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.

Josué Terlus

Josué lives in Loncy, a small community along the rocky road through Ti Fon, the area of Lascahobas that stretches between the dam-created lake near Peligre and Mòn Michel. Several years ago, he suffered a series of strokes. Because he lacked access to rehab facilities, the partial paralysis that set in went untreated. He lost most use of all four limbs, and would spend almost all his time just sitting on a bed. Before he was selected to participate in CLM’s pilot program for persons with disabilities, he had spent more than a year without leaving the dark, windowless room.

He once lived in his own small house. It was a small shack, with palm wood walls and a roof made of tach, the large fibrous pods that palm seeds appear in. But such houses require continual maintenance. Palm wood planks rot, and tach dries and cracks. His paralysis made it impossible for him to do the work, so he had to abandon his own home and move into his nephew’s. “It was my mother’s house, but my sister inherited it, and she gave it to her son.”

When the CLM team first approached him about the program, Josué was reluctant. Hébert Artus, the program’s assistant director, explains that Josué told him that our team shouldn’t waste its time with him.

But Hébert was able to convince him to give the program a chance, and Josué is glad he’s part of it. “My boys help me take care of the goats and the pig, and the 200 gourds that I get every two weeks helps. Sometimes I need it to buy salt. Sometimes, it means I can buy a candle so that I’m not completely in the dark.”

And our team has already noticed real change. Hébert explains, “I would see Josué regularly during the two-month selection process, and he was always hostile, a little bit angry to see me. But since the first six-day training, things are different. We go by his house, and find him sitting outside, rather than in his dark little room. And he shows you he’s glad to get a visit, throwing out his hand to meet yours with all the warmth his paralysis allows.”

Josué still has problems. Though the team has linked him to the Partners in Health rehab clinic, getting there will always be a struggle and his years without rehab make it hard to foresee how much mobility he’ll be able to regain. In addition, his nephew has started to hint that he’d like him to move back into his own house, and it will take time for the program to help him make the repairs his house needs to be at all habitable.

But his new attitude is the clearest sign that his hope has returned.

Jaklin and Bob

Jaklin lives with her husband Bob and their children in Fonpyèjak, a farming area that rises out of Bay Tourib towards the high plateau that overlooks both it and Boukankare to the south. When she and her family joined the CLM program in the summer of 2011, they had very little.

They had access to some of the farmland above and around Fonpyèjak, even to a small plot that surrounds the house they were living in. That house belonged to one of Bob’s brothers, but he let them use it. They couldn’t do much with the land, though. The pressure to put food on the table every day kept them from investing time and money in activities that would take months to bring anything in. When Bob was around, he would work for wages in their neighbors’ fields.

Now and again he would leave for the Dominican Republic. Then Jaklin would have to shift for herself and their growing family. Each time Bob returned, he would try to come with some extra money. Jaklin would use it to buy plastic sandals in Tomond, which she’d sell in the rural markets around Bay Tourib. Business was generally good, and each time she would restart her business it would work for a while. But eventually it would collapse, usually because of pregnancy. She and Bob weren’t using family planning. She’d be unable to sell for a few months, and would feed her children with the money in the business until it disappeared or until Bob returned. They were hungry much of the time.

Jaklin was accustomed to the way that she and her family lived. She had always lived in terrible poverty. When she joined the program, her mother Mirana joined as well. And if anything, Mirana was even poorer than her daughter, though she only had her youngest child still depending in her. She had been together with a man, Jaklin’s stepfather, for years, since shortly after that death of Jaklin’s dad, and for most of those years he had been disabled by poor health. Unlike Jaklin, who had a willing partner in Bob, Mirana was on her own.

Their lives started to change as soon as they entered the program. For its first six months, they received a stipend of about $1 per day. Though it was very little, and though they would struggle to save a small portion of it to invest, it was enough to ensure they’d have something, however minimal, to feed the children every day. This freed Bob to stay at home and farm for himself. His mother had a couple of plots that he could work rent-free.

During their weekly conversation with their case manager, they learned about family planning. Haitians in the countryside have a saying, “Children are a poor person’s one asset.” But Jaklin and Bob began to see the realities connecting their poverty to Jaklin’s frequent pregnancies and to the expenses that were increasing as their family grew. They decided use the planning available free of charge at the Partners in Health clinic near their home.

Bob’s increased presence at home made it easier for them to make additional progress. CLM set Jaklin up with merchandise to restart her sandal business, and the business took off. Bob would purchase loads of sandals for her in Tomond or even in Port au Prince, and she would sell them in Regalis, Zabriko, and Koray. She’d sell them out of her home on days without a market. The more she was able to manage their expenses with her profits, the freer Bob became to focus on farming, and for the first time in years they brought in an impressive crop of beans, the main cash crop in the hills around Bay Tourib. When he and Jaklin brought their harvest to market, they made enough money that they were able to afford to buy a mule. Having a pack animal, in turn, helped them increase their business because it meant they were no longer limited to selling what they could carry on their head.

Jaklin and Bob continued to prosper. They replaced the leaf-covered house they had been living in with a larger house covered with a tin roof. The new house was the first one that belonged to them. They graduated from CLM in March 2013, easily meeting all the graduation criteria despite suffering setbacks in the program’s final months. Their bean crop was devastated by consecutive hurricanes in the fall of 2012, and at the end of that year their sandal business was nearly destroyed because Bob lost most of their capital when he was robbed while in Port au Prince to do the buying.

After graduation, they kept moving forward. Between Bob’s farming and Jaklin’s small commerce, their income continues to grow. They built a grain-storage hut behind their new house. With their growing harvests, they really felt the need for one. Eventually, they were able to buy the plot of land the house was on, along with the small garden around it. And now they plan to buy some additional plots to farm.

