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.

Rosemirline at Nine Months

Rosemirline is just 18. She and her toddler live with her in-laws, the boy’s father’s parents, in Wòch Pab. Her sister-in-law, Rosemitha, a sixteen-year-old who also has a child, lives in the home too. Both Rosemirline and Rosemitha are program members. The heads of the household are not.

Rosemirline’s partner is a mason, but work for masons, especially young masons, can be hard to find in the best of times in Haiti, and these have not been the best of times. So he went to the Dominican Republic to seek farm work. He has been sending money to Rosemirline and their boy, but he cannot do so regularly. “He works way out in the countryside. He can’t always find someone to bring what he wants to send.” She thinks he’ll return soon, at least for a visit, because she needs his help to build their new home. They plan to put it on a small plot next to the house she is in right now. Her new latrine is already in place there.

With an infant in her hands, Rosemirline didn’t initially see how to start a commerce, so she asked the program just to give her goats. Her case manager Titon was able to buy three for her. Unfortunately two of them died shortly after she got them.

When livestock dies shortly after transfer, the team generally tries to replace it on the assumption that it may not have been as healthy as it appeared at purchase. Asset replacement has not yet started for the HTF cohort, however, and we do not yet know exactly what Rosemirline will receive to replace her goats. She and Titon will begin discussing it when he knows how much money is available for all the replacements needed.

In the meantime, Rosemirline would like to start a small commerce. It will be difficult for her to do so because she has no one to watch her boy, Jeanlixon. He is not yet two. What’s more difficult: Rosemitha counts on her to watch her boy, Odeson, too. He too is under two years old. Rosemitha found work as a maid in downtown Laskawobas.

If Rosemirline does start a business, it will have to be out of her home. She would like to sell rice, sugar, flour, oil: groceries in general. She thinks that she’d have customers. Her home is a little out of the way, but not too far. She knows such businesses are challenging. Neighbors will try to buy on credit, and it can be hard to get them to pay. But Rosemirline thinks she can manage.

She would be ready to start right now, but she doesn’t have the money. “Recently, things have been bad.” Ever since her weekly stipend ended, she’s been short on cash. She has had trouble making the weekly deposits she is supposed to make in her savings and loan association.

She could borrow it from the association anyway. She’s saved more than enough to qualify for a small loan, but she took out a first loan of almost 10,000 gourds to help her partner go to the DR. He sent the money for the first reimbursement, but she cannot borrow again until she has repaid the entire loan.

Renette: Still Struggling after Eight Months

Renette lives in Wòch Pab, on the southern edge of Pouli, just below the ridge that rises and separates Laskawobas from Savanèt. She and two older daughters joined the program in July of 2022.

She has been working hard in the program, but she does not feel as though she has made much progress so far. She received two goats, but they have not yet produced offspring, though both are pregnant.

She had originally hoped to receive goats and capital for small commerce from the team, but the significant increase in the cost of goats meant that by the time she had received the two that she and her case manager planned for her, there was very little money left to start a business.

But she didn’t give up. She knew she needed some way to earn money for her household. Her partner farms in the mountains above their home. He can be away for days at a time. And while he will usually return home with something from the garden, she cannot count on it, and it is just not enough. “He might bring some plantains, but even if he does, can I really ask the kids to eat nothing but plantains at every meal?”

She started selling kerosene. It is something she has sold often over the years. Many rural households depend on kerosene for light. But the business has changed in the last year or so. The crisis in gasoline and diesel distribution has impacted kerosene as well. Kerosene has been harder to find and much more expensive. Partly that means that she doesn’t always have access to merchandise. Partly it means that rural families are more likely to buy candles or just tolerate the darkness.

When she saw that her kerosene business wasn’t really working, she tried something else. She makes dous, a traditional Haitian sweet. It can be made with brown sugar and cashews, coconut, or sesame seeds. She generally makes hers with peanuts. She can produce it at home, and carry it around the neighborhood in a small bucket, calling out her wares and selling as she goes.

But her dous didn’t sell well, so she gave up on that business, at least for now. She remains determined to start again, however. “Things are hard, but chita pi mal.” That means sitting is worse. As difficult as things are, doing nothing is not an option.

