Author Archives: Steven Werlin

About Steven Werlin

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.

Final Verification: Exploring the Gray Areas

Our team is once again selecting a group of families who are living in ultra-poverty so that we can bring them through the program. The selection procedure is long and complex. It can take three months to identify a new group.

The paperwork we use has evolved quite a bit in the ten years that we’ve been implementing the program, but the final step and the criteria it depends upon have changed very little. We call it “final verification.” A member of the CLM management team visits families whom our case managers have recommended for the program, and he verifies that they qualify. We take individuals with disabilities in the program if we think they are poor enough to need us and believe we can help them, but I want to set those cases aside for a moment to consider the more usual cases: women living in ultra-poverty who have at least one dependent.

One could define “living in ultra-poverty” in various ways. One could try to estimate a family’s income or its level of consumption. Accurate analyses of either might be a good way to determine whether a family is poor enough to need our help.

But we do neither. Instead we depend on a number of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Are there school-age children in the household whom the family cannot send to school? Does the family lack the livestock, farmland, merchandise, or other productive assets that could enable it to establish a reasonable livelihood? Most importantly: does the family regularly go a day or more without a hot meal?

The criteria might seem pretty clear, even though applying them can involve challenges. The women we speak to can be reluctant, for a lot of reasons, to tell us the truth. You have to establish a comfortable conversational setting with a rural Haitian woman who has never met you. In my case, as the team’s one foreigner, she may never have met anyone like me. And you have to work through any falsehood she might present.

But the criteria themselves can be hard to apply. A woman might have productive assets, but be dealing with significant hunger if, for example, she has more children than she can manage. The children could be in school if you visit the household early in the year, but the family may not have paid their tuition, and the parents might therefore simply be waiting for the school’s principal to send the children home. Or she might have a children whose father sends them to school even though the household is hungry because the mother has no means of her own and the father provides no other help.

One of our clearer criteria is that a family should have no outside support. If children or siblings from Port au Prince or abroad are supporting a woman, then we probably shouldn’t. But the more complicated question is whether we should accept a mother into the program if she is still living at home as her parents’ dependent. We don’t generally believe we should be in the business of taking over the role that a parent plays in a child’s life. Certainly not if the parent is handling the role capably, and maybe not even if the role presents a woman’s parents with significant challenges.

A day last week spent visiting potential CLM members presented four such cases, and each case involved a set of circumstances that gave me pause for thought.

The first whom I met was Maniose. She lives in a shack on a hill overlooking the river that separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic. A thickly planted, chaotic garden of plantain, manioc, and weeds planted along the slope leading up to the shack hides it from the footpath that winds around the small hill’s base. The house is guarded by two well-fed-looking dogs, which is unusual for the homes we visit. Not that there are dogs, but that the dogs appear well-fed.

Maniose lives in the shack with her mother, her own two children, and one of her brother’s children. The brother lives and works in the Dominican Republic, and sends his mother money to support her and his child. Maniose, on the other hand, cannot her send her school-age older child to school.

She does not face severe hunger. Her mother combines what her son sends her with what she can harvest from her own garden to take care of them. Maniose has two adult sisters, who live in their own homes nearby, and they are willing and able to offer their mother, their younger sister, and the children an occasional plate of food as well.

But she has no hope of her own income at all. She has no idea what she might eventually do to support her two children, whose fathers have already abandoned them. She owns neither livestock, nor farmland, and she has no idea of a small commerce she might be able to manage. What’s worse: her mother has no land either. The shack they inhabit and the garden that surrounds it are on land that belongs to her son-in-law, the husband of one of Maniose’s older sisters.

With two children with different fathers, both out of the picture, no resources or plans of her own, and a home situation that could deteriorate quickly if her sister and brother-in-law cease to get along, Maniose’s situation is fragile, so I approve her for our program.

The decision to approve Liline was easier. Like Maniose, she is a dependent. She and her three children live in her parents’ home. The parents are farmers, and between children and grandchildren they have eleven kids to look after. Some of those kids are adults, but all depend largely on them. And Liline worries that her father is aging and, so, that the burden is falling more and more on her mother alone. As we chat in her yard, we talk about her teenage and 20-something brothers, who sit on the other side of the home. They look eminently capable of pitching in, but Liline complains that they’d rather leave things in their parents’ hands.

