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.

Idalia Bernadin 2

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

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

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

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

Miramène Georges 2

Miramène missed the first day of the workshop in Koray Grann. She stayed home with her sick child. The baby was feverish and uncomfortable. Miramène knew she had to come on the second day, though, so she left her mother in charge and hiked down from Gwo Labou to Koray Grann.

She feels good about how the program is working for her so far. Her goats are healthy. She works hard to keep them that way, making sure they’re tied up where they can get food but don’t have to stand in the direct sun. Her father helps her, but she is mainly on her own since her husband is in the Dominican Republic.

She still lives in her parents’ lakou, the yard with their house and also houses for her sister and brother. Her sister-in-law is also a CLM member, but her mother and sister are somewhat wealthier, so they didn’t qualify.

She and her sister-in-law decided to make one shared latrine for the whole lakou, and it has already been installed none of the households has had one until now. It will be ready to use in a couple of days. Right now it has no walls. But Miramène’s father has promised to add the walls in the next days, and the entire family will benefit.

Her new focus is on the new home she plans to build. CLM requires members and their families to contribute a lot towards the home, and Miramène is clear about her own contribution. Her father has been collecting the posts she will need for the house’s structure, and she’s already begun buying the palm trees she’ll need to build its walls. She told her husband about her place in the program, and he has been sending money to buy the lumber. He’ll come visit in December. “He’s really happy about the program, and agrees with everything I tell him we need.”

Laumène François 2

Laumène wasn’t feeling well on the first day of the three-day workshop. She’s been having headaches and hot flashes. But she came anyway, and she seems happy to be there.

She’s certainly happy to be in the program. “I’m happy about the way I’m managing [what I have]. They’ve given me things so I can hope.”

She talks about the water filter she’s received, about her new goats, and about the cash stipend she’s getting every week. “M ap vi alèz.” “I live comfortably.” Her goats, she says, are her path to a better life, and having her own water filter means she’s no longer crouching down to drink any water she comes across.

Her children are happy about the program, too. She says that they’re the reason that she can come to meetings whenever we invite her to one. “They see what I’m doing.”

She knows that the CLM team will only have 18 months with her, but she doesn’t seem worried. “They’ll leave me with principles that I can stick with.” Her goats will provide young, and she’ll have a new home so that she won’t be living “under a tree.”

Her plan is to stick with her livestock. She is afraid to invest in small commerce. “It’s too easy for the money to fritter away. The kids would yell for this or that, and it would eat up the money.”

Juslène Vixama 2

Juslène still seems lost.

She sits cheerfully in the classroom as a case manager opens the workshop. She and her fellow CLM members from the area around Koray Grann will spend three days together, going over the way they manage their new assets – almost all livestock – and how they have set out on the other aspects of the program, like home repair. She looks around as members talk or shout or sing. She never seems to focus for long on anything in particular. Others learn quickly to applaud in rhythm to offer encouragement. It’s a CLM custom: clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap, clap. But Juslène can’t pick up the beat.

She’s been in the program for three months, but can’t remember that. She can’t say when she started. But she sits smiling as we chat, looking left, right, always away but always cheerful. She’s happy in the program. “They gave me goats. They’re going to give me a house.”

But we talk about the house. The program provides roofing material and money to pay builders, but members have to provide the structural lumber and the material for walls. Around Gwa Labou, where Juslène lives, they use palm wood planks. It’s a lot to manage. She answers me quickly when I ask her whether she’ll be able to organize her part of the work. “I can.” But when I ask her how she will get the work done, she says she doesn’t know. Her husband will find the support posts, but she’ll need to buy the planks, and she has no idea where the money will come from.

But it is important to her. She’s been living in his sister’s house ever since her own was destroyed by a storm. She doesn’t like it. Her sister-in-law treats her well, but she says, “M pa renmen rèt kay moun.” That looks easy to translate. It looks like it means, “I don’t like living in someone [else’s] home.” But the Creole is stronger than that because “ret kay moun” carries a sense of homelessness, a sense of the status of restavek, the Haitian children who live as domestic servants.