Midway through 2014, Jaklin became pregnant with their sixth child. She had missed the date she was scheduled to receive the contraceptive she was usuing every three months. It was a difficult pregnancy, but she and Bob knew how to get help. When the doctor at the Partners in Health clinic saw she was in trouble, she sent her by truck to the hospital in Ench. There she delivered a healthy boy, and had her tubes tied. “Children are expensive, and six is enough.”

Jaklin and Bob have an entirely new life. They have a comfortable house to live in, the money they need to keep their children fed and in school, and a plan for further progress. And the best part of it is the way they now can and do face its challenges together.

Ytelet Maxi

with her daughter, Marc-Berlie

with her daughter, Marc-Berlie

Ytelet is from Zaboka, a village hidden among the steep valleys of eastern Tit Montay, Boukankare’s most remote rural section. The road to Zaboka is a long, difficult hike. Neither cars nor motorcycles can get there. But the CLM team can.

Before Ytelet joined the program in December 2010, she really struggled. She was trying to take care of her own child and of her younger brother, Dieulonet. But she had very few resources to manage with. “There were times when you’d look up, you’d look down – you’d look all around – just to find a little change you could use to buy the kids something to eat.” She and the children would go days at a time without eating a meal. Persistent hunger left her and Dieulonet so weak that a minor fever nearly killed both of them in the program’s first months. Only the determination of her case manager, Martinière, to carry her to a hospital that was hours away saved her life. As she said at her graduation ceremony in the summer of 2012, “Without Martinière, I wouldn’t even be here. And nobody would know that I matter just like everyone.”

Ytelet flourished in her time with the program, but not in the way that one might expect. She chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises, and neither developed very quickly. After a year, her two goats were still two goats. And her pig made less progress than that. A first one died, and she struggled to collect enough money to buy a second, smaller one.

But she and Martinière looked at another area where he saw she could improve her life. Even before she joined the program, she would farm to try to feed herself and the kids. She had no land, but she would plant beans – the most important cash crop in the mountains of Central Haiti – as a sharecropper. “I might harvest a bushel or two, but I’d have to give half to the landowner.” What’s worse, without cash, she’d have to buy the seeds on credit, and the standard interest rate on seed loans in the Central Plateau is a flat 100%. “I couldn’t get ahead.”

Martinière realized that Ytelet could do much better with her farming if she had cash to invest. So they came up with a plan. Ytelet would work hard to save money from the weekly stipend she’d receive for the first six months of her time in the program. She eventually saved up about $30.

She used that money to help herself in two steps. First, she bought up beans at harvest time, when the prices were low. She sold some at a profit right away by carrying them down to Boukankare where the prices are higher. But her new CLM home gave her a dry place to stock beans, too, and she put away as much as she could and waited for the planting season, when prices would shoot up. She also set some aside to plant in her own fields. Second, she set aside some of her profits from her first sales and rented land for cash. That way, her harvest would be entirely her own.

The strategy worked. The last harvest before she joined CLM, Ytelet had planted four mamit of borrowed beans. A mamit is a heaping coffee can, and is a standard measure of dry goods in the Haitian countryside. Her harvest was not great, but it was good, about thirty mamit. However, fifteen mamit went to the landowner and eight to the man who lent her the beans. Six months into her membership in CLM, she planted 12 mamit of beans that she purchased with cash up front on a plot she rented for 1000 gourds. She put away 40 mamit of beans at harvest, even after using some of her harvest to pay the neighbors who had helped her to work the plot.

After graduation, Ytelet continued to make progress by sticking to her plan. Her $30 grew to over $125 that she rolls over twice each year in her bean business. “At harvest, people need money and the market is full of beans, so the prices are low. I just hold on to them until the prices go up again.” With two harvests each year, she is earning well. She has even added to her livestock with new purchases.

In October 2014, she made a major decision. Unhappy with the quality of education her kids would be able to find in Zaboka, she decided to rent a room down the hill in Difayi, when she’d find much better schools. It would cost almost $100 for the school year, but it would be worth it. “I just want my kids to get a good education.”

When she looks back on her time in CLM, she smiles. “Life is easy now. I don’t worry about money anymore.” Her easy life might not look easy to everyone. She hikes the five hours from Difayi to Zaboka and back every two weeks to check on things, and she has to work her fields, keep an eye on her livestock, and take care of what are now three kids. But compared to the life she once led, it is easy. And she couldn’t be happier about her progress.

A now very-healthy Dieulonet

A now very-healthy Dieulonet

Luckson François

Luckson lives along the main road that leads from Mirebalais, in central Haiti, through Lascahobas and on to the Dominican border. He’s in his early thirties, and lives with his father and a young niece. Back when he was in his teens, his life seemed to hold great promise. He had learned to drive, and found a job in Port au Prince that allowed him to support himself and his sister, even as he put himself through high school.

His life took a terrible turn in 2001 when he was returning after work to the home in Port au Prince that he and his sister shared. He was mugged, shot once in the back. He lost the use of his legs and has been in a wheelchair ever since.

At first, his sister took care of him, shuttling him to the medical appointments that aimed to restore some measure of him health. But her sudden death forced him to return to his parents’ home. Then his mother died and his father’s condition deteriorated. He supported the household for awhile with a job as a school teacher, but persistent back pain that may be connected to the bullet that was never removed from his body made it difficult for him to sit for long hours every day, and eventually he had to give up the work.

Luckson is a tall man, and his wheelchair was too small for his long legs. It also lacked a footrest that could hold his feet in place. So he was unable to move around on his own. He would need to hold his feet with his hands while someone else pushed the chair.

