Dieumette entered CLM as what we call a “ka espesyal,” or a “special case.” That means that she did not show up on the lists that we develop with community input at the beginning of the selection process. Our first step is designed to give us a list that includes all households in a neighborhood, organized into about five different categories based on their neighbors’ sense of their relative wealth. We then interview all the households that fall in the two poorest categories as we search for families who might qualify for our program.

But we know that some of the neediest households will fail to turn up on those lists. For various reasons, members of the community do not think of them. Some of these families are simply invisible. They live in such isolation even from their closest neighbors that people can forget that they exist. But many are young single women, who live with one or more children in a house or yard that their neighbors identify as part of a larger family. Such a woman might just use a corner of someone else’s house as a place to sleep with her children, or she might live so close to parents that neighbors fail to see her independent need. Our case managers have to be on the lookout for such special cases as we work through the selection process. They include some of the families who need us most.

Dieumette lives in a small, one room house in Platon Sous, a small neighborhood about twenty minutes off the main highway that leads from Mirebalais to Port au Prince. It’s high above Mirebalais, with views that extend widely, to Montay Terib in to the west and to the mountains that cut through Boucan Carré to the north. She has two girls, with two separate fathers. Abandoned by both men, she is raising her daughters on her own. But her little house is close to those belonging to her mother and her aunts, so her neighbors did not count her when they were listing the households in the area.

But she needed help. She was struggling to feed herself and her girls with a small business, buying and selling pigeon peas, using capital that she borrowed from two different people.

She started that business by borrowing 250 gourds from one friend and 500 gourds from another, a total of about $17. She would take that money to the small markets nearby in Gran Boulay or Dalon, where she’d buy a sack of pigeon peas. She’d then take it to Port au Prince, where she would sell it in smaller measures. Her profits were steady, even after her transportation costs were calculated.

Then one day, she bought herself a “bwat sekrè,” or a “secret box.” That’s something like a piggy bank: a box with a small hole that allows someone to insert money, but not to take it out. Dieumette explains: “Every time I came home from the market, I would put a little something in my secret box. I needed money to feed my girls, but I knew that if we ate everything, we’d never get ahead.”

As spring turned to summer, the price of pigeon peas got so high that she couldn’t afford to buy a sack full any more, not with the very little money she had borrowed. And then her friends said they needed their money back.

So she cracked open her secret box and found that she had saved up 450 gourds, a little more than $10. It wouldn’t be enough to buy beans, so Dieumette thought about what else she could buy. “I bought a case of soap and four buckets of salt, and I started selling them in the market.” She kept turning them over and adding little bits of profit to a new secret box. And before too long she had 900 gourds, which was enough to buy a very small piglet, one barely weaned. But she is taking good care of it. It’s already worth twice what she bought it for, and it’s still growing fast.

Her business took a hit this month, as she has had to draw on it to send her little girls to school, but she already bought a second piglet with money from the savings club she’s in with her fellow CLM members, so she’s making good progress. And Dieumette already has a clear plan, too. When her pigs are big enough, she’ll sell them off to buy a cow. “I really want a cow, because once it starts giving you calves it can really help you.”

So, though she was regularly hungry when she started the program, she was all set to begin succeeding almost as soon as she joined. She had the financial discipline that she developed by using her secret boxes and the good sense to shift her investment when faced with a situation that called for a new plan. One of the ways we articulate the criteria for joining CLM is that we should not take families who could succeed with credit. Looking back, it looks as though Dieumette might have been able to.

But I don’t regret her selection, because I think that to assume that she could have succeeded with credit would have been a poor bet. She started with neither a husband to back her up nor assets like livestock that would have been sufficient to insure her against bumps in the road. And she wasn’t able at the time to feed her girls well. For someone like her, failure at a credit program was too easy to imagine.

Extremely poor families often live in isolation. They lead lives that may be parallel to those their wealthier neighbors lead, never touching the points of intersection that give a community the unity that defines it.

Many of them cannot send their children to school, and often those who can do not feel entitled to go to a parents’ meeting. They have no regular place at the local market because any little produce that they bring with them is too insignificant to require a fixed point of sale. They carry it around on their heads, or go straight to a wealthier retailer who will buy their load cheap. They don’t belong to community organizations. They would not feel comfortable at meetings. And no one would think to invite them to a celebration.

It’s not as though they are feared or avoided like lepers. It’s just that no one ever thinks of them.

So one of our principle social goals for CLM members is to help them become members of their communities. That is one of the reasons for establishing village assistance committees. Our members get used to attending meetings with friendly community leaders and even to speak up. The committee members’ work brings them to our members’ homes as visitors, a habit that sticks when the CLM members show the committee members that the visits are welcome. The relationships they will establish with these leaders as they start to develop their own economic means can protect them from returning to their former isolation, even as the livestock they accumulate can protect them from returning to extreme poverty when their livelihoods run into inevitable rough times.

So when a community has its own tools for managing problems and conflicts, we think it is to our members’ advantage for us to guide them towards those tools. That’s not to say that we never intervene strongly ourselves. Sometimes we do. (See: DeleGasyon.) But if we don’t have to manage things ourselves, we’d rather not. So when the case manager who serves the town of Trianon, which sits along the national highway in southern Mirebalais, explained the situation that had developed between two of the families he works with, I referred him to Judge Patrick, the justice of the peace.

The two families are neighbors. Dénius is the son of a woman named Osiane who was selected for the program. He became responsible for himself and his 14-year-old younger brother when Osiane died, probably of persistent malnutrition. Their father had died two years previously. Genel is his cousin, the husband of another woman we selected for the program. Dénius’s father and Genel’s mother were brother and sister. The mother is still alive.

Genel is about five years older than Dénius, a married man of 25. He’s also bigger and stronger than Dénius. Dénius may be 20, but he looks much younger. More important, Genel is tougher than Dénius, who is very sweet but probably lacking in what would be useful grit.

Not that he doesn’t try to stick up for himself: When Genel went into the land his father left him and lopped a fruit-laden branch off a mango tree to make charcoal, he complained, enough apparently to annoy Genel. Genel finally explained that he had been asked to make the charcoal by his mother, so that Dénius should complain to the mother instead. Dénius complained again when Genel cut down a tree on another plot of land that Dénius believed that his father had left him – Genel thought it had been left to the whole family by their grandfather – and made enough noise to make Genel angry and threatening.

Dénius then complained to Michel, their common case manager, who decided to sit down with them both. In the course of the conversation, Genel became angry again. He finally said, in front of Michel, that if he came across Dénius when the moment was right he would cut him to pieces. That was when Michel came to me.

Fortunately, Trianon had just been assigned a courthouse and a justice of the peace. Fortunately again, the justice of the peace is Judge Patrick, who had previously been assigned to a court in Tit Montay, where he became very familiar with CLM. So we were assured of a sympathetic hearing.

I had Michel help Dénius file a complaint based on the threat to his life. This would require the court to send Genel a manda envitasyon, something like a formal demand that he present himself in court for a hearing, but much less serious than a warrant for his arrest would be.

Judge Patrick’s sympathetic understanding was important, because our goals for the hearing were complex. Both Dénius and Genel are part of CLM. We needed to do what we could to help Dénius feel save and to clarify the land ownership issues that invited the conflict. We also wanted Genel to see that it was, for us, simply a matter of using a fair process to clear things up, and that we continue to see him as part of our CLM family – every bit as much a part of it as his more vulnerable younger cousin is.

Judge Patrick was wonderful, talking and listening respectfully to both men. He got Genel to admit that he had been hotheaded and to agree that he must manage any conflicts with Dénius in some other way.

He also identified the source of the problem as their different understandings of the way the land was left to them, and we were lucky enough to have a satisfactory way to define things. Their aunt, their parents’ older sister, came to the hearing. She is a childless older woman who has more-or-less moved in with Dénius and his brother, Amison. She keeps quiet and manages her affairs separately from them, though they share what they have with her and she shares with them. They speak to her with gentleness and respect, and she seems fond of them.

Judge Patrick asked her what she knew about the land in question. Did it come to Dénius as an inheritance from his father or did her father leave it in common to them all? There were no papers of any kind to establish the old man’s intentions, but the land is between a small garden that belongs to her sister and another that belongs to her. What, if anything, did she know?

