I Worked With Muhammad Yunus. It Was a Truly Eye-Opening Experience

I had just graduated college during one of the worst financial meltdowns in the United States. Fearing my fate, prompted me to pack up my meager belongings and head off to unchartered territory, all the way to Bangladesh in 2007.
Professor Muhammad Yunus, the father of microcredit, had just received the Nobel Peace Prize and the fanfare around him and his achievements were monumental.
It was luck that allowed me to meet him briefly at a large public event flanked by his supporters. His appearance was unassuming, and yet with a striking simplicity: Unique with his trademark Grameen (which means village in Bengali)-checked long-shirt, white pants, sandals, and a bright smile to complete the look.
He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye, heard me grovel through my promising speech to him, and probably out of sympathy simply ended our interaction just by saying “send me your resume.”
It’s not every day that a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate hands over a business card, and I was elated. I made my way to the Yunus-founded Grameen Bank in the Mirpur area of the sprawling and bustling megalopolis of Dhaka.
It is home to numerous Grameen ventures and the most prominent of which was the office of Professor Yunus.
It is a modest yet worthy building, reflective of the system inside that enables millions of borrowers—97 percent of them women, per Grameen Bank—to take out loans without any collateral.
The main entrance of this building sheltered a small museum “Jobra (the city where Yunus first started his microcredit initiative in 1976) to Oslo (where he received his Nobel Peace Prize). After which one could take the elevator to his office nestled in a corner of the fourth floor of the building.
When I entered the office, the room sweltered in the summer heat without air conditioning and a distant fan whirled hot air towards Yunus. He was wearing his trademark clothes, sitting on a wooden chair without cushions, behind a large wooden desk without drawers.
I once even asked Yunus why I couldn’t find desks at Grameen with drawers, to which he replied: “To prevent under-the-table transactions at the bank.” It made sense!
He had an old dial-up phone and called his most trusted right-hand Ms. Lamiya Morshed, head of “The Yunus Secretariat” (a separate entity from Grameen Bank).
She came to interview me, and my fate for the next three years was sealed. A noble woman, harboring a wealth of knowledge and speaker of several languages, a true polyglot. She took me under her wing to train me the in ways of working for a man of his reputation.
Yunus lived in a tiny apartment, which I believe had two or three small rooms, with his daughter and wife inside the Grameen compound. We weren’t really allowed to venture there, although I always wanted to see his place.
It was the only semblance of privacy that he had left. He was at the office before most of us no matter how late he worked at night. And he used the stairs to the office, seldom taking the elevator-setting a norm that encouraged all of us to follow suit.
The first few months were truly an eye-opening experience. The motto of his work seemed to have an impression of simplicity but with an underlying complexity that commanded change in every word that came out of him.
His personal office was initially just seven people, a personal secretary, and the rest of us assisted Yunus vis-à-vis Lamiya’s vigilant eyes. My work was to assist him in any way asked, focused mostly on arranging schedules with speaking engagements at esteemed events, draft articles on his behalf, and be of assistance to various social business ventures.
My first draft to Yunus was for a magazine article. I frantically typed with fervent, descriptive, floral language and I was proud of my accomplishment. Lamiya attached it to a memo, and I was sure that it would be approved and off it went.
No matter the mountains of work on his desk, nothing was left unattended, and within 30 minutes the assignment was returned to me with remarks, crossed-out sections and detailed strict comments.
His main methodology is disseminating in an easy language, straight to the point that everyone understands, and this started my three years of learning.
There were endless stacks of daily “memos” that you could find at any one point on his desk, the most important of which he would carry back to his small home behind the bank to be worked on after dinner.
Some of these were responses to an array of people from all walks of life from the managers of microcredit offices scattered at over 2,000 branches all over Bangladesh, new potential social business ventures, the media, and letters from heads of states eager to replicate the success of Grameen Bank in their own countries.
At another corner of the office there would be milling of Grameen Bank interns: International students from all corners of the world, learning the ways of helping people climb out of the vicious cycle of poverty through microcredit distribution to the poor.
Within the next three years, he would be awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the U.S. Congressional Gold Award, and as a growing organization separate from Grameen Bank, we needed a new office.
Our small team was busy working on the blueprint of a new center, reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter Center and the Nelson Mandela Center.
Our team approached Yunus, where he drew, on the back of an old calendar nonetheless, the very first logo of his new office: The Yunus Centre, first with one leaf, then two, and then settled on the three-leaf design, which was probably inspired by a tree outside his office.
From seeing him work upfront for three years, Yunus is undoubtedly a man of great virtue, endless energy, and always ready with a levelheaded solution to any challenge that comes his way.
He has a sparkle of an unencumbered man, undefeated by his previous pathos. He has a quintessential liberated outlook on life. This innate ability surely was the impetus that drove students of Bangladesh to approach him, after the overnight demise of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 16-year rule of Bangladesh.
Now, at the age of 84, Yunus has a new mission, very different from the microcredit and social business arena he fathered.
He will undoubtedly try his very best to make the powerless to be heard, while we all nervously watch the country enter yet another chapter of its tumultuous life. There is an immense weight on his shoulders to govern an ailing nation, with its youth in its center ready to surge ahead.
We find him on the precipice, alongside the 170 million people eagerly waiting to see him light his torch to guide Bangladesh out of this sudden, very dark tunnel.
Shams-il Arefin Islam, a classically trained tenor and a Yale-Berkeley College Associate Fellow, designs and manages climate mitigation projects through the in-setting of carbon within the agriculture commodity supply chain. Previously he worked at Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus’s The Yunus Centre, where he was a Program Officer.
All views expressed are the author’s own.
Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? See our Reader Submissions Guide and then email the My Turn team at [email protected].