She would like to sell beans. She’d buy them in the mountains above her home, either directly from farmers or at the small, remote markets up in the hills, and could sell them at the downtown market in Laskawobas, which is not far. But right now she does not have enough money to get started.

She would borrow the money she needs from her savings group. She has been good about saving. But she already has a loan out and cannot borrow again until she repays what she owes. She borrowed 15,000 gourds. Half of it went to pay school bills. Three of her children are in school. The other half went into the kerosene business, but that did not go well. She has made her first repayment, but is struggling to figure out how she will repay the balance.

A friend has offered to start selling her kerosene on credit, and she hopes to start this week. She will pay for it after it is sold. But a business like that will not make a lot of money. The prices these days are too high. And she will need income from that same small business to feed her family, pay the balance of her kids’ school bill, and complete work on her new home.

With her youngest child and her daughter Djeffeline, who is also a CLM member, and Djeffeline’s son.

The Problem with Bad Housing

Edner Louis is a single father. He lives with his four children in a beat-up shack in Pouli. It is a single room, about ten feet by five or six, with walls of rotting palm wood planks and, in places where the palm wood has rotted away entirely, sheets of tach, the large, fibrous seedpods of palm trees which serve as a poor-quality but flexible building material for the poorest of Haiti’s rural poor.

They have only been living there a couple of months. Remarkably, their previous home was, in some ways, worse. Edner and his family joined the CLM program in 2022. He and his partner Merline were living with four children in an ajoupa in Pouli, an agricultural area just southeast of downtown Laskawobas. 

Ajoupa are tent-like structures, shaped like prisms, with a central beam usually held up by posts that angle up to them, forming a triangle with the ground. In the Central Plateau, they are generally covered with tach. They tend towards the ramshackle, but that wouldn’t generally matter very much because they are usually just temporary dwellings. A farmer will throw one up in a field they are working in if the field is inconveniently far from home. It gives them a place to stay when there are large tasks to accomplish in the field.

But especially poor families can find themselves making an ajoupa a permanent home, and that is what happened to Edner and Merline. They had no place of their own, but Edner worked as a field hand for a wealthier neighbor. He watched some of the man’s animals, and he did chores in the man’s fields. The neighbor allowed the family to live in his garden shed. “It wasn’t a good house, but it was what we had,” Edner explains.

Edner tried to start small businesses several times while he lived in the ajoupa. He would sell kerosene or rum and cigarettes or gasoline. But Merline couldn’t stay at home all the time, and neither could he. If the kids wandered off while their parents were out and about, his merchandise would disappear. Their ajoupa had no secure door and no place to hide anything.

And that wasn’t all they would lose. 

The tach covering their home couldn’t stand up to serious rain. The whole family would be drenched by each downpour, as would all that they had. The couple owned a bed, but rains gradually rotted out the wood. They had important papers, like birth certificates, but no place dry to store them. Edner lost his certificate to rain, but he also lost the one for one of his kids. The other were reduced to barely-legible pieces.

One day, for reasons he still cannot explain, he saw that his home’s owner was starting to hire other men to do the work Edner would normally do. The man never said anything to Edner, but Edner knew that he needed to look for another place to live.

Edner talked with a friend he often worked fields with, and the friend was willing to have Edner and his family move into the shack that sits on his land. At the time, the CLM team was in the process of distributing the materials that members would need to install a latrine, which included four sheets of roofing tin. Edner borrowed the roofing intended for his latrine to cover his new house. Now at least some of it is rain-proof.

This is where Edner’s story gets complicated. Around this time, Merline started working as a maid. It gave her a small, steady income, and soon she had left her family and moved in with another man. Shortly after that, she disappeared. We do not know why. Rumors say that she moved to the Dominican Republic, but Edner and the children have had no word of her. Without steady work from his landlord he can count on, Edner has been hustling, getting day-labor in local fields to keep the children fed and in school. He and the kids take good care of their goats, but they still have just the two that the program gave them.

