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.

Modlet’s Courage

I first met Modlet in 2014. Modlet was then in his mid-teens, one of his mother’s seven children. Their father died when he was very young.

His mother and sister had been selected to join the CLM program, and our team had invited them to an initial six-day enterprise training workshop at a school in Mòn Blan, not far from their home. The mother, Charitab, brought him along to the workshop because she didn’t think she could leave him at home. He was sickly, falling down all the time. His balance was bad. He had a hard time feeling his feet. He’d lose a sandal without noticing, and he frequently trip over things.

The area around Mòn Blan is extremely rocky, with steep and narrow footpaths cutting crooked ways around bare ravines. The footing there is tricky for anyone. For him, it had become dangerous.

Gauthier was at the workshop as well, and when we saw the boy we didn’t think we should wait. I put him on the back of my motorcycle and took him to the hospital. It was a hard ride because his terrible sense of balance made him a bad passenger. But we arrived at the Partners in Health University Hospital in Mirebalais.

It was the first of several diagnostic visits. He eventually saw Dr. Louine Martineau together with a visiting American neurologist. And they discovered a serious vitamin B12 deficiency. They started treating it with daily doses, he improved quickly, and the effect lasted for a while. But when the symptoms returned, they switched him to monthly injections. After six months of injections, he was doing much better, and they switched him back to pills, which he continues to take daily.

All this involved a lot of travel between Mòn Blan and the hospital. It’s more than a half an hour by motorcycle, and lines at the hospital can be long, so a visit usually meant at least a half-day’s work for someone on the staff. I was almost always the one. His mother and sister have a case manager, but case managers’ schedules are much less flexible that mine was as a manager, so I could help them out by doing it in the case manager’s place.

As Modlet and I spent more and more time together, a friendship took hold. We talked a lot, and one thing we talked about was school. Modlet was a terrible student. At seventeen, he was still in the third grade. He had had to repeat classes a couple of times because his grades were so bad. Math was especially hard for him. I was a little surprised to discover that he couldn’t do even simple addition.

So we added a math tutorial to our visits. I had him collect and clean twenty little stones, and we started using them to practice addition and subtraction. Sometimes it seemed as though we were making progress, and sometimes it just didn’t. When he got his report card in June 2015, he had failed third grade again.

By then he was eighteen, and I wondered whether it was time to help him and his mother plan a different future for him. Just because he couldn’t succeed at school didn’t have to mean that he couldn’t make anything of his life. I spoke to Charitab, and she agreed. She actually felt more strongly than I did that it was time for him to give up on school. We talked about whether she could give him a piece of one of her fields to farm so that he could start earning money. He had been growing fast and was now a slender but very strong young man. It seemed like a good solution. Someone would have to sell his crops for him, because he had trouble dealing with money, but he had siblings who could do that.

When we talked to him, he listened politely. But when we asked him what he wanted, he asked whether he could try once more to succeed in school. He didn’t want to return to the same school, but there was another one farther up the hill and he wanted to give it a try. He felt really strongly. His mother and I spoke about it, and we both thought it was a waste, but we also thought that he’d never be happy unless we let him try, so she agreed. He registered for third grade in the new school. His older sister took care of getting him his uniform and the books he would need. He was ready to go on schedule in September 2015.

He just got his report card, and it was a fantastic success. He couldn’t have been more right, and his mother and I couldn’t have been more wrong. He came in fifth in a class of 19.

It’s a little hard to figure. He’s now 19, and when you talk to him he can still seem confused. But he works hard and is rightly proud of his success. We don’t know if the same B12 that helps with the nerve problems that were interfering with his mobility also has improved his brain function or if something else has made it possible for school to begin to click

Selection: A Case Study

Jeanne Brise lives with her partner, Chilet, and four of their six children in Bwa Kabrit, a quiet area that’s hidden among trees just off the main road leading into downtown Lascahobas. She’s been a CLM member for a little more than a month.

She went through the selection process in January. When we select families for a new cohort, we try to visit all the families in a community or a group of communities who might qualify for the program. But then we run up against the reality that underlies the way our operation functions. We receive funds for a certain number of families, so if the area we are preparing to work in yields more families than that number, some families will have to wait. We could just stop selecting when we got to the number we can serve, but that would bring another problem with it. Accurate selection is extremely difficult in a community where we are already working. Jeanne was one of the unlucky ones. We weren’t able to start working with her until June.

At the time we selected her, our choice might have looked surprising. Her selection form lists the couple as owning two goats and a pig, much more wealth than an entering family would normally have. But those assets were only part of the picture.

They were living in a miserable house of straw and leaves on land that they didn’t own, or even rent. They are not from Bwa Kabrit. They’re from Koray Gran, a community in Savanette, the commune south of Lascahobas. They left home because they could see no future there. They couldn’t earn anything like a living. Chilet had found some day labor working in fields near Bwa Kabrit, so he brought the rest of the family over. A landowner permitted them to set up a small shack on his land. But since they had no access to any land of their own, they could not farm. Their children weren’t in school, and they couldn’t feed them every day.

They would work in the neighbors’ fields when they could find someone who needed them, and Jeanne would do laundry for wealthier families. Their hard work brought some progress. They used Jeanne’s laundry earnings to buy the livestock.

But our selection team did not think it would be enough to establish a life. Here is what Wesnel Charles, the manager who verified their selection, wrote in his notes:

“None of their four children go to school because they don’t have the means to send them . . .. The children are really filthy. You see their poverty vividly. The mother’s the same way. She says that they have to struggle with hunger all the time. If it wasn’t for her laundry money, they’d just die. Supposing they were able to sell their two goats for 3000 gourds [now about $50], they could use the money to rent a piece of land to live on. Then they could sell the pig to buy some of the lumber they would need to build a house. But their shack has nothing in it but the sticks they sleep on and the few dirty rags they wear.”

He’s arguing that even the assets they had were not enough to help them move forward. And he turned out to be right. By the time they joined the program, they had nothing, even though they were still in the same shack. Nothing of Wesnel’s construction plan came to fruition.

First the pig died. When it was clear that it had contracted Teschen Disease, an incurable viral infection fatal in about 85% of cases, they sold it to a butcher for 1750 gourds, much less than it had been worth just a week earlier, when it still appeared healthy. But the low price isn’t the worst of it. When butchers buy a sick or dead animal, they don’t pay cash. They don’t need to. They know that the seller is over a barrel. So the butcher owes Jeanne and Chilet the money. She said she would pay in July, but July is almost over, and they haven’t been able to collect yet.

The two goats turned out to be only one goat. We’re not sure how the misunderstanding occurred, but Jeanne now insists that she only had one. When Chilet’s brother was facing a sudden expense, he asked to borrow it. That’s to say that he sold to get the money he needed, promising to replace it in August.