Like Manoise, Liline has neither resources or a plan of her own. And she is already 26, with three children from three different fathers who do not help her or their kids. If we don’t intervene, her search for a man to help her establish a livelihood may lead her into ever-deepening poverty. I give her my OK.

Roselande, too, lives in a large household. She and her two young children live with her parents and seven other kids. They depend entirely on her parents. Her father is a farmer, and her mother is a “machann lòbèy” in the nearby market in Kas. That’s a little hard to translate.

The first word is easy enough. It means “merchant.” Roselande’s mother is a businesswoman. She goes to the market two to three times a week. A “lòbèy” is a commotion or a scene. But Roselande’s mother isn’t selling disorder. She’s selling food. In the rural Central Plateau, a marchann lòbèy is a woman who sells prepared meals right in the market. Many of them – Roselande’s mother among them – buy everything they need on credit from grocery sellers early in the day. They pay what they owe at the end of the day, and take their profit home.

I could not evaluate how much the mother was bringing home each week. I wasn’t able to speak with her. But I knew something else. Roselande’s older child is already being treated for severe malnutrition at a nearby clinic. The child receives a weekly supply of super-fortified peanut butter. So whatever the mother brings in isn’t enough.

Roselande is just 19, so I could leave her for her parents to help, but her lack of any idea how she might help her children and the malnutrition that one is suffering convince me. I give her my approval.

Natacha’s situation is similar in some ways. She and her baby live with eight other kids in her parents’ home. Unlike the other women, she is an earner in the home. She helps her father in their charcoal business. They find neighbors willing to have a tree turned into charcoal, and the father cuts down the tree and processes the wood into charcoal. Natacha then sorts it and bags it. The tree’s owner gets half of all they produce. They then bring their share to market for sale. They could sell it quickly by the sack to wholesale merchants, but can make much more by taking the time to sit in the market and sell it in small quantities directly to consumers. Natacha shares in that work. The business is much too small for a household as large as theirs, and the family often goes hungry as a result, so Natacha would seem to be a good candidate for the program.

But she is only sixteen, and seems nothing like an adult. In our conversation, she seems to have no interest in setting out on her own. Instead, she tells me that she wishes she was still in school. She was a sixth-grader when she became pregnant, and wanted to start seventh grade this year, but neighbors convinced her father that he’d be wasting his money by sending her.

I give her case some thought, but I decide to reject her for CLM. She’s still a child. She has a child already, it is true, but she doesn’t even want to be an adult just yet.

Wilny is one of the case managers who recommended her for the program, and we are together for the day because he is my guide. So I ask him why they didn’t recommend Natacha’s mother for the program, rather than Natacha. I haven’t met her, but her family seems poor enough for CLM.

This is where things get complicated.

Natacha’s mother is a market woman with a small loan from our sister organization, Fonkoze Financial Services. Her having received that loan reflects their evaluation that she is capable of more than an incoming member of CLM is capable of. Someone who qualifies for an FFS loan cannot, by definition, qualify for CLM. And the very fact that she has the loan shows that she is beyond most CLM members in at least one important respect. The kind pf loan that she receives requires that she be part of a group of five women who receive their loans together. She has enough of a standing within her community that she was able to find four other women willing to take out a loan with her. She is not, in other words, as socially isolated as many CLM members are.

But we know that the family is going hungry, and we know something else as well. She has already had to borrow money from a neighbor to keep up with her repayments. That, too, reflects social capital most CLM members lack, but it may also mean that credit just isn’t working for her.

Our team will not need to complete the selection of families for this group of CLM members until January, so I suggest to Wilny that he hold onto to the file and give it some time. Natacha will not be able to join the CLM program. My decision in that respect is final. Even our director, Gauthier, will not overrule a member of his team. But if the case managers and their supervisor decide that Natacha’s mother’s effort through credit is failing, they can consider helping her get out of the credit program to join CLM instead.

This will be complicated. We cannot make our program appear to be an alternative to taking out a loan. Who wouldn’t rather get stuff they don’t have to pay back? But just as our CLM team makes mistakes in our selection process, our colleagues in the credit program can make poor evaluations, too. If Natacha’s mother is bound to fail in Fonkoze’s credit program, we need to find a way to support her. Fonkoze’s job is to leave no family behind.

