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.

Rosemitha Petit Blanc 6

The last month or so has been a sad time for Rosemitha. Her mother-in-law passed away in the hospital at La Colline after a short illness. Rosemitha is heartbroken. “She was always the one that took care of me.” Rosemitha’s husband spent much of his time in the Dominican Republic, trying to earn money, before the family joined the CLM program, leaving his wife and his mother back home with the kids. “When I had my child, she helped me and bathed me in the days afterwards until I could bathe myself.”

And the death did more than make Rosemitha sad. She had been proud of her new-found success as a businesswoman, and her husband was increasingly proud of her. But she spent all the capital in it taking care of the older woman, most of it even before she died. Care at La Colline was free, but either Rosemitha or her husband had to stay with her all the time, and whoever it was had to eat. Whatever was left of the money passed as part of funeral expenses, along with the income from the small patch of beans that her husband planted in the spring. And the couple still owes the coffin-maker 7500 gourds, or about $120. The CLM program can eventually help offset that debt, but Rosemitha doesn’t know that yet, so she is worried.

Without the income from her commerce, food in the home has once again become a challenge. Much of the time she’s reduced to feeding the family little more than plantains and greens from her small yard. The rice field her husband planted should help eventually, but in the meantime, times are hard.

She wants to get back in business as soon as she can, but she, her husband, and her case manager will need to figure out where she’ll get the money. And without her mother-in-law, she’ll face another challenge because she always felt good about leaving the children with her. As things stand, she can’t even leave the two younger kids with her stepdaughter because during his mother’s illness, her husband sent his daughter to live with a relative of his near La Colline. Her stepson and baby are too young to be left alone.

Idalia Bernadin 6

Idalia continues to worry about her youngest son. He’s been in and out of the hospital, suffering with shortness of breath. It turns out to be connected with a condition that causes him to have too much blood, which makes it harder for his blood cells to get the oxygen they need. That’s at least how I understand it. The only solution so far has been for doctors to remove some his blood every few months.

This has, in fact, provided a small measure of relief, though only a temporary one. But neither Idalia nor her husband want her boy to continue the treatment. None of the explanations they’ve gotten from doctors has made sense to them. They see doctors taking blood from their boy without feeling as though he’s getting much better. And they just can’t imagine that it could be good for him to be losing so much blood. Her case manager, Titon, will need to continue talking with both Idalia and the boy’s father to figure out what to do next. He might need our nurse’s help as well.

Her next older boy has needed medical care as well. Titon helped Idalia get him to the hospital, after a doctor visiting a mobile clinic we organized for CLM members and their families told them they needed to take him. The boy has been scheduled for hernia surgery, but the operation won’t happen until December. It will be free of charge at the PIH University Hospital in Mirebalais, but the hospital’s capacity is limited, so operations that don’t seem urgent can end up getting put off for a long time.

Idalia now has three goats: One of the two that we gave her died, but she and her case manager bought her another. That new goat had a kid, and it’s pregnant again. She’s worried about the second of her original two, however, because it has been mounted by a buck a couple of times without getting pregnant. She needs to trade it for another, but hasn’t gotten around to doing so yet.

She gave the goat that died and her pig, which also died, to Michel, a member of the local committee, to sell, and she’s worried because it has been months and she still hasn’t seen any of the money. The situation is delicate for her, because Michel is the same one who gave her access to a small piece of land to build her new home on. She and her husband had no land in Gwo Labou. She’s afraid to make him angry. She’ll need her case manager’s help to follow through.

She’d like to send her youngest boy to school this year. The older ones are probably too old to start. But she doesn’t see the money yet. The bean harvest she had built her hopes upon was weak, and with only three goats, she doesn’t feel as though she can sell one yet. So, the kid may have to wait another year.

Meanwhile, she already has her eyes on the future. She is very unhappy where she lives. She feels as though her neighbors only want her ill. “As soon as they see that you’ve begun to make progress, they start to hate you.” She no longer wants to return to Jinpaye, however. That’s the community her family fled before they settled in Gwo Labou. It is, if anything, even more remote than Gwo Labou, a long hike away from Gwo Labou up into the mountains that separate Savanette, in the Central Plateau, from Cornillon to the south.

Her plan now is to try to rent a room in Mirebalais. She feels that she will have less hostility to confront there, but she’ll have to figure out a business that will enable her to earn a living. And moving will present challenges as far as maintaining her farming and her livestock. She and her husband may have to figure out how they will split their time and their work.

Juslène Vixama 6

Juslène says she’s been feeling really good. And she’s especially excited these days because her baby seems as though he’s feeling good, too. From our earliest visits to the neighborhood, we had expected that he was undernourished, and we encouraged Juslène to get him evaaluated.