The aunt had a simple answer: She remembered that her brother once told her that their father had given him that piece of land. He had never cleared it for planting because he wanted to leave it as a source of lumber in case he and his children needed it to build a home.

Her declaration satisfied Judge Patrick, and it satisfied Genel as well. He said he was sorry, that he hadn’t understood things that way, and that he’d stay off the land from now on.

Dénius now asked the judge to make Genel promise to leave him alone. Genel started to get angry when he heard this, so that’s when we felt we had to intervene. Genel had already said three times that he’d avoid problems with Dénius, but Dénius was still scared.

I was sitting next to Genel, and as he started to speak I held his hand and asked him to let me respond. I said that Genel had already promised in front of the judge that he would not bully Dénius. To continue to ask for guarantees was to doubt his honesty. And no one had shown any reason to do that. I’ve gotten very close to Dénius, so when I said this, he relented.

Then it was time for Judge Patrick’s final maneuver. He wrote an agreement of reconciliation into the courtroom’s official record. There were a number of points in the agreement, but the central one was that Genel and Dénius would agree to act as brothers. Dénius would look to Genel as and older brother for protection and advice, Genel would protect and advise him. Judge Patrick made them sign the agreement and then hug. All in front of a crowded little courtroom. It was not the warmest of embraces, but I think it did what Judge Patrick wanted it to do.

On the way out, I pulled Genel aside for a chat. On one hand, I wanted him to understand that we would hold him to his agreements. On the other hand, I wanted to communicate my friendship towards him. For various reasons, I have grown very close to Dénius. I haven’t with Genel. But I wanted Genel to see that our team is committed to helping them both. We talked mostly about his very beautiful little girl and about one of the goats that the program had given his wife, which seemed a little sick. I also asked him to contact me if there was any more trouble between him and Dénius, and he said that he would.

Using the legal system in Trianon gave us a way to protect a scared young man from another who is stronger and tougher than he. But it also made their conflict, and its resolution, a part of the formal comings and goings of the community that surrounds them both. Making it a public matter served to bring both young men farther into the public realm as well.

One of the formidable challenges at the center of our extreme poverty program is ensuring we select the right families. We have a process that always involves three steps: community input, initial screening, and final verification. But sometimes there’s also a fourth step. Fonkoze’s Social Impact Management Unit – which is our research and evaluation team – takes 25% of the families that the CLM staff selects for the program and re-evaluates them. They then follow the families through the program so that we have a way to independently confirm the work that our case managers do.

Earlier in the month, we got an initial report on the 360 new members we are currently working with. The data it included about the first 64 members whom they will follow confirmed a lot about our selection. But there was one problem: One member, Elsie Fénélon, appeared to be completely unqualified for the program. Social Impact’s survey found that she owed three goats, a horse, and a cow before she even joined the program. While that would hardly qualify Elsie as wealthy, it would disqualify her for CLM, especially since we knew she was managing a small commerce and had been able to send her kids to school last year.

I asked her case manager to follow the report up. He’s an especially smart and experienced man named Christian, and I’ve learned to value his judgment greatly. I wanted him to find out about the livestock and to let me know his overall opinion of the household.

This is what he reported: There were in fact three goats, a mother and her two bucks. They had not yet been weaned. She had been given the mother by Mercy Corps, an NGO that had been working in the Mirebalais area at the time. She also had purchased a horse, really just a colt. A younger brother had offered her one for 2000 gourds because he wanted to help her out. She didn’t have that much, but she had 1500 in a savings club that she was in with other market women. So she paid that money down, and her brother agreed to wait for the rest. The cow belongs to her husband. Right around the time she was selected for the program, he finished a job for a neighbor who planned to pay him by selling a young bull. When the neighbor couldn’t get the price he was seeking in the local market, the husband agreed to take the bull in lieu of payment. Unfortunately, however, Elsie is not the husband’s only partner, and he does not contribute dependably to the household.

So she has more in assets than a CLM member typically would at the start, a lot more. And with her existing small commerce, she might seem like an excellent example of an extremely poor woman who could be served by our Ti Kredi program, rather than by CLM. Her business – she sells powered laundry detergent by the cup full – is 100% dependent on credit. She has none of her own money invested in it all at. She buys a sack of detergent at a time with no money down, and has to sell it off to pay for it before she can get another.

Our team occasionally refers to “original” CLM members. These are the ones who are the worst off, the ones who have nothing at all when we find them: No children in school, no assets of any kind, and no economic activity beyond day labor and begging. We find a lot of families like that, and Elsie was not one of them. We knew that her business was working for her – it had enabled her to pay into the 100-gourd-per-week savings club that made it possible for her to buy the horse – and, even if we discounted the cow as an asset she couldn’t depend on, the goats would give her something to fall back on if her commerce took a bad turn.

But not all of our members are “original.” Some are slightly better off, even though they are still extremely poor. Christian still wanted to keep Elsie in the program. He felt that she was really struggling to feed her family, and that her lack of decent housing in a neighborhood where housing is relatively expensive would put her at great risk.

I needed to take his view seriously, very seriously. I can’t pretend to judge more astutely than he. But I also know that he tends toward including marginal cases. It is a predictable consequence of seeing as many miserably poor people as we do: You want to help them all, and the weight of their poverty tends to play with your sense of who it is who is poor enough. Deciding, even correctly, to exclude a hungry household from the program because it is not quite poor enough becomes harder and harder as you go along.

So I went to talk to her myself. I wanted to figure out if I could why we had missed the assets when we first interviewed her. Had she simply lied? And needed to decide, more importantly, whether she belongs in CLM.

I went by to see her early in the morning, hoping to catch her before she went out. By the time I got to Labasti, where she lives, she was already out in the street, trying to sell the last couple of scoops of detergent so she’d be able to pay for it and get a new sack the next day. But she hadn’t gone far, and when word got to her that I was there, she came running home. It took her a few minutes to catch her breath before we could start to chat.

I already knew that her small commerce was on the edge. I had seen her the previous day in the small market in Trianon, trying to sell the same last bit of detergent she was walking with. The Trianon market is failing. Very little is sold there. But a few desperate merchants sit around, hoping that something will happen. If her sales were thriving, she wouldn’t have wasted a day there. So things weren’t going well. The day I saw her she was on her way to Terre Rouge, a long uphill hike from her home. She thought she’d be able to sell out her product if she went to the various fried-foods merchants who set up there for passing traffic. They don’t have time to do much shopping, so are often glad when the things they need come to them. It would be a long day, with low potential for return, so she must really feel the need for a few gourds of additional sales.

We talked about her goats. She told me that she had received one as a gift from Mercy Corps, but that she had offered it to her brother when she could not figure out how to pay her kids’ tuition bill when the school year was coming to an end. The brother offered her the 2000 gourds she needed, but then said he’d rather she kept the mother goat. He would take the goat’s first two young, instead. When the goat had a litter of two, he turned the kids over to Elsie’s oldest boy to take care of. He has now just sent for them from Port au Prince. It is also true that she has a horse, though it is not all hers and it’s much too small still to bring her anything but the extra work of taking care of it.

But as I talked to her, and looked at both her and her young children, I just thought “CLM.” Their house is a wreck, and the boys were scavenging something to eat in their grandmother’s corn. The ears are dry, ready for harvest, but the boys grill the whole kernels and then count on their good teeth to snack on them. Anything like a real meal would have to wait until the afternoon, probably late because the trip to Terre Rouge and back would take Elsie all day.

I could be wrong. Maybe Elsie would be a good bet even with Ti Kredi. I know that I’m subject to the same pressures that I see acting on case managers like Christian. But Elsie’s household is struggling by any measure, I know that CLM can help, and I’m not certain that Ti Kredi is really an option.

So I decided to make what was certainly the easy decision, the one to keep her in the program. I’m pretty certain that she will succeed. A lot of the entrepreneurship we seek to teach seems already there.