When it came time to think about where to build her new house, her father decided to rent a plot well downhill of the place she’s been living. Her husband has begun to assemble the support posts her house will need. “My life will change when I’m in my own house, but it hasn’t changed yet,” she says. The house, which is the part of the program most important to Juslène, will depend entirely on the two men.

Rosemène Achil

Rosemène Achil lives in Bozyo, a sparsely populated agricultural area in the lower, southern side of Boukankare. Bozyo is dotted with small, grass-covered hills, with narrow dirt paths that lead between and around them. Its homes are scattered through these hills, some on hilltops and others hidden away in the little nooks the hills provide.

Rosemène’s is hidden, at least a hundred yards from her closest neighbor’s. She lives there with four of her children. She had seven, and lost two. One of the surviving five – her oldest living daughter – lives with another family. She owns no land, but has a cousin who let her put up the shack on his. He even agreed to let her construct her new CLM home on it.

She joined the CLM program in 2009, immediately after the end of the successful pilot. At the time, she was living in a broken-down shack that provided no protection from the tropical rains. Her husband was with her then, and the couple lived on what he sometimes earned for a day’s work in a neighbor’s field. Her son Isnat, who was a teenager at the time, would help too. He would recognize sometimes that his mother had nothing to feed him and his younger siblings, so he’d go find work. The adults he’d work for could be slow to pay him, though. They still thought of him as a child.

The program gave her goats and a collection of poultry, and she struggled with the poultry. “I don’t eat eggs. It’s not something I grew up with. And you can’t raise the young poultry because the animals around here eat them all.”

But Rosemène had success with the goats. She took good care of them with her boys’ help, and they had young. She used the young, along with savings from her weekly cash stipend, to make other investments, though it wasn’t easy. She always needed some of the stipend to feed her kids, and had a hard time protecting the rest of it from her spendthrift husband. He would pressure her to him money as soon as her case manager, Lissage, had finished his visit. She’d have to argue or lie to keep him from wasting it. Eventually, she arranged with Lissage for him to hold on to it, depositing it in her savings account for her. She didn’t know what else to do.

When she graduated from the program in December 2010, she still had her goats, but she also had a fertile sow and a young heifer. She says that her case manager bought them for her though she knows that he bought it with her money. Almost six years after graduation, her livestock is still flourishing. Her cow was nursing its second calf and her pig had proven a reliable source of income.

But that points to Rosemène’s continued vulnerability, because one of her husband’s children took the bull and sold it. He spoke vaguely about having just “borrowed” the animal, but has shown no sign of a plan to replace it. And she can’t speak to her husband about it, because he has disappeared. Rosemène has been unable to assert her authority over the assets she’s worked to build up, and a reduction in her livestock holdings is dangerous because they are her only source of income other than the little her boy can earn.

Part of the problem is that she cannot establish a small commerce. Activity at the local markets would normally be the obvious way for a woman like Rosemène to generate a regular income. She would depend on livestock to manage larger expenses but use commerce to manage the day-to-day. But Rosemène “pa konn lajan. ” That means that she doesn’t “know money”. Haitians say this about two kinds of people. Some have trouble distinguishing between bills of different denominations. Others can’t do the arithmetic that making change requires. In any case, she and her case manager judged that small commerce would not work for her.

So Rosemène’s progress remains fragile. Her economic situation is much improved since she joined the program, but she has very little margin. This year, for example, her children are not in school because her husband wasted the last litter of piglets she had been counting on to cover the expenses. And psychologically, she’s fragile, too: She still understands the progress she’s made as something Lissage did for her.

But there’s reason for hope nonetheless. Lissage is committed to investing the time necessary to help her get through the trouble with her husband and his family, even six years after graduation. He’s helping her start legal proceeds against the man’s son to recover price of the bull. And Isnit is increasing showing signs that he feels himself ready and able to be the partner his mother needs to ensure the future of her younger kids.

And her view of herself has changed. The same woman who had to beg her cousin for a spot to put up her shack was proud that she was the one to finance her uncle’s funeral. She sold a large sow, replaced it with a much younger one, and used the difference in price to buy funeral supplies.