He would like to open a small commerce. He has experience. And normally he would be able to take a small loan from the couple’s savings and loan association to get started. But Merline took out a loan before she left him, and she moved away without paying it back. Unless he can pay it back, he won’t be able to get a loan himself. So for the time being, he is reduced to farm labor. Fortunately, there is a lot of work available this time of year.

And he has begun to talk with his friend about the land the shack is on. The man is willing to lease it for three years initially. That’s enough time to make it worth Ender’s while to build his CLM-supported house in the space. They have agreed to postpone talk of Edner’s eventually buying the parcel, but the friend has said he might eventually be open to that, too.

After 14 Months in Kaledan

Bettie Faustin returned to Kaledan, a community on the road through Savanèt, after the Pòtoprens earthquake in 2010. She had been a successful merchant in the capital, selling mainly clothing. But the earthquake destroyed what she had — “All my money disappeared under the rubble” — so she returned home.

She was able to start a small commerce immediately upon her return. She and some neighbors organized a sòl, or a savings club. Each week, they all contribute to a pot, and someone took the whole pot. The other women saw Bettie had nothing, so the let her have the first pay-out, and she used the money to buy bread, kasav, which is a Haitian flat bread, and peanuts. She made peanut butter, and sold peanut butter sandwiches along the road in Kaledan.

She and her partner worked hard. They knew that they could make more money from a bean harvest than from her very small commerce, so they would take money out of the business when planting season came around and invest it in a field of beans.

But their field was high up on the slope. That’s typical for poorer families. So, it was entirely dependent on rainfall. One year, they got no rain when they needed it. They lost the whole field. And, so, Betty lost her commerce as well.

The couple struggled, but through it all, they made one commitment to their children. They made sure they always sent them to school. Bettie remember how her mother made the then-unusual sacrifices to send her to school. “Even if you have nothing to eat, you always have to send them. That’s the inheritance you can give them.” When things were really difficult, she sent her oldest, who is now in his early 20s, to live with her sister in Pòtoprens. From there, he fled to the Dominican Republic, in search of work. Her four younger kids live with her and her partner and all are in school.

Bettie asked the program to give her goats and small commerce, and she receive two small goats. One had a kid, and she bought a fourth goat with income from the business she established. She has a plan for her goats: She wants to sell some of them when she has enough so that she can buy a cow.

She started a commerce buying and selling poultry. And it was working. It enabled her to manage her household and also to buy the additional goat. But poultry disease swept through the area in February, and it killed twelve of her chickens, eliminating her commerce. Ever since, her family has been living off the remaining proceeds of her last bean harvest and her partner’s income. He makes money cutting down trees and turning them into planks for carpenters.

That money was enough for them to get by and for her to continue regular contributions to her savings group. Just this week, the year-long cycle ended, and Bettie received her pay-out. It was about 12,000 gourds.

She has a plan for this money, and it is an unusual one. She and her partner have decided to get married. Normally we would encourage a member to use her savings, or at least some of her savings, to generate income. Especially in a case like Bettie’s, who recently lost her small commerce.

But Bettie is determined to get married, which will involve some expense, and it is really up to her.

And she has another plan to get her business started again. A short time ago she lent a friend 6,000 gourds that she took from her business. The friend is ready to pay her back, but she has asked them to hold on to the money for the time being. She knows that if she takes it now, it will go into the wedding too, but if she takes it after the marriage, she’ll be able to use it to start buying poultry again.

Dieusanie St. Phil is a single mother of four, living just across the road from Bettie, on a small plot of land she bought in better times. “It wasn’t expensive back when I bought it.” She lives with her four children. She was only able to send two of the four to school this year. She just didn’t have the means to send the others. “They will all go to school in September,” she says.

For years she has supported them by selling day labor, mainly helping neighbors with their bean crops. “Sometimes they pay money, sometimes they send me home with some beans or some corn.” But she says she has stopped that sort of work since she joined CLM.

She asked the team for goats, and she received two. Each had a kid, but only one of the kids survived. She herself bought an additional goats with money she saved from her weekly stipend. The goats are important to her. “I will take care of them so I can use them to send my children to school.”