Monday morning, I spoke with Denius. He’s a boy about 19 or 20, though he looks several years younger. He’s his mother’s oldest child, one of her four surviving boys. His father, who was also father to Amisson, the next younger boy, died a few years ago. The mother, Osiane, died just as the CLM program was starting. Her death was probably related to malnutrition. The last time we saw her, she was weak and a little disoriented. And she had a scarf tied around her stomach as poor Haitian sometimes do when they are suffering hunger pangs. We just didn’t get to her soon enough.

Relatives decided to take the two younger boys, but to leave Denius and Amisson, who’s 14, to fend for themselves. They’ve been managing. Not very well, but they’re learning.

During the first few weeks we were discouraged to see how little Denius was willing or able to do for the household. CLM depends largely on members’ deciding to work hard with the advice and the assets that we offer them, but Denius seemed to be mostly sitting around.

When I started to press him, he admitted that physical exertion made him dizzy. The shock of losing his mother was combining with continued hunger to make him weak. I couldn’t do much about his sadness – the cure for that seems to a combination of time and Amisson, who is unswervingly playful – but I could help with the hunger. An American intern had just finished six months with us, and she left a large quantity of powdered protein drink (chocolate flavor) behind. We brought most of it to Denius and Amisson, and added a care package of some more conventional food that had been left over after six days of the new members’ enterprise training. Denius has been saying that he feels much better, and we see new energy in the work that he’s started to take on.

But he was a little panicked when I saw him Monday morning. Sunday night, the relatives who had taken the youngest boy, Bernardo, changed their mind. Bernardo is two, and had been getting sicker and sicker since his mother’s death. I suppose they didn’t feel as though they could take responsibility any more. So they brought him back to Denius and Amisson, along with a sack of his dirty clothes, and walked away.

Denius didn’t know what to do. It is hard enough for him to have to raise Amisson without their parents’ help. But Amisson clearly understands their situation, as much at least as he could be expected to, and he had made himself much more manageable than anyone could expect. Bernardo, especially a sick Bernardo, would be a different story. At the same time, Denius was clear: “I can’t just throw him away.” He was stuck, and he’d have to figure out a way to be father to the little boy.

When Denius and I first spoke on the phone, he was most worried about a high fever. “I put Bernardo to sleep in the middle of the bed, between Amisson and me, but every time I rubbed against him, it felt like fire against my skin.” I told him to start bathing Bernardo in cool water to see whether he could bring the temperature down while I was on my way.

By the time I arrived, the temperature was down, but Bernardo was lifeless. He was sitting in the middle of the bed – he would cry if Denius tried to make him lie down – but he could barely keep his eyes open. More striking was the terrible rash that covered his head. Blistering sores and cracked scabs were all over his scalp. Every once in a while Bernardo would make an effort to scratch the scabs, but mostly he just sat there.

So I had Denius wrap him up and get onto the back of my motorcycle, and we rushed to the PIH hospital. We had to wait for most of the morning. I asked Denius whether he had eaten anything, and he hadn’t. So I went out and got him a large plate of boiled plantain and meat sauce. The women who surrounded him, the only man in the line waiting with a child to see the pediatrician, seemed to enjoy watching him feed Bernardo as he ate.

They eventually saw a doctor, who gave them a seven-day course of liquid erythromycin and two large tubes of ointment for the rash. On the way home, we stopped by Mirebalais’s one grocery store, and bought some powdered milk and some instant oatmeal.

After I dropped them off in Trianon, I continued up the hill to Yawo, which is on the road leading west along the ridge from Fon Cheval. I wanted to see Elourdes. She’s a new CLM member whom I’ve written about before. (See: DifferentShapes.) I had visited her on Thursday and found her struggling with a painful burn on her right calf. She had taken a spill when riding on the back of a motorcycle. The muffler had landed on her leg. We had a tube of good ointment for burns in our office, so I brought it to her. Monday, I wanted to find out whether it was helping.

Her yard is generally a loud, busy place. She has nine children. One is a girl in her mid-teens with a child of her own. But Elourdes was sitting on her front porch, with four of five of the young children sitting listlessly around her. She, her husband, and I had a good talk. The ointment was apparently helping a lot, but they were more interested in the goats we had given her on Saturday. The husband wanted to know whether he was allowed to mark the goats, and we talked about the advantages of doing so.

He and Elourdes remained cheerful throughout our chat, as did their oldest boy, a youth in his late teens. The younger kids, whom I knew to be inclined to play, were distinctly cheerless.

The reason was obvious. It was late afternoon, and they had not yet had anything to eat. Elourdes has been in the program for a couple of months, but she has nothing like a steady income stream. She, her husband, and the oldest boy were able to joke about how one has to live with hunger when there is no food in the house, but the little kids were miserable. I pulled the son aside on my way back to my motorcycle, gave him some money, and asked him to go buy something they could feed his brothers and sisters. He thanked me, and I rode off.

On my way back down the hill towards Mirebalais, I stopped in Pòsab. I wanted to see Guilène, whom I wrote about in the piece that mentions Elourdes. I had particularly wanted to see her boy, Jovensonne. I had taken him to the hospital the week before, and I wanted to see whether his foot was healing.

The moment I saw him limping over to greet me, I knew he was doing well. The week before, he had been unable to walk because his foot had been pierced by a sharp tool in an accident that occurred while he was playing with his uncle, who is a small boy not much older than he is.

Jovensonne had a plate of rice in his hands, which was another good sign. He tried to get me to eat some of it, but when I wouldn’t he finished about two-thirds, then gave the rest to a hungry-looking child from a neighboring house.

He then went back to his play. He had taken a coconut leaf and stripped off the foliage, leaving only the woody, saddle-shaped stem. He had then tied a stick across the narrow end. He was sitting on the wide end, holding the cross-piece, and sliding around the yard on this improvised motorcycle, pretending to honk the horn just as he had when he sat in front of me on my motorcycle as I drove him home from the hospital the previous week. I could hardly have felt more encouraged. “He has a good body,” his mother explained. That’s a Haitian way of saying that someone tends to heal quickly.

As I think about these stories, I think about the fundamental challenge I face when I write about CLM. It is easy to talk about how worried I was about Denius and the difficulties he would face as de facto father to his two-year-old brother. It’s easy to focus on the sick feeling in my gut as I watch Elourdes’ young children, listless from hunger, and how I feel a little better when I’ve left some cash in their brother’s hands. It’s easy to talk about the fun I have playing with eight-year-old Jovensonne, who tells his widowed mother that he wants me to be his dad. But I think it’s important to remember that I am not the story, neither my frustrations nor my joys. Everything important about CLM centers on the extremely poor families we work with, the problems they overcome, and our case managers, whose creativity and devotion enable those families to transform their lives. The story of CLM is their story, and my situation as a close observer is a privilege that I hope I know how to appreciate.

A final note: Things may work out for Denius. When Bernardo’s father got word that his boy had been abandoned by the relatives who had said that they would raise him, he came and took him himself. I don’t know what his situation is financially, but he must be in a better position to raise a toddler than Denius is.

Denius is upset because the man apparently took the boy gracelessly. “He didn’t say anything nice to me about the way we took Bernardo to see a doctor and get the medicine he needs,” he complained. But he is also very relieved. He had started to worry that his hopes of returning to school this fall, after missing the last two years since his father’s death, would fall apart if he had a toddler on his hands.

Here, in any case, is a photo of Denius and Bernardo, taken during the day they spent as father and son:

Bernardo

Bebe Geffrard

Bebe Geffrard is from Viyèt, an extremely poor agricultural region in northern Boukankare, a county in central Haiti. When she and her family were selected for the CLM program, they were extremely poor by any standard. She was living with their eight children and eight grandchildren in a decaying hut. She provided for the family as best as she could by farming, but couldn’t keep up with all the mouths she had to feed. She had too little land of her own to work. She farmed additional land as a sharecropper, but the one-third to one-half of every harvest that she had to give to the landowner made it impossible to get ahead. Her grandchildren were not in school, and the whole family suffered from persistent hunger.

Because Bebe’s family was so large, she received a cow. She took great care of it, and it gave birth to a healthy calf. She took excellent care of the calf too, and by the time it was weaned and ready for sale, the mother had given birth again. Bebe plans on keeping this second one, a female, so she will eventually have a second calf-bearer. But she sold the first to buy the land that she’d previously worked as sharecropper. Now the whole harvest is hers. There’s more food to go around, and there’s milk as well, so the children are healthier than they’ve ever been.