Lourdine Magloire

Lourdine Magloire lives in Savann Donnen, a rural area just off the main road that leads from Mibalè to Pòtoprens. When she first got together with her partner, Derisnord, he was a widower with three children. They decided to raise the three together, and Lourdine eventually had their fourth.

They remained a medium-sized, poor family for several years. Derisnord brought in a small income with day labor, working their neighbors’ fields. With no livestock and no land holdings beyond the small plot the couple lived on, Lourdine’s best option was to work as a market woman, selling groceries at the weekly markets in Labasti, Mache Kana, and Ti Sèkèy. Labasti is close by, but the others our long hikes from Savann Donnen, so she would rent a horse to make the trips.

Then Lourdine became pregnant again, and the couple awaited what they expected would be their fifth child. Except that Lourdine had triplets.

The event made their already-difficult life even harder. Lourdine spent months unable to leave her home to manage her business. All the capital she had in it quickly wasted away. The entire household was left to live off Derisnord’s agricultural earnings. Field labor typically pays 50 gourds per day. That may have been worth a little more than $1 at the time, though it’s now worth less than eighty cents. The international definition of “extreme poverty” is now $1.90 per day, and that’s per household member. Derisnord was earning about a dollar when he could find the work, and that was for the whole family.

Lourdine joined the CLM program in 2013. The triplets were just about a year old. She knew she wouldn’t be able to restart her business. She was too busy nursing. So she chose livestock – two female goats and a young sow – as her assets.

Savann Donnen is a good place to raise livestock. There are areas to let goats graze, and food to scavenge for pigs. You don’t have to buy everything you feed them. Thanks to Lourdine’s hard work, the livestock prospered. Her goats had kids, and her pig had piglets. She was able to use proceeds from sales of the young to manage some of her household’s needs. The kids began to eat well, and she sent the third and fourth ones to school.

As she developed her new businesses, she learned to count on the weekly visits she’d receive from her case manager, Guerrier. “He really pushes you because he doesn’t want you to slip back to the way you were.”

the time she graduated in December 2014, she had more than achieved her first big goals. Her children were healthy, the older ones were in school, and she had purchased a cow by selling off some of her animals’ young. And two years after that, her progress continues. The triplets are now in school as well, and she’s just purchased her second cow.

She still has challenges. Though she has valuable livestock holdings and plenty of food for herself and her children to eat, she can be short on cash. The day I saw her, she was running around trying to borrow the 100 gourds she needed to take a taxi to the hospital in Mibalè. She was due to renew her family planning. She knows that she needs to get back into small commerce to build a modest, regular cash flow, but the cost of getting all the children into school this year has left her without the funds she’d need to invest in a small business.

She’s thought about Fonkoze credit program, but the loans are group loans and doesn’t like the idea of borrowing with other women. “I’d think about it if the loan was individual.” For now, she plans to start buying cases of frozen chicken parts in the next couple of months, when she can sell off some more livestock to fund that first purchase.

She also has a larger vision. She thinks she can be a leader, and wants to get into local politics. “Right now, I’m just studying the lay of the land.” But she advocates strongly for CLM’s return to her neighborhood. She claims that there is a corner of it we missed. We’ll have to study what she says.

Idalia Bernadin

Idalia seems as though she might be about 40, but like most of the women from this new group, she doesn’t know her age. When she’s asked why she thinks she was invited to join the program, she says that it was because of her problems. But she knows that everyone has problems, so when pressed, she explains: “Tout moun konn mouye, men gen ki mouye plis.” “Everyone is wet sometimes, but some are wetter than others.”

She grew up in Beken, and community in the larger, western section of Savanette. Her mother had six girls and five boys, but lost five of the children. Neither she nor any of her siblings went to school, but they never knew hunger. Her parents farmed as sharecroppers, but they worked their own land too. They also kept livestock. “My parents worked really hard.”