He and entire household could do nothing but live on community charity. He had friends and neighbors who would occasionally give him something – food or a little cash – but he couldn’t count on any of them. “Haitians say, ‘A goat with many masters will die in the sun,’ he explained. They all mean well, but any of them might think that one of the others would do something for me. Sometimes our household went for days with nothing at all.”

He joined CLM’s pilot program for persons with disabilities in March. When the CLM team first came around asking him questions, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. “The first time they came, the guy just said that he was doing a census.” Then he got two more visits, and started to wonder what it was all about. “I didn’t learn about the program until they invited us to the first meeting. That’s when I began to feel glad because it seemed as though someone was finally going to help me.”

Though the program has not yet officially launched, he has already seen some benefits. When CLM staff saw how his ill-fitting chair was hampering him, they helped him contact the office of the Secretary of State for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities. A trip to Port au Prince in the CLM truck was all it took for him to receive a new hand-operated cart. The cart’s wooden body holds his feet comfortably inside, while he works peddles with his hands. His experience as a driver seemed to come back to him as his quickly learned to maneuver in the cart. On the day he brought the cart home, he was able to get from the street to his house by himself for the first time since his accident 15 years ago.

But when he talks about what he thinks of the program so far, that’s not what he mentions. “My life is totally different since I joined the program. The whole staff treats me like their friend. They took down my phone number, and call me now and again just to say, ‘Hi.’ I feel as though I’m part of something. It’s really a family. And it made me see that I have reason to hope for a better life. I’m not hopeless anymore.”

Luckson already has a plan for how he will move ahead. He wants to learn to repair cellphones. He’ll be able to sell cellphone minutes and repair phones right from his chair. Right now, people where he lives in Flande to go to Mirebalais or Lascahobas if they have trouble with their phones. It will be challenging. He’ll need tools and some training. But the CLM team is committed to trying to help him make it happen. Thanks to the Digicel Foundation’s contacts within Digicel itself, we are not far from making it happen.

After not Graduating

Not every family graduates from CLM.

The record since the program took off in 2007 is striking. 144 of the 150 families who participated in the initial pilot graduated, and the team has maintained that 96% graduation rate ever since. 3395 families have succeeded thus far.

The criteria are straightforward, nothing fancy. A family must be eating at least one hot meal every day. They must have two sources of income and $185 worth of productive assets. They can have no untreated cases of malnutrition and must be living in a house with a good tin roof. We want the woman of the family to have a plan for the future and the confidence to know that she can succeed.

But that leaves about 4%, or about 140 families, who haven’t graduated. That’s really a lot.

They fail to graduate for lots of reasons. For some, the case manager has failed to establish the trusting relationship that our program’s work depends on. We had a member named Marie who went behind her case manager’s back and sold all the goats that we gave her. He continued to try to work with her, but her dishonesty continued. And that was when he was able to see her. Much of the time, she ducked his weekly visits.

We don’t know as much as we should about the women like Marie, about what they do after their cohort graduates. We have anecdotes that suggest that many continue to make progress. Marie herself finished building her house after we had moved on, and she continued to build up her charcoal business as well. But we don’t have the resources to ensure follow-up.

But Mimose is doing ok.

She and her husband Wozèn live in Mazonbi, a remote area at the end of a rocky, twisting road that follows a secondary ridge northwest from Gran Boulay, a village on the mountain that separates the Central Plateau from the plain that contains the suburbs north of Port-au-Prince. When they joined our program in June 2013, they had three small children. She had once had a small commerce, but had lost the money one day when she was at market. Then she became pregnant with her last child, and couldn’t really move around. The boy was born right before she entered the program. Wozèn took on the whole responsibility for supporting the household by farming their small plot, and doing day labor in their neighbors’ fields.

The issues that interfered with her graduation were nothing like those we saw with Marie. We evaluate women after twelve months to see how much progress they have made towards the program’s goals, and at the twelve-month mark Mimose was ready to graduate. She and Wozèn had worked hard to build a well-constructed two-room house, using money she saved from her weekly stipend to making it larger than most of the houses that CLM members build. She was once again managing a small commerce, and though she had had trouble with her goats, she had enough assets overall to meet our graduation criteria.

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But then she ran into problems. She and Wozèn chose not to use contraceptives, and she became pregnant once more. The pregnancy made it impossible for her to get her small commerce to market – each of the local markets she sells at is a considerable hike from her home at the lower end of Mazonbi – and the money that she had in it frittered away as she and Wozèn worked to cover household expenses.

She and Wozèn had been struggling from the start to make something of their investment in goats. A jealous neighbor had killed three of them, and though they pursued restitution with their case manager’s help, the most they could get to replace their losses were two small goats that the man’s aunt gave them so that he could avoid prison. They reluctantly accepted the aunt’s offer because she had been a very good neighbor to them for a long time. They thought they owed her their cooperation. Shortly before the 17-month evaluation, which would determine whether Mimose could graduate, the two replacement goats died.

So the only productive assets that they had were a couple of chickens from a flock that the couple had been keeping to provide Mimose with the extra protein she needed during the last stages of her pregnancy, and a field they had planted with beans. It was less than our graduation criteria demand. The last thing we were able to do for her before we left Mazonbi and its environs was to arrange for another CLM member to give Mimose two more goats so that she and Wozèn could get started once more.

But it didn’t take long for them to begin to build their household back up again. Mimose gave birth to a healthy baby, and decided that her fourth child would be her last. The couple made the effort to get her to the hospital in Mirebalais for the childbirth, and she had the doctors their tie her tubes. “Four children is enough,” she explained. Wozèn added, “Children are expensive. They have to eat, and they have to go to school.”