Her real progress has come through her small commerce. She borrowed 6,000 gourds from her savings and loan association, and began selling local rum and cigarettes. She used the profit to increase her investment, adding other products, like home-made snuff and coffee that she roasts and grinds.

Products like snuff and coffee — things that she produces — tend to have a higher margin than things one simply buys and sells, and they have become, together with the rum, the focus of Dieusanie’s business.

When she finished repaying her first loan, she took a second for 20,000, and threw all the money into her wall commerce. She had no trouble repaying that second loan. Most encouraging is that she has been able to maintain her business even while repaying the loan. Her repayments have come, in other words, mainly from profits.

She saved in the same savings and loan association that Bettie was a part of, and she too amassed about 12,000 gourds. She doesn’t feel that her commerce needs the additional capital right now, so she has decided to buy a pig as a new investment.

She is happy with the progress she’s made, but she knows she has father to go, and she expresses this clearly. “I wouldn’t say that I am well-off, but I have started my way along a path.”

Johanne After Five Months

Johanne and her husband were Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. Their three boys were living there with them.

She didn’t have the documents to give her legal status. The family had ongoing expenses, and she could not find work to help cover them. So the couple decided that she would return with the boys to Savanèt, where she was born and raised. Her husband stayed in the DR. He helped her rent a room for 7,500 gourds, about $50, per year. But she says that he soon found another women back where he lives, and has shown no further interest in her or their children.

When her rent was about to come due, the owner decided to double it to 15,000. There was no way for her to pay. She had just moved back to the region, and owned almost nothing. Her only source of income was occasionally doing laundry for neighbors. She looked around, and eventually found a room she could rent for just 4,000, though it is only for six months. She moved in with the boys and her mother, who helps manage the house.

She asked the CLM program for goats and small commerce. She knew she needed to create regular income to feed her boys because she has no land to farm. So, she asked for just one goat, which left her 8,000 gourds to invest in merchandise.

She and her boys take good care of the goat, and it has already had its first kid. When she began to think about investing in commerce, however, she hesitated. She realized that 8,000 gourds was more than she knew what to do with. She didn’t want to waste it. So she took 5,000, put it together with a pay out from her savings club, and bought a second goat. If she keeps succeeding with the goats, she would like to buy a cow.

Osmane, her oldest son, with her goat.

She then took 3,000 and invested it in detergent and laundry soap. That sold well, but when the price of detergent rose, she switched to school supplies. She makes weekly contributions to a savings and loan association, and used a first loan from the association of 5,000 gourds to add some cosmetics to her business. “Hair jell sells the best.” When she finishes repaying that loan, she’ll take another. She would like to add detergent, laundry soap, and basic groceries to the business next.

With her rent due in the next couple of months, she is anxious to get into her own home. At first she thought it would be impossible. She owns no land. But that is where Webert is helping out.

He is a local carpenter and a preacher at her church. He also serves as a volunteer on the committee that the CLM team organized of local leaders willing to give the program and its members their support. Webert offered to sell Johanne a small plot of land for 75,000 gourds. That would be impossible for her except that Webert is willing to let her take possession of the land and build her house on it without any downpayment whatsoever. He discussed the decision with his wife, who agrees with it, but they have had to ask Johanne and her case manager not to let anyone else know. They’ve told people in their community that Johanne has paid some of the money already.

Johanne will be able to invest earnings from goats and from her growing business into the land. It will come slowly, because she also has to take care of her boys. But Webert and his wife are willing to wait.

Emmania After Almost a Year

Emmania lives in a small house in Woy with her partner, Jameson, and Jamesley, the couple’s four-year-old son. Their house is just a hundred yards or so off the main road that leads from downtown Savanèt to the Dominican border.

They haven’t lived there for long. When they first joined the CLM program, they were renting a room nearer to the downtown area. Their rent was 4,000 gourds per year. That’s about $25, and it may not sound like much, but the couple struggled to pay it. Emmania herself earned no income whatsoever. Jameson would borrow a motorcycle when he could and split the day’s receipts with the bike’s owner. He couldn’t make much, and he needed to manage both the rent and the 11,000 tuition at their boy’s school. “Sometimes we would just go hungry. We had to have a place to live and we had to send our boy to school.”

