I moved to Haiti in January 2005. I’ve been writing regular essays since then about the various projects that my colleagues and I work on and about our lives in Haiti.
Sometimes, deciding whether someone qualifies for the CLM program is easy. You come across someone who has little or no assets they can rely on, they have almost no income, and they have no direction. When long-time members of the CLM team meet such folks, we call them “originals.” I think it’s because they resemble the cases that the program’s founders had in mind when they established it.
Yesterday I met Nana, a single mother of a three-month-old girl. She lives in a room in a shack in her cousin’s yard because her late mother’s house, where she lived alone for most of her pregnancy, was deteriorating so badly that her cousin feared it would collapse around her.
She earns whatever she earns by helping out neighbors during harvest or when they are doing laundry, but she can’t do much right now with an infant on her hands. Talking with her leaves you wondering whether she has developmental issues as well.
An “original,” as CLM staff members tend to call such obvious cases of ultra-poverty. Nana clearly belongs in the program. But many cases are less clear.
Roseline and her partner live in a house they built in a yard that belongs to a cousin who moved to Pòtoprens. The cousin gave them permission to use the land.The couple has a single child. Roseline’s first child lives with her mother.
Their income depends entirely on the man. He works as a day laborer in their neighbors’ fields, making 100 gourds on a day when work is available. That’s a little more than they need for a minimally-decent meal. Right now there are just over 90 gourds to the dollar. Occasionally he finds work chopping up a tree for a neighbor making charcoal. That work pays a lot more money — many times the hundred gourds — but he can’t find it very often.
Their little boy has an asset: his uncle gave him a very small pig. As expensive as livestock has gotten over the pat couple of years, it may be worth 1500 gourds or more.
Despite her husband’s earnings, and despite the pig, I qualify them for the program. Their housing situation is unreliable. People change their minds about such arrangements all the time. Though they have a pig, since it was a gift, it doesn’t represent their own capacity to build an asset, and the mortality rate for such piglets, especially unvaccinated as it is, is high. Finally, Roseline’s complete dependence on her partner leaves her vulnerable. She’s already had one man leave her with child. So, I approved the family.
Margueline lives with her husband and their three children. Two of the three are school-age, and the couple sends them to school by selling plantain out of their garden. They are, however, behind in their payments.
The family keeps a couple of chickens in their yard. They also take care of a very small goat that belongs to Margueline’s aunt. She will be paid in kids if the goat has young while under her care.
Margueline generally makes coffee for the family in the morning. She’ll make a large meal later in the day. She was preparing cornmeal porridge the afternoon I passed by. The family had eaten cornmeal the previous day as well.
Since I knew that for two consecutive days they had eaten a good meal, I was inclined to disqualify the family. She also told me that they find much of what they eat in their own garden. So apparently hunger wasn’t really an issue for them.
But when I disagree with an experienced case manager’s opinion, I usually try to talk. I questioned the case manager who initially selected the family for the program, and he told me that things were quite different the day he met them. He saw clear evidence of their hunger. When he went by, they were trying to stifle their hunger by chewing on gleanings from a neighbor’s peanut harvest. The whole family — adults and children — were sitting in a circle, making the best of a couple of handfuls’ worth. So I approved the family on the case manager’s appeal.
Venicia lives in her house with three children. She has two other children who live with other family members who send them to school in larger towns. Venicia stays in touch with them, and they sometimes visit. But when she asks them if they’d like to return home, they say they are happy where they are. That’s how she knows they are treated well. The two school-age children who live with her are in school, but she owes the school money.
Her husband crossed the nearby border into the Dominican Republic about a year ago because the couple saw no opportunities for him near their own home. He hasn’t been back since, but they are in touch and she says that he plans to visit in April. He occasionally sends her money, but not often and not much. He is struggling in the DR without any legal papers, and even when he has some extra money, he must wait until a friend will be visiting Haiti in order to send it to Venicia. Without papers, he can’t use money transfer services.
Venicia gets by on those transfers from her husband and on the couple of hundred gourds she makes now and then by sorting and bagging charcoal for producers. They pay her 25 gourds per sack, and she can bag as many as six in a day when there’s enough charcoal.
But Venicia manages the little bit of money that she has well. The couple put up the frame for a new two-room house two years ago, and when her husband left the house was still just a frame. Over the past year, however, Venicia has purchased the necessary palm-wood planks to enclose one of the two rooms, and she paid the builder to enclose it. She covered the house with the palm seed pods that families who can’t afford tin use as roofing material in the Central Plateau. The one enclosed room now stores almost enough palm wood to enclose the other room and five hardwood planks that she will give a carpenter who’ll make her front door.
So, though I don’t doubt that Venicia has very little, I could not approve her for the program. Her life is very, very difficult, but she has the smarts and the discipline to make it — very slowly — without us.
Clotude, Jeanna, Itana, and their neighbors have been part of the CLM program for about five months. A lot has happened since they joined, for them and for Haiti. But the situation in Haiti has meant that some of the things that would normally happen in CLM members’ first months in the program have been delayed.
Two difficulties have combined to make provision of some of the supports that CLM offers families difficult. On one hand, gas has been hard to come by. In Gwomòn, it’s been expensive when available at all. As the Haitian government’s debt to international fuel suppliers has increased, the suppliers have cut deliveries to Haiti. And even after fuel arrives in Haiti, distribution is complicated. Some retailers have discovered that they can make more money by selling from gas pumps to street venders, who then sell gallons – often diluted – at inflated prices. Fuel that sells at 224 gourds per gallon – currently about $2.43 – has been selling for 700-750 gourds in Gwomòn, with occasional spikes both there and elsewhere that reach yet higher.
On the other, demonstrations and other manifestations of the political conflict have been more frequent, more sustained, and more intense in the last months. Protesters block roads, sometimes violently. Small groups of frustrated Haitians will also sometimes block the road to collect a toll before allowing travelers to pass. You don’t really know, from day to day, whether one will be able to get where one plans to go.
But after arriving in Gwomòn from Mibalè on Sunday, I went to Lawa with the CLM team there on Tuesday. They went as a group because they had scheduled a meeting with CLM members and the community leaders whom the members had selected to join the Village Assistance Committee. They would establish the committee, explaining its role in detail, and then have members vote in its leadership and set the date of its first meeting.
Though we arrived an hour before the scheduled meeting time, some of the CLM members were already there. Among them was Clotude’s oldest daughter. When we asked why she was there, she told us that Clotude wouldn’t be coming. She had had an accident that very morning, so she sent her teenage daughter in her place. Clotude had been working on the fence around her small piece of land, and something got into her eye. The team wanted to make sure she was alright, and I needed to speak with her, so we left the cockfighting ring, where the meeting would be held, and hiked the additional 20 minutes to find Clotude.
Clotude’s fencing, like much of the fencing in rural Haiti, consists of candelabra cacti. These succulents are easy to grow and easy to propagate from cuttings. In relatively short order, a family can establish a barrier that is hard to penetrate, even for wayward goats.
