I went to Mazonbi today to see Mimose. She was part of a cohort of 350 CLM families who completed their eighteen months in the program in December 2014. I have written about her before. Like about 4% of the families who complete the program, Mimose was unable to graduate. In her case, the total value of her business assets was below the minimum value for graduates. Her goats died just before she was to be evaluated.

But not graduating didn’t seem to affect Mimose and her family too badly. After graduation, she and her husband Wozen kept working hard. They bought a cow, and sold it off eventually to buy a large piece of farmland to add to their holdings. More recently, they sold that new piece of farmland, and used the money to buy another one, closer to home, that became available when Wozen’s mother passed away and his father wanted to sell off land to pay for the funeral.

Though Mimose manages a small commerce on and off, the family depends mainly on their earnings from farming. They farm their own land, and Wozen works for other farmers as well. She was proud to tell me that all her children are in school, and she made it clear that her crops are the reason. She said that harvests have been poor this year. Actually, she said, “There was no pigeon-pea harvest at all. None at all.” But, it turns out she was able to sell some part of “none at all” to pay 10,000 gourds in school fees for her children, buy their uniforms, and make sure they have the other little things they’d need.

And she’s had an even bigger problem to deal with in the last months, too. In the early fall, her home was destroyed by a storm. Heavy wind and rain sent a small church sliding down a steep incline. It fell into her house, ripping the house apart. She was inside at the time, but was unhurt. The kids were out playing in the rain. She quickly cleared out the rubble and improvised new walls as well as she could with sheets.

It could have been a terrible moment for Mimose and Wozen. She consistently names her house as the most important, life-change success from her time in the program. But the couple just looked at the fallen home, figured out what it needed, and spent what they had to spend to rebuild it immediately.

Between the cost of repairing her home and the cost of the children’s school, Mimose used up the money in her commerce. All she can do right now is take some of whatever they have in the garden each week — lately it has been sweet potatoes — and sell it at the small mountain market in Dalon. It is just enough to keep the kids fed, though she jokes that her growing boys are starting to eat a lot.

Recently she considered going off to Pòtoprens to work for a few months as a maid. It is one way she could save up some cash to go back into business. But she finally decided against it. “When I thought about the way my girl is growing, I didn’t want to leave her alone in the house with the little ones.. Their father is off farming, sometimes for days at a time.”