But motivating Juslène to do so was challenging. It is not as though she doesn’t care or that she is too lazy to do what she needs to do. Juslène seems to have intellectual/developmental challenges. Her trouble in this case was focus. She didn’t seem able to attend closely and persistently enough to the problem to follow through.

Our nurse’s screening suggested, however, that the boy’s malnutrition was severe, and that added urgency to the matter. Thanks to our close collaboration with Fonkoze’s own health department, it also made funds available to help Juslène with transportation to and from a public health clinic. Even so, it initially took some hounding from her case manager, Titon, to get her in motion.

Then she started to see the difference that the fortified peanut butter that is prescribed for malnutrition here was making in her boy. “He’s gotten stronger. He plays more, and he’s naughtier.” And that was all she needed to see. She’s excited now to go with her boy for his weekly appointments, and is delighted about his progress. She seems to feel rewarded by her sense that she’s taking good care of him now.

She’s still a little behind with her home construction. The new house is mostly finished, and she and her family have moved into its one room. But they need the wood from one more palm tree to close off the second room, and then they’ll need another door. And Juslène doesn’t see yet where she and her husband will get the money. She says they don’t even have a plan. And motivation may be an issue here too, because she is already very happy about where she is. Until they moved into the house, she, her husband, and their boy were living on the floor in his sister’s home. “I feel good now because I don’t live with someone else.”

My translation, “I don’t live with someone else,” doesn’t do justice to the strength of her sentiment. What she said is, “M pa rèt a moun.” The power of those last three words comes from a context in which they are frequently used. “Rèt a moun,” is often used to describe the situation of Haiti’s many restavèk children, who are sent by their parents, who often cannot keep them fed, to live with other families, sometimes as no more than unpaid servants, sometimes subjected to the worst kinds of abuse. It is as though she had classed herself among these modern-day slaves.

Economically, Juslène’s life hasn’t yet changed dramatically since she joined the program. Her two goats are still just two goats. They haven’t yet reproduced, because they haven’t been very healthy, and this poor health is another result of Juslène’s apparent intellectual challenge. Initially, Titon couldn’t understand why they weren’t prospering. Juslène appeared to care about them a lot, and she was always very good about making sure they were tied up in the yard every time he came for a visit. Through long conversations and several unscheduled visits, however, he discovered that she was so fond of them that she kept them tied up close to the house all the time. She wasn’t taking them each day to places where food was plentiful. She didn’t want to let them out of her sight. They were starving.

So Titon had a long talk with her, going back over a lot of the details of goat care that seemed not to have made an impression on Juslène, and he says that she’s getting better. For now, the family still depends largely on what her husband can bring in through day labor, though the couple has already learned how to stretch their money so that Juslène can save money by buying one or two 50-gourd shares in her savings and loan association at each weekly meeting.

Louisimène Destinvil 6

Louisimène has just been through a rough period. “I’m okay now, but I was really sick. I didn’t think I’d make it, but thanks to the Lord, I’m still here.”

She went to the small public health center in Kolonbyè rather than the better-equipped PIH hospital at La Colline. Even Kolonbyè is a long walk from her home in Gwo Labou, especially for a woman who isn’t feeling well, but it is much closer than La Colline. The care itself would have been cheaper at La Colline. Services at PIH clinics is almost free for everyone and it is free for members of our program. But she couldn’t walk all the way to La Colline, and she couldn’t afford the price of getting there any other way.

She and her family are still struggling because of the loss of their last bean harvest, but they are getting by. They have some plantains they can harvest, and these days both she and her husband can find day labor in their neighbors’ field to buy the rest of the food they need to eat.

Louisimène still believes that farming is her key to moving forward, though, and she and her husband are looking around to see where they can borrow a couple of cans of beans to plant for the fall harvest, which is generally more reliable than the spring one.

Her livestock has increased some, but not much. She now has three goats rather than the two that we gave her, but her attempt to raise a pig has led to a problem. The pig died early on, and she immediately did as she was instructed to do. She got help from a member of the CLM Village Assistance Committee in her neighborhood to sell the meat. The sale raised 2750 gourds.

But such meat is almost always sold on credit because the seller really has no choice. They need to get rid of it right away. Louisimène’s case was no different. But it has been months, and Louisimène hasn’t seen any of the money yet, nor does she have any idea when she might. Louisimène is shy about addressing Michel, the man who undertook to sell the meat, about her money. She will need her case manager’s help to get what she is owed. She already knows that she’ll do with the money. She wants to buy another small pig.

The slow progress of her livestock and the loss of her beans has put her in a quandary. She had been hoping that she would finally be able to send her girl to school this year, and the girl very much wants to go, but Louisimène doesn’t yet see where the money will come from.