But the plant contains a sticky, milky liquid, which is mildly toxic and slightly corrosive. In handling her fencing, Clotude got some into her eye. It’s a dangerous situation if she doesn’t rinse it quickly and thoroughly. The liquid can form a film that could interfere with her vision permanently. Her case manager called the staff nurse, Lavila, and we gave her, on Lavila’s advice, a plastic water bottle that we had with us. We showed her and a neighbor we found with her how to pierce its cap and then squeeze the bottle to produce a forceful stream of water to rinse out her eye. We will know when the case manager, Enold, returns next week whether it worked.
She and I also had some time to chat, though she didn’t want me to take a picture. (The photo above is from an earlier visit.) We spoke first about the economic activities that she has asked Fonkoze to transfer to her. She said she chose goats, sheep, and small commerce.
We generally transfer only two different activities, and Clotude had initially requested goats and a pig. But then she had second thoughts about the pig. “If you have a pig, you have to buy feed. You have to have resources. Pig feed has gotten expensive.”
So, she asked Fonkoze to buy her a sheep instead of the pig. They run about the same price. Sheep are more like goats. Both require only minimal care. “If you struggle with them,” Clotude explained, “they’ll provide offspring quickly. You just make sure each one can find something to eat, you make sure it has water, and you keep it out of the rain.” Clotude has received one of the two goats we will be providing and the sheep, and both her animals seem to be flourishing.
Clotude’s plan for small commerce depends on the savings club that her case manager set up for her and several women who live relatively close. Each week, all the women contribute, and one of them gets the whole pot. The arrangement is called a sòl, and it is extremely popular in Haiti. Each of the members of Clotude’s sòl gets 2000 gourds, which is now a little less than $23, and Clotude’s plan is to invest her payout in groceries that she can sell out of her home.
She knows that it will be a tough business. When you sell food staples from a home in the countryside, neighbors will ask to buy on credit. “Credit means I can sell more quickly, but neighbors might not pay for a week, two weeks, even three. But you think about how you used to buy with credit to save your own kids, and it’s not as though customers don’t want to pay you.”
She hasn’t been able to start her business yet, however, and the problem is that she hasn’t yet received her sòl money. The CLM team has fallen behind with its weekly stipend payments to some of the members in Gwomòn. The problem is that there were two quick changes in case manager. The original case manager resigned. It took some time to replace her, but the team did so. The second case manager was then surprised with a job offer close to her home less than a month after she started working for CLM, so she resigned, too. She’s been replaced by an experienced case manager, but it’s taking some time to catch up with all the bookkeeping. The supervisor responsible for Gwomòn expects to work things out next week.
Jeanna
Jeanna also asked the program for two goats and a pig, and she too decided to take a sheep instead of the pig. She’s happy with the decision, though a little bit nervous. Neither she nor anyone in her family has ever raised sheep, so she feels as though there’s stuff she doesn’t know. She thinks that her sheep might be pregnant. She’s had neighbors tell her that it is. But she isn’t sure.
She knows her goat is pregnant. It was pregnant when she received it. But she’s almost six months into the program, and she’s only received one. She knows she is supposed to get two, and she doesn’t know when she’ll get the other one.
Distribution of assets is running behind. Protests and gas shortages have made getting transportation to make large livestock purchases difficult in the last months. In addition, protests in Pòtoprens, almost halfway across the country from Gwomòn, interfere with any of the activities in Gwomòn that depend on cash. Fonkoze’s accountants are in Pòtoprens, and if they cannot get to the office, they can’t transfer cash into the accounts that field staff can access. But the needed transfers have now been made, and the team expects to finish purchasing and distributing livestock and other assets soon.
Jeanna is excited about installing a latrine in her yard and repairing the home she shares with her husband, Nelso, and their kids. She and Nelso have been working hard to assemble the lumber they’ll need early, so the house can go up quickly. Like Clotude, she wonders when she’ll finally receive the sòl payment that she is due, though she isn’t entirely sure how she will spend it.
Itana hasn’t been feeling well. She’s been sore, she hasn’t slept well, and she’s had little appetite. Nurse Lavila, the CLM nurse in Gwomòn saw her recently and gave her some pills, which helped. But she isn’t sure what they are. Itana did said that Lavila had been coming to see her every month, and Lavila explained that Itana is on her list of members with high blood pressure. She went by to check Itana’s pressure and to give Itana her medication. She also gave her some ibuprofen. She doesn’t think Itana’s issues require anything more serious, but she’ll keep an eye on her.
Like Clotude and Jeanna, Itana asked for two goats and a sheep after initially requesting a pig. “A pig is like a child. You can’t wake up in the morning without giving it something. I don’t want a pig I’m responsible for to go hungry.” Unlike the other women, she has received all her livestock.
But she’s finding the sheep puzzling. She hasn’t raised them before, and she’s trying to make sure she mates hers if it’s in heat. “I’ve taken it to the ram two or three times already, but I’m trying to figure out whether it needs to go again. I’ll probably just go again this afternoon.”
She also is waiting to receive her sòl payment. She had planned to invest it in small commerce, but she changed her mind. “People just won’t pay you.” She’s decided instead to use the money to help buy the lumber she’ll need to build a new house. She adds that the other women have wood that they can use, but that she will have to buy all that she needs.
She wants to build one as big as she can with the 22 sheets of roofing that the CLM program will provide. When I explain that she could make things easier on herself by building a smaller house, she explains her reasoning. “If people come to see me, I want to have a place to put them.” With so many of her children living away from home, her hope as she says this is clear. She adds that once she has finished her house, she’ll look to establish a small commerce.
Until recently, the CLM team had a straightforward way of offering new members their choice of enterprises. We had a menu of two-item choices. A member could pick from among goats, pigs, poultry, small commerce, and agriculture, and each would pick two. We are much more flexible now, but in our early years, we were quite rigid. It made a complex part of our work manageable.
But there were occasional exceptions. Ti Manman was one.
“Ti manman” means “Little Mama,” and it is what most people call Simélia Duvelsaint.
When she started the program, she had nothing. “A neighbor was letting me raise his sow, and he would have had to give me a piglet, but he took it back before it gave birth, so I got nothing.”
She and her daughters were living in a straw shack. She supported them partly through small commerce. A neighbor would lend her money now and again, and she’d use it to buy used clothing, which she’d then sell at the Mache Kana market nearby. She had learned to sew as a young girl, so when she found a tailor who would sometimes let her use her sewing machine, she became capable of altering the clothes for her clients, too. Occasionally, she’d even get the chance to make a uniform or two for schoolchildren.
It was, however, unreliable work because anytime the tailor went anywhere, Simélia would find the door locked, and she’d just have to go back home. “I couldn’t say anything. The woman wasn’t charging me. She was just letting me use her machine to be nice. She saw how difficult things were for me.”
Simélia had learned to sew by investing in her own education, something she started to do as a young girl. When she saw that her parents wouldn’t send her to school, she started earning money herself, grating manioc for neighbors who were making kasav, a Haitian flat bread. She used her earning to pay someone to teach her to read and write. “I never went to school, but I got up to the fourth-grade level. Now I’m one of the readers in my church, and I’m the one who works with my granddaughter.” She then found a tailor, and paid her to teach her the trade. “It didn’t cost much back then.”
She never had her own sewing machine, but she started to succeed. She saved enough to buy a cow, which she eventually sold to buy a small piece of land from a neighbor. But she never got to use the land, because one of the seller’s siblings took it away from her. “I had no one to help me,” she explains. She was left with the cow’s calf, but someone in the neighborhood broke its leg with a rock, and it eventually died.