Their rent was about to come due. What’s worse, the house was falling apart. “Part of the wall had fallen. I used a sheet to cover the hole.” So, her case manager sprung into action.

Fonkoze’s team was not yet ready to transfer to members the materials they would need to repair their homes or build new ones. That takes some time because each member’s needs are different. But his 50 families had already received their materials for latrine construction. Those materials included a few sheets of roofing, and the case manager thought that Emmania’s potential homelessness was more important than the roofs of new latrines. So, he asked a few of the CLM members who would be Emmania’s new neighbors — she had access to land from her grandfather — to lend her their roofing. They agreed and Emmania’s house went up quickly. When the home repair materials were distributed, Emmania paid back the loans.

Emmania asked the program to give her goats and a pig, and she first received two goats. One died shortly after the team delivered it, so it will eventually have to be replaced, and the other had a miscarriage but is now pregnant again.

When it came time to buy the pig, Emmania had a change of heart. She saw that a lot of pigs in the area were getting sick and dying, so she asked her case manager to give her a small commerce instead.

They bought plastic sandals for 3,500 gourds, but it wasn’t working out. “People ask to buy on credit, and then they don’t pay.” So as she sold off her first supply of sandals, she put the money away and bought some cement to cover her new home’s dirt floor.

She also saved just enough of the sandal money to try another, smaller business. She put a basket with school supplies on the side of the road in front of her house. But the pencils, pens, and notebooks haven’t been selling well. “I just don’t have any luck with commerce,” she says.

She also uses proceeds from selling out her sandals to continue contributions to her savings club. She is part of a sòl, a common way of saving in Haiti in which members of a group make weekly contributions and one gets the entire pot every week. Her turn comes up last, and she has already decided to buy another goat with her money. For the moment, she doesn’t really know what she will use the goats for, but she likes having them in case she needs money to cover a sudden expense.

Virgina Eleven Months In

Virgina lives in eastern Savanèt, in a community called Woy, between downtown Savanèt and the Dominican border. She, her husband, and their three children live in her parents’ home..

Up until a few years ago, the family was doing fairly well.They made most of their income by farming their own land, but Virgina managed a small commerce as well. The couple saved their money and bought a motorcycle. Renting it to a taxi driver brought in additional weekly income.

But Virgina suddenly became sick. Something happened to her lower back, and she couldn’t really move. Her feet swelled and became useless. Her family thought the condition was something magical, as though a spell of some kind had been cast on her. Instead of taking her to a hospital, which would have been a long, hard trip from Woy in any case, they took her to see practitioners of traditional treatments.

It was expensive. It didn’t help, but it cost the couple everything they had: their land, the motorcycle, and everything in her business. When the CLM team met them last year, the family was often going hungry and the children were no longer in school. Virgina could barely get around the yard with the help of crutches.

Her case manager and his supervisor convinced her to try going to the University Hospital in Mibalè, a government hospital supported by Fonkoze’s long-time partner, Partners in Health. The CLM team provided the transportation she needed in one of the program’s vehicles. She made the first trip in the cab of the small truck it uses to move goats. She has made five trips to Mibalè so far, and she is a different woman. Through medication and physical therapy she is slowly regaining her ability to walk.

She asked the team to provide her with goats and a pig, even though when she first received them she couldn’t get around well enough to take care of them. She had to leave that work to her family. Thieves stole the larger of the two goats she received, but her husband and children have taken good care of the other one, and it now has two kids. The team also bought her a very small sow, and she has since added a second sow herself with savings from her weekly stipend.

She’s learning to write her name by copying from a model.

When she first started to be able to move around again, she bought some oil and some rice and began to sell from a small table on the road in front of her home. She managed the business carefully. It gave her the income she needed to contributed every week to her savings group and some money to take care of household expenses as well. She is able to feed both her sows, which is remarkable because taking care of them can be as expensive as taking care of kids. She took out a first loan from that savings group of 10,000 gourds — about $65 — when she was ready to expand her business. She began to sell a wider range of products. She repaid that loan on time and took out a second, this one for 15,000.