Laumène François 6

Laumène has reached a difficult moment. It’s a struggle just to keep her household fed. The timing of the spring and summer rains killed her bean crop. She planted in April, and the spring rains stopped too early for her. “The folks who planted in March are the ones who did well this year,” she explains. The family is getting by for the moment main on roasted corn on the cob.

Part of the problem is that her first small commerce disappeared. Between keeping her children fed and wanting to buy at least one 50-gourd share in her savings and loan association every week, her investment withered away.

But she re-established her business with a 1500-gourd loan from her association. She’ll repay it with interest over the next three months. Though her investment is small, she sells a lot of different things: local rum, cooking oil, two different kinds of rice, salami, and macaroni. She keeps track of and restocks each item separately, buying a little bit of anything that’s low whenever she goes to market. She likes to sell a range of products because, “if they don’t ask you for one thing, you need them to need another one.”

She is concerned these days because the school year is approaching and with four of her children the right age to be in school, she’s not yet sure how she will send them or whether she’ll be able to. The small, inexpensive school that had been struggling to function just up the slope from her home appears to have failed, and sending her kids to another one, which will involve their having to ford the river below her home every day, will be more expensive. She has livestock, but not enough that she’s ready to start selling any off. She still has only three goats – though one is pregnant – and her sow. Her first litter of piglets died.

Her poultry is doing better. Her two turkeys are growing quickly, but though she purchased what she thought was a young pair, she now sees that she has two hens. She’ll have to see about buying a gobbler. Her two ducks are flourishing. Here again, she has discovered that she has two females and will need to see about a drake, but in the meantime one of her ducks has seven ducklings and the other has a nest of ten eggs, so she has some reason for hope.

CLM and Hot Peppers

Since Fonkoze established its CLM program over ten years ago, the team has been thinking about businesses it can transfer to program members. We help all members establish two businesses when they first join the program, and many eventually establish more than that. But the number of different businesses that we’ve learned how to offer over the years is pretty limited.

We started with just three: goat-raising, poultry-raising, and small trading. We added pig-raising when we noticed that the first asset many of our members purchased as soon as they had means to invest was a pig. We’ve watched raising pigs separate itself into two distinct businesses. Some members choose to raise a sow for the young she provides, and others raise a boar to fatten him up for sale to a butcher. For a while we experimented with giving members a horse to go with their small commerce, but we gave it up because we realized that a horse didn’t really count as a second business. We always want members to start with two, because there’s so much that can go wrong when you are extremely poor.

For the past two years, we’ve been trying to add some form of agriculture. Most of our members farm in one way or another anyway. They grow corn or, until recently, millet to feed themselves and their family. They’ll have a few plantain trees in their yard, and any who have access to land and can muster the resources are certain to plant beans, either pigeon peas or other more valuable varieties.

But for us to introduce a form of farming as part of the packages of productive assets we hand out when families first join our program, it needs to be reliably profitable. Farming beans, the main cash crop for at least the poorer farmers in the Central Plateau is not. Too little rain or too much, or rain that falls at the wrong moment, can destroy a harvest. And the crop cannot take too long to produce. We cannot consider plantains as part of an asset package because they take a full year before they yield anything.

So, we’ve been looking at peanut farming and hot pepper farming. The former isn’t working very well. It really depends on someone having access to more high-quality farmland than CLM members would normally have.

But farming hot peppers is showing some promise. It’s not for everyone. You have to have some land, though not a lot. And it can’t be just any land. Too wet or too sandy won’t do. But hot peppers grow well in many of the places that we work and they sell reliably across the Central Plateau.

Antonia Pierre is a mother of four who lives in Janjak, in Thomonde. She will graduate from the CLM program on August 1st. When she started, we gave her two goats and a pig, and she and her husband have done well with them. They have six goats now, and two of them are pregnant. They sold their first pig – a sow that never had piglets – for 4,750 gourds, or about $80. They used 4,500 to buy a boar, thinking it would grow faster, and it has. At this point it’s worth more than 10,000 gourds, and it’s still growing.

But as part of our experiment with hot peppers, we offered a pepper garden as a third asset to women in Antonia’s area who were interested, and Antonia was quick to sign up. “My husband has worked on pepper farms in the Dominican Republic, so he knew how much a pepper crop could be worth.” She was nursing when the CLM team organized the initial training for those who chose to participate, so her husband went in her place. After the training, the CLM team distributed a drip irrigation system to each participant. During the training, it had established nurseries where hot pepper plants were prepared. Antonia and her husband planted about 150 plants on 75 square meters of land in front of their home.

As the garden started to develop, Antonia was still pretty limited as to what she could do. But her husband was committed to the project. “He would wake up in the middle of the night to fill our barrel with water.” Once the barrel was full, it could keep the peppers watered for as many as three days. He worked hard to fight back the weeds, and stay on top of pests, too.