When she joined CLM, she chose goats and small commerce, but at one of the first days of training, the staff asked whether there was anyone who knew how to sew, “and I raised my hand.” Her case manager, Martinière, used the money he would have used to buy her goats and small commerce towards buying a sewing machine, instead. “It wasn’t quite enough,” he explained. “We had to use money she had saved from her weekly stipend, too.”
But she got the machine, and started to work. “I saved as much as I could after paying for the girls’ school, and I started to buy goats. I eventually had seven, but they got sick and died.” She’s had more success with pigs. She now has two: a full-grown sow and a younger one. She also gave her younger daughter one of the sow’s daughters to raise, and her daughter’s sow is now pregnant, almost ready to give birth.
Though her older daughter moved out in July, Simélia still has two children with her: her younger daughter and that daughter’s little girl. And until this year, the sewing machine was the key to their income. But it’s been broken for about six months. The only repairman she could find tried replacing some parts, but it didn’t do the trick. She’s waiting for him to come try something else.
In the meantime, she’s selling used clothing again. She also sells laye, a platter woven of straw used in various ways in the countryside. Finally, she sells bowls made of gourds, which are used in Vodoun ceremonies. She goes to four different markets every week. Her income varies, but she uses a sòlto steady herself. She and about ten other women contribute 500 gourds, or about $5.50, a week, and each week one woman takes the whole pot. “When it is my turn, I can use the money to buy poultry, to invest in my businesses, and to pay back any debts I have.”
Simélia continues to work hard. She invests a lot in her children’s education. But she also has a dream. She would like, once more, to buy a cow. “It’s just something I’ve always wanted.”
A photo of a photo from 2015, sitting behind her sewing machine.
Since it was established in 2007, the CLM program has worked exclusively in the countryside. That was consistent with Fonkoze’s original focus on rural areas, but also with the history of CLM’s parent program, the graduation program developed by BRAC, in Bangladesh. It also focused initially on the rural poor.
This focus had consequences for the program’s design. Its selection process depends on a fundamental fact about rural areas: neighbors know one another well. The enterprises CLM helps families develop have been principally the sort that work in rural areas: animal husbandry, small commerce, and farming. And those are just two of the ways the program has reflected its rural focus.
But Fonkoze knows – as BRAC knew as well – that extreme poverty exists in cities, too. So Fonkoze is now piloting an urban version of the program in Jeremi, in southwestern Haiti. After six days of training ended on Saturday, 200 new families joined the program from five poor, seaside neighborhoods.
There are some differences in how the program works. On one hand, though the selection process involved community members in its first steps, it was not a full-blown wealth ranking process. On the other, Fonkoze ending up transferring investment capital for small commerce, rather than assets. There are other differences as well, including a special array of challenges around home repair and land rights.
Lancie Vixima lives in Kamanyòl. She has eight children, but just five still live with her and the father of the youngest four. The oldest of the five has been raised by her partner as one of his own children. She’s a 14-year-old deaf girl who now has her own baby. Since the baby’s father provides no support, Lancie is responsible for her grandchild, too.
Lancie’s husband used to fish, and she sold used sneakers and schoolbags. But the husband suffered a hernia about a year ago, and had to give up his work. That put more pressure on Lancie’s commerce than it could bear. The expenses involved in getting him care, combined with his inability to contribute, ate up the capital her business depended on. It no longer exists.
To earn the little bit of income she needs to feed her kids, Lancie shells peanuts for women who sell them roasted. A typical job can involve as many as ten cans of nuts and takes her two-three days. She’s generally paid 150-200 gourds, or about $2. That’s enough money to buy 3-4 cups of rice if that is all she buys. But as big as her household is, it doesn’t go far. And the work is difficult for her because she has only one good arm. The other is very little help.
She was excited to get started in the program. “They taught us a lot about managing a commerce.” And she knows what she wants to do with the money she will earn once she starts. “If I make 500 gourds, I need to save 50. And I need to start sending my kids to school again. Four of them used to go, but I didn’t have the money to send them last year.”
Lancie is excited about some of the progress she has made in the program’s first ten months. She had been, practically speaking, homeless because she couldn’t stay in her own home. She and her children were living in borrowed space in her sister-in-law’s home.
In contrast to many of the members from Jeremi, this is NOT because she doesn’t own a home. Lancie owns a well-built home, given to her by a US-based charitable organization with operations in Jeremi, and the land it’s on was given to her as well. But the house had no roof. Not that some or most of its roofing material was in poor condition, but that its roof was gone, lost because of a series of storms. With the investment that the CLM program helped her make in roofing material, the new roof is up and she and the children are back in their home.
Her struggle to develop more income has had more mixed results so far. She initially invested 1500 gourds, which is now less than $15, in a komès epis, or spice business. She sold leeks, garlic, and onions, important seasonings in Haitian cooking, and she started off well, quickly increasing her investment to 2000 gourds. But the business soon withered away because she counted on it to buy all the food her household needs.
She wants to establish a business again. And she’s in a better position to do so now that she’s in her own home. She likes komès epis, and she’d like to return to that. She feels comfortable with it. But she’s like to add a business selling charcoal. Charcoal from wood is the principal cooking fuel in Haiti’s cities, and so it sells very reliably. She feels that an investment of 3000 gourds would get both businesses up and running.
Under some circumstances, she would be able to access the capital by borrowing it from her savings and loan association. All the program members in Jeremy are part of VSLAs.
But two things argue against that. On one hand, she hasn’t been making regular weekly contributions. “If I have 100 gourds, I am going to use it to feed my children.” And not, by implication, to add to her savings.This is a sharp contrast to the lesson she said she learned from the initial CLM training she attended. On the other, she is simply afraid to borrow money. “I have too many kids on my hands.” Lancie still speaks like someone who feels overwhelmed by the challenges she faces.
She does, however, have some money in her savings account, and she’ll need to figure with her case manager how she can use it best.
Margalitha
Margalitha Lissaint too is still struggling after 10 months in the program. She’s 28-year-old a single mother of just one baby. The child’s father abandoned them before Margalitha gave birth. A tiny woman – well under five feet tall – with a back bent by scoliosis, Margalitha just recently moved with her baby out of her mother’s home.
Even before her child was born, Margalitha was struggling to support herself. She tried businesses selling prepared meals or fritay, fried snacks, along one of the alleys that runs through her neighborhood. But she couldn’t keep it business going because she would sell on credit and then her customers wouldn’t pay. “They’d swear at me when I tried to collect.” Margalitha knows that she shouldn’t have given credit in the first place, but in a poor neighborhood like hers, refusing isn’t easy. “The people who ask you are your neighbors, and when you’re hungry too, you can’t say ‘No.’”
She’s anxious to use the resources CLM will give her to start her business again. “I won’t be able to sell on credit anymore. I have a child I’m responsible for.” She wants to go back to selling fritay, but also basic groceries. And she’d like to add a side business selling used clothes. Her mother is in the CLM program as well, and she thinks she can count on her help, especially when she needs a babysitter.
And she’ll need the help. She made it into secondary school before her mother’s inability to pay forced her to give up her studies, and she now hopes that being part of CLM will enable her to return.