She realized that she wouldn’t be able to simply buy more groceries or even more types of groceries. She needed a second business. By now she was moving around more comfortably, so she went to market and bought up local corn. She rented a mule, and brought the corn for sale to Miguel, on the Dominican border. Dominican buyers come to buy Haitian products.

That is a good business, but with the change in seasons she plans a change in products. It is almost time for the next bean harvest, and she thinks that if she buys loads of 50-or-so measures of beans for 15,000 gourds she will be able to sell them in Miguel for about 23,000. It is a good profit, and she should be able to make several trips. “I’ll make enough to buy a little water,” she jokes.

In the meantime, the family’s life has changed. They eat everyday, and her children are back in school. The couple is working on building a new home of their own on the plot of land that they moved to when they sold their own.

She does not seem sure just yet what she will do with her growing wealth. Though she hopes eventually to be able to buy land once again.

Graduating Youth

Chitine and Julme live in Makari, an agricultural area in the mountains above Marigo, in Haiti’s Southeast. She’s twenty, and he’s nineteen. Both of them come from CLM families.

Chitine’s one of eight children. “We were all living in a one-room shack. CLM helped my mother build two more rooms, so we finally had some space.”

Her mother also struggled to keep the children fed and in school. Only three of the kids living under her roof could attend. She couldn’t afford to send them all. Julme and his siblings had the same problem. At 19, he is a fourth grader because his mother was not able to afford to send him to school every year. “We could not always go.” The CLM program invested in both of their mothers, helping them establish the sources of income they need to take care of their kids.

But the CLM program’s founding director, Gauthier Dieudonné, saw a problem. His program was succeeding at helping women establish livelihoods that they could grow, just as it helped the mothers of Chitine and Julme. And the women and the families were changing their lives in other ways as well.

One of the most important was that school attendance had increased for participants’ children. And that was proving to be a lasting change. Studies of the families that were done years after their graduation from the program showed that the children were still in school.

But Gauthier thought about members’ older children, kids in their late teens or even early twenties who were too old to go back to school easily or to get very far with standard education even if they did. Julme is in school this year, but though Chitine says she will go, it is February, and she has not started yet. Gauthier worried that they could easily slip into the poverty their mothers were just escaping from if no effort was made to help them establish a way to begin their own adult lives. He started to dream of establishing schools just for them, which would offer a strong, if minimal, academic grounding; education in life skills like healthy practices and personal finance; and training to help them start in a trade or another way to earn a living.

So for years he looked for a way to help such young people directly, and he and Fonkoze finally found a chance to do so as part of larger CLM implementation. We have not yet been able to implement Gauthier’s full vision, but we made a start. Older children from CLM families were invited to join clubs that the program set up in their neighborhoods. Children from other families, with similar profiles, were invited as well. The young people received training in life skills and in personal finance. They had the chance to learn a trade, such as cosmetology or ceramic tiling. They were organized into savings and loan associations, and learned farming techniques. They received funds to invest in new economic activities. Like their mothers, they had the chance to graduate after eighteen months.

When asked how the program helped them, Chitine and Julme point, first and foremost, to progress in their social lives. Julme says that he met new people and made new friends. “I got to know a bunch of people I couldn’t have hoped to meet.” Chitine talks about how comfortable she is now talking to people, even talking in front of people.

She also talks about her new profession. “I learned cosmetology. I was able to make money around the holidays doing people’s nails.”

They both also learned good farming techniques. And this is where things get interesting. Because they both planted gardens on land that belongs to their parents, and neither garden succeeded. Chitine explains. “We planted eggplants and peppers, but the plants just dried up.”

But they both looked carefully at what happened, and they both think they know what went wrong. Julme explains that the land itself wasn’t strong enough, and that they have begun strengthening it through composting techniques that they learned in their club.

So they are both ready to give their gardens another try. Thanks to their parents’ experiences in CLM, finding the resources they need to reinvest in their gardens won’t be difficult. Chitine says, “My parents are happy that I am farming, and they’ll help me with what I need to plant my field.”