The couple almost took a step backward went he decided to go to the Dominican Republic for a few months. They had ceased receiving their weekly cash stipend from CLM. The program provides the stipend for just six months. And none of their business activities had started to bring anything in. He figured he could earn some quick money and return quickly. He didn’t see what alternative he had. But with an infant in her hands, Antonia had neither the time nor the energy to give their peppers all the attention that he could. She was less regular with watering, and the plants suffered. “The leaves started to dry out. They turned brown.”

But he came back after a couple of months, and it was just in time for the couple to begin their harvest. The pepper plants had suffered some in his absence, but there was no serious damage.

When sales began, the CLM team was in for a surprise. We had assumed that we could help Antonia and the other members who joined the hot pepper experiment by linking them to buyers who would sell large quantities of peppers to the growing hot-sauce industry. Small Haitian factories were producing high-quality hot sauce, and we thought that they would provide the best, most reliable markets for these small farmers. We had initially established the pilot as a part of a larger effort to support the development of “value chains,” linkages between farmers, salespersons, and end users, which could be part of developing strong economies in rural Haiti and markets for CLM members’ produce that would be more reliable long-term.

It didn’t work out that way, because there was something we didn’t know about the use of hot peppers in rural Haiti. The manufacturers want ripe peppers. These, they feel, give them the best, most consistent flavor. Rural Haitians, however, eat and cook with hot peppers when they are just half-ripe. It’s what they are used to. And harvesting the peppers before they are completely ripe has advantages for the farmer. It allows for a bigger harvest spread out over a longer season.

It also presents a generally different business model. Large farmers will pass through their fields every two weeks and clean them out of thoroughly ripe peppers. They can sell these by the sack to sauce factories. They make money in lump sums every two weeks. But when Antonia focuses on semi-ripe peppers, she can harvest every few days. She’ll take a small bucket to a market, and sell them by the cup. Rather than relatively few lump sums, her more frequent sales give her the kind of steady income that allows her and her husband to manage their household. She calculates that she has already made more than 15,000 gourds, or about $250, this year, a cup of peppers at a time. She can’t compete with the large producers, but they cannot compete with her, either. They don’t have the time or the inclination to make their living out of lots of small, retail sales.

None of this means that pepper farming has proven to be a guaranteed success. Antonia’s sister-in-law, Dieubenit, has achieved little through her efforts.

It’s not that she’s been an unsuccessful member of the CLM program. On the contrary, she has been, largely, strikingly successful. The two goats we gave her are now seven, even though she sold one of the larger ones to buy a donkey. The donkey has been important because she established a strong business buying and selling charcoal using savings from her weekly stipend, and until she bought the donkey she was limited to what she could carry on her head. She has about 2000 gourds in the business that she uses to buy merchandise every week. Profits from the sales send her children to school and they enable her to invest in her fields and to hire labor to help her and her husband farm. Quite an accomplishment for a couple that used to get by on the 50 gourds per day – less than $1 – that her husband could get working for their neighbors. We also gave her a pig, which she fattened up and sold for 7500 gourds. That money gave her half of what she needed to purchase a small plot of land that she and her husband built their new house on.

The reasoning behind the purchase of land explains the failure of her pepper crop. Until they bought their own land, the couple lived in a shack on a piece of land owned by a wealthier neighbor. He let them put up the shack to live in because he didn’t need the space himself and felt sorry for Dieubenit and her husband. They planted their peppers on his land as well. He didn’t mind. He wished them the best. But he had family members in the area, and they were either lazy or malicious with their livestock. They let them graze on Dieubenit’s pepper crop more than once. “It wasn’t my land, so I didn’t think I could say anything.” When the landowner found out, he was angry, but it was too late. “Now that I have my own land, that can never happen again. I won’t let it.” Dieubenit plans to try peppers again.

Louimène Gené, Two and a Half Years After Graduating

Louimène’s path into the CLM program was an unusual one. She agreed to join the program in May 2013, when we were selecting 360 families in southern Mirebalais.

At the time, she and her husband Lucner were eminently qualified. They were living with their two young boys in a small ajoupa, a tent-like structure made out of straw. The land their ajoupa stood on didn’t belong to them. A farmer whom Lucner did work for let him put it up in a corner of one of his fields. Louimène and Lucner had no productive assets and no land of their own to farm. The depended entirely on the fifty gourds Lucner could earn on days he could find work as a field hand. At the time, that was just about $1.