“I need to support my baby, but I need to save money, too. That way, if the business shrinks I’ll have something I can invest to make it grow again.”
Margalitha did re-start her fritaybusiness shortly after joining the program. It was starting to progress, but then she ran into trouble. Her baby got sick. Between doctors’ appointments, lab work, and medication, she quickly burned through everything she had. She now counts on her mother, who is also a CLM member, to keep her and the baby fed.
She wants to get back into business, but with all the difficulties she’s faced selling fritay, she’d now wants to try something else. She’d like to take some of the money in her savings account and invest in sandals.
The two live with her mother once again, too, but that situation may be temporary. She is building her own small, one-room home on land that her family controls across a small yard from her mother’s house.
The situation is unusual, however, and may be fragile. She is building the entire home out of roofing tin. Not just the roof, but the walls as well. It is striking to see the bright, new corrugated-aluminum walls reflect the sun just as the roof does. Using the roofing that way leaves her with a much less stable structure than cinder blocks and concrete would, and it means that the home will be especially hot during the days, but it is much less expensive. And she’s afraid to make a more substantial investment because her family’s claim to the land is, apparently, in dispute. She may need her case manager’s help to figure out how to secure her right to the land.
In the meantime, she has already earned some extra money by renting a corner of the still-unfinished home to another single mother.
Meloude
Meloude St. Vil and her husband Nicola live with their six children, ages five to 13, in a neighborhood called Dèyè Distriyèl. Her husband does whatever odd jobs he can find, often scavenging scraps of iron that he can sell to recyclers. Meloude sometimes finds someone willing to give her their laundry to do. Neither has any regular income.
Until Hurricane Matthew passed through Jeremi in 2016, the family lived in a small house with a solid roof, but the hurricane’s category-five winds blew the house down. She and her husband collected what they could of the roofing material and used it to put up a new set of make-shift walls. That lasted until an unexpected windstorm blew the house apart Friday night.
She and Nicola support their kids with his little jobs and her occasional laundry, but it’s gotten much harder. “More people are doing those things now.”
She’s started to work out her plan to establish a more regular income. She wants to get up early in the morning and sell prepared breakfasts. She figures that she can use the business to feed her children before they go to school. She’ll finish selling early in the day, and then move to the market. She’ll sell basic groceries there.
She thinks that, combined, the two business can help her out. She needs to feed her children, but knows that it’s also important to save. “I have to put 50 gourds somewhere now and again so I’ll have something if the house needs repairs or if one of the kids gets sick.”
Meloude’s new home on the waterfront.
Ten months into the program, Meloude and Nicola are glad to be working to rebuild their home once again. Because she is part of the CLM program, she has more resources to invest than she’s ever had before. Though the house is still a temporary structure, made mostly of roofing tin, the couple has begun assembling the blocks they will need to replace the walls. They have purchased most of the blocks they’ll need, but they will need more money to buy the cement.
Meloude feels her life has changed since she joined the CLM program, and not only because she can hope to repair her home. “M pat konn manyen lajan chak mwa.” That means that her hands didn’t touch money every month. It is hard to believe that she means it absolutely literally, but it is, nonetheless, a powerful way to talk about the difference in her life. She has money to manage, to make decisions about. She no longer must live hand-directly-to-mouth.
She used to sell prepared meals, buying the ingredients in the morning on credit and then paying the merchants that same day. But if her food didn’t sell well, or if too many of her clients paid with credit themselves, she could find herself unable to pay what she owed. She’d have to face the merchants, and ask for their patience. And in the meantime, her own business would be blocked until she could clear the debt.
The capital that the CLM program made available to her made it possible to re-establish the business with her own money. Because she’s not borrowing any more, she can keep things going through the inevitable dips that her business will go through. As long as she manages what she has, she can sell any day that she doesn’t have something else she needs to do.
But most of the money CLM provided the family has gone into her husband’s business, which is now flourishing. He buys scrap metal of all sorts and sells it to recyclers in Pòtoprens. It took some time to build up his capital from what Meloude initially gave him, but he can now buy 15,000 – 20,000 gourds worth each time he ships.
Meloude with her new baby. She says it will be the couple’s last.Sonya
Sonya Etienne is succeeding quickly. She lives with her husband Gary and their two children, ages four and nine, in Nan Site.
The family previously depended entirely on Sonya’s business selling charcoal for cooking. Gary is willing to work hard, but he has no skills. He used to depend on finding masons willing to take him as an assistant, carrying mortar, rocks, cement, or water, whatever they would pay him to do. But the work was irregular. He could go days at a time without finding anything. He eventually got sick, and was unable to work at all. He’s recovered, though, and now makes cinder blocks with a shovel and a mold. The work is much more regular. Some of the progress the couple has made comes from his improved health.
Sonya has a lot of experience with her charcoal business. She buys a sack or two and divide it into bags that give someone what they might need for just a day or two. Sales are reliably profitable even if there are occasional small losses. “Sometimes you open a sack and most of the charcoal has been ground down into pieces that are too small. Then you lose money on that sack.”
Paying for her husband’s healthcare while feeding the household without his help proved to be too much for her business, and it disappeared. She was excited to get started again using the capital that the CLM program made available.
She was also happy with the lessons about small commerce that her CLM training provided. She learned some things about avoiding counterfeit money that she believes will be valuable. But there was more, as well. “They said you should sell what you know, and I know charcoal.” A charcoal business is important to her because it means that she always has some to cook her own food.
She wanted to add a side business selling cookies and crackers to schoolkids and another selling cellphone minutes. But other opportunities came her way. Once she had re-established her charcoal business, she started buying gasoline in five-gallon jugs and selling it by soft-drink bottles, half-gallons, and gallons to motorcycle drivers. They are willing to pay a premium to avoid having to go all the way across town to get into line at a gas station.
She also started a business selling ice, but she didn’t start it herself. Her ten-year-old son Widmaël did. Someone gave him 100 gourds, which is less than a dollar, and he bought a small block of ice, which he carried around until he sold it in small chunks. Sonya explains, “He never spent any of the money he made. He just kept buying more and more ice.” So she bought a thermos chest and started buying in larger quantities. She would sell to people who came to her looking for ice, but Widmaël would still make most of the sales by taking a small amount at a time and walking around with it. When school starts, he’ll go in the morning. “Ice sells better in the afternoon sun anyway,” Sonya explains. She still plans to sell cookies and crackers, but is waiting for school to reopen to get started.
Sonya and Widmaël
Looking back after ten months, Sonya thinks more about the Haitian proverbs they have discussed in her CLM trainings than about any particular skills she’s learned.
“Hang up your bag somewhere you can reach it.”
“If they pour water for you, you should be ready to scrub your own body.”
This second proverb was especially meaningful because, she says, “there is a level of effort I would not be putting into to things” if I weren’t in the program.
She believes in saving, and has been using a local savings structure for years. Someone with means collects savings every day: one Haitian dollar, which is five gourds, on the first day of the month, two on the second, three on the third, etc., all the way to the 30thor 31st. At the end of the month, you receive 450 Haitian dollars, or 2250 gourds minus a 50-gourd fee. If you miss payments, you get back what you have deposited, minus the same fee.
Savings are especially important because her home is a rental. She and her husband have been paying 10,000 gourds per year. That’s almost $110. It is much more money than they can earn in a single shot. Their lease is up in September, and the landlord has already warned them that the rent will increase to 12,500 for the coming year.