After Six Months in Pouli

Ercilia lives in Wòch Pab, a farming community south of the road that cuts through Pouli. It is just below the mountain that separates Laskawobas from Savanèt. She is in her 40s, but has only been in Wòch Pab for a couple of years. She lives with four of her children, a grandchild, and her partner, Bertrand.

A few years ago, she and Bertrand bought the land they live on from his brother for 75,000 gourds. That’s about $500 now, but would have been more than twice that when they made the purchase. They sold a large pig and a crop of beans to put together a downpayment of 20,000 gourds. Not long after that, they sold another pig and paid another 10,000. So, they still owe 45,000, and her brother-in-law has been asking about the balance. Bertrand plans to leave so he can earn the money for another payment by working in the Dominican Republic. He and Ercilia do not see another option.

The couple farm together, and Ercilia has managed small commerce on and off over the years. They have not always been as poor as they were when they joined the program. “I had the means to live pretty well, but then I got sick, and that took everything.” She was pregnant, and she miscarried. She had to be rushed to the hospital. She and Bertrand sold their one cow to cover the mounting healthcare expenses.

She has ten children. She had the two oldest with her first partner, who passed away. She had five with a second man, but she felt so mistreated by him and his family that she finally decided to leave them. She rented a small room, where she lived with the two oldest kids, and that’s when she met Bertrand. They now have two young children. Bertrand is nice enough to her older children, but he is only truly committed to his own. “He know he owes my children food to eat, but I have to earn money to cover other expenses myself. I have always done commerce. If I can get my hands on 1,000 gourds, I can find a way to make something of it.” The kids are in school, but Ercilia has not yet been able to buy them books.

Ercilia asked the program to buy her goats, and she got two. One miscarried its first litter, but the other is pregnant. She expects it to give birth in March.

But the progress she’s made so far has little to do with goats. It has much more to do with the stipend she’s been receiving each week. She has gotten 500 gourds, or about $3.30. CLM members typically use the stipend to do lots of different things. They buy food for their family. In fact, we used to call the stipend a “food stipend.” Some buy poultry. Sometimes, members put it directly into purchase of merchandise they can sell.

Ercilia has been investing it all in her savings group. A share in the association costs 100 gourds, and the rules allow her to buy up to five shares a week. She is careful to buy the maximum every week. That investment made it possible for her to borrow the money she needed to buy a hardwood tree, which Bertrand turned into charcoal the she has been selling. She is on track to repay her loan, and has begun to see a difference in the money she has available to manage her expenses. Though her stipend has ceased, she is committed to continuing to buy five shares every week

At the end of a one-year cycle, her savings group will pay all its members the money they have invested along with whatever interest the group has earned through the interest on loans and various fees it charges. In all, Ercilia could have almost 30,000 gourds if she keeps buying five shares every week. She would like to use that money to buy a cow. She thinks of a cow as disaster insurance. “If I didn’t have the cow when I was sick, I could have died.”

Angela lives nearby, though she is from Savanèt, on the other side of the mountain, not from Laskawobas. She seems exhausted by life. “I don’t know anything anymore. I have been through too much. I was a big, strong woman, and this is what’s left of me.”

And it is not hard to understand her attitude. She’s had fourteen children, and only six survive. The first nine she had with her husband, who passed away. By the time he died, the couple had lost their home in a fire. Everything went up in flames. Neighbors gave them the few sheets and old clothes that they needed.

She then met a widower, and had five more children with him, but they eventually separated. She lives in a home on land they purchased together. Her five youngest children now live with her, along with five of her six grandchildren and her current partner. Two of her daughters are now also members of the program.

The household gets by principally through farming. The family eats most of what they grow, but Angela will sometimes sell a large bunch of plantains or a couple of yams when they need cash. She and her partner also earn cash through day labor in neighbors’ fields, but she won’t let her children do so. “I don’t want them to experience that misery.”