She received two goats with her cow, because CLM members always start the program with two new assets. As they’ve produced young, she’s kept some, but has sold the males and some females as well. Her first sale enabled her to buy a horse, which is a big help with her farming, and now the horse is pregnant too. She also now has four mother goats, even though she has used further sales to invest in her farming, buying seed, fertilizer, and tools as she needs them.

She doesn’t do much in the way of small commerce. She doesn’t have time during the farming season. She does, however, sell from her harvest, and she uses income from her crop of pigeon peas each November to start commerce that she learned to manage from her case manager, a former Tikredi agent named Alancia Belony. She maintains the commerce until farming season returns in the spring.

Bebe’s life is different now. Her family eats well, the younger children are in school, and they live in a well-built house with a good tin roof. She made it larger than a typical CLM house by having her boys build it and using the money they would have received to buy extra roofing and nails. The older boys still live in the older hut, except when it’s raining. “They like to have a place of their own,” Bebe explains.

Bebe graduated from CLM in July 2012, and she and her family keep moving forward. Her third calf is on the way, and she already knows that she’ll use it to buy more land. She has her eye on a small plot down the hill from her home, along a small stream. The flowing water will allow her to irrigate, so she’ll be able to farm beans, her main cash crop much more reliably.

Bebe’s increased wealth is encouraging. But it’s not the best part of her story. What’s most encouraging about Bebe is the way she’s transformed herself into a strategic, forward-looking thinker. With CLM’s help, she’s both learned to plan shrewdly and acquired the assets she needs to make plans that can work. That transformation gives her good reason to hope for a brighter future for herself and her kids.

We are just starting work with the 361 new families that our team selected in southern Mibalè. I thought that a good way to introduce this new cycle would be to introduce a few of the families who have joined the program. I thought that would help show the various kinds of families we deal with.

Elourdes Joseph lives with her husband, nine children, and a granddaughter in a small house in Yawo, in the mountains the separate the Central Plateau from the plain that envelops Port au Prince.

No one has to tell her how difficult life is when you have that many children. She’s tried family planning, but she never felt comfortable with it. “It made me short of breath. I couldn’t walk up even the little hill next to my house. And it gave me back pain, too.” So she had one child after another, and could only shake her head when her oldest daughter, who is still a teenager, became pregnant and added another child to the household right as Elourdes was pregnant with her youngest son.

She and her husband have always struggled, and by enterprising management of minimal resources they have managed to stay afloat even as their family has grown. Nowhere is their enterprise clearer than in the story of their home.

For the first few years after her marriage, Elourdes lived with her husband in a series of make-shift arrangements: first in the homes of various friends and relatives, then in a tent on her father-in-law’s land. But very early on, her husband bought a tree for 20 gourds. Just a few years of growth and inflation enabled her to sell the tree for charcoal for 900 gourds. They needed 600 of those gourds for household expenses, but Elourdes invested the rest. “I didn’t want all the profit to melt away.”

So she bought a very small pig for 300 gourds, and cared for it until she could sell it for 2500. Then she sold it, and bought roofing material. By then, a local organization was cutting a new road in her neighborhood with a NGO-funded cash-for-work program. Her husband was able to earn enough money to cover the other expenses that building required.

But all that enterprise is not enough to support a family of twelve. Her husband suffers chronic back pain, so he can’t work very much, and they have little land and no livestock to build a livelihood with.

Like many new members, Elourdes is optimistic about the program but a little unclear. She says she wants to “move forward,” with the program’s help, but she not yet sure what that might mean.

One of the criteria for a family’s membership is that it includes a woman who is capable of working and who has at least one child dependent on her. Generally, that means a mother and her children or her child. Sometimes, we come across grandmothers raising their children’s children, or godmothers who have responsibility for a godchild. But in almost all cases, we are dealing with mothers, even if the children on their hands are not their own.

AFH’s cohort of CLM families has three exceptions, however. They are groups of siblings whose parents have passed away. Julienne Dorcé and her younger brother and sister live in Yawo, in a house that belongs to a childless aunt. The aunt moved out when she realized that her sister’s children need the house more than she does.

Julienne’s mother died about a year ago. The father had died long before that. The mother left the seven children, including an infant she had had with another man. That infant died shortly after their mother did, leaving just six. After the baby’s death, relatives took the three younger survivors, having decided that the older children would have a hard enough time taking care of themselves. So the three oldest now live together.

The two younger, Sorel and Maudeline, grew up in Port au Prince, with another aunt, because their mother could not feed them. One hears all sorts of horror stories about the many, many children in Haiti who are focred to grow up outside their parents’ homes. They are often little more than unpaid servants, subject to every form of abuse. But Sorel and Maudeline were lucky. Their aunt took good care of them, sending them to school when their mother could not do that much for the children who remained with her.

They had to return to Yawo and their mother after the earthquake of 2010 destroyed their aunt’s home in Port au Prince. The aunt came shortly afterwards with her children. But by then, both women were sick, and both eventually passed away. Sorel and Maudeline joined Julienne and their siblings in a house that belongs to one of the dead women’s sisters, and the aunt’s children, who are still quite young, moved in next door with another aunt, who is a single mother, and her kids. She joined the CLM program together with Julienne.

Saintanette Denval lives in Demare, a hilly agricultural area behind the important market in Labasti. She and her husband have two children, a girl about eight and a 16-month-old boy.

Demare is not really an area that one would expect to find as full as it is of families who qualify for the program. The land is rich. Sugarcane and corn grow well, and there’s plenty of forage for livestock. In addition, the market is right there. Residents can get their produce sold with very little difficulty.

But for the many landless and almost landless families who live in the neighborhood, Demare offers very little except the chance to earn about one-fourth of the minimum wage – the Haitian minimum wage – for a day of farm labor.

When CLM case manager Hilaire Nozan visited Saintanette in her home during the selection process, he was shocked by what he saw. Her baby was clearly starving. He was fourteen months old and lacked the strength even to lift up his head. Saintanette explains that she could see that the baby never ate anything, “But I didn’t know what to do.”

Hilaire knew he needed to act, so he arranged for the CLM driver to drive Saintanette and her boy to the Partners in Health hospital in Cange the very next day. Doctors there found the boy to be severely malnourished, and they admitted him for treatment. He was in such terrible condition that they had to keep him for almost two weeks, feeding him first intravenously and them with Partners in Health’s special fortified peanut butter.

The boy is fine now. And Saintanette couldn’t be more grateful. “If Hilaire hadn’t taken us to the hospital, my boy would not be here with me.

Guilène is a single mother of two, who lives in Pòsab, right along the national highway that runs south from Mirebalais to Port au Prince. She and her husband were struggling hard together. They had one child, and they started building a new home while Guilène was pregnant with their second.

He worked as a day laborer on a truck that would carry goods from Belladère, on the border with the Dominican Republic, to Port au Prince. One day, his driver took the dangerous unpaved route over the mountains, through Zoranjè to Titayen, so that he could avoid the customs office on the main road. While descending a steep hill, the truck’s brakes gave out. Both the driver and his workers died in the accident. Guilène was a widow, eight months pregnant with her little girl.

So she finished the house in the front of her mother’s yard. Her stepfather did much of the work that she couldn’t do herself. And she began to sell her furniture and her other household items in order to buy food to feed herself and her boy.

The March 8th graduation of 338 CLM members from Bay Tourib and north central Boukankare was an achievement our team was rightfully proud of. Here’s a blog that Mackenzie Keller, of Fonkoze’s staff, wrote about it: http://100millionideas.org/2013/03/07/women-the-backbone-of-society.

And here are her photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/101507663468736938297/CLMGraduationBayTourib?authkey=Gv1sRgCLiO0pTajfe5pwE.

But it merely marked the end of one assignment, not the end of the CLM team’s work. Fonkoze has charged its CLM team with eliminating extreme poverty across Haiti’s Central Plateau, and the only way to make meaningful progress towards achieving that goal is to keep working.