It wasn’t at all the way they had started their life together. The two met in Port au Prince. Lucner was a trader, selling soap or rice or women’s underwear. As he put it, “Anything I thought I could sell.” Louimène was working as a maid in a home next to where Lucner’s sister lived. Lucner liked Louimène as soon as he saw her, but he decided to get to know her better. One day, Louimène was sent to Lucner’s business to buy some rice. Lucner volunteered to deliver the rice himself, leaving the business and his wallet with Louimène for the monent. The wallet had all the money from the business in it, over 7000 gourds. “I wanted to see whether she was honest.” When he returned to his business, he found that all the money was still there.

He gave her 500 gourds as a thank-you gesture, and she used that money to buy cookies and crackers, which she began to sell. Soon she had turned that 500 gourds into more than 1000, even while she was working as a maid. “I liked her right away, but when I saw how smart she was I decided to try to make her mine.”

They’ve been together ever since, first in Port au Prince, then back in Mirebalais, when he decided to return to care for a sick brother. That brother’s illness was life-changing because it ate up all the capital the couple had. Lucner could only look for work as a field hand. And they were able at first to live in his family’s yard, that didn’t last long. Louimène and Lucner’s sister could not get along.

So the couple really needed something like CLM. But when the program started, Louimène was unavailable. She had returned to her own home, in Bouli, a remote corner of Boucan Carré, to take care of her sick mother. Initially, Lucner went to the six-day enterprise training workshop in Louimène’s place, but when it appeared that Louimène would not be able to participate in the program herself, the CLM team selected another woman to replace her. Weeks later, when Louimène returned to Mirebalais, she found that her place in the program had been taken.

Fortunately, the couple got a second chance. A woman who was selected with Louimène decided to abandon CLM and move to Port au Prince. The CLM team was able to recover the pig and one of the goats that we had given her. We took back the roofing material we had given her as well, climbing onto the roof to pull the nails one-by-one. Finally, we took back 1000 gourds she had saved out of the cash stipend CLM members received during their first six months in the program.

So Louimène received far less support than members of the CLM program normally do. She got one goat, rather than two, and one flat transfer of 1000 gourds rather than six months of weekly 300-gourds payments. In addition, she received just nine months of weekly coaching, rather than eighteen.

But Louimène and Lucner made good use of what they were given. Lucner kept working hard in in their neighbors’ fields, even as he took primary responsibility for their livestock. Louimène invested the 1000 gourds in a small commerce. She would buy spaghetti and canned milk, put it on her head in Labasti, and walk the five miles into Mirebalais, making sales on the way. Normally, she’d sell out by the time she got to town, and she’d buy merchandise there for the next day. Her business began to grow as she invested some of the proceeds into additional products. On Thursdays, she would find a busy corner of the Labasti market place, and her sales would be strong.

Meanwhile, she and Lucner talked to the landowner about letting them improve the structure they were living in. Often farmers who are open to allowing a poor squatter put up an ajoupa on their land will object if the squatter adds a tin roof. It makes the structure seem more permanent. And Louimène and Lucner wanted to add not just a solid roof, but a cement latrine. But they were eventually able to get permission to do so, in part because of their case manager’s help in the negotiations.

In December 2014, Louimène graduated from the program after having spent only nine months in it. By that time, she had sold her original goat and its young. She had acquired a second smaller pig, but had sold the first one. She used the proceeds from the sales to buy a cow, which she wanted because she had a plan. “We needed land, and if you buy a small cow you can hold onto to it. While it grows, you wait for someone to sell a piece of land, and when the chance comes along, you can sell the cow and buy the land.”

And that’s exactly the way that things turned out. After graduation, the landowner began to resent the family’s presence on his land. He started pressuring them to leave. Since they had no place they could go, the couple put up with his humiliations as best they could. But eventually they found another landowner with a sudden need for cash. They were able to buy enough of a plot to put their little house on for 12,750 gourds. They even spent the extra money and effort to install a simple latrine, having learned of its importance while in the program. One of Lucner’s brothers bought a neighboring plot for a similar amount. It was Lucner who made the purchase, but he was careful to put Louimène’s name on the receipt, rather than his own. “If anything happened to me, I wouldn’t want Louimène to have problems with my family.”

That is when things started to get more difficult. Lucner got sick. He was unable to work for a couple of months. The couple sold off their second pig and, eventually, their small commerce. By the time Lucner was working again, the couple was back almost to square one. They had their own house, and it was covered with a good tin roof, but they had no assets and no small commerce. Eventually they made a difficult decision: Their children would move in with Louimène’s mother, who lives in Bouli. Louimène would seek work as a maid in downtown Mirebalais until she could save enough money to return to business.

For two months, now, Louimène has been working for 2000 gourds-a-month. Her employer doesn’t normally eat a home, so Louimène is on her own for her meals. Louimène goes hungry much of the time so that she can send money to her mother for her children’s upkeep while she saves up as much as she can towards the day when she can go back into business. But after two months, she’s saved 1000 gourds. And now that Lucner is healthy, they may not be far from their dream of bringing the family back together and sending the kids to school.