Suddenly the couple’s assets were at zero. And the landowner who had given them permission to set up their shack on his land decided he wanted his land back.

So by the time the couple joined the program, they seemed well qualified: no assets except some money owed to them, children who are hungry and not in school, and a miserable little shack that they would not even be able to stay in much longer. Whether Wesnel’s decision was correct at the time he made it is a separate question, but events seem to have born out his reasoning.

The couple now has a lot of work to do. They found a small plot of land to rent, and their case manager, Sandra, help them convince the land’s owner to let them owe him the money. She made sure he knew that she would be taking responsibility for helping them save up the money that they owe him. Now they’ve begun to prepare their move. They are going to have to be very careful with money. They owe the rent, they will have some construction materials to buy beyond what the CLM program offers, and they want to send their two older kids to school this year.

Breaking the Bank

We want the women who graduate from the CLM program to have access to savings and credit after they complete the program. It is one way to help them continue to progress. This can be straightforward. Our sister organization, Fonkoze Financial Services (SFF), provides such services to thousands of Haitian from all over the country, including the Lower Central Plateau, where we are based.

But we also work in areas that SFF does not reach. Their need to break even limits what they’ve been able to do. So we started looking for ways to facilitate long-term access to a supportive financial structure, and we can across Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA). I’ve written about them here: http://www.apprenticeshipineducation.com/vsla/.

VSLAs are a way to organize a group of people to save money and use their savings to make loans. A group agrees to meet one a week, and at every meeting every member must buy at least one share. They can buy as many as five. The group determines share prices at an initial meeting, and these prices can vary greatly. Our own team works with groups whose shares are as small as 25 gourds and as big as 500. Members of the group can borrow money from the pot, usually as much as three times their own savings, and they repay the loan with interest. The group also decides both the rules about repayment and the interest rate.

We’ve set up a number of VSLAs as part of an experiment. We wanted to understand how they work and judge whether they could help our members. Two of the groups involve CLM staff members – Full disclosure: I’m in one of them – and the rest are primarily for CLM members.

On Monday, the first group that we established reached maturity, the end of its one-year term. VSLA members generally agree to save together for a year. At the end of the year, they divide up the pot, including the interest that they have earned through their loans.

The pay out is a long and tedious process, because the VSLA approach is as low-tech as it could possibly be. Each member has a bankbook, with a star for every share they have purchased. The secretary had to count all the stars in every book and then recount them to make sure there were no mistakes. Then he had to count and recount the money in the pot. He did all this under the watchful eyes of the president of the VSLA.

The group should then have been able to simply divide the amount of money in the pot by the number of shares to find the share price, but things were slightly complicated. One member had defaulted on her loan. The unpaid balance was more than the total of her shares, so her shares were taken out of the total.

The group had originally set the share price at 25 gourds, or about 40 cents. They kept the price low to help them respect their commitment to buy at least one share every week. Over the course of a year of hard saving, they had accumulated over 81,000 gourds, or about $1,300. Several individuals had saved up $100 or more. When they did the division, they discovered a share price of just over 30 gourds, a 20% return on their investment. The secretary and the president then carefully calculated and recalculated each member’s share, and counted out the money for one member at a time. Members sat quietly and attentively through the tedium. They were clearly pleased.

Aniolie Occilien, a CLM graduate, explained what they like about the VSLA. “It forces you to save your money. You get it all at the end, and then you can do what you want with it.” She wants to invest her savings in a cow.

Dieula Chery felt the VSLA worked well for her, too. Another CLM graduate, she took out VSLA loans twice, and invested the money in her small business. She buys produce in the rural markets around Mirebalais, and she travels by truck with her merchandise to Port au prince. “It really helps. I was able to buy a third cow. I’ll use the money I saved up to by a mule. I’ve never had an animal to carry my stuff. It will help me get it out to the main road, where the truck passes.”

Next week, the group will start over again. This time, it will probably be larger. A number of their neighbors have been waiting to join, and it doesn’t appear as though many want to drop out.

We are excited about what we are seeing and have begun to establish more VSLAs. The newer ones are mainly for women who are still in the CLM program. That way, a woman can take out a loan or two while her case manager is still readily available.

First Trip to Kolonbyè

Getting to and from Chito is challenging, at least during the rainy season. Chito is a small community in Kolonbyè, the westernmost section of Savanette. It’s the section where our team is looking for qualified families for a new cohort of CLM.

Even just getting to Kafou Debriga, the point from which we set off for Kolonbyè and Chito, requires you to cross a river a couple of feet deep. I’m told that, during the dry season, one can get all the way to Kolonbyè on motorcycle, but we left ours in Kafou Debriga because the main river, the Fer à Cheval, looked dangerous. It was challenging enough to ford it on foot. The quickly rushing water was well over knee-high. Trying on a motorcycle would have been needlessly risky.

When we got across the river, we split into two teams. Most of us went to the left, towards the area around the Kolonbyè market. Wilson and I went with a couple of case managers to the right, towards Chito. The area had about 23 families whom our case managers had already recommended for inclusion in the program. Wilson and I would be responsible for making the final determinations.

Chito is a fertile, green area that rises from the river towards a mountain to its south. It’s mango season, and there were mangos, and children eating mangos, everywhere, but also trees of many other kinds. Chito shows little sign of the ravages that charcoal production is responsible for in most of rural Haiti.

And its homes seem more-or-less evenly sprinkled throughout the trees in clusters of two, three, or four. They were of various sorts, all if them small – just one to four rooms – but some had decent tin roofs and well-made cinderblock walls. The ones we were visiting though were mostly of a kind: one or two rooms enclosed by palm planks and covered by tach, the thick, fibrous sheets taken from a palm tree’s seedpods.

The first woman I met was Nadia, a 22-year-old mother. She had been sent to Port au Prince as a young girl because her mother could not support her, and there she lived as a domestic servant in another family’s home. She eventually ran away from that family and found a paying job as a maid.

When she became pregnant, she thought about her options, but she decided to move back in with her mother. By then, her mother was partially paralyzed, unable to care for herself, and Nadia thought she’d have a friendly roof over her head and an opportunity to help her childless older sister care for their mom.

Nadia was clearly without means. On the section of her poverty scorecard that describes her assets, she scored a perfect zero: no livestock or productive assets of any sort. She scored another zero in the section measuring income. Her total score was less than one-third of an average result, and most of her score came from points she earned by having only one child and having access to good drinking water.

But despite her dire and obvious poverty, it wasn’t immediately clear whether to accept Nadia into CLM. She was living as a young dependent in her family’s home. Her older sister was the one providing the little food that they had. She was dating a man who’d occasionally make her gifts of money, and those gifts were the household’s one form of support.

But neither the older sister nor the mother qualified for the program. Neither had a child. And we had to do something. So we decided to take Nadia. We figured that we couldn’t count on her sister’s income. The guy could move on to the next woman at any time. And even if he didn’t, he and the sister could decide to focus on themselves.

