Raynold, second from right, with two little brothers and his older cousin, Bonel

I’ve written about Raynold before. He’s the teenage son of a CLM member from Anba So, a secluded neighborhood of Boukantis. He suffers from scoliosis, a sometimes-painful curvature of his spine that severely limits his activity. It means he can’t carry loads, he can’t comfortably walk the distances that rural life demands, and he sometimes even has trouble breathing. (See: Additional Services.)

Working with someone like him, who has very special challenges, takes much more than a case manager’s weekly visits can accomplish. As Raynold makes his own slow progress, it’s been encouraging to see how a network of powerful and committed organizations are working together to support him along his way.

We first took him to see an orthopedist in Canje, the principal Partners in Health hospital. That first doctor was able to identify the problem, but he couldn’t do much more. He merely pointed out that it would be important for us to bring Raynold for regular check-ups because the scoliosis could get worse as Raynold grows, the spine not just bending but also twisting, and it could lead to further, more serious problems down the road.

But that doctor was not himself the last word in what Partners in Health could offer. Dr. Andrée Leroy, a Haitian-American back specialist, is on staff at their hospital in St. Marc, on the coast to the west of the region CLM works in. We brought Raynold to see her in late January. She spent a couple of hours with us, calling a pediatrician and another specialist to help her check him over thoroughly.

We learned a couple of things. Raynold’s scoliosis curves to the left, which is more rare than the right-curving sort. It’s probably congenital and goes together with his unusually short stature. There’s a standard way of measuring the severity of a curvature, and Raynold’s is serious enough that he would be a candidate for surgery if he were in the States.

But he’s not in the States. We don’t know of anyone in Haiti capable of what would be, Dr. Leroy said, a very difficult operation. And it’s an operation with a long and difficult recovery, so that even if we could send Raynold to the States for the operation — and maybe we could — we might have to keep him there for as much as a year while he was healing. We couldn’t do anything of the sort without interrupting his life with very unpredictable consequences. So Dr. Leroy proposed a less invasive approach. It has three parts: A brace, physical therapy, and an orthopedic mattress.

Unfortunately, Partners in Health doesn’t do bracing. On the other hand, Fonkoze has another partner that does. Fonkoze has worked closely with BRAC since we decided to establish CLM. The program is, in fact, a Haitian adaptation of an approach that BRAC originally developed in Bangladesh. Shortly after the earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, BRAC established a limb and bracing center in Pétion-Ville. We contacted BRAC’s Haiti office and within days had arranged for Raynold and his mother to spend four days at the center while they take his measure, make the brace, and then ensure its proper fit.

While he was in Pétion-Ville, I arranged some extra work for him. Raynold has never been to school for a full year. It was only in the day and a half that he spent in our office so we could bring him to St. Marc that he learned to write his name. He showed that he really wanted to learn. So I asked Mackenson, a high school student who lives near me in Kaglo goes to school near the BRAC center, to spend a couple of hours a day with Raynold, starting to teach him to read. They took a literacy reader that was written by Laurence, Fonkoze’s Director of Education, and worked really hard for those three days. Raynold has already made a good start, and continues to work with his cousin Bonel, at home.

That’s not Bonel’s only role in Raynold’s story. Ten days after he got the brace, we took Raynold back to Cange to meet with Megan Brock, the American physiotherapist on staff there. By then, Raynold was already reporting that he was pain-free. As long as he has the brace on, he doesn’t feel back pain anymore.

Megan thought it would be useful for Raynold to have a family member with him who could help ensure he would stick with the program. It would have to be someone he’s comfortable with, but someone who’s a little older too, someone with the authority to push him a little. He chose Bonel. Raynold’s the oldest of his mother’s ten surviving kids. They live next door to his aunt and uncle, Bonel’s parents, who also have ten kids. It’s quite a collection.