While she was in the last months of pregnancy, Wozèn took good care of their new goats, and they grew quickly. But he and Mimose were constantly concerned about goat thieves. The area around Mazonbi is spotted with little hills and valleys. Wherever they might choose to tie their goats to graze, the goats would be hidden most of the time. And there are numerous little paths that lead to Croix-des-Bouquets and Titayen, easy routes to market for someone who decides to lead away a neighbor’s goats. So they sold them and looked for another way to invest the funds.

Then a neighbor asked them about farming a field that they could not afford to plant, and they agreed to rent it to him for two years. They took the rental money, added the money from the sale of the goats, and bought a cow. They paid a lot for the cow – about $260 – but they thought it was a good investment. “It’s a big cow,” Mimose explains.

And now Mimose is ready to get back into her commerce. In the coming weeks, she plans to apply for a loan from Fonkoze, once again joining the women who were in CLM with her. She’ll send Wozèn to purchase rice and beans and other basics for her in Croix-de-Bouquets, and then she’ll bring them for sale in the local markets in Labasti, Dalon, and Ti Sekèy.

We’re optimistic about Mimose. She and Wozèn work hard and together, and they learned enough during 18 months with their case manager to have an excellent chance to succeed over the long term.

Not Ready for Credit

Programs like Chemen Lavi Miyò are called “graduation” programs. Participants spend eighteen months with us. Then they graduate. We hold a celebration, and we hand out certificates. Then the women move on to bigger things.

We are part of Fonkoze, a large microfinance institution, and while finding customers for our banking operation is not our goal, we do encourage graduating members to join Fonkoze’s credit programs if we think they could benefit. And we believe those programs can help many of our graduates continue their struggle to lift their families out of poverty.

So while we were planning the graduation of 347 families in December, we worked hard with our partners in the banking side of Fonkoze to arrange for loans. Case managers recommended approximately half of all graduates for credit, and most of them received their loans right away.

Case managers don’t decide by themselves whether a woman should join the credit program. Their recommendation emerges from conversations they hold with each CLM member in the months just before graduation. CLM members need to understand what it takes to succeed with credit, and they need to want to take the risk that comes with a loan. They also need to be clear about the difference between credit programs and CLM. The fact that Fonkoze provides both can lead to unrealistic expectations when they leave CLM to join credit. Finally, the case manager needs to be convinced that a prospective graduate will be able to manage a small business that can absorb the extra capital that the loan provides. Unless it can borrowed money will be more of a useless burden than a helpful tool.

Miraclide is a recent graduate from Niva, a large swath of farmland just south of Mirebalais. She made enormous progress during her 18 months with us, but did not decide to take on a loan when she graduated. It’s instructive to see why.

She lives with four children along the paved highway that runs from Port au Prince, through Mirebalais, and then on to the north. When she joined the CLM program, she had little that she could call her own. She had been forced to sell the one goat that she owned in order to rent the room they slept in. As her year-long lease was expiring, she wondered what she’d do. The father of one of her kids would send her about $1.50 a day, but it was all she had to feed all of them. She was pregnant at the time.

Shortly after she joined the program, she found a spot nearby that another neighbor was willing to rent to her for five years. Her case manager helped her figure out how to assemble the money she’d need to make her payments. So with the program’s support she built a small house and a simple pit latrine on the land. She started to care for the livestock we gave her – two goats and a pig – and they multiplied, despite the epidemic of Teschen Disease that was sweeping through the region, killing many of the pigs.

She also started a small commerce, and it began to take off. At first, she sold cosmetics: soaps and shampoos, perfumes and lotions. She would place them with a series of saleswomen who already had stands that they sold from along the highway. They would make a small commission on the sale. She might give a woman $10 or $20 worth of merchandise, with payment scheduled a week or two later, after it was sold. Her merchandise moved well, because she didn’t have much competition. Local merchants who were selling cosmetics were mostly selling hers.

But there was a problem. The women who were making the sales wouldn’t always pay her on time. Each delayed payment would affect the amount of new merchandise she could purchase, so her business began to shrink.

Fortunately, she and her case manager were quick to identify the problem. Leaving her merchandise to be sold on consignment meant giving up too much control, because she couldn’t know when she’d be paid. She decided to sell off her cosmetics business and try earning money another way.

By then, she had given birth to her second child, and because she had her baby on her hands, she couldn’t choose anything that involved a lot of time out of the house. That’s why she decided to sell basic food products – like rice, oil, bullion cubes, sugar, flour, and tomato paste – out of her home. Neighbors would come to her when they weren’t able to make it to the market in Labasti or Mirebalais, or when they just needed a few ingredients to make a simple meal.

Once again, her sales started out strong. But her difficulty collecting the money she was owed persisted. Women who sell out of their homes face enormous pressure to sell on credit. Their closest neighbors come by, asking for a cup of rice or a measure of cooking oil. Something they need to feed their children. They promise to pay the next morning or the next week. It’s difficult to say “No.” She’s your neighbor. You’re around her every day. And her children, the children your own children play with, may be hungry.

It’s also difficult to collect these debts. You can go a customer’s home, and make a lot of noise, but Miraclide was unwilling to make ugly scenes. And even an ugly scene might not help. The woman might simply not have the money when she said she would have it.

So Miraclide’s business continues to stumble along. She earns enough to keep herself and her children fed, but her income shrinks and then grows again as the amount of money she has in her clients’ hands increases and diminishes. When the school year is over, she’ll be able to use her older girl as a babysitter, and then move her business to the market. That will help. People who come to the market expect to pay cash. But it will only help for a couple of months. When her girl goes back to school in the fall, she’ll be stuck again. As long as she has to stay with her baby, she won’t be free to invest herself fully in the business she needs to make herself and her girls prosper.