So on the Monday after the Friday graduation, work began on recruiting the next cohort of CLM families. Our team is charged with finding and enrolling 360 this time. THe group will be financed through a gift from Artists for Haiti. Graduation should take place towards the end of 2014. We’ve been in the field for the past couple of weeks.

I had very little to do with the work at the beginning. The team worried whether my presence too early in the process – my white, foreign presence – could complicate their work. Folks are already be inclined to imagine that someone is planning to do something for them when our team starts asking lots of questions about their neighborhood and its residents, and that suspicion makes good information harder to come by. My being around would only make their hard job harder.

But last week we began final verification, and that’s the point in the selection process at which I have to be involved. I’ve written about final verification before. (See: Final Verification.) It’s the last stage of our selection process. It’s when a member of the CLM management team, like me, visits a series of women whom CLM case managers have recommended for the program. Our role is to verify whether the prospective families really need CLM.

Much of this work is easy, especially with a group of very experienced case managers such as the ones on the Artists for Haiti team with me. They are very good at determining the situation of the women they speak with. The great majority of women they decide to recommend obviously deserve the help we can offer. Sometimes a quick look at the hungry small children hanging around their mother, who appears to be without any hope of feeding them, is all one needs to sign the form that will make it possible for us to offer a family such help as we can.

I think of Jésumène and her daughter Rosemène, her oldest child, both of whom I met last week. They live in the same straw shack. They have no land they could farm, and no resources to invest in small commerce. Jésumène’s husband left her to take up with another woman. Rosemène rejoined her when she left her husband because of his abuse. The women have eight younger children between them.

Their main means of support is Jésumène’s twenty-year-old son, her second child, who finds people who allow him to make charcoal for them out of trees that they own. He must give the landowner half the proceeds from the sale, but can give the other half to his mother. A sack of charcoal sells for about $5 in the countryside, so if he can get a couple of sacks out of the wood his neighbors offer him, he can give his mother about that much. Making charcoal takes several days, however, so they would not get that money more than about once a week. It’s doubtful that he can make charcoal even that often. And often the wood that he makes consists mainly of scraps. He may not always get even a full sack.

The kids surely scavenge some. It’s almost mango season, and there’s sugarcane these days too. And the family may receive occasional gifts from neighbors or relatives as well. The boy probably works in neighbors’ fields as well, which would earn him about $1.25 a day. But the picture as a whole for Jésumène and her children is very grim. It was not hard to decide to qualify both women for CLM.

There are borderline cases that are more difficult. One way to look at the decision that we need to make is to ask whether our Ti Kredi program could serve the family we are considering. It offers six months of very small loans and more coaching than our standard credit program does, and prepares women to enter the larger credit program.

So when I met Julienne, I had to give that question some thought. She’s currently only able to send two of her eight children to school, but she and her husband have a relatively decent two-room house and, more importantly, she has both a salt business with about $6 of capital in it and a donkey that she uses to carry the salt from the market where she buys it to the one she sells it at.

So she already has a small business, and she’s had the discipline and the acumen to keep her $6 intact for a while, though it hasn’t been able to grow. I considered referring her to Ti Kredi, figuring it could give her the tools to slowly build her business into something larger. But with her eight children to feed, and the pressure she’ll rightly feel to put more of them in school, I just couldn’t see it. Especially when I saw the handful of younger ones hanging around their front yard late in the afternoon looking very hungry. We come across other women whom I do refer to Ti Kredi. They might seem to have fewer resources than Julienne does. They have neither a business nor an asset as valuable as a donkey. But they have fewer children and fewer signs of hunger.

Another difficult case was Elène’s. She and her husband appear to be in their late sixties, but they have no idea how old they really are. Neither they nor any of their children have birth certificates, and their parents did not even teach them who was president when they were born, which is a standard way to approximately remember birth years in rural Haiti. They live in the front room of a two-room house. It’s a nice house, in good condition, though its roof of straw and palm seed pods probably leaks unless they invest a lot of time in keeping it in good repair. Their youngest child is a twenty-something man, who lives by himself in the back room. He’s not a dependent.

She and her husband wouldn’t come under consideration, but they have a severely handicapped granddaughter living with them. The girl moves the way I remember seeing children with muscular dystrophy move, though I am not competent to diagnose her real problem. Imagine a twelve-year-old girl with muscular dystrophy whose family has never talked to anyone who might know how to develop such capacities as she has. She mainly lies on the house’s dusty dirt floor, and playing by herself. Her mother, Elène’s daughter, left her in Elène’s hands, and the grandparents have no idea what to do for her beyond keeping her fed and as clean as they can.

Elène’s husband has a small yard around their home that he plants with plantains, corn, and millet. They also rent two small pieces of farmland that he works. So life is clearly very difficult for them, but they seem to be feeding themselves and investing in their long-term well being probably isn’t for us. It’s a hard call.

At times, final verification can feel hard. You wander from house to house, hearing the horrible stories of lives on the edge. One hears again and again of hunger, of lost or even absent opportunities, of violence. You are charged with deciding who, among very poor people, is poor enough to require CLM’s help. It feels hard.

But dwelling on its difficulty is a trap. You can’t pretend that such difficulty is meaningful in the face of the misery you encounter, especially since you wander around with the knowledge that soon, if not immediately, you team will be able to begin showing the families you select a path towards hope.

Jésumène Zidor graduated from CLM in June 2012. When she joined the program at the end of 2010, she was one of the poorest women we recruited. She was living with six children and two grandchildren in a straw shack in the upper end of Viyèt, a very poor agricultural area in north central Boucan Carré. Viyèt is all farmland, and the land is fertile, but its concentration in the hands of relatively few ensured that it would be fertile ground for CLM’s selection process, too. Viyèt, and its immediate vicinity, is home to around seventy members.

We measure poverty in various ways when we are selecting families for our program. We use Fonkoze’s poverty scorecard, a survey designed to evaluate poverty across a range of simple indicators. We don’t just look at how much money a family has, but how they live. What kind of house and what kind of land do they have? How many children? What sources of income? What other assets? On this two-page form, Jésumène and her family scored 11.5 out of 63.5. An average score is 31.8. New CLM members sometimes score as much as 20.

Three of those eleven points came on a question about water. Upper Viyèt has a capped spring that gives Jésumène’s family fairly easy access to pretty good water. It’s important, but it doesn’t do much to keep them fed or clothed. In the second section of the questionnaire, which investigates the family’s assets, they score only one point. While the family did own two chickens, they owned no other animals. They owned no farmland, so their only sources of income were day labor, sharecropping, and making charcoal out of scavenged deadwood.

The second survey we use is a food security index, which helps us assess a family’s nutritional situation. Jésumène’s family scored as badly as it possibly could, indicating that they were consistently missing meals, sometimes going for days at a time by foraging, without ever lighting a fire. She had had to send three of her children to live as servants in other families because she simply couldn’t feed them.

Most striking was their score on a third survey we used. It’s called the PPI, or Progress out of Poverty Index. It was developed by an international team from the Grameen Foundation to allow comparison between levels of poverty in different countries. On this ten-question form, Jésumène’s score was zero.

Jésumène described the situation straightforwardly: “We didn’t have food to eat. The children weren’t in school.”

Jésumène flourished in the program. Because she and her husband were so very poor, with so many children on their hands, they qualified for a special benefit. Thanks to a gift from Bothár, an Irish development organization, we were able to offer them a cow as one of their two types of income-generating assets.

The hardest challenge for those who receive cows is establishing a daily income. Cows take a long time to produce anything they can sell. But Jésumène managed her secondary asset — she received two goats — well, and also invested savings from her six-month stipend in poultry. In addition, she took some of that stipend and gave it to her husband to work with. He makes and sells chairs, having used his wife’s initial investment to start buying the materials he would need.

Jésumène loves CLM, and her reasoning is simple: “Tout sa yo di, se sa yo fè.” That means, “Everything they say they’ll do, they do.” She adds, “They helped us build a house. We had been getting soaked every time it rained, but now we can stay dry. We have a good house. We have livestock. We even have a latrine.”