//Raynold with a sample of siblings and cousins. A couple of aunts squeezed themselves into the photo as well.//

Bonel is eighteen, three years older than Raynold, and he’s his closest friend. Bonel’s been to school for several years, and can both read and write. And it turns out that he’s willing to help out a lot. He took a day off from school to go to Cange with us. Megan spent the whole morning with us, developing a program for Raynold and teaching him and Bonel how to do the exercises. They are now doing the exercises regularly in Raynold’s home.

We haven’t yet looked at whether we’ll be able to help Raynold’s family acquire an orthopedic mattress. For the time being, they would yet have a space to put one in. His mother, Antonia, is only just beginning to organize herself to build the new house we’re helping her construct. We provide roofing material and nails, and we pay the people who build up the walls and put on the roof, but she’s responsible for the lumber. She’s started to collect it, but she’s not finished yet. Unfortunately, her husband’s not much help. Their current house isn’t dry enough to protect an expensive mattress. We’ll have to wait and see.

For now, we’re just excited to see the progress Raynold’s made. And it’s been especially encouraging to see how a larger community of people, each of whom had something unique to offer — from Dr. Leroy and Megan to Mackenson and Bonel. Each has been willing and able to contribute importantly to one young boy’s well being. I don’t know what will become of Raynold, but his life is already better than it once was.

Zaboka is the eastern edge of Tit Montayn, the most remote section of Boukankare county. Four case managers work there. It’s four hours from where they can drive to on their motorcycles, through a narrow pass that’s split by a waterfall. Five more case managers work in the western part of Tit Montayn, but they stay for three weeks at a time at a residence we established in the area. The four guys who work in Zaboka have to hike up each Sunday and head back down each Wednesday because they work Thursdays in another part of the county. It’s hard.

One Sunday early last March, Martinière arrived in Zaboka to find one of his CLM members in a panic. Her name is Dorsilia, and she had been waiting for him since early in the day. One of her fellow CLM members was dying, and nobody wanted to do anything about it. Could he help?

He ran off with her, and she led him to Ytelène. Ytelène had a very high fever and was terribly weak. So were her two younger siblings, her brother Dieulonèt, who lives with her, and their sister, Dieudamène, who lives with their parents, next door. The case managers hadn’t been in Zaboka the previous week. They had all been in another part of Boukankare, at a training session for members there. Apparently, Ytelène and the others had been deteriorating for days.

Martinière asked her family why they hadn’t led them to the hospital, and they let him know that she didn’t have the kind of sickness a hospital could treat. They had spoken to local healers, who told them she was going to die. They couldn’t see the point in carrying her all the way down the mountain just to have to carry her back up for burial. Martinière made a lot of noise, but he couldn’t convince the family to take responsibility to get the three of them the care he felt they needed. They were, they said, “used to death.”

They are an unusual family. The three of them were raised as siblings. I’ve referred to them as brother and sisters. There are two younger children as well. But their birth mothers and fathers are not the same. They all lost their mothers in infancy, and were brought to Clemancia. She has never given birth to a child, but is adoptive mother to all five. She says that she chews on cottonseeds, and that it makes her lactate. She can thus nurse babies who are not her own.

Clemancia with her five kids and Ytelène’s boy. Ytelène is on the far left. Dielonet and Dieudamène are on the right.

When Martinière couldn’t get Ytelène’s family to take things seriously, he thought of the CLM team instead. He ran up a ridge to get a telephone signal, and called the CLM driver, Wilfaut, who was at home in Léogâne, about four hours away, spending a rare free Sunday with his family. Wilfaut got in his truck and started driving. He would meet them at the end of the road that cuts through Boukankare, and this would cut a final hour out of their hike to the hospital.

Martinière then went back down the hill into Zaboka, grabbed a stretcher from a local Partners in Health extension worker’s house, unfolded it in front of Ytelène’s home, and recruited a CLM member’s husband to help him carry Ytelène down to the hospital in central Boukankare. By then, Clemancia’s husband, Sourit, had agreed to carry the young boy, Dieulonet, down the hill on his back. He would walk down with a neighbor, another CLM member’s husband, and they’d take turns carrying the boy. Sourit, who is Ytelène’s natural father, would not carry her. As they were leaving Zaboka, word finally got to Dieudamène’s father that she was sick. He lives in another part of the county, but he came running to carry his own little girl to another hospital closer to where he lives.