And Sonya was excited to report that she is on the way to solving her rental problem. She and her husband Gary were able to make a downpayment towards the purchase of a small piece of land not far from the neighborhood where they now live. It will eventually cost 90,000 gourds, but they are well on their way. There is already a shack on the land, and they will need to replace it, but they decided to focus on installing a latrine first. Once the latrine is in, they feel they can move. Replacing the shack can wait.
Marie Milise
Marie Milise Mistaire lives in Lapwent. She’s had nine children with six different men, but she lost one of the kids. She’s been alone with her kids since the last man died. Six of the children live with her. Her oldest girl has been living with her uncle out in the countryside ever since the younger woman’s stepmother, whom she had been living with, put her out of the house. Her second daughter moved out to be with a boyfriend, but she now wants to moved back in with her mother, pregnant. The boyfriend refuses to help her.
Marie also has a nine-year-old with severe disabilities who lives with a sort of foster family. The family lives near a school for handicapped children, and they took a liking to the boy. Marie pays for the school, but they take care of the boy for her.
She used to make a pretty good living selling fish. She would buy a big thermos-chest full from local fishermen and take it for sale to the market. On some days, she would see that the market was too flooded with fish. Then she would separate her merchandise into small loads and carry them on her head through the residential areas of town. It might take three or four trips to sell a full day’s load, but she would usually sell out. If she had any she couldn’t sell, she would dry it out and sell it later. She was successful. “I could put aside 500 gourds of the profit every day, even after I took out what I needed for my family.”
But taking care of her late husband before he died ate up all her capital. She was forced to turn to friends for charity.
She was excited to be part of the program, and knew she wanted to go back into the fish business. “I will do what I know.” And she was confident she would succeed. “You don’t buy something to sell it at a loss.” She was thinking from the start of building up savings. “When the CLM team sees my savings account, they’ll know I worked hard. I think I can come in first place for savings.”
She re-started her fish business with 2500 gourds of the capital that the CLM program made available, and has built it up to 4000 gourds. She makes 500 to 1000 gourds of profit in a day. She tries first to sell her entire load to a restaurant, but if she cannot, she walks it through the street selling individuals as much or as little as they want. “Even if it’s just 25 gourds, you cannot tell them you won’t make a sale.” If she sells out quickly, she can make a second trip.
When she joined the program, she was thinking of all the things her house needed, things she felt the lack of, like a bed, chairs. “When they first came to my house, they had to sit on my water jugs. I want to buy chairs so I can offer them a place to sit. I had a big pile of dirty laundry because I didn’t have the money to buy soap. If they see that my life doesn’t change, they’ll think that their investment was wasted.”
And her life has changed. “I didn’t have cups we could drink water from. I didn’t have a basin to do laundry.” She proudly shows off some of the household items her business has enabled her to buy.
But as she talks about her progress, she smiles and makes a pun. “Fòk ou jere. Jeremi gen ‘jere’ ladann.” “Jere” means “to manage.” She says that “You have to be able to manage. Jeremy has managing as part of it.”
Fonkoze piloted the CLM in three regions: Lower Lagonav, Boukankare, and Twoudinò. At the time, they were rated as the three poorest parts of the country. In each area, the team worked with fifty families.
Twoudinò is in Haiti’s northeast, a region that has seen important changes since the CLM graduation. The main road between Okap, Haiti’s most important northern city, and Wanament, on the Dominican border, is now smoothly paved. Its completion has facilitated trading in the region because both Okap and Dajabon, the Dominican city across from Wanament, are important market towns. In Karakòl, just north of Twoudinò, post-earthquake relief funds helped establish a park of assembly factories that now employs almost 15,000 people. Excess electricity generated at the park makes the region the only one in Haiti with reliable power all the time.
Elissiène lives in Kayès, not far from the park. Her home is a multi-room cement house in the back of her yard. Her two youngest children still live with her, and the three older ones are off on their own. She’s a widow and has been one since before she joined CLM. Cement homes belonging to two of her grown children – “off on their own” doesn’t mean distant – sit in front of and on either side of her house, the three together forming a semi-circle.
She started the program with goats and poultry as her activities, and she managed both well. Eventually she was able to sell off her other livestock to buy a cow. But she didn’t feel as though she could take care an animal that big by herself, so she turned it over to a neighbor. He would receive every other calf it produced as his payment for caring for it. Neither he nor Elissiène benefitted from the arrangement, however, because the cow was stolen.
While she was part of the program, she also developed a small commerce. She used savings from her weekly stipend to get started. Eventually, she was selling bread, sugar, local rum, cigarettes, and other high turn-over items. The commerce prospered and she maintained it for years. “If you are a woman and you’re in business, as long as you know what you’re doing you’ll make some money.”
But she sold out her business a couple of years ago and threw all the capital into improving her house. She felt as though she had no choice. Two of her children got jobs in local factories, and they needed their mother as a full-time babysitter. Now that the kids are getting a little older, she’d like to go back into business. “I can leave them for short periods, now.” All she would really need to do is go off to buy her merchandise. She would sell, as she always did, right out of her home. Going back to earning an income, even a small one, is important to her. Her youngest child missed out on the national 9th-grade graduation exam last year because Elissiène owed money to her school.
Anne Marie, or “Mad’Kòk”
If you go to Jakzil and ask for Anne Marie’s home, they’ll try to take you to one of the three nearby women named Marie. But you won’t find Anne Marie. She’s married to a man they call “Kòk,” and no one knows her by anything except “Mad’ Kòk”, or Mrs. Kòk. “If you ask for Mad Kòk, anyone around her will bring you straight to my home.”
Jakzil is a village of closely-spaced shacks on the plain near Haiti’s northern coast. The Atlantic Ocean is just a few steps away. Anne Marie, like Elissiène, received goats and chickens when she first joined the CLM program, and she managed them with great success. By the time she graduated, she was ready to buy her second cow. In the years that followed, she sold the four calves they produced and invested the money in the house she lives in now. It has all been her work, because though she is known exclusively by her husband’s name, she cannot count on him to contribute to the household.
Jakzil was arid to start with, and in recent years drought has very much reduced her access to grazing for her cows. She watched the two big ones losing weight and getting sick. She eventually sold them at a loss to a local butcher.
But she did so with a plan. While in CLM program, she had built a small commerce selling salt. As a retailor, she saw the potential benefits of a larger business. So, she took the money from the sale of her cows and bought a salt basin. The coast around Jakzil is one of the areas that produces the coarse salt that is principally consumed in Haiti. Anne Marie lets sea water into her basin and then closes it off, letting the water evaporate. Once a month or so, she can harvest. A single harvest can bring in 10,000-15,000 gourds. She doesn’t have time to manage the basin herself, though. A neighbor does it for her, and they split the income.
She doesn’t, however, depend entirely on that income. She spends much of her time hunting tchatcha, a kind of small, saltwater crab used in Haitian cooking, and other small crustaceans she can find along the shore. She sells these to merchants, who bring them to market. She also gets a regular monthly salary from a local school with a school lunch program. She supplies them with the firewood they need in their kitchen. She collects it locally.