She asked the CLM program to buy her goats, and she received two. They are healthy and growing. She and her family appear to take good care of them. They haven’t had young yet, but one is pregnant. The program budgets a certain amount of money for each member to use as a business investment. After her case manager bought her goats, Angela had some money left over, and she she decided to buy pig feed. She had a small pig before she entered the program, and has been struggling to keep it fed during the current dry season.

Like Ercilia, Angela was disciplined about investing her stipend in her savings group, but she isn’t sure what she wants to do with it. She already took out one loan, but she turned the money over to one of her children, who lives and and manages by trading near the Dominican border. She is about to miss her first repayment, so she’ll be charged a small penalty, but she is confident that her child will return the money and that she’ll be able to repay it.

She’s frustrated, though, because she can’t take out another loan until she’s repaid the first one, and she would like to start a business selling pig feed. She could make a little money, but also keep her own pig fed.

She has been struggling to learn to write her name. Her parents didn’t send her to school, and her focus has always been on her children’s education, not on her own. But she’s starting to make progress. Her girls are happy to tease her for her efforts, but they are clearly happy to see her progress, too.

Laskawobas: After Five Months

I spoke to Roseline Jean a little over a month ago. (See: here.) She was struggling. Her children’s father passed away, and her new partner is off working in the Dominican Republic. He accepts her three children, but she isn’t sure how motivated he is to really help them. A sick baby led to expenses and to days of missed work that only made things harder, and one of the two goats that she received fro the program died shortly after she received it.

She has made good progress in the short time since we spoke. Her focus now is on her commerce. She still sells fried snacks in front of her home in the afternoons. It’s a small, but steady income. She was previously buying produce by the sack as a second activity and selling it in smaller quantities, but she gave that up because prices became too unpredictable. And, especially as main harvest season passed, it was hard to count on profit.

So she tried something else. For many Haitian families, Sunday dinner is something special. It is the one day of the week on which even poorer families try to eat meat. She buys chicken meat in Laskawobas every Saturday and delivers it to her clients late in the afternoon so that they can prepare it for their Sunday meal. She sells on credit, and goes around to collect on the following Saturday morning, before she goes to buy again. Clients appreciate the service, and the business is growing. It provides a nice additional lap of income each week.

There is, of course, risk involved in selling for credit. Clients might not pay. But unlike a lot of CLM members, Roseline is comfortably literate, and she keeps careful track of what folks owe her in a notebook.

She tracks the debts in dollars because, like many Haitians, she thinks of money in terms of Haitian dollars, not gourds. A Haitian dollar is five gourds. It is a holdover from the Duvalier dictatorship, under which the gourd’s value was fixed at five to the dollar. She has a similar list for her snack business, and says that she hasn’t had trouble collecting what she is owed so far.

Though forage for her surviving goat has been in short supply since the weather has turned drier, she and her children have been fighting to keep it healthy by bringing food to it. “We collect leaves from the trees around here and bring it to our yard. We make sure that it has a lot to eat.”

The goat is pregnant, and means a lot to Roseline. She says that eventually she’d like to buy more of them. “Raising goats can leading you to raising a cow, and raising a cow can enable you to buy land.”

Katiana Joseph lives in the same small neighborhood. She seems much younger than Roseline. She and her partner, Raulner, live with their child in his mother’s house.That house is home to quite a crowd. About ten in all are cramped into the small space.

Raulner is the home’s main earner. He works as a taxi driver, with a motorcycle that he rents from an older brother. Between what he earns and the contributions that other household members make, the family usually has something to eat.

Katiana received two goats, and one is pregnant. They are healthy and growing. She is hopeful. She would like to start a small commerce, but she isn’t really sure how she should go about it. She will need a lot of help from her case manager to establish the direction she was to take.

She is happy, however, that her family now has a latrine. “Everyone has to have a latrine. If you don’t have one, everyone can see you.” Raulner worked hard so that the family would be able to use what the CLM program was offering. Raulner himself dug the pit. He then had to carry all the cement and other materials they would need. They live some ways off the main road.

They haven’t been able to enclose the latrine yet. For now they are using sheets, but they are hoping to buy and prepare palm wood planks to wall it in.