Ytelène and Dieulonet were in terrible shape when they got to the Partners in Health hospital in the center of Boukankare. They found a bed for Dieulonet in the maternity ward. Eventually they found one for Ytelène someplace else. Having gotten the two of them settled into beds, Martinière gave Dorsilia and Clemancia some money. They had come down the mountain to attend to Ytelène and Dieulonet at the hospital. They would need to buy themselves something to eat. Then he hiked back up to Zaboka so he’d be able to work with the rest of the CLM members up there the next day.

When he got back to Zaboka, it was long past dark. He met with a group of laborers relaxing after a hard day’s work in the field. They said that they hoped it would be as easy for him to carry Ytelène back up the hill as it was to carry her down. They added that it had been a long time since they’d had coffee and bread. That’s typical fare for a rural wake.

But Ytelène didn’t die. Neither did Dieulonet. It’s a year later, and we just evaluated Ytelène’s progress as a CLM member. We evaluated all members at the 12-month point using the same survey that determines whether they’ll graduate from the program in 18 months. It helps us see who will need extra support to finish the program well.

Ytelène has flourished. She and Dieulonet live in a nice little tin-roofed house, with her two kids. She has two goats, a pig, a small cow, and a range of barnyard fowl. She’s worked especially hard buying beans by the sack from the farmers around her, and selling them at a profit. Martinière also got her a job at the local preschool. She herself made it through sixth grade. So she has a small but steady income she can earn on the side.

She herself credits CLM, especially Martinière. “If it wasn’t for the CLM team,” she says, “I wouldn’t be here. Neither would the kids. I would be dead. So would Dieulonet, and so would Dieudamène. I never imagined that the CLM team would do that much for me. When Martinière stood up in the hospital [to get me a bed], it was a really big deal. Since then, my family sees me as someone who really matters.”

She has a big dream, too. She’d “like for CLM to cover all of Haiti so that everyone will know just what CLM is.”

Looking at Ytelène’s evaluation form, seeing how far she’s come, it’s hard to imagine that her friends, family, and neighbors were ready to leave her for dead. It’s even harder to imagine when one meets her. She seems to have so many possibilities in front of her now. She works so hard and so effectively, managing her resources efficiently and energetically. Thanks to Dorsilia and Martinière, she has that chance.

Martinière, the hero of this story.

Ilrick Louis-Fils lives in Bento, the eastern corner of a narrow plateau that stretches along the border between Tomonn and Boukankare, from where Mòn Dega rises above the Boukankare River in Domon, across Nan Mango and Balandri, until it descends again towards the Tomonn River below Opyèg. She and her two children have been CLM members for over a year, since they were selected as part of the major scale-up at the end of 2010.

Most new CLM members live in isolation before the program finds them. If there are other development initiatives in the area they live in, those initiatives pass them by. One characteristic of the extremely poor is an inability to nose their way into the front of a line. Their neighbors are much more likely than they are to receive any advantages that local institutions can offer. CLM members are generally forgotten. We often find that their neighbors fail even to mention their existence.

But Ilrick is an exception. Even before CLM started working with her, she was receiving accompaniment from a field agent who works for Zanmi Lasante — or Partners in Health — the Haitian NGO that serves as the representative of the Ministry of Health in Central Haiti. It’s the organization made famous by Dr. Paul Farmer.

Zanmi Lasante (ZL) and Fonkoze have been close collaborators for years. Two of the ZL hospitals have Fonkoze branches right on their grounds. Farmer once explained the partnership clearly. He was tired, he said, of watching people recover from illness only to have them suffer from poverty that medicines alone cannot cure. Good public health requires more than just medical treatment. It takes economic development, too, and that’s something he knew that Fonkoze could provide.

Since CLM was launched for the extremely poor, that partnership has only deepened. ZL now provides free care for all CLM member families and — maybe more importantly — works closely with CLM staff to help members overcome their social and psychological barriers to access to care. Individual, life-saving examples of this special teamwork are too numerous to list.