If you ask her how she feels about the progress she’s made, she gets excited. “I had nothing. I was living in someone else’s home. I remember what my life was like, and I’m determined to manage my livestock so I can continue to move forward down the road.”

And she hopes to be able to join Fonkoze’s credit program some day, but right now a loan seems like a bad idea. She doesn’t feel confident that she’d consistently be able to make her payments. It would always depend too much on the women who owe her money. And she doesn’t want to have to sell off livestock – the only insurance that she has –to pay off a debt.

So she’ll wait. She’s young and her little girls are young, too. She’s learned that she can run a business, and she’s confident that she’s be able to flourish as soon as she’s free to really get to work.

Rose Marie Takes Her First Loan

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Walking through Derasin, to the home that Rose Marie and her husband Emmanuel shared before they joined the CLM program, you would not have imagined that the couple living there would need the help that CLM offers. The yard surrounding their home was always richly planted, covered with healthy-looking patches of beans and corn. Large, old mango trees provided comfortable shade. You would have assumed that anyone living in such an area would at least have plenty to eat.

But nothing about those fields or trees belonged to Rose Marie or Emmanuel. As Rose Marie struggled with her third pregnancy, the family would get by on whatever Emmanuel could bring in through irregular day labor. They frequently faced days without solid meals, getting by on abandoned mangos or boiled leaves.

Then the family joined CLM, and things began to change. Emmanuel continued to seek day labor, whether in his neighbors’ fields or in the sand pits that line the main highway along the ridge separating Port au Prince from the Central Plateau. Rose Marie stayed home, looking after their two children and taking care of the livestock they received from CLM. She would use their weekly stipend to ensure that her children were eating well, but she’d also use part of it to buy poultry. She began keeping chickens, ducks, and turkeys, and they all prospered.

As her due date approached, however, life became more difficult. She is a tall, strong woman. But she was becoming enormous. Her previous pregnancies had been nothing like this. Her feet and ankles began to swell so much that it became hard to move around at all. And Derasin is far enough off the main road that she would need to walk just to get to where a truck could pick her up to take her to the hospital. Preeclampsia is a serious threat to the women of rural Haiti, and her case manager, Georges Zetrenne, kept a close eye on her situation. CLM’s driver Wilfaut made four trips to the hospital with her before she finally gave birth to twins.

Having the twins to take care of changed her life. She was limited to what she could do around the house. Emmanuel would have to work even harder to bring in whatever income he could. Between the pressure he was under to earn their daily bread, and Rose Marie’s inability to leave the twins, the couple was forced to make a difficult decision. Their two older children had finally started going to school, but neither parent was able to walk them to the one they were attending. They had to keep them at home and hope to start over the following year.

Shortly before Rose Marie graduated, the couple hit a bump in the road. They lost a large pig and a cow to disease in quick succession. They suspected jealous neighbors. They had harvested good crops on farmland they rented, and their livestock was starting to take off. The deaths of such large animals were sudden and mysterious. But rather than cry over their losses, they decided to move out of the house they had built on Rose Marie’s land. So they packed up what they owned and moved to a small place on land that Emmanuel’s family owns in Fond Cheval, near the sand mine that was becoming their most important source of steady income.

The day after graduation, Rose Marie took out her first Fonkoze loan. She had been in a credit program offered by one of Fonkoze’s competitors in the past, before joining CLM, but it hadn’t worked out. She would borrow enough money to buy a pig and some poultry. The pig would mature over the term of the loan, and she’d sell it to repay the loan and its interest. The poultry would remain as her profit. Because she generally had good luck with poultry, and her family was small, it seemed like a good arrangement.

But Teschen Disease is a serious threat to pigs in the Central Plateau, and Rose Marie’s luck ran out. She lost a pig to the disease, and had to sell off other assets just to pay back what she owed.

Facing the chance upon her graduation from CLM to join Fonkoze’s credit program, Rose Marie made a different sort of plan. Fond Cheval is a bigger and livelier place than Derasin, and she and Emmanuel decided to use their move as an opportunity. They began selling cellphone minutes, and the business took off. They decided to use credit to accelerate the sales. The loan is important, because cellphone minute sales can only work if you have enough cash in the business to be able to provide change all the time. Having the correct change ready is one of the most important competitive advantages that a salesperson can offer to clients in the Haitian countryside. Without it, she and Emmanuel would have had to choose between losing customers to other venders or selling on credit. Thanks to their loan, they can now sell as much as 2500 gourds worth in a day. That’s translates into 200 gourds of profit. They had no trouble making the first of their three repayments. And they did not need to shrink their business to do so, even though they have also been using some of their earnings to help feed their kids.

And they are nowhere near ready to stop. They’re already planning what they will do with their next loan. “We want to increase the loan just a little. But we won’t put more money in the business we have,” Rose Marie explained. “We’ll add another, new business.” The twins are still small enough that one or the other of them has to stay at home all the time, so Emmanuel will stay with the twins and sell phone minutes from home on market days, while Rose Marie buys sacks of produce that she can then divide into retail quantities and sell in front of their home.

Rose Marie and Emmanuel have struggled since they joined CLM, but they have made real progress, too. They are ready to send their older children back to school in their new home community, and are committed to helping all their children to a better life.

Emilienne and Kendy

Emilienne joined the CLM program almost a year and a half ago, and is preparing to graduate in December. She is originally from Zilia, a very rural area tucked in close to downtown Mirebalais, but she spent much of her life in Port au Prince, raising her children together with her husband in Cité Soleil, one of the city’s most notorious slums. “There were so many people there, I could always sell something. I’d just set up my business outside my front door.”