She’s focused now on her youngest child, a teenage daughter who still lives with her. Her most important goal is to keep sending the girl to school. “She’s my youngest. She’s the one I have to raise the highest.”
Rosette
Rosette also lives in Jakzil. She had nine children, and eight of them survive. Her four youngest are still in school. Two will be in their last year of high school this year, and two will be in 10thgrade. She has had to raise them alone.
She too chose goats and poultry as her two CLM-activities. They flourished while she was part of the program, but didn’t last long afterwards. “There was so much draught. The livestock couldn’t survive.”
So, Rosette found another way to get by. Her neighborhood is part of the area served by the electricity generated at the Karakòl factory park. Her home has electricity all the time. She acquired a freezer. She buys five-gallon jugs of treated drinking water and fills small plastic bottles. She freezes them and sells them as ice. A jug of water costs 25 gourds, and she can sell the ice for more than twice as much.
She remembers the program fondly. She especially enjoyed the group trainings. “You have to learn to be comfortable around people. You have to change, and we changed.”
Bwa Joli stretches along one of the ridges that divide Tomond from Boukankare, which lies to its south and west. It is a hard-to-reach neighborhood of small farms, mainly patches of corn and beans. The one road into the area is the steep climb up Mòn Dega. Recent work by heavy road equipment smoothed out some of the worst spots on the slope, but the work stopped in Plenn Dipò, so the last hill from there to Bwa Joli remains challenging.
Gran Chemen is a broad footpath well onto the Tomond side of the ridge. That’s where Manoucheca Louis lives with her partner and their three kids. Before the family joined the CLM program, they survived by farming, making charcoal, and selling the avocados that grow on her in-laws’ land once-a-year. “If you don’t have a horse, you have to carry your merchandise on your head, which means you can’t make much. You’re stuck selling a day’s worth of labor or making charcoal. We had reached a difficult moment.”
Manoucheca
Manoucheca has been a CLM member for seven months. She chose goats and poultry as her two enterprises, and while the goats haven’t yet had kids, they are healthy. “I put them with a buck and thought they were pregnant, but they weren’t. I mated them again last week. So, we’ll see.”
The poultry has gotten off to a quicker start. As part of the package, she received two turkeys, and one already has three chicks. Turkeys are valuable, but they are hard to keep. They tend to wander off, and they are easy to steal. “The chicks were disappearing for days at a time, to I finally had to tie the mother to keep it in my yard.” In addition, a sharp rise in the price of local chickens has increased the value of her holdings. She plans to wait to sell off some of the chickens, though. “I’ll use the money to buy another goat, because a goat can turn into a cow. For the price of three adult females, you can by a young calf.”
But she isn’t ready to sell any livestock yet, and she’s reluctant to sell any for food. So, her husband is still responsible for the family’s income. And she needs that income, both to feed her kids and to save every week in her Village Savings and Loan Association. “If he gives me 500 gourds to go to the market, I make sure that I set aside 50 gourds or so.”
She’s getting ready to use the access to credit that her savings provide. She plans to borrow 3000 gourds this week to buy beans at the market in Opyèg. She’ll be able to sell them for a higher price by carrying them downhill to markets in more populous areas. She can buy on Wednesday, and sell on Friday in Domond. Then she’ll buy again on Saturday, and sell on Monday in Difayi. She doesn’t have an animal she can load, so she’s limited to the seven coffee-cans worth she can carry on her head, but it is a good, if a difficult way, to establish a regular income.
It is a hard time for her to begin, however. She is in the early stages of a new pregnancy. But Manoucheca is confident. “When I had my other kids, I was able to work almost until they were born.”
Marie
Marie Exantile also lives in Gran Chemen, though her home is a long way off the main path. She lives as a widow with five children and three grandchildren. Her husband has been dead for seven years.
Her oldest daughter, Zette, is also a CLM member, and she will move out of her mother’s house as soon as her own is ready. But Zette will take only her youngest child. The other two children will stay with their grandmother because the man Zette is moving in with is not their father.
Before joining the program, Marie and her children survived by farming. She would sell a day of field labor whenever she could. “Life wasn’t good. I didn’t have the strength to send my kids to school. I couldn’t keep them fed.”
She chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises. One of her goats already had a kid, and the other is growing quickly. She almost lost the kid because its mother wasn’t producing milk. But she tried a folk remedy she had heard of, and it worked, so the kid is healthy now.
Her pig was pregnant, but it wasn’t really mature enough to bring the pregnancy to full term, and miscarried the litter. It recovered well, however, and Marie still has high hopes.
Like Manoucheca, Marie thinks it is important to save money in her association, but she has to find the money on her own. She occasionally sells a bunch of plantain or whatever she can find in her garden to both buy what she and her children need and to set aside some savings. Unlike Manoucheca, she’s reluctant to take out credit. She’s been suffering from cramps in her legs for almost a year, so she has trouble getting around, and it is hard for someone where she lives to start a business without doing a lot of walking. And without a business to invest in, she is afraid that she wouldn’t be able to repay what she borrowed. So, she thinks she’ll wait until the savings and loan association pays out her savings at the end of the year and see how she’ll invest the money. “I’ll have to see how much there is.”
For the moment, not a lot has changed about her life. For six months, she received a weekly stipend, but she has no new source of income. She isn’t willing to sell any of her livestock, whether to invest in other ways or to feed her kids. “I remember once I sold two goats to plant a garden of beans, and the beans failed. My neighbors laughed. They said I was in too much of a hurry to get rich.” For now, she’ll save the livestock so she can use it if she’s faced with an emergency.
Joveline St. Fleur lives in Anana, a small community along the road that cuts through Tyera Mouskadi from Tomond to Kas. She lives with her mother, five siblings, and her older sister’s child. Her mother’s oldest died before Joveline was born, and Joveline’s oldest sister now lives with her partner in a separate house.
Her mother’s name is Rosette Bruno, and she has been a member of the CLM program since last year. Rosette will graduate, if she passes next week’s evaluation, at the end of August.
Joveline says that CLM has really helped her mother and the family. “They gave her money and helped her start a small business, so she could begin to send some of the kids to school again.” Rosette chose goats and small commerce, and her three goats are now five, even though the first litter died right after birth. Two of the young females are pregnant now. Rosette started a small business selling basic groceries out of her home, and it took off. She used it to manage household expenses and also to buy weekly shares in her savings and loan association.
The program helps the communities it works in establish associations, and members can buy from one to five shares each week. At the end of a year, members collect all that they’ve saving along with the interest they’ve earned. Increasingly, it is the most important of the various forms of savings that the program encourages.
Members can also take out loans. Rosette used one to buy the materials she needed to complete construction of the family’s new home. She had a hard time repaying it, but her association was able to deduct her balance from the end-of-year pay-out. The remainder of her pay-out enabled her to by a large pig for 4500 gourds.
Unfortunately, someone stole the pig. That’s a big loss for Rosette, but Joveline says she’s looking to her goats to help her get moving again.
Joveline just spent three days at CLM’s summer camp in Kas. She liked it because she learned things that she’s always wanted to know. “We learned to make different stuff, like liquid cleaner and kokiyòl.” The latter is a sweet fried dough, sold in little rounds. Joveline would like to help her mom by starting a kokiyòl business now that she knows how to make them. She thinks she’ll need about 2500 gourds to get started, but she isn’t sure. She also isn’t sure where she’ll get the money, but she’s hoping that her mother will lend her a goat that she can sell for the capital she needs.
