In April 1980, I married Afrozi. There was a big ceremony in Dhaka to which we invited many of the ministers I knew and bankers with whom I worked. Afrozi and I met several years earlier when we were introduced by mutual friends. She was a Bangladeshi teacher and researcher in advance physics and was then working at the University of Manchester. She was as comfortable in the Eastern and Western worlds as I was. By November 1982, the Grameen Bank membership stood at 28,000 out of which less than half were women. How did we achieve this jump from the less than five hundred members we had in Jobra in 1979? The secret can be stated in one word: slowly.
Whenever Grameen starts functioning in a new location, it is never in a hurry to do anything. This is important for our success. First, we do not want to offend anyone who might be antagonistic towards us or suspicious of us. But also, we believe it is better to progress slowly and steadily and get things right, than to go quickly and make mistakes. No branch should try to reach more than a hundred borrowers in the first year speed only when everything is in order. A guilding principle to our work is to start low-key and in a samll way.
Why hurry? If poor people have survived without Grameen for all these centuries, they can survive without us for many years to come. Our objective is to develop a system that works, not to rush out a service at breakneck speed. Grameen is a self-help organization. We only want to liberate the genius of individuals to create a better life for themselves. We are not an organization bent on forcing anyone to do anything they do not want.
反対いたり → 反対したり なにかもが → なにもかもが のミスタイプです失礼。
活動は → 活動を のミスタイプです。何度もすみません。