ZL was serving Ilrick almost a year before CLM found her. She has AIDS, and needs medication daily. ZL long discovered that they could not count on poor, rural victims of AIDS and tuberculosis to use their medications correctly, so rather than simply giving them medications in large quantities, they have field workers who visit them frequently to provide their dose and ensure that they take it. Ilrick has an ZL agent who visits her almost every day.

But that accompaniment was not the end of Ilrick’s problems. “I used to have to beg for something to feed my children every day,” she explains. “I had nothing. We didn’t even have a dry place to sleep at night.”

That’s where CLM could help. Ilrick chose goat-rearing and small commerce as her two enterprises, and she’s had trouble with both, but has been able to overcome that trouble and is moving forward.

The program gave her three goats, and now she has four. She would have more, but two of them miscarried their first pregnancies. They are now in good health, and both are pregnant again.

Her commerce is a more difficult but also a happier story. Shortly after she was selected for the program, she became sick enough that she could not sell. When her health improved, she got started, but she didn’t think she could manage the whole investment we were offering her. We normally help members who choose commerce start with 1500 gourds (about $37.50) of merchandise. Ilrick asked her case manager to deposit 500 gourds in her savings account and let her start with only 1000 gourds.

She worked as hard as her strength would allow her, and began to make profit. She would sell cookies, crackers, and rum from a small basket in front of her house. She is right on the main path that leads to the large market in Nan Mango, so plenty of people come by regularly. She economized as much as possible so that she could put some of her profit aside.

The big change came when her accumulated profits, together with the 500 gourds she had already set aside, enabled her to buy a small horse. From that point, she could make a weekly trip down to Domon, where she can buy run cheaply by the gallon. She can now make more than six hundred gourds each week from the sales.

CLM helped her put a good tin roof on her wooden house, so now she is ready for the rainy season, too.

A lot has changed for Ilrick. “Before, when I had nothing, I couldn’t even get people to lend me something to help me get by,” she says. “Now they see my goats and my horse, and they’re happy to make a small loan if I’m short on cash. They know I’ll have the money to pay it back.”

She has come a long way, and now she’s looking towards her next step. She’s like to buy a cow. In addition to the milk and the calves it can provide, it will serve as an insurance policy. It will give her a large asset that she can sell if she has a dire need.

After that, there’s no telling how far she and her children will be able to go. Thanks to Zanmi Lasante and CLM, her future can be bright.

Perrona in front of the shack they’re in until their house is ready.

Perrona lives with her husband Soiye and their two small boys in Nan Joumou, a sparsely populated area behind the Mannwa ridge that overlooks Boukankare from the north. The hills that cut through Nan Joumou and areas around it — the whole valley between Mannwa and Bay Tourib, in Tomonn — aren’t high, but they are steep, and the valleys between them are narrow. The area is thus pretty remote.

She was selected to be part of the large group of women who joined the program at the end of 2010, and she was in the program briefly. But she could never make a firm decision to stick to it. One week she would tell her case manager, Martinière, that she wanted to be a member. The next week, she would tell him that she had decided not to after all. I eventually went to speak to her and her husband, looking for a final decision, but I found only her, and she said that they had decided to “take a little break” from the program. When I told her that we couldn’t offer her “a little break,” she let me know that she had decided simply to leave it. She returned her membership card and her “pink notebook,” the register that Martinière used as a weekly record of his work with her.

Within a couple of months, however, Soiye sought me out as I was hiking around Mannwa. He let us know that they had decided to join the program after all. His older sister and Perrona’s mother were both starting to flourish as members, and he and his wife were ready to take their chances, too.

I had to tell him that I was sorry, but that we had completed selection in the area, that we had offered them as many chances as we could, but that Martinière’s members in Mannwa were already well into the program, and we couldn’t offer them a chance to join at that time.