But the progress that has meant most to her is just as simple. She says, “M gen yon ti kal tè pou m chita.” That means, “I have a little spot of land where I can sit down.” Before joining the program, she and her family were sleeping on straw mats on the floor of a hut that didn’t belong to them on land they didn’t own. She was renting, having to figure out each year where to find the money to pay a landowner who didn’t really want her on the land. She made a first down payment with sale of some of her goats’ offspring and completed payment for the land with the sale of her cow’s first calf.

When she was preparing to graduate from the program, she and her case manager considered how she could best move forward. She decided she’d start a small commerce, so they made a plan for her to join Fonkoze’s Ti Kredi after graduation. She would use the loan to start her commerce.

Ti Kredi is a six-month introduction to microcredit. Members take out three loans, the first for one month, the second for two months, and the third for three. The loan values increase as well, starting from 1000 gourds, or about $25 and growing to 2500. After graduating from Ti Kredi, members typically go on to standard solidarity group credit, where loans start at 3000 gourds and can grow to more than ten times that.

When Jésumène took out her first loan, she bought bread and sugar and sold them mainly from her home. But when she took out her second loan, she started to discover that simply adding to the amount of sugar and bread she would buy didn’t increase her profits because it didn’t increase her sale.

So she continued to sell bread and sugar, but put some of the capital aside. She went into the hills behind the area where she lived, and bought a sack or two of charcoal. She then carried the sacks down to the market downhill from Viyèt, where she sold them at a profit. She would only make about 50 gourds of profit on a sack. That’s about $1.25. But by turning the money over quickly, a couple of times each week, she was able to make a useful addition to her income. She took out her third loan, the one for 2500 gourds, and with her two businesses working well, she is paying it back easily.

But she is already thinking about her next step, and plans to change her business again. “I don’t have a horse yet, so I can’t carry enough charcoal to market to make that business grow.” She plans to buy a horse with proceeds from the sale of some of her small goats, but isn’t ready to just yet. Instead, she will become a voltijè. That means she’ll go to the market early in the morning and buy livestock as cheaply as she can. She won’t go home with it. She’ll turn it over again before she leaves. If she is disciplined and astute, and is willing to hike to several different markets, she will be able to make a good profit three or for times a week. It could turn into pretty good living.

Jésumène dreams of moving forward even farther with her life. She wants to keep investing in livestock and land. She has lots of kids and would like to leave them something when the time comes. And she has good reason to hope for further success. Her willingness to think creatively, flexibly about how to build her business is a promising sign.

Women end up in extreme poverty for a variety of reasons. Some suffer catastrophic expenses – often an illness or a death in the family – that send them spiraling backward. Some become responsible for a household before they are ready, whether through rape, seduction, or simply an imprudent decision. They just have no capacity to manage a home. Some have too many children too quickly, and so their families become too large for the means they have to support them with.

Orana Louis was born into her poverty. She joined CLM in August 2011, and her mother joined the program at the very same time. Orana was living with her husband and children by then, and her mother, Mirana, still had her youngest child living with her, so they qualified for the program separately, and joined it together.

Orana and her husband, Sòn, live with their five children in Fonpyejak, a hilly neighborhood on the outskirts of the central village of Bay Tourib. When we first met them, they were struggling to get by with farming. They had no assets to speak of except their land – just two chickens – and had very little money to invest in crops. They didn’t have a home of their own. The seven of them were living in a small house that belonged to one of Sòn’s brothers.

Their main sources of income were working in their neighbor’s fields and the little they could realize from the sale of bean crops that depended on beans they would borrow from a local peasant organization. Sòn would go to the Dominican Republic now and again to work for a few months, and when he returned to Haiti, he’d try to come with some extra money. Orana would then use it to buy plastic sandals in Tomond, which she’d then sell in the rural markets around Bay Tourib. Each time she would restart her business it would work for a while, but eventually collapse. Often the problem was pregnancy. She’d be unable to sell for a few months, and would feed her children with the money in the business until it disappeared. They were hungry most of the time.

When Orana joined CLM, she chose goats and small commerce as her two assets. She wanted commerce because she liked the possibilities it offered, even though her previous success had been very mixed.

At first she struggled. Her goats didn’t do very well. Of the three that we gave her, two died within a couple of months. The third eventually gave her two kids, which she was able to sell to make another investment. But if it had just been for her goats, she would still be very, very poor.

What really helped her was her commerce. Once she joined the program, it took off. Her success is mainly rooted in her willingness to work hard, to work smartly, and to work in concert with her husband, but her membership in CLM has been a big help as well. First, she received 1500 gourds of start-up capital. That’s almost $40. Second, she received six months of weekly cash stipends that helped her keep her family fed between crops so that she could leave her capital in her business. Third, she and Sòn received coaching that helped them connect the dots between her frequent pregnancies and their poverty. As a consequence, they made a commitment to family planning that allows her to focus on the kids she already has.

Her business really took off. She began sending Sòn to do her purchasing in Port au Prince, where she can buy more varied and less expensive merchandise. By buying well, and turning over her inventory regularly, she was able to set aside almost enough money to buy a mule. She just had to add proceeds from the sale of her goat’s first two kids to accumulate the 12,000 gourds she needed.

Buying the mule, in turn, made a big difference because it meant that she was no longer limited to the amount of merchandise she was able to carry on her head for the hour and a half it takes to get to Regalis or Zabriko, two of the three markets she’d sell in every week. In addition, it opened up a secondary business that eventually became very important to her: She would buy mule-loads of produce in Bay Tourib, and carry them to market in Tomond, a five-six hour hike away.

Then something happened which might have seemed like a disaster. On a trip to Port au Prince, Sòn lost 3500 gourds. He doesn’t know what happened to the money.

But it wasn’t a disaster. Orana just moved on. “I still have some sandals to sell. And I have a load of corn and beans to bring to market. Once I get that sold, I should have enough money to send Sòn to buy again. It was a big loss, but we’ll manage.”

Her well-considered sense that she and Sòn will manage, despite the loss, is a major victory for them. They have succeeded not just in building a better life, with children in school and eating well every day, but they have established a resiliency in the face of misfortune.

There will be bumps in their road forward. But Orana and Sòn have proven that they can face and overcome a pretty large one.

Mannwa is the first CLM region that I really became attached to. That attachment started with the difficulties the region presented.

It is, first of all, beautiful but challenging terrain. Haitians say, “Dèyè mòn gen mòn.” That means, “Beyond mountains there are mountains.” It’s a useful proverb, with numerous meanings. But in Mannwa the proverb is very literally true. It’s a ridge that extends northwest to southeast in north-central Boukankare County, rising up in the west from a mountain stream that separates it from Tit Montay, the county’s isolated western section, and reaching to the east, where it merges with the Balandri ridge that defines much of the border between Boukankare and Tomond, to the north. These two ridges mostly enclose a more-or-less triangular valley. But the valley is not shaped like a cup or a lens or a lemon wedge or like anything regular at all. It’s crisscrossed by a series of lower, but also steep ridges that likewise belong, broadly speaking, to Mannwa. So hiking around Mannwa means constant climbing and descending. It’s rough work.

But that wasn’t the real challenge that attached me to Mannwa. I quickly came to enjoy the hiking. I have to admit that I was very hard pressed any time I had to follow Martinière, our case manager there, along his whole route, because it meant walking farther than I can easily walk in a day and, therefore, walking too quickly as well. He would start his Wednesdays at our satellite base well to the west at Zaboka, in Tit Montay, and then had to visit eleven homes, scattered widely throughout the area. But any chance I had to hike through the region, visiting with only a few of the members, was always a pleasure.

So the primary challenge there was never the geography. It was selecting CLM members. Mannwa was one of the first places where I did final selection without help from other members of our program’s leadership – normally we go out in twos or threes to sweep through a neighborhood as quickly as we can – and when I finished selecting families who seemed qualified for the program, about half refused to join.

It is not that unusual for a family to decline our invitation to join CLM. There are always a few. Generally, they have heard rumors about terrible, crazy sounding things that will happen to them if they join. Sometimes, after families have been in the program for a while, they will tell us the rumors that they heard. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or to scream. A young woman from Mannwa once told me that she heard we would make her dance naked. Her husband said that he was told we’d kill him. A woman from Tit Montay once told a gathering that she had heard that we were going to take all the men to Port au Prince and replace them with others. She added that her husband wasn’t much to speak of, but that she was used to him and didn’t want to change.