Micheline lives farther into Chito from Kolonbyè and slightly closer to the river. A mother of seven, her current partner is father only to the youngest. The man comes to see her and his son once in a while, but he has another family where he spends most of his time. The father of the first six children died years ago. Micheline now lives in a house with the youngest four children. The older children are living in other people’s homes. It’s mango season, so the children aren’t as hungry as they are most of the year. But scavenging ripe mangos and washing the mangos that neighbors are preparing to send to market are not reliable ways to feed a household. Approving Micheline for the program was an easy decision.

I also met Julienne. She was the only woman I met during the course of the day who was my age. She lives in a house with three children and a grandchild. Her two daughters are the earners. One has a boyfriend who pays to send her to school and occasionally gives her some cash that she can use to help her family. The other does neighbors’ laundry. They pay her either with food or a little bit of money. The third child is a teenage boy. He’s not in school, and he more or less fends for himself by doing chores for neighbors who give him a meal.

If I had used our original criteria for CLM, I wouldn’t have been able to take Julienne. She has no children who depend on her. But she’s partially paralyzed. She depends completely on her kids because her arms are no use to her. So we can take her as a disabled person. The Kolonbyè cohort is our first attempt to integrate all the persons with disabilities we come across into our program. So after a short chat with Julienne, I approve her for our program as well.

Wilson and I saw about 20 potential members in Chito during the day. We finished mid-afternoon, and we could see the rain approaching from farther east as we were preparing to cross the river once more. By the time we got to the water’s edge, we were caught in a downpour. Fording the now swelling current was a chore. We were already drenched by the time we got near our motorcycles, so there wasn’t much point in trying to wait out the rain. We hopped on and rode away.

Cenecia Tranquil

Cenecia grew up in an extremely poor family in Dubuisson, an area of northeastern Saut d’Eau. Her parents had ten children, but though the family often had to go without, her mother and father kept the family together. “Back in those days, people didn’t send their children away. There weren’t so many orphanages.”

When she first joined the CLM program in 2010, she was living alone in a straw shack with her four youngest children. Her three older kids were living with their father – who is not the younger children’s father – in Port au Prince. She and her kids were struggling. “Things were really bad. We were barely getting by. I’d make some charcoal now and then or go to work for a neighbor.” The father of her younger children was in the Dominican Republic. He had gone looking for work, but he hadn’t been able to send anything back to Cinecia. The children attended school on and off, but Cenecia never knew whether or when she’d be able to pay their tuition. There were days when she didn’t even know what she would give them to eat. She owned no livestock, not even a chicken.

She joined the CLM program, and she got to work. She chose goats and poultry as her enterprises. Her case manager gave her two young female goats and a variety of birds: hens, a rooster, and a couple of turkeys, too. And though most of her poultry died, her goats had offspring.

But her real progress came through small commerce. “I saved up some of the money from my weekly stipend, and my case manager Josiane taught me how I could use it to start a business.” She sold groceries – staples like rice, oil, and the like – from her own home and at the local markets. The commerce worked well, and as she moved through the program, her profits increased steadily.

And she needed the profits, because she had a lot she wanted to accomplish. The shack she was living in had a roof made of tach, the thick, fibrous seedpods that grow on palm trees. It offered no protection from the rain. And the walls were much too shaky to repair. She wouldn’t be able to cover it with a tin roof. She’d have to build something new. That meant finding the support posts and cross beams. CLM doesn’t provide the lumber that home repair requires. And she’d have to do it by herself, without a husband’s help.

When her husband returned from the Dominican Republic, he was surprised to find Cenecia and the children living in a new house with a good tin roof. The CLM program had offered Cenecia fourteen sheets of tin, but that wasn’t enough for the house that she wanted. She used profits from her business to buy 16 additional sheets so that her house could have two rooms. Now she’s glad she went to the extra expense. “My girl sleeps in one room, and my boys in the other. They’re getting older so I don’t want them sleeping in the same room.”

When she was ready to graduate, Cenecia felt as though she was facing a problem. She wanted to add to her business by joining Fonkoze’s credit program, but she was afraid to do so with the business she had. “People were always buying on credit, and they wouldn’t want to pay.” In rural Haiti, sales made in the marketplace are usually made with cash, but the neighbors who come to buy groceries at someone’s home often expect to be able to buy on credit. If Cenecia couldn’t count on collecting what neighbors owed her, it would always be hard to repay her loans. Right before graduation, Josiane had organized a meeting, and she asked whether any of the graduating CLM members owed money to other members of the program. She wanted to settle the debts before she left. The experience marked Cenecia. “When I told her about the women who owed me, they got mad. Even to this day, there’s one who won’t speak to me.”

Cenecia would be joining Fonkoze’s Ti Kredi program, a special credit program featuring very small loans and extra support from specially trained credit agents. She would start with only 1000 gourds, which was worth about $25 at the time and only about a third as much as Fonkoze’s standard first loan. But she didn’t want to risk it with a business in which customers might not pay. So she gave up her grocery business, and moved into the charcoal business instead. At first, she would buy the charcoal by the sack, and then split it into smaller portions that customers would buy for household use. Sometimes she would buy tree branches, and her husband would turn them into charcoal. Instead of selling out of her home, she sold at local markets, where all sales were for cash.

The business took off. She took larger and larger loans as her business grew. Soon she was buying and selling charcoal by the sack. She’d sell several sacks at a time in a single trip to Port au Prince. And she started selling lumber, too. She’d buy trees that she’d have cut into planks for furniture makers or home construction, or she’d buy planks that had already been cut.

As her income grew, her life changed. The two-room house she built while part of the CLM program began to feel too small. So she and her husband added a second building, with three rooms, next door to it. It has the family’s kitchen, a storage room, and a bedroom for the two of them. The children can be noisy. She also rented a room in Port au Prince so she could send her three older boys to trade school there. One’s studying ceramic tiling, another is learning plumbing. Her children were eating better, and there was no problem paying for school any more.

Her last loan was for 50,000 gourds, worth about $1000. She used it to make the first payment on a plot of land that had been planted with sugarcane, the second cane field that she’s purchased with Fonkoze credit. The land will eventually cost 105,000 gourds. She managed the first three repayments on her loan with money from her commerce and other of her own and her husband’s earnings. She’ll make the last two payments with sales of syrup milled from the land’s cane. But she plans to take a much smaller loan when she’s repaid this one. “I don’t yet have a plan for 50,000 gourds. I’ll take 25,000 instead.”

But she also has an ambition that goes beyond taking care of her family. She wants to start speaking to new CLM members when they first enter the program. “When I tell them where I was and where I am now, that will help them have hope for themselves.”