Claudette and Franckel, Two and a Half Years After Graduation

Claudette and Franckel

When Claudette joined the CLM program, she and her husband Franckel had very little. They were living with five children in a single room they rented near the Labasti market, which sits along the main road between Port au Prince and Mirebalais. Four of the children were theirs, and one belonged to Claudette’s brother Manny, who lived nearby. She had been living with her aunt and uncle for years.

The couple struggled to send both their oldest girl and Manny’s girl to school. To pay the tuition and other expenses Franckel would turned wood that belonged to neighbors into charcoal and take half the revenue. He also did day labor to keep the family fed, earning less than $1 a day in their neighbors’ fields. Occasionally, he’d getting a job on a team milling sugarcane for a few days. That would be a windfall. Claudette didn’t contribute to the household’s income. With the couple’s twin toddler girls and the infant boy who followed them, her hands were more than full.

They chose goats and a pig, and got to work, taking good care of their livestock. They couldn’t afford to buy land to build a home on, so they talked to Franckel’s brother. He gave them a small plot downhill from a larger one that he claimed from their half-siblings. The brother is a difficult man, a bully. That’s what enabled him to claim the land from their siblings. It didn’t really belong to the half of their family that he and Franckel were part of. But the brother presented the only way that Franckel and Claudette saw of establishing their own home, so they dealt with him as best they could. To make things worse, the man was jealous of their participation in CLM. He and his wife had been too wealthy to qualify. So Franckel and Claudette had a lot to do to manage the relationship.

Things weren’t easy, and their frustration built as their livestock failed to multiply. By six months into the program, their pig was growing, and it would soon have piglets. But the piglets all died. Even at twelve months, their two goats were still just two goats. So the couple prepared to make a difficult decision. Their baby was no longer breast feeding, so Claudette would leave their area to seek work as a maid in Port au Prince. The work would be poorly paid, but it would be regular income. Franckel would have to manage things at home with the help of their older girl and their niece.

But something got in the way. Claudette’s brother Manny became dangerously sick. He had severe constipation and accompanying stomachaches. Franckel’s brother was close to a Vodoun practitioner who made money as a healer, and he convinced the couple to let his friend take care of Manny. Claudette could only watch as Manny’s condition deteriorated.

One rainy afternoon, however, seeing Manny in agony, Claudette made a courageous decision. She took him from the healer’s compound, put him on a motorcycle taxi in the midst of a tropical downpour, and rushed him to the Partners in Health University Hospital in Mirebalais. Doctors performed emergency surgery to remove the blocked section of his intestines, and so saved his life.

The cause of his trouble was extra pulmonary TB, and Manny would need at least six months of treatment after he left the hospital, so the couple built a small shack next to their own, where they could keep Manny with them while protecting the children from possible infection. He became a full part of the household. They helped him get to his follow-up appointments, and cared for him as he recovered. As he gained strength, he began to help with housework. He had long been a hard-working farmer, but initially he could just manage the smaller chores. He was anxious, however, to do whatever he could.

Meanwhile, the couple’s livelihood was undergoing a transformation. They found a landowner who was willing to let them work a small plot as sharecroppers. They would do all the work, and keep half of any income. Franckel first cultivated it for the charcoal he could make from the wood growing on it, and then invested the money from charcoal sales into planting a crop of beans.

They also found someone willing to sell them 2000 gourds worth of sugarcane on credit. Claudette explains the opportunity: “Making money from cane is a lot of work. Some people would just as soon take the easy money and be done with it. But Franckel’s not like that. If he sees a way to make an extra 50 gourds, he’s always willing to make the effort.” They used the income from that sale to buy another load of cane. “Franckel found someone who had a cane field they had already harvested. But he thought it looked like it had a lot of cane still in it, small plants that would grow if they had a little more time. He bought the harvest for 5000 gourds, and eventually sold 15,000 gourds worth of cane.”

But even as they were beginning to find a path towards financial success, their lives grew more difficult socially. Franckel’s brother was angry that they had turned their back on his friend, the healer. And his jealousy only intensified as he watched his brother’s lot improve. So he decided to run Franckel and Claudette off the land he had provided for them.

Fortunately, it was at about this time that their first bean harvest came in, and it was a good one. They sold it off and made good use of the profits. They bought a horse, and made a down payment on a small plot of land that they could build a house on. They threw up a three-room shack. They wanted Manny to have his own room. It wasn’t much, but it put a tin roof over their heads and it was theirs. They had to sell off their goats to get the house built, however, so they were left with farming as their only economic activity. And with Manny and five children on their hands, things were very tight.