Rosemitha Petit Blanc 7

Rosemitha and her husband have been unhappy ever since his mother passed away. They both feel her loss keenly. They loved having her around. To Rosemitha, she was a second mother, having accompanied her through her pregnancy while her husband was away working as a field hand in the Dominican Republic.

And their loss is more than emotional. The older woman was an important member of their household. A trusted babysitter, beloved by her grandchildren, she made it easy for Rosemitha and her husband to go off and engage in their various activities, and her willingness to share domestic chores lightened the couple’s burden of work around the house.

Her sickness and subsequent death was also expensive. The CLM program made a standard contribution of 5000 gourds to offset funeral expenses, but the couple still owes the coffin maker 7500 gourds – about $120. The coffin cost 10,000. They gave the coffin maker half of the CLM money, and used the other half to pay off the various expenses they incurred entertaining their neighbors during the wake.

Their goats have been slow to multiply. Two have had litters, but the kids did not survive. Once again, two are pregnant, but they’ve learned not to count too surely on the results. But normally, they would have their pig’s litter of piglets available to them to pay down their debt and invest in new opportunities. They’ve had good luck with their sow. But the expenses associated with the older woman’s illness cost them the opportunity to use the piglets to make progress. They had to sell the whole litter before it was even born just to manage the expenses that helped the older woman pass through her last weeks of life. So, they’re waiting for their sow to ween the piglets so that they can breed it again.

Rosemitha would like to get back into small commerce. She had felt good about her success at it, and the daily income really helped the family. It enabled her husband to focus on farming without having to worry about bringing in something every day. With the Fall bean harvest approaching, there will be opportunities for those with the cash to buy beans directly from farmers and the energy to get them to market.

Rosemitha still has savings from her cash stipend that she could use as her investment, but she’s not sure about the energy. “Ever since my mother-in-law passed away, I feel weak.” In the past, she has carried most of her merchandise on her head to the places where she can find trucks to get it to markets, but right now she doesn’t feel as though she has the strength to do so.

She doesn’t worry about her home’s immediate needs anymore. She and her husband have food enough right now from their own fields. But they will have a lot to do to get themselves back onto the path forward, and right now the steps they need to take seem to feel as though they are too great.

Idalia Bernadin 7

Idalia hasn’t been feeling well. She says she’s had a cold and a fever. She’s been coughing a lot, too. She went to the Hospital in Mirebalais to see a doctor, but did not plan her visit through our CLM nurse, and she was not able to get herself seen. The hospital sees many more people every day than it was designed to serve, and getting to see a doctor can be complicated.

It might be simpler for her if she went to the clinic in Lakolin. It too is part of the Partners in Health network, and though it lacks the range of specialists that the Mirebalais facility’s role as a teaching hospital gives it, the lines can be much shorter and the procedures simpler. But Idalia prefers Mirebalais. Her oldest son lives there, and one of her younger ones spends most of his time at his brother’s house. Going to Mirebalais gives her a chance to see them.

And now she has an exciting new reason to do so. Her daughter-in-law just gave birth to Idalia’s first grandchild. Idalia used the occasion to spend some time with the younger couple, helping out.

She and her husband are nearly finished with their small home. They need one more palm tree, though, for a last section of one of the walls and a few finished touches. And Idalia’s not sure how they’re going to buy it. She doesn’t see where the money is going to come from, so she’s planning to talk with her case manager, Titon. She hopes he’ll have some ideas.

Building her house has been a struggle. She and her husband haven’t had a lot they can invest in the project. And it’s been hard to make progress even though hers is smaller than those being built by other members. Its only full-time inhabitants are Idalia, her husband, and their youngest son, and they decided to construct only one small room. The couple doesn’t want to remain in Gwo Labou, and they see no reason to invest too much in a house there.

They moved there a couple of years ago from Jinpaye, an area of Cornillon farther into the hills above Gwo Labou. They fled Jinpaye, where they have some land and some roots, to escape accusations of theft made against her husband. He was brought up before local leaders there, accused of stealing plantains from someone’s field, and her intervention at the improvised trail only made things worse. “A wife doesn’t speak for her husband,” she was told.