She lives now in Gwo Labou with her husband and the youngest two of her four children. They met at church when they were young, and her husband sent his parents to her parents’ home to formally ask for her hand. They struggled, but they got by. “Le w malaria, ou pa jam san pwoblèm,” she explains. They farmed their land, growing plantain that she’d bring to market for sale. She also maintained small business selling rum in Jinpaye, where they lived. “When you’re poor, you’re never without problems.” Now and again, they’d be able to keep a goat.

They moved to Gwo Labou recently. They were driven away from Jinpaye, the remoter mountain community where they had been living. Her husband was accused of stealing a bunch of plantains out of a neighbor’s garden.

She claims that her husband was innocent, that there was no proof, only suspicions. She went to complain to the local KASEK, the elected official responsible in some measure for law and order in the countryside, and he told her that wives don’t speak on their husbands’ behalf. So they fled, fearing for the man’s life.

And that’s not her only problem. Her oldest son is in prison in Port au Prince. They are staying in a cousin’s home for now. Their case manager, Titon, will have to help them figure out a more permanent solution.

Idalia is happy to chat and able to explain the various lessons that Titon has already gone over with her. She remembers the points that they’ve gone over well. She can talk about the care of her goats and about Vitamin A.

She doesn’t have a clear plan for the future, but she has hopes. She wants to add to the livestock we’ve given her. She’s not sure what she’ll buy, but explains that “everything has its own price.” What you buy depends on what you have to spend.

Marie Yolène Théus

Yolène is a 27-year-old woman with four kids. She and her family live on the top of a little hill in Fon Desanm.

Her mother died when she was very young. The older women had a baby die before childbirth, and she wasn’t able to get the help she needed to overcome the complications. Yolène hardly remembers her. Yolène was taken in and raised by her older sister. The sister took good care of her, and she helped her with her nieces and nephews. But she did not send her to school.

Eileen eventually moved to Port au Prince to look for work as a maid, but got pregnant. She returned to Fon Desanm to have her child, and soon moved in with her current partner, who went through getting a birth certificate for her first child, though it has no father’s name on it.

Like several of her neighbors who joined the program when she did, she chose goats and small commerce as her two activities. And she has already received her three goats. But she has changed her mind about commerce, and her reason is telling. She’s worried that becoming a businessperson could lead her into arguments with customers who want to buy on credit and then don’t pay. And she says that she’s afraid of arguments.

So she’s asked her case manager, Martinère, to buy a pig for her instead. He’s happy to let her make the decision, but it is complicated. The pigs that the CLM program buys for new members cost more than the amount that it would spend to buy her merchandise for her business. Members who choose goats and a pig get only two goats, so the staff will have enough money to buy a promising pig. But Yolène already has three goats, so the pig she’ll get will be very small. But she is afraid enough of going into business that she’d rather have the pig even so. She eventually passed one of her goats along to a member who hadn’t received hers yet. So now Yolène will be eligible for a proper pig.

She optimistic about the program. “Lavi w pral chanje kanmenm. Ou pa gen anyen. W ap genyen.” “Your life will change in any case. You have nothing [now], but will come to have things of your own.”

Rosana Mitil

Rosana Mitil is a 42-year-old woman who lives with her husband, their eight children, and their oldest daughter’s baby in Fon Desanm, a mountainous area that rises on the north side of the road to Savanèt. She and her daughter both received recommendations to join the program from the case managers who did the initial selection in Fon Desanm. But the daughter was disqualified because she is entirely dependent on her parents. Rosana and her husband do everything for the family.

Rosana has spent virtually her whole life in Fon Desanm. She was born and raised there. Her parents brought her up her on their own land with her sister and five brothers. They farmed and raised livestock. Though the children didn’t go to school, they ate well. It wasn’t until she moved out to live with her husband, until she was an adult herself, that she began to have problems. “Tè a pa bay ankò,” she explains. “The land doesn’t yield [what it used to yield].”

Rosana chose goats and small commerce, and she and her husband have started taking good care of the goats. There are a number of CLM families in the small corner of Fon Desanm where they live, and competition among them seems to have driven them to construct especially good huts for their goats. Rosana’s is no exception: solidly built with well-chosen support posts made of rough-hewn lumber, walls of woven sticks, and a roof of palm-seed pods.