When Claudette graduated from the program, the couple had their horse and a couple of chickens, but all their other money was in the fields. And Claudette was pregnant with what would be their last child. As Franckel explained at the time, “We know that our family is already large, but we want one more, and we are sure that we can support all our kids.”

Their success with sugarcane is what changed their lives. Claudette and Franckel began to buy all the cane they could, and would rent local mills to turn it into molasses. They’d then sell the molasses to rum distilleries. With each new purchase, they had more to invest. Soon, they were farming sugarcane, too, paying five-year leases on plots of land. Eventually, they had over three hectares under cultivation and a sugar mill of their own.

And as they rolled over the capital that they invested in sugarcane, they invested in the quality of their lives as well. They poured concrete over the packed dirt floor of their home, and repaired and painted the planking that made up its walls. They re-did its small porch with cinderblocks and cement. They bought the plot in front of the house to plant a garden. Their three younger children joined the two older girls in school.

Many CLM graduates are successful, but Claudette and Franckel know that few have been as successful as they have. “Some graduates are willing just to keep the things they have,” Claudette explains, “but we always are trying new opportunities.”

Each has an explanation for their success, and their explanations converge. Each credits the other. Franckel says that Claudette has two qualities that really help them. “She works hard with whatever we have, and she never complains when we have nothing.” Ever since she weaned their youngest child, he’s made sure that she always has some capital to manage a small commerce. She buys loads of whatever produce is in season, and sells it in local markets. “Since she manages the house with her business, I can focus on bigger things.” For Claudette, it’s Franckel’s willingness to work hard wherever he sees an opportunity. “He doesn’t worry about doing things the easy way. When you are in a difficult situation, if you see a path out of it, you have to be willing to take it.” For both of them, it starts with their willingness to discuss all their decisions and make them together.

And they seem well on their way to continued success. With money from the sale of their sugar mill and 100,000 gourds they borrowed from a local credit union, they made a down payment on another hectare of land. This one they will own. Their next cane harvest should enable them to complete the purchase. Here, there is a small disagreement between them. Franckel wants to build a new, larger home on the new plot. Claudette would rather stay where she is and use the new land for farming. “We’ll have to discuss it,” she says.

And Claudette is making progress in another sense. This year, she found an afternoon school program for adults at her church and she entered the first grade. “I go to meetings and there are folks old enough to be my parents who can read and write, and I can’t. It’s embarrassing.” She had never been to school before.

Vilanie Assé, Fours Years After Graduation

When Vilanie joined the CLM program in 2012, her life was difficult. Seven of her ten children were still living at home, in a house that didn’t belong to her. She and her family were crowded in a small, broken-down house on the main road running through Chapèl, just below the Roman Catholic church in Bay Tourib. She struggled to keep her children fed and in school.

But she joined the program, and she got to work. She chose goats and small commerce as her two assets, and though the goats didn’t develop especially well, her small commerce flourished. She bought merchandise — either produce or charcoal — in Bay Tourib and sold it in local markets. She quickly added a second business. She was a good cook. People liked to eat her food. So she established a business preparing food at the market in Koray. She go early on Saturday morning with the ingredients she needed, and she always managed to sell out whatever she prepared.

Her most limiting factor initially was the size of the load and the distance she could carry it. She had no pack animal, so she had to carry everything on her head. So a soon as she was able, she used savings from her weekly stipend and earnings from her commerce to buy a horse. And that’s when her business took off. By the time she had spent twelve months in the program, she easily met all the graduation criteria. She and her husband had purchased a small plot of farmland, and she had 3000 gourds of savings in her bank account.

She built her CLM-house, but when the same landlord that had been pressuring her to leave the house she was squatting in saw her begin to progress, he offered her the chance to buy the house on reasonable terms, and she jumped at the chance. Its location made it a great spot to extend her business. She started serving her meals every day, not just market day, and her profits increased. She is careful to cultivate her customers, and the care pays off. “If you have a regular customer, and their short of cash one day, you sell them on credit. They almost always pay you back, and it keeps them buying from you. Sometimes if they’re hungry and can’t pay, I just give them a little something for nothing. It means they’ll keep thinking of me when things are better for them.”

With a horse to carry loads for her, and her sales growing, she combined her two businesses. She would bring loads of produce to market in Thomonde, where she would buy the ingredients for the meals she’d prepare. Her produce brought a higher price in Thomonde, and the ingredients her food stall required would be cheaper.

Her husband worked the farmland for them. She would use money from her business to buy seed, and supplement that with five coffee cans full that they could borrow each year without interest from the local peasant association. Before long, they had rented an apartment in Ench for two of her boys. She wanted them to go to better schools than they could attend in Bay Tourib. It was expensive, but to her the investment was worth the effort.