But she’s not at home in Gwo Labou. The couple found a member of the CLM Village Assistance Committee willing to let her build her CLM home on a corner of his land, but she’s embarrassed by her dependence on a stranger’s goodwill. And she feels as though her situation gives her an especially low status in the community, which affects her ability to progress.

“Yon moun vini mwen ye. Mwen rèt sou tè moun,” she explains. That means, “I’m a stranger. I live on someone else’s land,” and it’s her explanation for a range of complaints, including her sense that her neighbors don’t worry about paying her money they owe her. She’s sold both goat meat and pork, but the only money she’s received out of what she is owed is what Titon has collected for her.

She has three goats, but they haven’t been productive. One is pregnant, and a second may be. It was just recently together with a buck. But the third has been with her the longest, and it’s not gotten pregnant yet. It is probably past time for her to sell it and buy a replacement.

Idalia says that she’s not going to graduate from the program. She says that others have told her that she can’t graduate without poultry, and all the chickens that she has purchased die soon after so brings them home. She just spent 600 gourds, or almost $10, to buy six young ones, but they didn’t last.

She doesn’t really have to own poultry to graduate. That is her misperception. Many CLM families have graduated without owning poultry. But we do insist that members develop at least two income-generating activities, and Idalia has only one, the goats, so far.

Isemène Pierre, Four Years After Graduating

When Isemène joined the CLM program, she was unusually poor even by the standards of a program designed for the very poorest rural families in Haiti. Her husband had recently died in Lachapèl, where they were living at the time. Isemène sold everything that the family had to pay for the funeral.

With nowhere to live and nothing to live on, she wandered to Sodo with her seven children. Sodo is home to one of the largest annual parish festivals in Haiti, and it attracts a lot of beggars. Isemène says, “M t ap mache tcheke lavi.” That’s a little hard to translate. It’s like saying she decided to take to the street to see whether she could find a way to live. While at the festival, she met a local man, a stranger, who heard her story and was willing to let her boys set up a shack for the family on a corner of his land. That’s where we found her when we went through the area.

Isemène chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises. And though her livestock never really flourished, she was able to add a small cow by the end of her time in the program. She also established a steady source of income. Using a thousand gourds that she saved during the six months of her weekly 300-gourd stipend, she started buying scrap wood and turning it into charcoal, which she would sell by the sack in Mirebalais. She also started sending her younger children to school, something she had been unable to do since her husband’s death.

Perhaps even more importantly, she bought a small piece of land in an empty area along the road to Sodo. She completed the purchase at a critical time, just as her youngest child, a boy just hitting his teens, suddenly died. When our team interviewed her, she explained that the most important thing about owning the land was that it gave her someplace to bury her son.

Four years later, her life has changed in some ways, but remained the same in others. Her livestock is gone. She had grown impatient with its slow growth, so she made the risky decision to sell it all and use the proceeds of the sale to buy a cow much larger than the one she sold. The new one grew well, and soon it was pregnant. But the areas along Sodo’s main roads see a lot of theft. The unpaved, mountainous route from Sodo to Titayen is a favorite passage for smugglers and thieves into Port au Prince. One day, Isemène’s cow disappeared. She finally found its butchered remains – including the unborn calf – in the bushes. Though she reported the theft to a justice of the peace, there was nothing he could do to make up her loss.

Her two older boys eventually moved out of her house, building their own homes on their mother’s land. One lives with his wife and two children, supporting them by farming as a sharecropper. The other learned his mother’s business, and supports the child he had with a woman from whom he is separated by selling charcoal. Isemène and the boys have planted trees in the yard, and it is beginning to feel like a lakou, the sort of the collection of homes that is the basis for Haitian rural life. Isemène glows when she speaks of how happy it makes her to know that she and her children have a place that is their own.

She still supports her younger children with the charcoal business. She’s never been able to increase it, but she makes sure it doesn’t shrink. After four years, she still depends on the same one thousand gourds of capital. She makes 1000 to 1500 gourds of profit each time to sells a load in Mirebalais. She knows she could make more if she took the time to sit in the market and sell it in small bags, rather than by sacks, but she worries that the women who buy her sacks so that they can divide them into retail portions would resent her if she took over both roles. She also believes she could grow the business if she was able to get the kind of loan she heard about before graduation. CLM members who live in areas served by Fonkoze’s microcredit operations receive training in the use of credit. But she wasn’t able to find women interested in forming a five-person solidarity group with her.