Sonya and Mimose

Sonya and Mimose are cousins and also neighbors in Flandé, a neighborhood just over the border in Lascahobas, on the road from Mirebalais towards the Dominican border. Sonya, who’s on the right in the photo, was a widow living mainly on her own. She supported herself selling biskwit, a bread common in rural Haiti. It’s baked in large, rectangular sheets that are scored so they can be separated easily into little squares, which are sold individually. She would buy a few sheets from a local baker, and then carry them around the neighborhood in a basket on her head.

One day a few years ago, she fell over very suddenly. As it turns out, she had suffered a minor stroke and lost much of the use of her right arm and leg. Her neighbors called her daughter, who was living in Port au Prince, and the younger woman agreed to return to Flandé to live with and take care of her mother. Everyone felt that Sonya could no longer live on her own. Her daughter was soon pregnant, but the younger woman’s boyfriend became sick even before their child was born. The boyfriend’s family took him away, and he died soon after that.

Not knowing how to access physical therapy, Sonya regained very little of her lost mobility. But she and her daughter had to figure out how to take care of themselves and a new baby even while Sonya herself needed help to do the simplest things. She could no longer sell biskwit. And her daughter was nursing the baby, so she wasn’t able to do much either. They lived mostly from their neighbors’ occasional charity.

Sonya wondered whether things might change for the better when she was selected to participate in the CLM program, but she also thought of her cousin Mimose. Mimose had been supporting herself and her husband since he had first become sick about four years earlier. She didn’t have much money, but she’d go to the market several times a week, buy merchandise on credit – salt or flour, for example – and sell it during the day, repaying her debt before she went home. But one day she was sitting in the market, selling some salt, when she felt something strange in her legs. Something was wrong. Her legs and feet seemed to lose strength, and she eventually lost the ability to get around without a walking stick. Even with her walking stick, she could only walk short distances. She could no longer go to the market. She was soon a widow, living in isolation in a hut hidden well off the main path. She would see Sonya whenever she had to go to the hospital. She’d have to pass right by Sonya’s house. But otherwise she just stayed home.

Sonya told the selection team about Mimose. Mimose was at the hospital when they visited the neighborhood. But the team went to the hospital to interviewing her, and that eventually led to her joining the program together with Sonya when it started last spring.

CLM members are asked to choose two enterprises to develop when they join the program, and Sonya chose a pig and small commerce. She would need her daughter’s help to take care of the pig, but she had an idea for small commerce that she’d be able to manage mostly on her own.

She lives along a long dirt road that leads into a mountainous area of northern Lascahobas. People walk down the path with loads of their own products on their head to bring them to market in Central Lascahobas. One of the most common products is charcoal for cooking, which peasants carry in large sacks. Sonya used the funds that CLM provided to start buying sacks of charcoal as people passed by with them. She would then separate into small bags and sell to her neighbors. The business works, and she makes a healthy profit. Her income soon allowed her to add other products to the business, too.

Mimose’s house seemed too far off the main route for her to think of small commerce because she felt too immobile to get products to anyplace where she could sell them. So she chose goats and poultry. Her slightly isolated, heavily wooded yard seemed a good place to raise them. And they have begun to prosper.

But she needed a more regular income. One day, she was especially frustrated. Each week, members of the CLM program for people with disabilities are encouraged to make a deposit into a lockbox that they keep at their home. Their case manager keeps the key with him. It is a way to facilitate savings for people who’d have a very hard and expensive time getting to the bank. Mimose had been struggling to deposit 100 gourds every week, about $2, even though the program’s expectation was only 25 gourds. But one week, the day for her deposit came and she didn’t have a gourd. She couldn’t do it. Not even 25 gourds. She knew she had to do something differently.

Mimose also knew that small commerce would be the best way to manage her expenses every day. She and Sonya would chat whenever she had to pass Sonya’s house on her way to follow-up appointments at the hospital, and they finally came up with an idea. She would take advantage of the same foot traffic that was making Sonya’s business possible. Sonya invited her to set up a business on a spot along the road, right next to her house, and she began selling fried snacks. “I chose fried snacks because it was what I could do.”

To get the business started, she and her case manager agreed that she would take the money she had saved out of her lockbox. It would be like a loan she’d make to herself. Once her business was off the ground, she would start making deposits again.

Her business is now flourishing, even though there are days she can’t make the short but difficult walk from her house to Sonya’s. And she’s making deposits into her lockbox, just as she promised herself she would.

And she and Mimose have managed to do more than just establish two businesses. They have established a friendship important to them both. “I love having Mimose here. I sit with her while she sells her snacks, and we chat all day. We’re not lonely anymore.”

Return to Zaboka

I last visited the village of Zaboka in March 2013. That was nine months after we celebrated graduation for the CLM families in Tit Montay, the mountainous region of northwestern Boucan Carré that includes Zaboka. It is hard to get to. No paths that even a motorcycle can manage reach anywhere within a long hike. Since that visit, I had tried to arrange some time to hike up on a couple of occasions, but it had never worked out.

So I was wondering what I’d find as I headed towards the waterfall that divides eastern Tit Montay from Central Boucan Carré on Christmas Eve’s Day. I had left CLM headquarters in Mirebalais the morning, and I had taken my time, so it was midafternoon by the time I got to the old CLM base in Zaboka, at Nava’s house. Nava was off in western Tit Montay, visiting a sick farmer. He is the closest thing to a doctor within a long hike of Zaboka. He’s been a Partners in Health community health worker for a long time, and is a learned practitioner of traditional rural healing arts.

But his wife and Fona, one of his sons, were at home. Madan Nava put water for coffee on the fire, and started planning an evening meal for her unexpected guest. Fona made ready the room that the CLM team had rented for almost two years. It had become his since we left, but it would be mine for the next few days.

The CLM team does not have any organized way to follow the lives of our graduates after they leave the program. After eighteen months with the families, we have to move on. Some members enter Fonkoze’s credit programs, but then they are more connected to our commercial partner, Fonkoze Financial Services and its credit staff, than to the CLM team. We are always happy to come across such as we bump into now and again, because they almost always confirm our belief that the improvements they’ve made in their lives are lasting. Even those we find who have slipped back into hard financial difficulties generally show an understanding of the possibilities before them and an optimism which has its roots in their ability to plan a return to better times. So I was looking forward to the chance to see some remote members more than three years after graduation.

A place like Zaboka is especially interesting to us. Programs like CLM are generally called “graduation programs.” The idea is that the participants need very intense accompaniment to overcome the extreme poverty they face, but that even after they complete our program, they’ll be well served to continue in other programs that an institution like Fonkoze can offer. They “graduate” from one kind of accompaniment to another. In Fonkoze, a series of differently designed programs make up what we call the “staircase out of poverty,” with CLM as the first step. Typically we have encouraged members to join Fonkoze’s credit programs after they finish with us. It gives them a good way to continue their progress after we’ve helped them start.