She was part of an evaluation we did of CLM members one year after graduation, and Vilaniee’s data shows that she continued to prosper. Her business grew, her fields yielded strong harvests, and her horse had a healthy colt.

In the three years that have passed since that post-graduation evaluation, Vilanie’s life has seen some ups and downs. Like many farmers in the Central Plateau, the last two years have produced weak harvests. She and her husband suffered a total loss of their entire millet crop two years in a row. That’s put a lot of pressure on her business because it has forced the family to live of what she can buy, rather than what they can grow. And it is doubly hard because she has to buy food both for her own household and for the boys in Ench. Last year, she made the difficult decision to sell off the colt to pay the boys’ tuition. It was a sacrifice, but she had a bit of luck that made up for it. Her mare’s second pregnancy resulted in a mule. The mule will eventually carry much more of a load than a horse and will be a more valuable asset if she ever chooses to sell it.

So the future for Vilanie and her family is looking bright. Her business is thriving, and she and her husband have planted ten cans of beans, enough for a major harvest if the weather is moderately favorable. She’s grateful for the tools that CLM put in her hands, but she knows very well that she is the one who changed her life. “I was careful with everything they gave me. I didn’t waste it. And now I have something to show for it.”

Orana Louis, Four Years After Graduation

It’s been four years since Orana graduated from the CLM program. She was part of a group of 350 women we worked with in Bay Tourib, an area of western Thomonde. She and her husband Sonn were able to transform their lives during the program’s 18 months and the couple of years that followed.

Previous to joining CLM, the family depended on what Sonn could earning working in the Dominican Republic. He would return to Bay Tourib whenever he had money he could bring with him. Orana would have to stretch out what he brought her to make it last. Now and again she would start a small commerce with some if the money, rather than just spending it on food, but frequent pregnancies got in the way. The couple had no livestock, and though they had access to land that belonged to Sonn’s family, they couldn’t afford to plant it. They frequently went hungry.

But the livestock Orana received as a CLM member encouraged Sonn to stick around. It gave him work to do. And the couple was able to use savings from their food stipend to begin investing in their fields. They took some of the proceeds from their harvest, and invested it in Orana’s small commerce. She sold plastic sandals at the local markets. Their lives took off.

There were bumps in the road. Sonn was the one who travelled to Port au Prince to buy Orana’s merchandise, and on one of his trips all their money was stolen. They had to start over again. But by the end of the program, Orana had a small but steady business. They couple had been able to buy a mule, so that she didn’t have to carry her merchandise to market on her head. More importantly, after she graduated they had been able to purchase the land they lived on and some additional farmland as well. They even started leasing additional plots to plant even more. Neither Orana nor Sonn was ever afraid of hard work, and they finally had resources to work with.

But the last two years have been hard. The couple feels as though they’ve taken a step backward. It started with Orana’s last pregnancy, her sixth. It was difficult. Though her boy was born healthy, she required expensive hospitalization in its last days, and the couple had to sell off her commerce to pay.

Then they suffered some poor harvests. Like most farmers in central Haiti, they would normally depend on millet, but the last two years’ millet crops were total losses. Some kind of parasitic invasion destroyed the millet in much of Haiti. Their pigeon peas were lost this year because of heavy rains that fell at the wrong time, and like most farmers who planted their beans late last winter, their current crop looks unpromising. “The folks who got their beans planted early are seeing a good harvest. But our land is hot. We have to wait longer. And it doesn’t look like we’ll get very much.”

Orana’s quick to point out that the kind of problems she and Sonn have now are nothing like the ones they used to have. She doesn’t have trouble keeping her children healthy and fed. “We have plantains and corn. We planted some malanga that should be ready in a few months, and we have pumpkins growing all around us.” They have another mule — they sold their first because it wasn’t strong enough — and they still keep goats. “I can pay for school for the kids, and as long as you have a few animals you must be doing ok.”

But Orana does have one problem, an unusual but a serious one. It concerns Daben, her fourth child. “He won’t go to school. And it’s not as if I couldn’t pay to send him. He doesn’t want to go.” Orana explains that Daben’s problem is teasing. He was born with both male and female sexual organs. I call him “he” because he identifies unambiguously as a male. The school is full of the kids he grew up around, and they torment him because he’s different. Orana isn’t sure what to do. “He’s a healthy boy. He’s never sick. There’s nothing wrong with him. But because of the way he is, he won’t go to school. And these days you’re not supposed to bring up your kids to be ignorant.” This last note has an especially strong ring to it coming from Orana because she never got to spend a day in school herself. “I think about it all the time. Even his younger brother’s in school.”

It’s gotten bad enough that Orana has thought about giving Daben up for adoption. “I wonder whether it would be different if he was living where no one knew him.” For now, she just wants medical advice to help her understand what options there might be.