And though her income is enough to keep the family afloat, her inability to make it grow has become a problem. Tuition prices at local schools have gone up considerably over the last couple of years, and this year she could not afford to send her children. She can’t yet imagine how she might send them next year, either. Her one hope in this regard is for her teenage boy. He saved up enough money from doing chores for her and for neighbors as well that he was able to buy a small pig. If it survives, it could allow him to pay his own way to school next year.

Juslène Vixima 7

I came across Juslène in a corner of Gwo Labou different from the one I have previously found her in, a couple of hundred yards uphill from the house I’m used to. She and her toddler were sitting under a tree in a neighbor’s yard as she helped the older woman shell a small harvest of peanuts. She no longer lives in her sister-in-law’s house. Juslène and her husband have managed to complete enough work on her own home that they felt ready to move into it. All it still lacks is an internal door separating its two rooms.

Juslène is delighted. She says that her sister-in-law’s house was too cold. And it’s true that it sits in a small yard surrounded by large trees. Very little sun gets in. But the more important difference is that the new house is her own. “Ou dòmi lakay ou. Lè w vle leve, ou leve.” That means that you sleep in your own home. You get up when you want to get up. Moving to her own house has given Juslène a new measure of control over her life.

She’s also pleased because her little boy was released from the malnutrition program that the CLM team referred him to. Its medical staff judges that he no longer needs the fortified peanut butter that is the standard treatment in Haiti. And as I speak with Juslène, the boy is noticeably more playful than he has been during my previously visits.

He must be two or three, and he is getting chatty. Not yet pronouncing words clearly, but putting out one short, choppy phrase after another. Juslène repeats most of the phrases, correcting pronunciation and adding missing words. She says that talking with her boy is new for her, but she really enjoys it. She learned it from Titon, her case manager. The importance of talking to newborns and young children is one of the CLM program’s key lessons, and Juslène appears to have learned it well.

Juslène still needs to work hard to further develop her wealth. She still has just two goats, but they are both pregnant. And she has no reliable source of income. She says that she and her husband still depend on working in her neighbors’ fields, but that means income that is both small and irregular. That’s something that she and Titon will have to work on.

But Juslène has changed a lot. Her neighbors wouldn’t talk seriously to her. They looked at her as an “egare.” That means someone who’s empty-headed or lost, out to lunch. Juslène used to spend most of her time looking down when someone tried to speak with her, as though she was afraid to engage in conversation. Now she engages with people comfortably. Titon notices that difference, and so do Juslène’s neighbors.

Laumène François 7

“Things aren’t moving the way I’d like them to, but they’re moving,” Laumène explains. She’s been struggling with headaches that she still prefers to address with folk remedies, but she continues to work through it all.

Two of the children who still depend on her are in school this year. A third would be in school, but he got sick right at the beginning of the year, and he went to stay with an older sister in Port au Prince, who is helping him get treatment. Laumène plans to send him in school starting in January. Another lives in Port au Prince as well, even though his mother thinks of him as her dependent. Her real difficulty is with Elijean.

Elijean is 15, and lives with his mother in Gwo Labou. She and the boy’s father sent Elijean to preschool, and Laumène still shows off his diploma with pride. But then the father decided not to pay for the boy to go to primary school. After a couple of lost years, Laumène herself managed to send Elijean. But it was always a struggle. Sometimes she couldn’t pay fees on time, sometimes she couldn’t buy all the books he’d need, and sometimes she couldn’t afford a decent pair of shoes. He would miss time. And the more time he missed, the less interested he became.

Now that Laumène could send him he’s no longer willing to go. He prefers to hang around and make little bits of money doing odd jobs. The day I sat with Laumène, for example, I crossed paths with Elijean as I was hiking up the hill to her home. He was lugging a sack full of avocados down the mountain for a neighbor. Laumène worries that Elijean will regret his decision someday. “He’ll see the other young people and the progress they’re able to make.” But she hasn’t been able to get him to change his mind so far.

