As I flew over Bangladesh in July 1992, my 23 year old self was excited at the thought I was finally about to find my purpose in life. I had grown up in the French rural region of Normandy, with undulating hills and fields filled with cider apples, horses and dairy cows. I had gone to Paris to study and had landed in an elite French business school, much to everyone’s surprise, including my own. I was idealistic. Gandhi was my hero, India the country I most wanted to explore and I found it difficult to reconcile these longings with what was expected from me as a business student. On that summer evening I was on my way to Dhaka to do an internship at Grameen Bank, a rural bank that gave very small loans to poor women.  It had already made waves in the international debate on development as it shifted perceptions away from straight giving to empowering people to help themselves. I couldn’t have found anything closer geographically and in spirit to following in Gandhi’s footsteps. And I was desperately hoping that my newly acquired business skills might have some relevance and that I would finally find a place for myself in the world.

From the plane Bangladesh looked airily dark. People in the villages still used mainly oil lamps and it would have been easy to believe there was no-one there. Yet Bangladesh already had over one hundred million people on a surface a quarter that of France. How they could live on what is effectively the estuary of two mighty rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, whose tempers are notoriously unpredictable and change the land map regularly, was in itself a miracle. 

Stepping out of the aircraft I was embraced by warm tropical air, with whiffs of oil, rotting fruit and the sweet fragrance of frangipani flowers. The airport building itself was a large shed, officers in dishevelled khaki uniforms had all the time in the world to assert their power on arriving passengers. I was wearing the pink salwar trousers I had bought the year before in Pakistan and a blue tee-shirt. Bangladesh is a Muslim country and modesty of dress is required.

I was to spend first a couple of days with Ibrahim and his family. My mother had met him through work she did with an NGO in Bangladesh and he had become a family friend. I had visited them two years earlier during a trip around India, that stay had made me feel Bangladesh was vibrant with initiatives of all kinds to develop education, health, income, infrastructure, etc and filled me with enthusiasm.

During that visit Ibrahim’s wife Moni had prepared a chicken biryani I remembered with emotion, such was the refinement and subtlety of taste in spite of the simplicity of her kitchen and her self-effacing way. Their boy had fetched all the ingredients and she had spent the morning in the wet kitchen plucking the chicken, emptying it, preparing exotic vegetables and adding spices I couldn’t recognise. Their flat was simple and devoid of luxuries but the extensive collection of slightly mouldy National Geographic copies in Ibrahim’s office betrayed his worldliness. He regularly travelled abroad to discuss academic papers on solar energy, the subject he taught at Dhaka University. The NGO he had set up installed solar panels on the rooves of village houses to power light bulbs and small fridges, taught village people to grow vegetables outside their house to supplement their rice based diet and built deep tube wells and latrines. 

I had accompanied him on some of his rounds and had been struck by the effervescent joy, curiosity and hospitality of the people I had come across. Women in bright coloured sarees and children in school uniform would crowd around me, marvel at the colour of my skin and want to touch it, ask me my name, if I was married, why I wasn’t married, where my father was, they wanted to show me their house, introduce me to other family members. It was both overwhelming and touching. It was clear most were living practically from hand to mouth yet their houses were impeccably clean and tidy and they would insist on offering me hospitality with pride. They were proud I would want to meet them, and proud to share what little they had with me. It’s there I was offered the best rice crispies I ever ate, prepared by a woman who worked as a daily labourer in paddy fields, blown rice with milk that was still warm from the cow, as she unsuccessfully tried to keep the curious village children out of her one room house.

Ibrahim was waiting for me at the airport. We took a tuktuk to his home. Our excitement at meeting again was mutual. He still demonstrated a love for his country and an eagerness to show it to me that I witnessed over and over again with his country fellows. Yes, there was grief at the suffering of its people, from floods, hurricanes, and many other causes more complicated to explain, but also an absolute commitment to making this young country thrive. It was filled with this enthusiasm that I started my internship.

