. And those on the sidelines who watch but dare not ignore the terrible rumors about us soon find out that the Grameen managers' understanding of religious issues is often deeper than that of most of the people who accuse them of being anti-Muslim.

We believe that Islam is not at all a hindrance to the eradication of poverty through micro-credit programs. Islam does not inherently prevent women from making a living for themselves or from improving their economic situation. In 1994, the adviser on women's affairs to the president of Iran came to visit me in Dhaka, and when I asked her what she thought about Grameen, she said, "There is nothing in Shariah law or the Quran against what you are doing. Why should women be hungry and poor? On the contrary, what you are doing is terrific. You are helping to educate a whole generation of children. And thanks to Grameen loans, women can work at home, instead of sitting around."