But Fonkoze Financial Services has struggled to provide credit in especially remote areas like Zaboka. It hasn’t worked well, and it isn’t clear whether it can work at a cost that’s sustainable. So the former CLM members there had been on their own since we’d left them. Seeing them continue to prosper would encourage us greatly.

On Christmas day, I went on a long hike. I would visit Chipen, in north central Tit Montay, a two-hour hike up from our base. Then I would climb up to the top of Do Zoranj, the ridge that separates Tit Montay from Hinche and Maïssade, to the north. That would allow me to cross over to Bwawouj. From there, I’d descend the rocky, twisting path back to Zaboka. I’d be back by late afternoon if I left early enough and be ready to return to Mirebalais the next day.

Edithe

When I got to Chipen, I went straight to Edithe’s house. I had seen her on my last trip, and she had been doing well. Her children were healthy, and all but the oldest girl had been in school. Before she joined CLM she hadn’t been able to send any of them. She told me about her livestock – she had suffered some losses, but they had increased on the whole – and about her future plans.

I again found Edithe at home. The last time I had come it would have been more accurate to say that she found me, running up when she saw me starting up the slope after I had crossed the mountain stream that separates Chipen from Labòd. But this time, she didn’t see me until I turned into her yard. She was doing chores together with her kids.

Her oldest girl was visiting. In the years since my last visit, she had married a young man from the other side of Do Zoranj, near the market in Nan Sab. Edithe was happy about the marriage. She both liked and trusted her son-in-law. Her goats and her cow had gotten healthier since he began to care for them for her. There is more and better forage around Nan Sab than Chipen. Her cow had had a calf, and both were doing well, as were her goats.

She did talk about one problem: Her children weren’t in school anymore. It wasn’t that she was unwilling or unable to send them. The problem was that there was no school. The one nearby in Labòd had closed. This happens often enough in areas where too few parents can pay enough to enable a school’s owner to keep the teachers paid. Edithe had tried hiring a teacher to give her children private lessons, but he had taken her money and left the area after a month. She wasn’t sure yet what she would do. The nearest functioning schools were farther than the smaller children could walk every day.

When it was time for me to move on, she told her children that she’d be going off for a while and that they should see to finishing their chores. She wanted to lead me most of the way to Bwawouj. They way I had planned to take was much too long. There was a shorter route, but she’d have a hard time explaining it to me. She’d rather just lead me along.

It was a straight uphill hike. Her house in Chipen is about 3200 feet high, but Do Zoranj is at over 5500 feet. The route she chose was much shorter than the one I knew, but much steeper, too. When we got to the ridge, she sent me on my way, asking when I’d see her again. I told her I didn’t know, but that I would just appear sometime. “Just like I did today.” She smiled and headed back to her kids.

I followed the path along Do Zoranj to Bwawouj. I was especially anxious to see Mirlène and Orelès, a young couple who lived at the top of the ridge,m with a view of Regalis over 3000 feet below..

Orelès, Marlène, and their boy

While the family was in the program, Mirlène had given birth to their second child. Then both she and the child had grown sick. The couple believed it was because Orelès had been unable to pay their midwife’s bill. Though Mirlène eventually recovered, they lost the child shortly before Mirlène graduated. And the day I first met Orelès was when he came down to Domon so that I could give him some money out of our CLM emergency fund to offset the cost of the funeral. It was a way for us to help them protect the assets they’d begun to accumulate.

When I saw them in 2013, things had reversed. Mirlène was taking care of Orelès, who had spent more than two weeks too sick even to get out of bed. They had sent their older daughter to Mirlène’s mother so that Mirlène could focus on giving her husband the care he needed.

They were getting by. Orelès’s brother and sister-in-law were helping them out. But Orelès seemed afraid. They had been on my mind frequently in the interval, but it is so hard to get to Bwawouj that I could never learn how things had turned out.

I walked past their house as I looked down towards the rest of Bwawouj. It turns out that I didn’t remember exactly which house was theirs. But Mirlène saw me and yelled. Even from a distance, she was pretty sure she knew it was me. As I walked back into their front yard from behind the house she greeted me with a big smile and a respectful peck on the cheek. Orelès strolled in from their field almost immediately after that. I didn’t even have to ask the biggest question on my mind. He was clearly in the very best of health.

He’s a thin slip of a man, especially compared to his powerfully built wife. But he’s a farmer in a non-mechanized culture, who has spent his life hiking up to his home at the top of a 5500-foot hill. So when things are right, you can see that he’s healthy and strong. Like Mirlène, he was smiling broadly. He slipped inside their small house, and brought a couple of plates of tchaka – a hearty stew of beans and whole kernels of corn. He asked whether I could eat peasant food, and smiled as I took a plate. We began to chat as we ate.

Mirlène went inside too, but she fetched their little boy, whom she wanted me to see. He wasn’t yet a year old. He had been born some time after Orlelès regain his health. And the boy looked great. As she held him in her lap, she told me that they had taken her oldest girl back from her mother, too. The family was together again.

Orelès added some explanation. They were doing well, and he was in a mood almost to boast. Thanks to his mother-in-law, his brother, and his brother’s wife, they had made it through his sickness without selling off the livestock that we gave them. He had then been able to go back to his farming, and his crops had been good, especially the beans. He had been able to add a cow to the animals they already owned, and they had purchased some additional farmland as well.

I couldn’t stay long. So we said our goodbyes. But I had plenty to feel encouraged about as a headed down the winding, treacherously rocky path back from Bwawouj to Zaboka and to Nava’s house.

There was one more person I wanted to talk to when I got back to Zaboka. Ytelet didn’t live there anymore. She had moved to Regalis. But I was lucky. She had come back for a couple of days to see her parents and attend a wedding.

Ytelet

Early in her experience with us, Ytelet and her younger brother, Dieulonet, had been near to death. They hadn’t had much but high fevers complicated by malnutrition, but their family had given up on them. They wouldn’t bother to carry them down to the hospital in Central Boucan Carré because local healers had told the family that there was no use. Ytelet’s case manager, Martinière, had his own opinion, and he mobilized some assistance to get them down to the hospital, where they received the care they needed. They had recovered, more or less, within a week.

Ytelet and Martinière then got to work developing a way for Ytelet to earn an income. Her children’s father had a wife and more kids on the other side of Tit Montay, so he wasn’t doing much for them. Ytelet had been farming land as a sharecropper, using seeds that she would borrow, paying back in kind with interest at 100%. It was what she knew how to do, but it was also a cycle of poverty that appeared to have no escape.

But Martinière showed her how to start a small business in beans with cash that we gave her, and she eventually earned enough to both rent farmland and provide her own seeds. It was a business model that worked. The net return on her first harvest was nearly ten times what her return on her last sharecropped land had been.

