Idalia says that she feels good about being in the pwogram. “M santi m nòmal.” But when she talks in detail about how things are going, she seems mostly frustrated.

One of her two goats already died. “It started yelling all the time, and then it stopped eating. Then it just fell over and died.” The other one is now pregnant, so she has something to work with, but when the goat dies, she says, “It really hurt.”

She’s worried about building her home, too. “They are giving us the tin, but we don’t know where we’re going to get the lumber.” She explains that she isn’t from the area where she now lives. She and her husband have no land there to harvest the posts that she’ll need from. They don’t have any palm trees of their own, either. “We might be able to find what we need in Jinpaye, but it’s a long way, and we’d have to get it here.”

Money is still hard. They haven’t been able to plant this year because they have yet saved up anything they can invest in farming. And her husband’s been sick, unable to move around. Worse still, her teenage boy, her youngest son, is sick too. Doctors who came to offer a mobile clinic told her she should take him to the hospital for a more thorough exam and treatment, but she hasn’t been able to get him there yet. She’ll have to arrange a trip with her case manager.