She’s unhappy that her small commerce disappeared. She thinks she was forcing it to do too much for her and her children. “Their father gives them nothing. I’m not his wife.” She started the commerce with money she borrowed from her Savings and Loan Association. She used earnings from it to buy shares at the Association’s weekly meetings. She took some of the money to register three of her kids for school, used 400 gourds to send her boy to his sister in Port au Prince, and a little over 1000 to repay the loan. She has about 500 gourds left, but that’s not enough to stay in the business she had.

“I want to set up a rum business, but it’s better if I do it with my own money.” Locally produced rum sells reliably, with a healthy profit margin, because it’s cheap. But she’s worried that if she tries to do it with another loan, she could have problems because drinkers often buy on credit, and you can lack cash when you need it to buy a new supply or make a loan payment. So, she’s waiting for her bean harvest. It should provide her plenty of money to get started.

In the meantime, she’s happy about the way that her poultry are multiplying. She has chickens, ducks, and turkeys of various sizes running around her yard. Several are sitting on eggs. She had none when she joined the program. In the absence of her commerce, they give her a reliable way to manage smaller expenses, the sort for which she wouldn’t want to sell off a goat. And the turkeys in particular can help her increase her wealth. Large ones can sell for over 1000 gourds. Selling a couple of large turkeys can bring in enough to buy good young goat.

She’s made some progress with her goats. She started with just two, and now she has four, three mature females and a kid. But the kid has been sick. The other kid from the same litter died already. Their mother hasn’t wanted to let them nurse.

Laumène is doing everything she knows how to do to save the kid. She holds its mother at times to help it nurse, and she bathes it and encourages it to start eating regular food, but she’s pessimistic about its chances. Her hopes focus instead on the other two females, both of which are pregnant.

Her larger concern related to the goats is theft. Theft of livestock in the area around Gwo Labou has become an epidemic. A gang of thieves appears to be making the rounds at night. Laumène calls me to a secluded spot in her yard, right in front of the door to her house, and she whispers that she’s started bringing the goats into her home at night. “They smell, but I’ll put up with it to protect them.” She explains that she bought some extra cleaner so she can to go over the room they spend the night in every morning, and she proudly shows me the room, asking me whether I see or smell any sign of them. She also decided to leave her goat shed in place, even though it needs repairs, so that thieves won’t come look in her home.

Modeline Pierre 7

Modeline is waiting. She’ll give birth to her second child any day. So, her husband is doing most of the work and most of the running around for the couple these days.

For example, he has been attending Village Savings and Loan Association meetings for her, purchasing shares for the couple every week. They also took out a 3000-goud loan – a little less than $50 – for them to invest in his business plan. He purchased several trees of avocados before harvest. It was a good opportunity for someone willing to work hard. He would have to climb into the trees and pick the fruit just before they were ripe. He’d put them in sacks, and then carry the sacks, one-by-one down the mountain to the roadside to get them to trucks that would haul them for sale in Mirebalais, Lascahobas, or Port au Prince.

But Hurricane Irma’s winds took most of the avocados off the trees before they were ready. He only harvested six sacks full that could be sold. And the bad luck didn’t end there. The truck he loaded the sacks onto broke down on its way to market, leaving his avocados to rot. It was a total loss. He’ll have to work hard, farming for neighbors, to earn the cash to repay the loan.

He has also been doing most of the care for their livestock. Their pig continues to grow, and three of their four goats are pregnant.

Modeline is worried about one of the goats, however. “It’s been really sick. It couldn’t even stand up to eat.” As its condition worsened, it was also attacked by external parasites. These often flourish as a goat sickens, making its condition even worse. But Modeline fed the goat by hand and began giving it regular baths to fight the parasites. She says that she started finding them dead in its fur. The goat has started to stand up and move around a little. It’s too early to say whether she’s been able to save it, but it’s better off than it was.

Her house is almost finished. It still needs doors and windows, but all the lumber is ready. Modeline is just waiting for the builder to get around to the job.

She chose have the house built right next to her mother’s house, and initially that made a lot of sense. Her stepfather had always been kind to her. He helped is mother raise her after the two left Kwafè, where she was born. And he continued to help support her even as he and her mother had a number of young children. Modeline eventually met her husband, but he lived mainly in the Dominican Republic, where he could find work to support her and their little girl. Staying close to her mother meant Modeline had adults nearby to help her and it also enabled her to babysit for her young siblings, which freed her mother and stepfather to work in their fields. It worked for everyone.