She continued both her year-round bean business and her seasonal farming, and her modest wealth grew. She purchased additional livestock, including a cow, and was eventually able to send her children to a school down in Central Boucan Carré, one much better than anything they could attend in Zaboka.

I had been looking for her in Central Boucan Carré since the start of the school year, but had never come across her. As we talked in Zaboka, I learned why.

Her children’s father had cheated her. He had agreed to take care of her cow. Her bean business took her away so much that she couldn’t do it herself. But he had sold the cow without telling her and taken the money himself.

She didn’t want to take him to court. He is her children’s father. But she didn’t want to have anything more to do with him, either. So she dumped him. She knew she could do very well without him.

But a young, healthy, and successful woman certainly wouldn’t lack suitors, and Ytelet had plenty of them almost right away. She decided to get together with a successful farmer from Regalis. She saw her children liked the man, and he seemed to like her kids as well. He was willing to take her with the three of them, and promised to send them to school at his own expense. So she moved to Regalis. It was a good move for business, too. The Regalis market is a good place to buy and sell beans.

Now she hikes back and forth between Zaboka and Regalis to work her farmland in Zaboka and buy beans from local farmers. And she has a plan. She is saving up to buy a mule. Owning one will help her take her business to another level because she’ll be able to take beans to sell at the larger markets down in towns like Thomonde and Hinche, where the prices are higher.

The CLM team worked with 109 families in and around Zaboka, and with over 360 across all of Tit Montay. Talking to three of them isn’t enough to draw any conclusions. But their work and the work of their case managers seems to have enabled them to succeed on their own.

Mannwa

It has been more than three years since the women of Mannwa graduated from our program. They were part of the first group of families we selected when we scaled up in the fall of 2010. We began working with them at the beginning of 2011.

Mannwa presented challenges from the start. Even during the selection process, we had difficulties. About half of the ultra poor families we found there, families who needed the program, refused to join. We made a series of trips to the neighborhood, meeting with prospective members individually and with other community members in group meetings, but we couldn’t convince them.

And just getting to Mannwa to hold all those extra meetings and make all those extra home visits was not a simple matter. Mannwa is on the top of a mountain, and there are no roads that lead up to it. Even the ones that approach the bottom are challenging, especially during the rainy season, when they turn into muddy, rut-filled messes.

It took me almost three hours to hike up Mannwa’s steep face from the closest approach I could make with my motorcycle. When I finally reached the summit. There’s a small plateau that spreads out across the ridge as it widens at the top. I hiked across the fields of corn and pigeon peas that cover most of it until I arrived at Edrès’s home. He’s a tall, middle-aged farmer with a broad face and a wide smile. During the summer vacation, when his kids are home from school in Mirebalais, his yard is populated by children of all sizes – boys and girls, young women and men. You see them singly and in twos and threes, going back and forth doing their chores or playing their games. And they all resemble Edrès almost to comical degree.

He’s a local leader and a community agent for Partners in Health. He provides vaccinations, chlorine tablets for drinking water, and other simple health services, including referrals to the hospital at Rat Leta, in central Boukankare. He was also the president of a committee we created to support our work in and around the neighborhood, and he turned out to be its only active member. But he really was active, supporting us in all sorts of instances. He helped CLM members address cases of domestic violence and manage their health problems, he resolved community conflicts, and kept an eye on things when we weren’t there. At times, he just gave us advice, important because it came from someone who knew the community and its history much better than we ever would.

More recently, he had been the agent for the Haitian government’s extreme poverty program. This had given him an excellent way to continue to follow our graduates’ progress. He had just decided to give up that job. The constant hiking was getting to be too much. But his oldest son had passed through an open recruitment process and was ready to begin training to take over the job.

He and I talked first about Manie and Sorène, a mother and her grown daughter who moved into new houses right next to each other on the edge of the plateau. He felt good about Sorène. Joining the program had been hard for her. She eventually had to leave the father of her children because he refused to let her participate, even though he couldn’t keep their children fed. “She doesn’t waste anything,” Edrès explained. She had sold her cow because it wasn’t growing as she wanted it to, but she used most of the proceeds to buy goats and to invest in her farming. Most encouragingly, she had talked over the decision with Edrès, still recognizing him as someone who can give worthwhile advice. Her little daughters were flourishing. “She’d be doing even better, but she has trouble finding grazing land for the goats. She has to keep them out of other people’s farmland, but the grazing isn’t easy on her part of the hill.”

Manie was different. She had entered the program almost as poor as someone could be, living temporarily in a house she had been forced to sell to pay for her husband’s funeral. The new owner wanted her to leave. She didn’t have even a chicken she could have sold to start raising money to find a new place to live.

But she had only one teenage boy still living with her, and Edrès reported that they are managing. They had moved into a small house that our support had helped her build, and though she hadn’t done very well with her livestock, her children were taking good care of her. When I saw Jacquesonne, her youngest, later in the day as he was returning from the fields, he confirmed everything that Edrès told me. He had used his own farm earnings to buy his mother a pig to care for. They would share the profits. And his older brother was helping her out as well.

Then Edrès turned to the women from the other side of the ridge. “The women from Lalyann are all 10s. They’ve got cows and horses and mules, and are really moving ahead.”

He dragged out what I had thought would be a short talk into a long one because his wife and their kids wanted to make coffee for me before I headed on my way. But eventually I took off along the ridge that separates central Boukankare from its northeastern corner. I wanted to catch up with the women from Lalyann myself. For fifteen minutes I had broad views in both directions, but then I followed the narrow trail that descends on a long, straight diagonal into Wòch Djèp, the neighborhood where Rose Marthe lives.

I was most of the way down the path when I heard quick footsteps behind me. I turned and saw Rose Marthe herself, running to catch up, wearing a homemade dress of red and blue. She had been working in a field higher up the hill when she saw me in the distance, and didn’t want to risk missing me when I got to her home. She was out of breath from running, but we were close to her house so we decided to walk the rest of the way.

Rose Marthe and her youngest boys

She told me about the challenges she had faced over the months since I had seen her. She had lost a child, still a baby. The boy had caught a high fever with diarrhea, and she wasn’t able to get him to the hospital in time. It is a four-hour hike. The funeral had been a big expense, but she had managed. She’d had to sell off some livestock, “But I didn’t sell the cow,” she said. She hadn’t been able to buy one until two years after she had graduated, and she wasn’t going to waste it. She sold some of her goats instead. “I still have four mother goats and a kid,” she added.

Her other challenges have involved her husband. Sepavre is a farmer, and he works hard. But he’s also unreliable. He occasionally sells off some of her assets to pay for things he wants. He never sells off enough to really send Rose Marthe backward, but he keeps her from making as much progress as she could. He had recently fallen from a mango tree when I saw her. He hadn’t been hurt badly, but he was still recovering. She had to care for him, and she had to do the work of both of them as well.