But crime in Cité Soleil was rising. And then disaster struck. While Emilienne was pregnant with her last child, her husband died. So despite her ability to earn a living in Port au Prince, she decided to move back to Mirebalais. Her oldest children were already off on their own, and she found family members willing to take two of her younger children in. So she moved into a small room in a cousin’s house in downtown Mirebalais. She was pregnant, but alone, supporting herself making and selling tablèt, a handmade praline-like candy.

One night, she woke up alone in her room, and knew that her time had come. She had her baby without waking up anyone. “I had my boy, washed him off myself, and cut his umbilical cord. Then I got up, went out, closed the door behind me, and started to make my candy. The next morning, my cousin heard a baby crying in my room, and asked me whether I had had my child.”

By the time she joined CLM, she had moved back out to Zilia, with her young boy, Kendy. She was living in a straw shack, on a cousin’s land. She supported the two of them by buying a couple of twelve packs of crackers on credit every day, and selling them at the Mirebalais – Port au Prince bus station. She’d pay for the crackers at the end of the day.

She chose goats and small commerce, and got to work. She started working to develop her small commerce while Kendy helped by watching her goats. And they began to flourish. Her goats grew and eventually had kids. But Zilia is a difficult neighborhood. Though it is sparsely populated and even a little remote, it is also very close to downtown Mirebalais. And so it’s more subject to crime than more distant areas. She and Kendy lost two goats to theft. Little Kendy was so heartbroken that she was too busy comforting him to worry about the losses.

At the same time, her business started to grow. She continued to sell crackers — with her own money, now — but added other snacks, even cold drinks.

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The commerce has been growing. She and Kendy set up the business each morning, before he goes to school.

But it isn’t always smooth sailing. Just last week, a young man passed by and tried to steal 50 gourds by reaching his hand into her basket. Fortunately, Kendy saw him. “Kendy ran after the man and grabbed him. The man tried to deny that he had taken the money, but Kendy saw where he put it. He grabbed the guy and wouldn’t let go. Kendy made so much noise, that people came up. By-standers tried to hit Kendy to drive him off, but he wouldn’t give up. Eventually, the man gave the money back, but I was so mad. Who know’s what could have happened to Kendy? And for just 50 gourds.”

Emilienne is excited about the progress she’s made. “I have a new house, I have livestock, and I have my business. I’m taking good care of Kendy.” Her dream is a simple one. “Kendy’s everything to me now. I just want to give him the chance to live a good life.”

Pase Kado

August 24, 2014

When our director, Gauthier, describes the way our team moves, he talks of a “bale”, or a broom. We sweep through each neighborhood, integrating all the residents who qualify for the program before we move to the next neighborhood. And we generally pass through an area only once.

But even Gauthier will admit that we’re not perfect. We can miss people for various reasons.

The problem we have faced most often is from women who choose not to join program. As poor as the families we aim to serve are, they can be afraid to take advantage of what we offer. It must seem too good to be true. And they often have neighbors and family members who encourage them in their distrust, jealous that they have not qualified for the program themselves.

But we’ve made a lot of progress at preventing such problems in the years since we first started. We’ve added community meetings to the first steps we go through early in the process. Once we decide whom we will invite into the program in a given community, we invite the community’s leaders to listen to an introduction to the program, trying to get them to be our advocates to families who might be on the fence. It’s made a difference.

Even so, however, we occasionally find people who have fallen through the cracks, and we haven’t found a dependable way to help them. They remain a small stain on our dream of eliminating extreme poverty in the Central Plateau, but the small stain is important when we consider what it really means to leave a family behind: hunger, sickness, and a future with very little hope.

Roselène is an example. She lives in a remote corner a Venis, a sprawling patchwork of hilly farmland just south of Mirebalais. We had no trouble finding just over 50 families to work with in the area. When our selection team passed through Venis, we talked to Roselène and her husband, but we didn’t qualify them for CLM because of a misunderstanding.

Members of our team were trying to identify what larger livestock the couple might have. We don’t take families who own large, valuable animals like cows or mules. They saw Roselène’s husband managing a cow and a horse, so they asked him whether he owned them. People will often hide their wealth if they know that we have something to offer to the ultra poor, so one of the people on our team told the couple that we would be offering free vaccinations to livestock, but we had to talk to the true owners. Roselène’s husband was only looking after the animals for a wealthier neighbor, but rather than risk losing that chance to get vaccine for animals in his care, he lied and said they belonged to him. So our team moved on to the next house.

Shortly after that, we started serving the neighborhood. As the members started to make progress towards lifting themselves out of extreme poverty, Roselène could only watch. We had left her behind. And a couple of weeks later, the owner of the cow and the horse took them back from her husband. They were left with nothing.

But in every neighborhood we work in, we establish a Village Assistance Committee. These committees are made up of local volunteers, and they help us ensure the program’s success in various ways. They support members on days when the case manager is not around, either helping them contact the case manager or intervening directly. They provide an added layer of supervision, ensuring members learn to take care of the assets we give them. And they bring resources to members who need extra help as they are beginning to turn their lives around.

The committee in Venis has been especially active, and as the months went by they expressed frustration at the fact that we were doing nothing for Roselène, though they identified her as one of the poorest women in the area.

Rather than complain about it, however, they took action. Committee members decided to pitch in to buy her the roofing material she would need to build a new house, and they contributed the lumber by culling it from their own land. They were managing a small effort to build a community latrine, but they took some of the materials they has set aside and built a latrine for Roselène instead, redesigning what they would build for the community along more limited lines to compensate for the extra expense.