Kerline joined the CLM program 16 months ago. At the time, she and her husband were living with their two young children in the barest of shacks on their land in Tyera. That shack, or ajoupaas such constructions are called in Creole, was really no more than a rough tent. Two poles in the back and two more in the front crossed at the top to hold up the pole in the middle, which supported the roofing material. A few posts stood on the other side of their yard, where construction had begun on a new home, but the couple had been able to make no progress.
They survived as day laborers, earning 50 to 100 gourds per day working in their neighbors’ fields. At least when work was available. Kerline’s ability to earn is limited. Her right arm has been misshapen since birth, and she can do very little with it. “We had no home, we didn’t have anything. We were much worse off. We couldn’t make progress. We just sold days of work.”
They chose goats and a pig as their two enterprises. Her boar is healthy and growing, and she wants to keep it until it is large enough that she can exchange it for a small cow. Her two goats are now five. They haven’t yet been reproducing. She’s only had one healthy kid so far. She was able, however, to buy two additional goats: one with savings from her weekly stipend, and the other with money from her savings and loan association.
Kerline would like to eventually start a small commerce. She knows that it’s the best way to ensure a steady income. But she has reservations. “I’ve tried commerce before, but people buy on credit and then they’re slow to pay. The women who succeed at commerce are the ones willing to raise hell to get paid.”
She’s thinking of the kind of business that some rural women run out of their homes. The CLM program has lots of experience of women who struggle to make such businesses work. The sort of women who enter the program are especially vulnerable because they lack the social standing that makes customers feel compelled to pay. The fact that they are thought to have received their businesses as a gift from CLM can make collecting what they are owed even harder.
Kerline knows that the simple solution is to run her business at local markets, rather than out of her home. Customers at the market do not generally expect credit, and it would be easy for Kerline to avoid giving it. But the challenge before her now is accumulating the 1000 to 1500 gourds she feels she’ll need to get started. (One thousand gourds is currently worth about $11.) She says she has no money.
She could easily sell one of her goats. Prices for goats – really for all livestock – have been very high, and even a small goat would sell for more than she needs. But she doesn’t want to do that. “I wouldn’t want to sell one and then lose the money.”
She wants to keep her goats so that she can sell one when necessary to cover the expenses of sending her younger child to school. Her older child now lives a little way down the road, with Kerline’s sister. “She’s sending her to school for me. I have to make sure I can take care of the younger one.” So, she’s willing to wait until her husband can earn the money she’ll need to start a business at the local markets.
Guilbo and Guisman
Guisman and Guilbo are twins. They have lived all their lives together, first in their parents’ home in Tyera, then each in his own home with his own family on opposite ends of the yard they grew up in. They were once prosperous farmers, as Guisman explains, “We planted sweet potatoes, corn, and manioc. We could live from the harvest, and buy livestock with what was left over from what we sold.”
Guilbo was the first to run into trouble. He went blind, and lost his ability to farm. He sold the livestock and, then, even his land in efforts to save his vision, but nothing worked. He and his wife were left with children to support but without the means to support them. “Once you sell something off, it is hard to replace it.” The family lived mostly off of gifts from members of their church and their older children, who by then were married.
Guisman fell back into poverty shortly after his brother. He sold off most of what he had in a struggle to save his sick oldest child. Fortunately, the struggle was eventually successful. But then, like Guilbo, he went blind. He, too, began to depend largely on occasional gifts from members of his church.
The brothers qualified for CLM because of their poverty and their disabilities. Though about 95% of program members are women with dependent children, the rest qualify, whether men or women with or without dependents, as individuals with disabilities. This was an important change in the program that started with a pilot sponsored by Haiti’s Secretary of State for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities, using an award he received from Texas Christian University.
Both brothers have made modest progress in their 16 months. Guisman chose goats and small commerce. The return on the goats has been minimal so far. One of the three that the program gave him had a healthy kid, but another one died. The program was able to help him replace it, and now two of the goats are pregnant.
His wife used the capital the family received for small commerce to establish a business selling inexpensive footwear of various sorts. Proof that the commerce is succeeding is the pig that they have purchased out of its profits.
Guilbo has had a harder time. He chose goats and a pig, but both his goats died, and though the program replaced one of them, the replacement died as well. His sow has been healthy, and it is due to produce its first litter this month. If even only a few of the piglets survive, it will be a windfall. He’s hoping to use them to buy a cow.
In the meantime, his family is living, like Guisman’s, on his wife’s small commerce. They already used its profits to buy a goat. Unlike her sister-in-law, however, Guilbo’s wife did not start her commerce with CLM assets. Instead, she used a small gift from the family’s church.
But Guisman points out how important the CLM program has been toward both families’ success. “The training we’ve gotten has made our wives’ businesses work. We learned how to manage a commerce well and how to use the income.”
Once new CLM members have been selected and have received their initial six days of training, their real work in the program begins. A lot has to happen, almost all at once.
Families must prepare to install a pit latrine in their yard. Very few have previously had access to one. They need to get the correct measure for the pit that they will dig from the CLM team, dig the pit, and assemble the rocks, sand, and water that construction requires. Timing is important, because if you dig your pit before the CLM team is ready to deliver the cement and begin construction, its walls can deteriorate, especially during rainy season.
They also begin to receive their weekly stipend, and have to make quick decisions about how they will use it. Most will use the majority of the money to supplement their food budget, but most also want to start to save by joining a sòl, a form of do-it-yourself group saving common throughout Haiti. Members make a fixed contribution every week, and one of them receives the whole pot as a lump sum. Case managers help members use the sòlto learn planning, requiring them to detail what they will do with the money. They follow up to ensure they’ve done what they say they’ll do.
But the centerpiece of the CLM program continues to be helping each family establish a reliable livelihood, a way to earn a living on its own. At their six-day training, members learn about the various businesses that CLM can provide, but then they must choose the ones they want to try themselves. Case managers and CLM members go through a process called “enterprise selection,” each member deciding what sort of productive assets she would like the team to give her.
The process has changed in the past couple of years. Originally, members chose from a short menu of possible pairings: goats and commerce, goats and a pig, goats and poultry, a pig and commerce, or a pig and poultry. Occasionally options would be added, removed, or revised. We experimented with commerce and a horse. We added peanut and pepper farming. Members made their decision before the initial training, at the same moment they were offered the chance to join the program. Their decision determined what two three-day training modules they would receive.
But the CLM team eventually decided that too many members were inclined to make poor decisions. They just didn’t have enough information. And rather than let them make costly mistakes, their case managers were, too often, deciding for them, taking away members’ ability to set their course at the beginning of the program.
So, the training modules were streamlined to take just one day, and new members were offered a quick introduction to all the different assets that CLM can provide. With that information in hand, they are better positioned to decide for themselves what they would like to do. Case managers might ask pointed questions. In some cases, they might even ask a member to reconsider her initial choice. But they are trained to encourage the member to decide.
Tuesday was enterprise selection day in Lawa, in rural Gwomòn. The visits were led by the CLM team’s supervisor for Gwomòn, Gissaint César, a former case manager who was promoted to work as a supervisor in 2017. He went through the same process with each new member individually, at her home, starting by asking them to review the advantages of each of the various enterprises the challenges it presents.