On the first day I haggled with the tuktuk as was customary to go from my guesthouse to the head office of Grameen Bank in the slightly ex-centred neighbourhood of Mirpur 2. Grameen Bank prided itself on not spending money lavishly as so many international aid agencies did. In the nineties international aid was THE business in town. It paid for expensive consultants, shiny 4 wheel drives and the affluent districts of Gulshan and Dhanmondi buzzed with foreigners busy drawing up development plans from the comfort of their air conditioned offices, or trying to clinch an infrastructure contract with the government, often paid for by their own government in the form of tied aid. All these people looked incredibly important and secretive, they probably didn’t want their ideas stolen then sold to the even more important people who held the purse strings.

In contrast the head office building of Grameen Bank was a simple brick building that only cost a fraction of the market rate because, said Muhammad Yunus with pride, the founder of the bank, no hands needed to be greased. 

Inside there was a collegial atmosphere with a large cantine where everyone ate together.

I was introduced to a few other foreign students, also interns, and to my supervisor, a stern looking man whose role seemed to be to curate our experience so we could become ambassadors for the Grameen Bank cause. I was allocated a desk in a room with the other interns, with lots of reading material and research published on the bank. 

I was also given a programme to go to the villages and see the operations on the ground. I needed to learn enough Bengali to be able to converse at least a little bit with the women there, and I had intensive lessons for a couple of weeks. I discovered a melodious and poetic language, the language of Nobel laureate and poet Rabindranath Tagore. The boy in my guest house kept asking me if I could help him find a job in my country, yet he had tears in his dark soft eyes when he sung to me the national anthem of Bangladesh, written by Tagore, which is all about how the skies of Bengal make the heart sing like a flute. Quite a contrast from the French national anthem with its strident call to arms.

I had set myself two missions to test my possible contribution to development work. One was to offer my marketing skills to sell Grameen Check internationally, the thin striped cotton handwoven by village women that was so resistant and comfortable in hot climates, and I was going to write my third year thesis on the bank’s financial sustainability.

At business school I had thought that of all business areas marketing seemed to offer the most promise for me. Short of saving the world there was at least an element of needing to understand people of different countries and cultures and understanding how a service or a product could be useful or meaningful to them. In a practice interview with an older business school student I had said I wanted to work somewhere with soul and purpose. His reaction was so filled with incredulity at my naivety that I felt ashamed at not wanting to have a regular well-paying career in a regular company like everyone else. His message was clear: I needed to pretend to be what I thought a potential employer might want. I wondered how on earth I’d manage to not only blend in the business world but survive in it. Maybe through my experience at Grameen Bank I could discover how I could use business skills for a greater good. I hadn’t spent a few years at an elite French business school being told how great we were without being imprinted with the belief that we knew a thing or two about managing organisations that others would be grateful for.

A decisive moment was coming up: a one on one meeting with Yunus, the founder of the bank, every intern had a chance to meet him personally. He and the bank hadn’t received the Nobel Peace Prize yet, that would only come 2006, but there was no doubt he was a big deal. I had already met him two years earlier with Ibrahim, his brother, at a small family party. I was too awe struck to engage much in conversation. This time I felt I couldn’t let the opportunity slip, but also that I had more to contribute. 

Finally after a week the big day arrived. I was nervous when I entered his office but was met with sharp, direct and friendly eyes. The room was simply decorated. There was a frame on the wall with the PhD in economics he received in America. There were photos of him talking with Bangladeshi women borrowers of the bank and a photo of his family on his desk. He enquired about my mother, he remembered she was involved with work in Bangladesh.

He laid out the purpose of the internship programme and how Grameen bank was inspiring other micro credit projects around the world. He went to explain how in the absence of any government grants Grameen bank had to cover its own costs, just like the borrowers had to invest into productive assets to be able to reimburse their small loan with an interest, and how the bank had created businesses to fulfil the needs of its borrowers. It had recently started a nursing school funded by school fees paid by the students, mostly children of poor village women who had borrowed small sums from Grameen bank. Yunus explained he had a rule that a new business had to break even within the first two years or it would close. I couldn’t help but reflect on how the entrepreneurial spirit and courage shown by the borrowers and the Grameen businesses seemed much greater than what I had seen at business school. Most of my fellow students were destined to safe well-paid careers with large companies.

Eventually, I found an opening and enough confidence to present my projects: helping Grameen bank sell Grameen Check around the world and carrying out an audit on how financially self-sufficient the bank really was.

His face showed no expression and he didn’t respond right away. A niggling doubt appeared inside of me.