But to get Roselène on the road out of extreme poverty, even on a slower track than the one we usually provide our members, would require some investments beyond what the committee members were able to provide, so they asked us to help.

First, we needed to establish that Roselène is as poor as they say. We have occasionally heard from committees about families that need our help only to discover that the families are not as poor as we’ve been led to believe. So Elvoit, the case manager who works in Venis, went to meet her, and he redid the selection survey. Without the livestock that her husband had pretended to own, she qualified easily.

Then I went out to verify his findings. I wasn’t sure where she lived, but I had an easy way to find her. I went to Jésumène, a CLM member from Venis whom I know well, and asked her whether she could show me where her husband’s other wife lives. Jésumène and Roselène are matlòt, or women married to the same man. It felt like an awkward question to ask, but Jésumène showed no awkwardness in her answer. She was glad we were going to help Roselène. She talked about how badly Roselène had been doing since their husband became sick, unable to work. Jésumène herseld has two older sons who can help her. The second, Bonapart, is especially hard working. And she has CLM as well. But Roselène, she said, really needed help. She called over one of her daughters, who led me straight to Roselène’s house.

A short interview was enough to show me that the committee was right. This enabled me to mobilize some of our resources. We gave her a water filter and a five-gallon jug, and we found a little money to pay a local builder to start work on her home.

But there is not much a woman can do to change her family’s life if she has no assets to develop. Though we think of our program as a comprehensive approach to poverty alleviation, the core of what we do is on the economic side. Roselène was happy about her new house and latrine, but she needed a way to generate income, too, and fortunately we had a solution.

Since the very beginning of the program, we have operated with a consistent principle: the assets we give our members are theirs to keep. The program was developed for families too poor for credit, so our leadership decided to base it entirely on grants.

New partnerships can mean new opportunities, however, and they can also call for compromises with groups whose principles are different from ours. The 360 CLM members in the group I work with right now were sponsored in part by Heifer International, a major organization that we were working with for the first time. (See: http://www.heifer.org.) At the core of Heifer’s approach is a practice they call “passing on the gift.” The poor who receive livestock from Heifer are expected to give offspring to other members of their community. It is a way to ensure that the benefits Heifer provides are shared as widely as possible. We have generally felt that our members are too poor for such and approach, that they need the ability to accumulate their own assets quickly to escape persistent hunger.

So we worked out a compromise. Members supported by Heifer would receive four goats instead of two, and then pass two of the offspring on to other deserving families. Fortunately, Venis is one of the neighborhoods where our work is partially supported by Heifer, so all 52 members there received extra goats. They are now reaching the point at which we can begin to ask them to give some away.

Tuesday, Elvoit worked together with the Village Assistance Committee to organize a small, ceremonial passing-along of the gift to Roselène. He selected Paquese Salomon, a woman from Rato, which sits along the entrance to Venis from the north. Paquese has been particularly successful with her livestock. Though she started with nothing, she already has more than $400 worth and has set aside almost $150 more to buy another large animal. The minimum standard for graduation from CLM is about $200, and she has a few more months in the program to continue growing. She’s doing very well.

So they invited Gauthier and me to join them. It would be our first experience with Passing on the Gift, so we wanted to be present. We sat in a circle in Paquese’s front yard. Nine of the committee members were there, including the two who are, themselves, CLM members. There were speeches from Elvoit, from Gauthier, from the Committee’s president, and from one of the CLM women who sits on the Committee.

Gauthier especially wanted Paquese to speak, because we wanted to know what giving away assets might feel like for a member of CLM. So he asked her to say a few words.

“Se te kondisyon an,” was her initial response. “That was the deal.” She knew that the reason she had received four goats instead of two was that she’d have to give two of them away.

But Gauthier wanted to hear more, so he asked her how she really felt about it in her heart, and the committee president expressed his desire to hear her as well. So she thought for a moment, and then finally explained that she was really happy. “I used to live like she was living. I had the same kind of problems. Now I’m someone who’s able to help.”

We are unlikely to make Passing on the Gift a regular part of CLM. It is complicated to administer, and might turn out to be expensive. But for Roselène and Paquese, it offered real rewards.

How Memène and Chiver got rich

More about Memène and Chiver
July 6, 2014

Memène was pleased when I asked her to stand up at the three-day workshop for CLM participants. Gauthier, our program director, was about to speak to the group. I had spoken to him about Memène several times over the last year, and I thought he’d want to hear about her progress from her.

She has generally seemed like a shy woman, but she hopped right up off the bench chair with a big smile. “My husband and I just sold a pig. Between that money, and some money I earned from my small commerce, we were able to buy a cow. And he just got paid for some farm work he was hired to do, and earned enough to buy two more. We have three now.”

That puts them a long way from where they were when they joined CLM. They live in an especially poor corner of Demare, an agricultural area tucked behind Labastille, the most important weekly market in Southern Mirebalais. A hillside that was once covered with dilapidated straw shacks but now sparkles with shiny new tin roofs on a half-dozen CLM houses.

It is not as though they simply took off once they joined the program. We evaluate all families after six months. The survey we use is meant to serve case managers, helping them focus their attention of members who are progressing more slowly. Families are scored as fast climbers, slow climbers, or slow-slow climbers. Memène scored as a slow climber, and Christian, her case manager, noted that he was concerned because she seemed unwilling or unable to set her mind on any sort of a plan.