But in Mannwa an unusually high number of families refused the program. I can’t say whether it was connected to the prominent role that I, the only non-Haitian on our staff, played in the process or if it had something to do with the peculiar character of the neighborhood and its residents. Though I try to be aware of the effects my foreignness can have on our work, I case reason to believe that, in this case, Mannwa’s peculiarity was party responsible. It is the first place we worked where we were able to discover only one community leader whom the poor could name as someone they could turn to for occasional help.

We had seven members in the area along and behind the main ridge, but had as many families who declined. We invested some extra time in trying to change their minds. I went door-to-door, asking each of the families to reconsider. I then organized a meeting for leaders in the community, at which one of our case managers and I talked to them about the program and what it could offer.

I was especially anxious about one young woman, Micheline, an 18-year-old mother, who had been abandoned by the father of her child. She and the child were living with an older sister, but our surveys showed that she owned almost nothing of her own and was going hungry much of the time. She was almost as poor as a mother of only one child could be. But her sister was refusing to let her join. I couldn’t convince her. Even after she appeared to agree to enter the program, she got cold feet at the last minute. She didn’t show up for the first week of enterprise training. When we had to replace her, we added Sorène, a very poor woman with multiple small daughters, who managed to join us by leaving the husband who did not want her to participate.

So although our data showed us that the Mannwa area had numerous families qualified for CLM, we were forced to start with just seven in Mannwa itself and four more in Deniza and Gapi, on the southern side of the ridge.

The most memorable moment from those first stages of work in Mannwa was the visit I made to Rose Marthe in her home. She had given birth to a daughter only days before I met her, so she could not get up from the sleeping mat she was resting on while we spoke. Haitian women tend not to go outside of the home for about the first week after giving birth. I sat on the ground in front of the house as I spoke to Rose Marthe – she had no furniture – and she answered my questions from the mat inside her small shack, where she lay.

When she looks back on the days when she joined CLM, Rose Marthe speaks in striking terms. “CLM has been very good for me. I was hungry. You could almost say I was naked. Now I eat well, and my kids eat well. They go to school. I have my animals and my commerce. Things are good.” The day I went to see her, six months after graduation, she was unhappy because she couldn’t feed me. It wasn’t that she didn’t have food in the house. She knows, however, that I am a vegetarian and she and her daughter had already prepared their meal with goat meat. It wasn’t a holiday. That’s just how she eats now.

Her life had always been difficult. She was born in Regalis, a market town in southwestern Hinche. When she was a young girl, her parents sent her to live with an aunt because they couldn’t afford to keep her fed. She spent two years with the aunt, travelling between Gonaïves and Okap, helping her aunt manage her business.

She left the aunt when she had had enough of her abuse, and she returned to Regalis. “She beat me too much.” But she didn’t stay long. She went as a teenager to Pétion-Ville, and found a job as a housekeeper, where she spent eight years working in the same woman’s house. She was finally forced to leave when she became pregnant with the woman’s brother’s child. “He came to the house all the time, and started to like me. But when I got pregnant, I had to leave.”

She went back to Regalis and started to raise her child. She couldn’t do it alone, so she hooked up with a man. The boy was about six years old when she got pregnant again. Her second child’s father abandoned her before the next boy was born, but by that time she had gotten together with Sepavre.

His real name is Julius Vil, but you won’t find him in Mannwa by asking for Julius. There’s a lot to be said about nicknames in Haiti, especially in rural Haiti. “//Se pa vre//” means, “It’s not true.” I have no idea how that becomes someone’s name. But that’s what everyone who knows Julius calls him.

Sepavre was already married at the time, but Rose Marthe was willing to be a second wife because Sepavre would help her raise the child she was pregnant with when they met. Her first child died during that second pregnancy, and Sepavre buried the boy and organized the funeral.

So Rose Marthe and Sepavre started their life together. She lived in a small straw shack, with her infant boy and a little girl, his daughter from a previous relationship. The shack was just a few hundred yards uphill from his other wife’s house. Sepavre would split time between them.

He was very hard working, but most of the assets he worked with belonged to his other wife. Rose Marthe had very little she could give him to work with, so he had very little he could bring her in return. They got on well together, but as they had more children, their poverty only deepened. She would work as a day laborer in wealthier neighbors’ fields to earn a little cash. The only way she and Sepavre could plant their own fields was to borrow the beans, repaying them with interest when the harvest came in. The interest rate would vary seasonally, but could range as high as 100%.

That’s when CLM came to Mannwa. Rose Marthe now credits CLM for very much improving her life, but her path through the program was not easy. With a newborn in her hands as we got started, she had no way to begin with a small commerce. So the two assets she chose were goats and a pig.

Goat rearing went well for her from the start. We gave her two goats, and she bought herself a third with proceeds from a savings club that she joined with fellow CLM members. Wòch Djèp, the western corner of Mannwa where she lives, is good country to raise goats in. There is plenty of forage, so they’re likely to do well as long as you can keep them out of your neighbors’ fields, which is something that Rose Marthe and Sepavre were very careful to do. Six months after graduation, Rose Marthe had eight goats, even though she had sold several in order to make other investments.

Pig rearing was another story. Rose Marthe joined CLM just as an epidemic of Teschen disease, an incurable and usually fatal pig disease, was sweeping through Haiti’s Central Plateau. Her pig caught the disease, and died.

She was determined, though. She raised what she could from sale of the meat, added some of the money she saved from her weekly food stipend, and bought a second pig.

This second one was just a piglet. It would have taken a lot of time and energy for it to generate a return. But pig rearing, though risky, can return a very high profit. So she and her case manager decided to give it another try. When the second pig died, Rose Marthe wept.

So she turned her focus towards the goats, but also made an important change in the way she farmed. She bought the beans that she needed for planting with cash from her savings. That meant the whole harvest was hers. She and her children would have plenty to eat, she would keep some to plant, and she’d still have something to sell. She added some of her savings to the proceeds from her first cash-based harvest, and was able to begin a small commerce. She’d buy produce – beans or corn, usually – in a either Zaboka or Regalis, remote mountain markets where prices are low, and then she and Sepavre would carry sacks on their heads to other less rural markets where they could be sold at a profit. It might mean hiking four or five hours with their load, but the money was good.

She finally was able to earn enough that she was able to use some of her profits, together with proceeds for the sale of a couple of goats, to buy a mule. It cost 11,500 gourds, or about $275, but it can carry much more than she can, so it has enabled her business to grow even more. In addition, she was able to set aside enough beans that she now lends them to neighbors at a profit.

So economically, even though she has struggled, Rose Marthe has succeeded wonderfully. But she almost lost everything she had midway through her experience in the program when she came down with cholera.

Under the best of circumstances, cholera is dangerous, but when you live in a remote area such as Wòch Djèp, the danger is much greater. Rose Marthe shouldn’t have been vulnerable to cholera. She knew better. Her case manager taught her about cholera every week. She learned about the importance of washing her hands. CLM gave her a water filter. And we helped her build a latrine in her yard. But she was probably careless while snacking in a market. None of the other members of her household caught the disease, but another CLM member who lives nearby and walks to market with her did.

Rose Marthe tells the story: “I started to feel sick and to vomit early in the day. I had diarrhea, too.” Her neighbor, Edres, is a Partners in Health extension agent, so he had some medication on hand. “I drank what I could, but things got worse and worse. By the time my husband knew I was sick, I was too far gone to make any decisions.”

Partners in Health has a free cholera center in Boukankare, a two-three hour walk from their home, but Sepavre and their neighbors carried her to a private center in Zaboka, instead. It was no closer, and was expensive, but Sepavre is from Zaboka, and he wanted her to be near family. He would need to stay with the kids, but didn’t want her to be at the clinic by herself.

I happened to be in Zaboka the day after she was brought to the clinic, and even with a day of intravenous fluid in her, she looked bad. But as dangerous as cholera is, it appears to be relatively easy to cure, and Rose Marthe pulled through without lingering effects.

It takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to hike from Rose Marthe’s place east to the closest CLM member, Magalie. About the same distance east of Magalie’s house is a separate, north-running ridge. The area from Magalie’s house to this second ridge is called Lalyann. On the southern side of that ridge, close to where you begin a steep climb up to Mannwa, lives Omène. Chrismène lives at the ridge’s northern tip, just when it begins to descend into a narrow ravine.

When we met Chrismène during the member selection process, she told us that her husband, Elgué Jean Pierre, had abandoned her to seek his fortune in the Dominican Republic. Chrismène was just 23 when she joined CLM, with an oldest daughter who must have been eight or nine. At the time, she had little with which to keep her children even minimally fed: just a small plot of land that she would farm, and two chickens.

Her original Poverty Scorecard is confusing. The Poverty Scorecard is the longer, more detailed of the two surveys we use as part of the selection process. Together, they collect a range of information that helps us judge a family’s standard of living. Chrismène’s Scorecard reports her, on one hand, as having a partner who would work the land and was responsible for more than half of the household income. It also says, on the other, that he had left her and gone to the Dominican Republic.

Her other form, the Food Security Survey was much clearer. She scored as badly as one could have. She and her children were regularly going hungry, depending on her husband’s family for an occasional handout to keep themselves going.

But from her first entry into the program, Chrismène flourished. She took excellent care of her animals, and they multiplied. She invested cash that she saved from her stipend in her farming, and was rewarded with strong harvests. And she worked quickly and with discipline to take advantage of the materials the program made available for her to repair her home and build a latrine.

We were at first surprised to see how quickly she was able to get her house built. Home repair is one of the areas in which we tend to see a big difference between the women who live with supportive partners and those who are single. This is because there is a lot we insist that members do towards building their own home, things more easily done with a husband’s help. Though we provide roofing material and nails, along with cement for latrines, members must provide all the lumber, sand, rocks, and mud that construction requires.

Chrismène is a small woman, and her children are still too young to help her. When the program started, she didn’t yet own a pack animal. Though she could help get the building materials to her home, she would need someone to do the heavier lifting. Getting building materials from Kafou Jòj, the nearest approach a loaded truck could make, up the slope to Mannwa, and then back down the other side to Lalyann would be no joke. And with Elgué in the Dominican Republic, we were not sure how she’d manage.

It turned out not to be a problem. Plentiful help came from what at first seemed a surprising source. Omène is a slightly older woman, and is married to Elga Jean Pierre, who had been introduced to us by Omène and Chrismène as Elgué’s twin brother. We were continually impressed by his willingness to come to his sister-in-law’s aide. He helped her collect the lumber she’d need to build her house, to get her materials to Lalyann from Kafou Jòj, to work in her fields, and to manage her animals.

It also turned out to be less surprising than we had thought. One day, Chrismène’s case manager, Martinière, was passing through the neighborhood, and went by a meeting that Edres was holding for all the mothers in the area. Both Chrismène and Omène were there, and one of their neighbors, looking at how well they seemed to be doing since entering the program, remarked that Elga’s wives were looking good. Martinière looked at the two women and they looked at him. The three of them could only laugh.

Elgué never went to the Dominican Republic. He is, in fact, Chrismène’s son. Her husband is actually Elga, the same man who is husband to Omène. The women explained that they had been afraid to tell us the truth, worried that we would accept only one of the two wives into the program. So they conspired to deceive us – not that they needed to – and they succeeded for a while.

Elga and Chrismène

The real Elgué, Chrismène’s son, on the right. On the left is Benole, Omène’s son and Elgué’s brother.

In French, a “matelot” is a sailor. The word appears to be connected to the word for mattress. Two sailors would share one hammock by sleeping at different times. The shared sleeping arrangement turned into a name for the class of sailors themselves.

The Creole word “matlòt” is most likely derived from a feminine version of the French, but its meaning is somewhat different. Matlòt are woman like Chrismène and Omène, who share the same husband.

It’s not an unusual arrangement in rural Haiti. We regularly come across situations in which men have two or three wives. They may be married legally to one of them. With or without a legal marriage, community members may recognize one of the women as the madanm marye, or the real wife. In Elga’s case, Omène is the madanm marye. But the men are not necessarily legally married to any of them. Sepavre is married neither to Rose Marthe, nor to the other woman who lives nearby. In fact, he left the other woman a few months after Rose Marthe graduated, quickly taking up with a new second wife. Sometimes the men have reasonably stable relations with all.

And it is, perhaps, not surprising that such families are very well represented in CLM. Men who establish two or more households are bound to have more trouble supporting their wives and kids. Both their harvests and whatever cash they might earn have to be spread around more thinly. Omène and Chrismène are two of the more fortunate examples of a phenomenon we see all the time: Polygamy is a rich source of extreme poverty.

Chrismène also had more than Elga to aide her. She also received help from her older sister, Joceline, who is also a CLM member, but who lives with her husband in another part of Boucan Carré. The sister returned to Lalyann while Chrismène was building the house to help collect the stones and the mud that construction would require.

Chrismène wasn’t born in Lalyann, but in Pidem, a small, hilly region of western Boucan Carré, close to the river that cuts the commune almost in half. Her parents died when she was a little girl. By then, the family’s poverty had forced them to send Joceline away to live as a domestic servant in Elga’s parents’ home. When the parents died, Joceline asked Elga’s family to take her little sister in as well, and they agreed to do so. Chrismène moved into their home when she was about seven or eight years old.

Elga started flirting with Chrismène just a few years later. “I wasn’t quite ten,” she explains. Within a few years, she was pregnant with their first child. She could only have been thirteen or fourteen. That first child died, but they had their second only about a year later. Not long after that, Elga started dating Omène, whom he eventually married. He and Omène have five children together, and he has three surviving children with Chrismène. Though Elga and the two women are clear as to who his legal wife is, he says he is unswerving in his commitment to Chrismène. “I could never abandon her, “ he says, “I’ve made her suffer too much.”

Both women transformed their lives during eighteen months of the program. When they were evaluated for graduation in late June 2012, both women scored perfect 10s, meeting or exceeding all graduation criteria. They could have graduated with scores as low as seven. Omène, the less wealthy of the two, had succeeded in accumulating assets worth over 18,000 gourds – or about $440. That’s more than three times the assets that are minimally required for graduation. Chrismène had over 21,000 gourds’ worth – more than $520 – mostly in livestock. She had turned the two goats that we has given her into seven; she had bought a horse that had already given her a colt; she had a small pig and five chickens; and was continually earning new income by farming the small plot that was hers. A few months after graduating, she sold three goats, a live pig, some pork meat, and part of a crop of beans to buy a cow.

Her success was the source of some jealousy. Omène was not able to buy a horse until shortly after she graduated, and she seemed to resent the fact that Chrismène was ahead of her. But she didn’t let her resentment amount to anything. In general, she remains the same woman who joined in the conspiracy about her husband that they thought would be necessary for both her and her matlòt, Chrismène, to be accepted into CLM.

Elga and Omène

Both Omène and Chrismène are facing hardship six months after graduating from CLM. Chrismène woke up one morning to find that her horse had died. Fortunately its colt is old enough to survive, but it is a very big loss. In Omène’s case, the mother horse is fine, but its first colt was stillborn.

But both are confident that they can overcome their difficulties. And they have reason to feel confident. They are resilient now, capable of managing the steps backwards that they’ll face now and again. Chrismène has her cow, her colt, and three large female goats. Two of the three have kids, and the third is pregnant. Though food is not right now as plentiful in her home as has been recently – she’s reached the last weeks before her large millet harvest – she still has plenty of yams and pigeon peas to ensure that she and her children manage well enough. They aren’t hungry. Omène has eight goats and her horse, and a small field of plantain trees right next to her house. They both have chickens that they use for eggs, meat, or can sell if they need a little cash.

Most importantly, all three women – Chrismène, Omène, and Rose Marthe – are truly graduates in the sense that they have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty and are now leading different, sustainable, and still-improving lives. Talking with them, one senses their optimism. One feels that they each have plans and the capacity to carry their plans out.