The resources that CLM made available to the family eventually convinced Modeline and her husband that he could do well staying at home, farming his mother’s land and taking care of Modeline’s livestock, and initially this led to conflict. Modeline and her husband suddenly found her stepfather troublesome. The older man seemed to resent the younger man’s desire to work independently for his wife and child. He too was trying to make money by buying and selling avocados, and he expected the younger man to work for him.

But Modeline says that the conflict has passed. The two men are now friends “de men nan kou.” That means that they have their hands around each other’s neck. It might sound like choking, but it really means that they are embracing. Modeline couldn’t be happier about it.

Now Modeline has a very simple ambition. She wants to be able to use her livestock to buy a cow, and then use the cow to buy land. The land that she and her husband work right now belongs to her mother-in-law. “Buying our own land is our dream.”

Rosana Mitil 7

Rosana wasn’t feeling well as we talked. She’s been plagued by a cold that she can’t seem to shake, and has had a toothache for the last few days as well. The toothache makes it hard to sleep, which only makes it more difficult to get over the cold. But the primary dental option in Fon Desanm and elsewhere in Kolonbye are tooth-pullers, rural practitioners who will extract a troublesome tooth cheaply. But cheaply is not free-of-charge, and Rosana has been resisting the expense for the time being.

One of her kids is sick with a feverish cold, too. It doesn’t seem serious enough to go to a clinic, so for now she’s trying to wait it out, hoping it will pass. But with her eight kids and her grandchild all crowded into the small, two-room house with Rosana and her husband, it is rare for only one child to be sick. The children pass their colds and fevers around. For Rosana, that’s just part of having her big family.

She’s unhappy these days that her small commerce disappeared again. This version was created with money she borrowed from her Village Savings and Loan Association. She took out a loan for 7500 gourds – about $120 – and invested 4000 in her business. The other 3500 went into her farming. But the 4000 gourds in her business were not able to generate enough profit for her to repay a 7500-gourd loan, especially while she was using some of her sales to help with household expenses as well. So, with each reimbursement, the business got smaller. The final repayment cleaned it out entirely.

She had turned her three goats into six, but she’s back to five, and soon expects to have just four. She sold a small buck, one of her original goats’ first offspring, to help with school fees. And her boys recently came across one of her adult nanny goats lying with a foot broken where they had left it tied to graze. To all appearances, it had been struck by a thrown rock. The nanny had been pregnant, and miscarried. Rosana thinks it will eventually die since it can’t get around to feed. Her two other adult females are pregnant, and they should have their litters soon.

All this leaves her worried about graduating, but it doesn’t leave any question in her mind about her progress. She has livestock now, and a house with a solid roof. So, when it rains, “I only know it because I hear it.”

In the meantime, she and her husband are focused on their farming. A good crop might be enough to make a big difference.

Altagrace Brevil 7

Altagrace is having a hard time. “Things aren’t working. Pa gen aktivite.” That means, literally, that there’s no activity, but it’s often used by someone to say that she has no business, no economic activity. Altagrace borrowed 7000 gourds – about $112 – from her Village Savings and Loan Association, ostensibly to create a small commerce. But she hasn’t been able to pay it back. She felt so embarrassed that she stopped going to the weekly meetings. She has had to send her children to school without uniforms because she needs to focus on repayment.

She used 3000 of the 7000 gourds to repay a previous debt, having borrowed that money from her mother-in-law to rent a small plot of land to farm. She used another 2000 gourds to buy a bed, the first one that she and her husband have ever had. That left her too little left to start anything substantial enough to enable her to repay the loan.

She thought of investing the rest of it in produce that she could send for sale in Port au Prince, but she’s watched recently as neighbors have lost their investment because the old trucks used to take produce from the countryside into the city break down frequently, leaving produce to spoil. It seemed too risky.

But she finally decided that she needs to return to her Association, facing whatever criticism the other members throw her way. So, she borrowed 2500 gourds from her brother-in-law, who is a coffin maker. That will be enough to pay the late payment fees and take a big first step towards reimbursing the loan itself, but it will still leave a large balance. She’ll be able to chip away at it by selling plantains from her garden, but won’t be able to fully pay the debt until she and her husband bring in the harvest from the rented land. And it is poor land, so they couldn’t plant a high-revenue crop like black beans. They planted pigeon peas and manioc instead. And catching up with her payments is important to her because Altagrace likes the Association. “It’s useful. I’ve already taken out two loans,” she explains.