Eventually his response came crushing like a wave: “You are very welcome in our country, and very welcome to learn more about Grameen bank. You are invited to watch and ask questions. Your help is not needed.”

The tone had remained friendly but the message was clear. No foreign interference was tolerated, nor was any arrogant belief that I had the vaguest idea about what was needed or that indeed I had the power to do anything helpful. I felt acutely how young and ignorant I was, talking to a man in his fifties who had lived through wars and lifted mountains, and how even younger I looked. 

I don’t remember how I managed to extricate myself and my shame from his office, but I do remember following his advice to the letter: for the following weeks in Bangladesh and indeed for much of my life I tried to first watch and ask questions, long before wondering if I could be of any help and whether my help was welcome. It certainly cured me from thinking I could arrive with ready-made solutions to any new situation and taught me not to underestimate the resourcefulness of people, no matter how illiterate or poor they may seem.

It took me a few days to digest what he said, even though it was brief. It took me longer than that to fully appreciate where his response came from. To realise that from its birth Bangladesh had been threatened by foreign interference. In the bloody war of independence from Pakistan in 1971 when hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi civilians died, America supported Pakistan. In the nineties the abundant foreign aid was more often than not allocated by foreigners to foreign companies carrying out consulting or building large infrastructure projects, with little consultation of people on the ground. Yunus had returned from America in the early seventies and found that nothing he had learned in his PhD in economics could help alleviate the suffering of his fellow country people during the terrible famine of 1974, when over a million people died, made worse by the American decision to withhold food aid because Bangladesh was exporting jute to Cuba. He and a few others found that small loans were lifesavers to poor people wanting to start a small business to feed their families. They were prey otherwise to loan sharks who expected a reimbursement of twice what they had borrowed, and banks didn’t lend to people without collateral. This flew in the face of conventional thinking in the world of international development, where “poor people” were considered to have so few resources that it was Western countries’ duty to give them what they needed, and more often than not tell them what they needed. That Grameen Bank went as far as charge 18% interest on loans to the poorest of the poor to pay for its high administration cost of having officers in every village where it operated – that was shocking and many people protested in international aid agencies.

My visits in the villages around Tangail and Jamalpur gave me the opportunity to hear the stories of many women, their personal tragedies, how floods had swallowed their land, how disease had taken away family members. And yet they kept going, they had dreams, children kept laughing. I was struck by how the loans given out by Grameen bank and other local institutions relied on the strong sense of community: borrowers were bound together. If one defaulted, the others wouldn’t be able to borrow any more. That feeling of community could be felt everywhere, in a village everyone knew each other and looked out for each other. One day I was alarmed when I heard the shouts of a man being beaten up by several others. A Grameen bank officer explained that he had stolen some chickens and the villagers were punishing him for it: even local justice was dealt with by the village. I particularly remember one woman, over the years she had built a prosperous shop thanks to several Grameen bank loans, she commanded respect. I found her a bit scary but also felt she was a great role model for the women who were new to running their own business.

I had come to Bangladesh unconsciously fancying myself as a saviour and had been wrong footed and humbled. I hadn’t expected the sheer vitality of some people who had nothing and for whom every day was a question of survival. Instead of falling into deep depression and inaction, they seemed intensely alive, keenly attuned to their environment, like a wild animal who needs to secure its next meal to survive. I remember in particular a young teenage boy called Salim who used to hang around the Sonargon, one of the two top hotels in Dhaka. He would invariably appear and ask guests “change money?”, “taxi?” with such twinkling dark eyes and a disarming smile that it was difficult not to like him and give him the occasional order, which he always delivered with prompt alacrity as if his life depended on it. And it probably did.

When I returned to Paris I was struck by the morosity and the resignation of people in the underground and the streets. I missed the huge skies of Bangladesh, the clouds reflected in the paddy fields, the aliveness, the colour. I still didn’t really know what my path was, but I knew that if I kept observing and asking questions something would turn up.

Note: Yunus has been convicted in 2023 to 6 months in jail for violating labour laws. The sentence has been decried by supporters around the world as politically motivated. He is currently on bail pending appeal.

This piece was written as part of a writing workshop entitled “Parables of Change”, run by David Alder. Feedback is very welcome, on jennydawatt@gmail.com.