Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus, Alan Jolis Page B

First, 85 percent of poor women in rural Bangladesh cannot read, and second, they are rarely free to come out of their houses without their husbands. We had to devise a whole series of tricks and techniques to recruit women borrowers. At first, because of the rules of purdah, those of us who were men never dared enter a woman's house in the village. Purdah refers to a range of practices that uphold the Koranic injunction to guard women's modesty and purity. In its most conservative interpretation, purdah forbids women to leave their homes or to be seen by any men except their closest male relatives.
    In rural villages like Jobra, purdah is colored by beliefs in spirits that predate Islam. Such beliefs are usually perpetuated by the village pseudo-mullahs who teach religious primary schools, or mak-tabs, and interpret Islam for the villagers. Though these men are looked on as religious authorities by the illiterate villagers, many of them have a low degree of Islamic education and do not always base their teachings on the Quran.
    Even where purdah is not strictly observed, custom, family, tradition, and decorum combine to keep relations between women and men in rural Bangladesh extremely formal. So when I would go to meet with village women, I never asked for a chair or any of the bowing and scraping that usually accompanies figures of authority. Instead, I would try to chat as informally as possible. I would say funny things to break the ice or compliment a mother on her children. I also warned my students and coworkers against wearing expensive dress or fancy saris.
    Instead of asking to enter a woman's house, I would stand in a clearing between several houses, so everyone could see me and observe my behavior. Then I would wait while one of my female students entered the appointed house and introduced me. This go-between would then bring me any questions the women might have. I would answer their questions, and back into the house the student would go. Sometimes she would shuttle back and forth for over an hour and still I was not able to convince these hidden women to seek a loan from Grameen.
    But I would come back the next day. And again the go-between would shuttle back and forth between the village women and me. We wasted a lot of time with the student having to repeat everything I said and all the questions of the village women. Often our go-between could not catch all my ideas or the women's questions would get jumbled. Sometimes the husbands would get irritated with me. I suppose the fact that I was a respected head of a university department reassured them somewhat, but always they demanded that our loans be given to them, not to their wives.
    One day, as I sat in a clearing between the houses of a village, it clouded over and started to rain. As this was during the monsoon season, the rain turned into a heavy downpour. The women in the house sent an umbrella out so I could cover myself. I was relatively dry, but the poor go-between got rained on every time she shuttled back and forth between me and the house. As the rain increased one of the elder women in the house, said, "Let the professor take shelter next door. There is no one there. That way the girl won't get wet."
    The house was a typical rural Bengali hut—a tiny room with a dirt floor and no electricity, chair, or table. I sat alone on the bed in the dark and waited. Wonderful smells of simmering atap rice seeped into the hut from next door. A bamboo wall and cabinets divided this house from the neighboring one, and every time my go-between talked to the women in the adjoining house, I could hear some of the things they said, but their voices were muffled. And every time the go-between would return to tell me what they had said, the women next door would crowd against the bamboo divide to hear my answers. It was far from an ideal way of communicating, but it was certainly better than standing outside in the rain.
    After twenty minutes of this—hearing