Her husband returned recently after spending a few weeks in the Dominican Republic, looking for work. “He couldn’t get far because he didn’t have much money.” He stayed near the border, but wasn’t able to find anything. There’s plenty for them to do in their fields right now. It’s time for weeding, which is a lot of work. And he can find day jobs in others’ fields, too. The latter is important because the cash it brings in is still a large part of what keeps the family fed.

Meanwhile, her livestock is increasing in value slowly. What were two goats are now four, and one is pregnant. And her hog is growing and getting fat. Even so, she thinks of her fields as her most important activity. “My hope is my garden.”

Solène Louis 7

Solène feels as though she’s made a lot of progress since she first joined the CLM program. She talks about her house and her livestock. She talks about her new-found ability to save. And she summarizes her list of changes with encouraging words, “Now I have hope.”

Her children started school the year before she joined CLM. Their education is important to her. But she didn’t have the money to finish paying the fees, so they weren’t able to complete the year. The school principal eventually sent them home.

Her first year in CLM, then, was the first schoolyear her kids were able to complete. But Solène made an interesting decision. Both of the children passed their exams to enter second grade, but she decided she wanted them to repeat first grade nonetheless. “I just didn’t feel as though they’d learned enough.” She made the decision knowing that it means one more year of school she’ll have to pay for each child. Unlike many of the other CLM members, she had several years of schooling herself, so she feels competent to judge. In fact, she sometimes earns a little money on the side by tutoring some of her neighbors’ children.

Life is cheerful now in her lakou, the small yard on the top of a little hill where she built her house. The land belongs to her father-in-law, and he lives with her, her husband, and the kids. Solène says that he is as happy as she is about the house they have been able to build. They made the extra investment necessary to build four rooms, three more than the CLM program demands and two more than most families build. “My father-in-law’s in the house with us, and the kids will start to get big and I’ll want them out of my bedroom,” Solène explains. So, it took more time and more money than it had to take, but the family no longer worries about rain. The house still lacks some finishing touches: the shutters and the galatan, which is the ceiling that closes off the part of the roof that hangs over the front porch. And Solène still owes the builder 500 gourds – a little more than $8 – but she plans to hold on to the money until he does the rest of the work.

Solène and her husband continue to focus on their farming. She borrowed 8000 gourds from her Village Savings and Loan Association to plant beans, and the couple should see their harvest in a couple of months. She has fallen behind in her repayments, though. The Association’s rules require monthly payment of part of the capital along with some interest. But she has resigned herself to the penalty she’ll have to pay because she’ll wait until she sells her beans to repay the whole sum.

She could have started paying already, but she came across another opportunity. She found someone willing to sell her a calf in its mother’s womb. Because it’s still unborn, it will cost her only 6000 gourds, which is several thousand less than she would probably have to pay otherwise. The calf should be born in April, and she’ll have until then to come up with the 2000 gourds she still owes. She made a down payment of 4000 already.

Her other assets are increasing in value slowly. She had three goats, but one died. The other two, however, are getting big. Both are healthy and pregnant, and they should produce litters in December. She was able to sell meat from the one that died for 3000 gourds, but rural Haitians who buy meat from a deceased animal do so on credit. Her buyers won’t pay her until November, when she expects to use the money to replace the lost goat. She did better with her pig. She took care of the one we gave her, fattened it up and sold it. She used most of the money to rent farmland, but she also replaced the larger pig with a smaller one.

She continues to manages her small commerce, which she sees as an important investment. She had 2500 gourds in it, but school-related expenses at the beginning of the year ate into the total, and it’s down to only 1000 gourds. “I won’t let it getting any smaller, though. I need to buy shares in the Savings and Loan Association every week,” she explains.

The Association meets weekly, and each week its members can buy from one to five shares at a price the group determined together when it was established. The share price for her group is fifty gourds, and she counts on her commerce to provide at least that much each week, in addition to the contribution it makes towards managing her household. Solène values membership in the Association because it has enabled her to save about 5000 gourds already, though, as she says, “The poor don’t save.”