Nevertheless, Rose Marthe was plowing ahead. Her younger children were ready to return to school, and she had helped her oldest daughter and her sister prepare to move in with men whom they had chosen to try to make their lives with. She was sorry that her girl had decided to start a family, rather than to continue with school, but she was resigned to the fact, and was glad to have been able to help her get started.

We left her house together. She was heading back up to her field, and I wanted to follow the trail as it turned back farther down into Lalyann. I had other women to visit.

Magalie was next on my list. I saw most of her children. They are all still small. But she herself was off farming farther down the valley. Nevertheless, the kids told me that everyone was healthy, their mother’s livestock was in good shape, and that they were ready to return to school.

Magalie’s children with some neighbors

I reached Omène’s house next. She wasn’t there, but her husband, Elga, was. He was hanging around the house because a machete wound he had recently received in his forearm limited what he could do. The arm had healed to all appearances, but he couldn’t yet work hard with his hand.

Elga was glad to see me. Omène and his other wife Chrismène were both working in a field higher up the slope. A neighbor had assembled a team to clear and plant a large plot of her land. Omène and Chrismène have livestock and gardens of their own, but they are happy to earn a few extra gourds with a hard day’s work.

Elga and I chatted about the first time we met, in January 2011. I had gone out on rounds, covering for Martinière, Omène’s case manager. Martinière had asked me to follow through with Elga for him. At the time, Elga ans Omène were living in Elga’s parents’ yard, and Omène was having lots of problems with her in-laws. Elga would travel a lot, chasing farm labor wherever he could find it, and whenever he was away his parents would treat Omène as a child, laying down the law for her, even threatening her. Omène was tired of it. She had complained to Martinière. He was happy to try to intervene, but he wanted to hear from Elga first. The problem would be very different depending on who Elga was inclined to side with.

Elga was on Omène’s side, 100%. He was embarrassed that he had put her in such an awful position, and was anxious to free her from it. Even four years later, he shook his head, remembering how his parents had behaved. I let Martinière know, and the two of them helped Omène get out from under his parents’ rule. “Things are fine now,” he explained, “ever since we moved down the hill into our own house. We can go back and forth, seeing each other when we need to, but everyone has their own place.”

Then we talked about each of his wives. Polygamy is not unusual in rural Haiti, but Elga, Omène, and Chrismène represent something like a best-case scenario. Elga is devoted to both, and has shown no interest that we’ve ever heard about in any other women. The two women accept each other and are on sisterly terms. The ten children are as one family.

This is a difficult moment for them all because Elga’s contribution to the two households is limited, but he’s making sure their livestock is in good shape. They’ve both increased their holdings a lot since graduation. And he exercises the hand as much as he can, trying to speed its recovery so he can get back into the fields. They’ll soon be peanuts to harvest in the east, near the Dominican border, and Elga is anxious for the work. “I owe it to Omène. We sold her calf to rent and extra field this year, but we lost the crop so the calf was wasted. She could have bought a horse instead.”

By now I was rested, and I was still anxious to see the two women. Elga filled my bag with avocados. He wanted to send a gift to Martinière. I was worried about carrying the extra load up the steep path to Mannwa, but I saw him sling the bag over his own shoulder. He said that I would never find the women unless he showed me where they were, and we set off. Omène’s oldest daughter, Natacha, sent us off with a final word: “Martinière deserves a spanking. He never comes to see us anymore.”

Natacha

We were about halfway up the path when we turned off the main path. We walked across a field of pigeon peas, through a garden of plantain trees, and suddenly saw a team of a dozen workers clearing and planting a field. The two women were there, and they broke off from working and came running. Elga stepped back. He knew it was their time to talk with me, and we sat for a few minutes. We couldn’t talk very long because it was midafternoon already, and I wanted to be sure to get most of the way back to Mirebalais before the rain.

The women didn’t want to talk about very much except Martinière. They had seen him at the market in central Boukankare a few weeks earlier, and had been really happy about that, but they couldn’t imagine when he might visit them at home again. They know he has other work. They explained why they decided to take a few days of work in a neighbor’s field, too. School would be opening soon, and a little extra cash for books and other supplies would only help. Otherwise, they’d have to sell livestock.

Christine and Omène

As we said our goodbyes, they said the same thing that Natacha, Rose Marthe, and Magalie’s kids had said: “Kounye a, nou p ap janm wè w ankò?” “Is this the last time we’ll ever see you?” I tried to assure them. They know how hard it is to get to Mannwa. But I’ll always try to visit when I can. They hadn’t expected me that day, and another day will come when I’ll just show up.

The Elga picked up my bag – he decided he owed it to me to at least get Martinière’s avocados to the top of the hill – and we turned straight up the path. When we got to the top of the ridge, he handed me the bag and said, “It’s still a long way, but at least it’s downhill.” Then he headed home. And so did I.

Christella

Our team first met Christella Fleurissaint in May 2013, when we were going through our selection process for a new group of families. She was living at the time with Rosemond, her second daughter’s father. She had her first daughter with her as well. “My oldest girl’s father has never done anything for her. I have to be her mother and her dad.”

The four of them shared a rented room. Rosemond would do odd jobs. Christella would buy vegetables with money she’d borrow from neighbors and friends, then sell her merchandise and return the capital right away. They owned neither land nor livestock. They had no way to send the girls to school.

But shortly after Christella joined our program, her relationship with Rosemend disintegrated. He was living mainly in Port au Prince, and he stopped coming to see her. Her annual rent was due. It was only about 1000 gourds – about $25 at the time – but she didn’t have the money. And her vegetable business collapsed because she lost the money in the market one day and wasn’t able to pay back the neighbor who lent it to her.

When she joined the program, she chose goats and a pig as her activities. She wanted to get back into the vegetable business as well, but she and her case manager Christian figured that she’d be able to do that with savings from her weekly stipend when she was ready. She wouldn’t need much to get started.

She started dating Michelet, and they quickly moved in together. Michelet had been a hard-working builder, but successive motorcycle accidents had damaged he knee beyond repair. He gets around nimbly with a crutch, but can no longer carry the heavy loads that anyone working with rocks, cement, and cinder blocks needs to manage. So he learned to change and repair flat tires. The highway from Port au Prince to Mirebalais and beyond passes through Labasti, and improvements to the road have come with increased traffic. His services were in steady, if not heavy, demand.

He helped Christella pay the rent she owed and added money from his earnings to grow her business. He also took on shared responsibility for the household. They eventually had a child together, but he showed himself to be devoted to her other daughters as well. “Anytime someone asks him, he says he has three kids.” Christella explains. “You should see how my oldest girl clings to him.”

Thanks to their good care, Christella’s livestock thrived. Her pig grew quickly, and her goats had kids. Soon her older daughters were in school.