They have always supported their household by farming, and in good years they’ve been able to buy livestock – usually goats. But they use their goats to invest in farming, too, selling one each time they need money to plant, and it’s been some time since they sold their last one. For this year’s spring harvest, they had to buy the beans – five coffee cans full – on credit, which was payable in beans with 100% interest at harvest. But they made a bad guess, planting their beans too early, and harvested less than they planted. They’ll have to repay the debt when they can.

Rosana is anxious to start her business, but she knows it will take some thought. The easiest thing would be to sell groceries in the market and out of her home, but she’s afraid that, with all the mouths she has to feed, her merchandise would just disappear. The temptation to reach into it to prepare her meals would be too strong.

So she wants to start a business in beans. If she buys them at the market in Savanèt and carries them to Lascahobas she can make ten gourds – about 15 cents – per mamit, or coffee-can full. She will initially have enough capital to buy about five mamit, so the whole trip, including the hours of hiking with a sack of beans on her head, should net her about 75 cents. The two markets’ schedules mean that she can only make the trip once each week, so she will use her sales in Lascahobas to buy sugar there that she can then sell at a profit by carrying it across the mountain back to Kolonbyè. She thinks that even such small profits can help her get ahead because she won’t think of the money as hers. “Li p ap pou mwen,” or “It won’t be mine,” she says. She’ll just leave it in the business to grow.

Even though she hopes to move forward, she hasn’t been able to imagine what that will look like yet. She has no specific ambition. “Se lè m gen nan men m, m ap wè sa m ap fè.” “When I have something in my hands, I’ll see what to do with it.”

Rosemitha Petit-blanc

Rosemitha lives in a small house right along the road that leads through Kolonbyè to Savanette. She had been living in Port au Prince, supporting herself by selling kleren, the locally brewed rum, and cigarettes, but she returned to Kolonbyè to live with and care for her aging grandfather.

She felt she owed him her care. He was the one who raised her. Her parents had never been a couple. Her father’s father took her in when she was very young. He was a well-to-do farmer and took good care of her.

His wife, however, didn’t like her, so she eventually accepted the chance to move to Port au Prince with her mother’s sister. Though her aunt didn’t send her to school, she took good care of her otherwise, grateful perhaps to have Rosemitha to help her with her own kids.

She grew up in her aunt’s home. As a young teenager, she had two children with men who crossed her path, but the men took their children and abandoned her. She started to make her way by getting work as a maid in other families’ homes, but she left that work when she received news that her grandfather, whose wife had passed away, was alone in his home and in poor health.

When the old man died, she decided to stay in Kolonbyè. At first, she just continued to live in the house he left behind. She had nothing of her own, but would live on whatever neighbors were willing to give her. She made her way by begging, or did minor chores in exchange for food. She was still living in the old man’s house when her current partner found her. He immediately liked her and also saw her as someone who could help him raise his two kids. She now lives with her partner, their infant boy, his two young children, and his mother in a house that belongs to the older woman.

They seem to have a strong relationship. Her husband speaks enthusiastically about Rosemitha as a stepmother. “She does everything for them. She’s a mother to them in every way except that she didn’t give birth to them.” But there is a lack of respect in the relationship, too. When Rosemitha is confused by one of my questions, her husband and mother-in-law gang up on her: “How can you say that? If you aren’t sure, say you don’t know!.”

But things are hard. His children are old enough for school, but they aren’t able to send them. They can’t even feed the children every day. For now, they depend entirely on what he can bring in as a day laborer, working in their neighbors’ fields. The usual rate, when work is available, is 50 gourds, or less than 80 cents. And that 80 cents has to feed three adults and three kids.

Rosemitha chose goats and small commerce because she feels that she’s succeeded at small commerce before. Her husband is already working hard to help her with the goats, making sure that they have everything they need, and seeking advice when he sees something in one of them that concerns him. She isn’t ready to start just yet, though. She’d like her boy to be a little older before she starts leaving him with her mother-in-law.