Jeanna spoke at length about both poultry and small commerce. The former gives you small assets that you can sell off quickly whenever you have a small, urgent expense to manage. If a child is sick, for example, you are sure to find a neighbor willing to buy a chicken, and that will generally give you the money you need initially to get the child to a doctor. Commerce, by ensuring a stream of cash, enables you to “pay a sòl or buy a little bit of food” when you need to.
But she chose goats and a pig, the goats because they are easy to care for and require no special food and the pig because they can accumulate value quickly. She specified that she’d rather raise a boar than a sow. “Piglets get into people’s gardens, so they throw rocks at them and kill them.”
Gissaint spoke to her at length about the choice, asking her to identify her goals. Jeanna explained that she wanted to be able to sell offspring from her goats to buy a larger animal. “I want a horse so I can get into commerce again.”
She has been managing a business on and off for years, living in Senmak, where she sells drinking water and kerosene, any time she is not at home with a baby. Her husband would stay in Lawa with the kids. But when asked about her hoped-for horse, she makes it clear that she does not imagine returning to that life. “If I had a horse, I’d do my business from home. I wouldn’t have to leave my children anymore.”
Clotude sees her options as limited. Whereas Jeanna refers several times to the role that her husband, Nelso, will play with her in managing her new activities, Clotude comes back repeatedly to the fact that she is alone. Her husband is dead, and her older children live away from home. She’s alone in the house with three daughters, ages twelve, seven, and two. “I can’t leave.” At the same time, she feels a strong need to get something started. “I need to have something in my hands.”
She’d like to raise a pig. If you take good care of one and get a little lucky, your wealth can increase fast. Boars gain value quickly as they grow, and sows produce saleable offspring more quickly than goats do. But pigs are also demanding. “To manage a pig, you have to have means in hand,” Clotude explains. They need to eat well. You have to take on the labor-intensive work of foraging for them, and even then you can have to buy pig feed regularly.
So Clotude chooses goats instead. They don’t require much care beyond moving them around so that they are always tied up out of the sun and within reach of food. She says her twelve-year-old daughter Claudine can help her with that.
She also chooses small commerce. She’ll sell groceries along the main path. It is her only option until she can find a way to leave her girls for longer periods.
It is risky. Neighbors often want to buy on credit, and it can be hard to say “no.” If they don’t pay on time, you can run out of merchandise without a way to buy more. But Clotude is anxious to try. “Once it gets going, I can start buying a chicken or two now and then. Eventually, I’d like to buy farm land so I can plant sugarcane.”
Itana remembers much of what she learned at the six-day training. She has little trouble going through the advantages and disadvantages of each business with Gissaint. Goats are easy to take care of. Chickens are easy to sell quickly in a pinch. Small commerce is the one way to a steady cash income, and pig make money quickly.
Her initial reaction is to thank Gissaint for whatever he might decide to give her. “You have to take whatever falls your way.” But as Gissaint makes her understand that he is determined to leave the choice up to her, she relaxes enough to let him know what she thinks. She sees problems everywhere. Pig feed has been expensive lately. Small commerce can disappear if people buy on credit. And poultry is subject to disease and theft. So Itana asked Gissaint to give her goats, and nothing else.
At one time, this would have been a problem for the program. CLM used to insist that all members choose two different kinds of assets as a way to lessen their risk. But Itana knows what she wants, and Gissaint is willing to give it to her. Her plan is to use the first offspring from her goats to buy a pig. By then, with good management of her weekly stipend, she hopes to have the means to take good care of one.
Rosenie lives in Lokari, one of the small neighborhoods that dot the northeast corner of Tomond, near the Dominican border. She’s been a widow for some time now, raising her three children on her own. Before she joined the CLM program life was, she says, difficult. “It was hard to keep the children in school.” She managed with a small business selling groceries that she would buy on credit. Sometimes she’d have to sell on credit, too, which could lead to trouble paying the merchants she bought from when the time to replenish her merchandise came. She also talks about not having enough food to eat. “Sometimes I’d have food for a day’s meal, and I’d have to make it last for two days or three.”
But those struggles are not what is most on her mind when she talks of the past. “They humiliated me. People around me wouldn’t talk to me because I was too poor. I live near my family, but they humiliated me too.”
When she joined CLM, she chose goats and a pig as her enterprises, and though she has seen only minimal growth from her goats – the two goats that CLM gave her are now three – her pig did well. It had a first litter of eight piglets. Neighbors killed three of them, saying that they were eating their crops. So, she quickly sold the other five to avoid further losses.
She decided to throw the income from the sale of the piglets into her farming. The timing was right for her to plant peanuts. In fact, she removed the capital that she had built up in her growing commerce and threw that into her peanut crop as well. Now she has a large crop moving towards readiness for harvest. She and her children still struggle with day-to-day expenses, but she is excited about the progress she will be able to make once she can sell her harvest.
But when talking of her bad years, she emphasizes her humiliation, and what means most to her now is the sense she now has that she’s no longer alone. “I have friends now, the other CLM members, but other people too. They see that my life has changed.”
Christela
The CLM program has shown a consistent ability to help women improve their lives. Ongoing research is designed to show how dramatic and how lasting those improvements are and to help the program’s staff learn how they can do a better job. But there are some women who are able to use the program to make a decisive transformation, not just an improvement. Christela is one of them.
She’s just 22, and she had one young child when she joined the program. She lived with the child’s father, Chedner, and his two younger siblings in a shack on land that Chedner’s family had given him. Chedner supported them all. Christela’s young in-laws would help with chores, but neither they nor she were earning any income. Chedner would travel back and forth between their home in Lolimon, in far northeastern Tomond, and the Dominican Republic, where he’d do any farm work he’d find. “He couldn’t stick around. He’d go off to work in the DR, but then come back with little to show for it,” Christela explains.
His mother, too, became a CLM member, which is just to say that she didn’t have the resources to help the couple or her other children either. Though Chedner went to school, she couldn’t help him continue, and she had to stop sending her other children as well.
Like Rosenie, Christela and Chedner chose goats and a pig. But whereas Rosenie’s goats have stagnated, Christela’s are producing. She now has six. When her pig recently showed signs that it might be sick, she and Chedner decided to sell it right away. They’re using the money to buy another goat. “Chedner’s smart,” Christela brags. “He pays attention to the animals, and when one of them looks sick, he calls my case manager, Manno. Then we decide whether to sell it and replace it with another. We talk together, and we decide together.”
The couple managed their cash stipend carefully, and it enabled them to make weekly deposits into their savings and loan association. That, in turn, made it possible for them to borrow money to invest in a first peanut harvest. Christela and Chedner worked hard together in their field, and the harvest was strong. They were able to put together income from that harvest with savings from their association to buy a small cow.
The key to all the changes in their lives has been the way the family’s participation in the program has made it possible for Chedner to stay at home. “He finds work. We have money so we can farm, and he has the livestock to manage.” And Christela foresees further progress. “We’ll work even harder. We’ll take care of what we have. We’ll work together.” Christela is excited about sending their baby to school for the first time in September. “She’s not three yet, but she speaks clearly. She’s definitely going to go.”