But both she and Michelet were frustrated by how limited his contributions to the household were. “Michelet might make two hundred gourds on a good day, but he didn’t have his own equipment, so he’d have to give half to the owner of the tools.”

So they made a big decision. They sold all their livestock and used the money to buy a small, gas-powered air compressor. It cost 14,000 gourds. Michelet’s earnings would double right away. “Christian liked the idea, but he told us to be sure to buy some livestock as quickly as we could. He didn’t want us too reliant on just a few things.” They used some of Michelet’s new income to buy a young sow, and used some to re-start Christella’s vegetable business. She had given it up while nursing their baby. Michelet smiles as he remembers. “The other CLM members in our neighborhood all made fun of Christella when she sold her livestock. They thought she’d never graduate. But now we’re doing better than any of them.”

Christella graduated from CLM in December, and immediately joined Fonkoze’s credit program. She likes credit because it gives her more money to invest. The business takes a lot of work. She’s on the road all the time, buying at various local markets and then selling in Port au Prince. “I don’t have a regular place to buy or a regular product. Sometimes it’s okra, sometimes it’s sweet potatoes. Sometimes I buy corn. Whatever I think I can sell.” When she graduated from CLM, she had only 1750 gourds to buy merchandise with, but her first loan was for 3000 gourds, and as soon as she paid that back she got a second one for 4000. She’ll finish repaying her second loan in December and take out a new, larger one right away. “I’ll need the money to buy merchandise to sell for the New Year’s holiday.”

Christella has made enough profit that she was able to buy a second pig. Meanwhile, Michelet keeps working hard. He took his compressor to Saut d’Eau for the parish festival there, which is one of the largest in Haiti, and made enough money to pay a three-year lease on the land their CLM house sits on. Christella says, “There’s nothing lazy about Michelet at all. He’s always working hard.”

And they have a clear goal for the coming years. They own no land, and so can’t really build the home they’d like to live in. “You can’t put a nice house on rented land,” Michelet explains. But thanks to their lease they mow have three years to save up to buy a little plot. “We’ve promised ourselves that we’re not going to rent land any more.”

VSLA

One of the persistent questions we face is what CLM members should be doing after they graduate from the program. They receive eighteen months of close accompaniment from our team, and when they graduate we judge them to be capable of continuing to support themselves. But almost all are still very poor. We believe they will be better able to continue their progress if they are within a supportive structure.

At our program’s inception, we made a simple assumption about the next step. As part of Fonkoze, an institution that has long made microcredit the core of its poverty-alleviation efforts, it was easy for us to think it terms of our own microcredit programs. Even before Fonkoze had established CLM, we offered regular solidarity-group loans to thousands of borrowers and a six-month program of credit and additional support for those who would need extra help to succeed. It seemed natural to try to graduate CLM members into the Fonkoze’s credit programs when they were done with us.

But the results have been mixed.

We have seen many CLM graduates move into Fonkoze credit and then continue to make progress by using it to make their businesses grow. But there are problems, too. Some CLM graduates live in areas that are difficult to serve for a commercial entity that needs to be sustainable. Fonkoze’s credit programs have to break even. They are not supported by donations, the way CLM is. And some areas that CLM serves are just too expensive for credit agents and their supervisors to access. Other graduates succeed in CLM without developing small commerce as a financial activity. They live off farming or livestock instead. They don’t feel a need for credit.

So we’ve been experimenting with alternatives to Fonkoze’s credit programs, and one of the most promising is the Village Savings and Loan Association, or VSLA. It is a process that offers a group of friends and neighbors a way to establish simple financial services on their own.

VSLAs use a strongbox that has three locks. Three different VSLA members keep the keys, and a fourth person keeps the box itself. The box can be opened only at weekly meetings. Savings are made at the meetings by the purchase of shares. Each member must purchase at least one share per week, but may purchase more. Share prices are determined at the group’s first meeting. At that meeting, the group also decides on the size of a weekly contribution to the Association’s emergency fund. Members can then take out loans of up to three times their savings. They repay them with interest in two to three months.

The VSLA functions on a one-year cycle. All the loans have to be completely reimbursed by the last meeting. At that meeting, the whole pot, which includes the balance in the emergency fund, the savings, and the profits generated through interest on loans, is distributed to the members proportionally, depending on the number of shares each has purchased over the course of the year. Members who have not taken out loans profit from the interest that their fellow members have paid. Those who have borrowed money benefit from returns on their own payments.

One of our pilots is functioning in Dolibren, a rural neighborhood in southern Mirebalais, and the response of its members so far has been very positive. They day I visited they were giving their second round of loans, even as the first round of borrowers were making their first payments.

At the start of the meeting, the group’s president brought out the strong box, and the three members who hold the keys came forward to open it. The box holds two separate bags of money. One holds the emergency fund. The other holds the amount of savings that is not out in loans. It also holds a savings book for each member of the group, a calculator, a pen, an inkpad, and a seal.

Three different group members open up the locks.

The savings books are then distributed, and members are called forward, one at a time, to make their contributions to the emergency fund. This group had decided they would contribute five Haitian gourds per week, or about ten cents.

After the contributions are counted and verified, members are once again called forward, one at a time, to buy shares. This group chose to set the share price at 25 gourds, and members bought from two to five shares each. The number each purchased was recorded in the savings booklet with the seal. Someone who bought three shares received three stars in their booklet on a line designated for the particular week. Using the seal to record shares, rather than writing the number, makes it easier for even those who cannot read to verify their own booklet.

Share purchases are recorded with a small, pencil-shaped seal.

The three members who had received the first set of loans then came forward, one at a time, to make their payments. The repayments went into the savings pot, together with the proceeds from the week’s sale of shares. The elected board then counted the pot so that they’d know how much money they had available for new loans. Three new members took out loans, ranging from 1250 to 3500 gourds.

A record of Atelia’s loan and her first repayment in a separate section of her savings booklet.

Finally, the board verified totals in each of the two pots. The pots were returned to the strongbox, together with the savings books and other equipment. The whole meeting took about 90 minutes.

I spoke to Atelia, a member who has begun repaying a loan. She borrowed 1250 gourds to start a business buying sacks of charcoal in the area around her home, and selling them at the Nan Gad market, which overlooks Port au Prince. Her business, she said, is going well, and she reported no difficulty making her repayment. She purchased five shares on the day her repayment was due. “I like borrowing from the Association because all the profits stay with us.”

Atelia Hermé. She graduated from CLM last spring.

The experiment shows promise. But we will need some time to see whether the VSLAs really succeed. Right now, all three pilots are working smoothly. Too smoothly. None has yet had to manage a problem. There have been no missed repayments. None of the members have faced major issues in their lives. We won’t really be able to evaluate VLSAs as a strategy for CLM until we see how they deal with setbacks. There will be setbacks. But right now, we are excited by what we see.

Apprenticeship in Education

Essays on Life in Haiti by Steven Werlin