And that was the least of her problems. She was also subject to a lot of abuse, so much so that we had to bring in a representative of the Haitian government’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs to see her and Chiver. We had tried to get her out of the house or to get Chiver past his violence by ourselves, but we hadn’t had much success. (Click here)

But bringing in the law seems to have turned the trick. We have been keeping close track of the couple ever since we first heard about the violence, and they both report that it has stopped. “Now when Memène makes me mad, I know I have to walk away,” Chiver explains. Memène’s view is even simpler. “Things are really good.”

Many CLM graduates are able to buy a cow before they graduate. Some are even able to buy one before they reach the twelve-month mark in the program. But the achievement of Memène and Chiver is exceptional. From zero chickens to three cows in just twelve months. And from a member we expected to advance especially slowly.

For rural Haitians, cows means a lot. If you take good care of them, they grow reliably and, so, gain greatly in value. A heifer will eventually provide young, which can add a lot to a household’s wealth over the course of years. And cows are a lower-risk investment than other large livestock. If they die, you can sell the beef. Pack animals, which are more useful for the most part, become food for scavenging dogs.

But a cow is also a status symbol, a sign of wealth. It affects the way that communities perceive its owner and the way its owner perceives herself. When Chiver first surprised me by showing me the three cows, I joked that he was now a “gran nèg,” or rich guy. He liked the joke, smiling broadly. But part of what he liked was that it was only half a joke. A family with three cows really is wealthy, at least comparatively. And even if he and Memène continue to have problems to resolve, he knows he is now much better off than some of the people living around him.

But I didn’t quite get it. As badly off as they had initially seemed to be, I was having a hard time imagining how they had turned things around so quickly. So I went to chat with them to see whether I could figure things out.

The first possibility I had to consider was that we had mis-selected Memène for the program. We are good at selection, but we aren’t perfect. If they had had wealth we didn’t know about right from the start, that would explain a lot. This seemed pretty likely, because the couple had proven itself capable of working hard and profitably. I really wondered how such hard, productive workers could have been as poor as we thought they were. I went back to their initial selection forms, and they said that Memène had had very little wealth at all. No livestock whatsoever, for example. But I asked her about this, and she reaffirmed that she had had nothing. And her case manager said the same thing. I thought back to they way she and Chiver described the fights they had had to me, and one of Chiver’s consistent accusations had been that Memène had come to him with nothing. “I took you in right off the street,” he would say. He eventually came to feel sorry to have spoken to her that way, but the accusation itself was evidence that Memène had been as poor as we thought she was.

But there was another possibility. Chiver might have owned some livestock that our case managers had decided not to include on Memène’s form. It would have been a reasonable decision. Their relationship seemed anything but reliable. If they both identified his livestock as definitively his, she would be in dire poverty the moment they broke up. Or she would be forced to stick with him because of her poverty. But Chiver told me that he didn’t have anything when we started. Not that he hadn’t ever had animals. He had started to build up wealth a couple of times, but had always had to give them up. Most recently, he had accumulated a handful of goats, but had had to sell them off when his father had a sudden need for cash.

So I sat down with Memène and Chiver in front of their new CLM house. Chiver was weaving palm leaves into thin walls that he could use to surround their latrine. It sits close to a narrow footpath that leads to a working sugarcane mill, and the latrine’s original wall had been knocked over by a horse that had passed by carrying a load of sugarcane. Memène and I sat on small chairs in the little bit of shade that the front of their one-room house could provide, and the two kids were jumping around on their bed, inside. Chiver sat on the ground as he wove.

I tried to explain my question to Memène: They had proven how hard and effectively they are willing and able to work. Their wealth was growing quickly right in front of us. How, I asked her, could two such capable young people have gotten as poor as they had been?

I had a hard time getting the question out clearly. Memène sat in silence at first. Chiver looked at her and told me that she didn’t understand. He started to help me explain. This itself was progress. He knew better than to simply answer for her.

Eventually Chiver and I were able to pose the question clearly. Memène is a woman of few words, but her own were clear enough. “Se te pwoblèm nan kay la.” That means, “It was the problems we had around the house.”

Chiver then explained. They had been struggling just to make sure there was food in the house every day. He would have to find work as a day laborer just so he, Memène, and the kids could eat. Day labor pays a little more than $1 per day. And you can’t make a meal for two adults and two kids for much less than that. A contract to weed or plant an entire garden could be worth several thousand gourds, but you might have to wait a long time to be paid. Chiver couldn’t wait. Every meal, every day, depended on him.

“Once Christian started bringing Memène money every week, I was able to look for contracts. I didn’t need to work by the day any more. When Memène started her commerce, things got ever better.”

As soon as they escaped the daily struggle with hunger, Chiver was able to turn his attention to more lucrative contract work. By the time we bought Memène her pig, he had purchased one too. She now keeps the family fed by herself, which means that Chiver can focus on work that will continue to make them wealthier. They even invited her little brother to move in with them. There is plenty of food to go around, and the younger boy can help look after the little kids. That gives her more time both to do the heavier housework – like laundry – and to take care of her small business.

When we talk about their dreams, things have gotten clearer, too. They know that they cannot simply continue to buy large animals. There are only so many Chiver can take care of on the very little bit of land they have access to. But someone willing to work as hard as he does on other people’s farms would have every reason to hope for success if he could start accumulating farmland of his own. It won’t be easy. The land in Demare is expensively fertile, and the titles aren’t always clear. Chiver is afraid that he could spend a lot of money on a piece of land, and then find out that he didn’t buy it from the real owner.

But when you talk to them about the prospect of buying some farmland, they get giddy. They both like to farm, and you can tell that owning their own land is their dream. If they can start working on it while we are still with them, we can probably secure some reliable help with the deeds.

So Memène andChiver are well one their way to a better life, one that they’ll be able to sustain over the long haul.