What’s worse: CLM selection works neighborhood by neighborhood. We go through each area only once. That’s why we work so hard to avoid missing anyone. Generally, if we miss them once we probably have missed them forever. Normally, Perona and Soiye would have lost their one chance, and lost it permanently.

But they got lucky. Nan Joumou is on the very northern edge of the region we had covered in late 2010, and by the next summer, we were selecting new members in a neighborhood just a little farther north. Nan Joumou had never really fit conveniently into Martinière’s territory in Mannwa. It had been a difficult hike for him to get down to Perrona’s house and back up to Mannwa each week at the end of his long trek from Zaboka across Mannwa, through Gapi, to Viyèt. It wouldn’t be any easier for the new case manager, Titon. He would have to hike southwest, across a couple of ridges and valleys, from Gwo Monte, in the alley between Mannwa and Balandri. The house is almost 45 minutes from the nearest members Titon serves. But I hiked to Nan Joumou myself to invite Perrona to rejoin the program, and she and Soiye didn’t hide their excitement. They’ve now been in the program for just over six months. They’re facing challenges, but making good progress as well.

The two enterprises that Perrona chose to start were goat rearing and pig rearing. Each has had its problems. They received two good-looking female goats, but one died of anthrax shortly after they got it. Thanks to their prompt attention, they were able to prevent the disease from spreading to the surviving goat. But it wouldn’t get pregnant. Eventually, Soiye had to sell it, and buy another. This new goat is now almost ready to give birth for the first time. We haven’t yet gotten them their pig at all. The epidemic of Teschen disease tearing through Central Haiti is discouraging. Pigs are dying in such numbers that we’re hesitant to take the risk.

But these problems, which could be blocking their progress, have failed to really set them back because it has turned out that they have a real talent for poultry rearing. They did not choose to receive poultry from CLM, but have used all the possibilities that the program has offered them to buy birds on their own: chickens, ducks, and turkeys. They saved part of their weekly food stipend during the six months we offered it, and used it to buy birds. They used the transportation stipend that Perrona has received at each of our training sessions, and used it to buy birds. They even bought some birds that had nothing directly to do with CLM. Soiye explained: “The program didn’t give us everything that’s here. But everything you see is ours. The program just asks us to do our part.”

Now that they’re comfortable with their place in CLM, they’re also candid about both the things that convinced them to leave the program and the one factor that convinced them to come back. “People who weren’t chosen for the program don’t want you to make any progress,” Perrona said. “They told me that I could die. They told me that I’d have to dance without panties. They said all kinds of things.”

Soiye then added, “But when we saw that people were dying of cholera left and right, we realized that we could die too. We decided that if we died in the program, at least we’d leave something behind.”

So now they’re definitively part of CLM, and they’re planning how they can continue to progress. They are still nervous about taking the pig. It seems so risky. But they and their case manager have another idea. The population near them in Nan Joumou is too small for Perrona to make much money by setting up a small commerce there, and each of the local markets is a long, hard hike away. For her to really start anything worthwhile, she’ll need a horse. If she had one, she could buy merchandise in the mountains and bring it down to the town, and then buy other stuff again in town and bring it back up the hill. She’d have a reasonable chance of earning enough to help her and Soiye really get ahead, especially since he’s demonstrated that he’s willing to work hard to pull his weight as well.

A horse will cost much more than the small pig we would buy for her, but if we take the money we would use for the pig and add to it the savings she’s accumulated in the first seven months of the program, she might have just enough to buy a small horse and a first load of merchandise. It seems worth trying.

With Soiye and their boys.

Jean Manie is a CLM member who lives in Chimowo. Working with CLM members is always challenging, but Jean Manie has presented Alancia, her case manager, with real difficulties. I’ve written about her before. (See Jean Manie.)

Many of the special challenges she presents grow from her upbringing as a restavèk, a child living in domestic servitude in someone’s home. She spent her earliest years at her aunt’s house. Her own parents died when she was an infant. But by the time she was a very young girl, she had moved in with her married cousin Irma and Irma’s husband Moussa and was doing all sorts of unpaid household labor — from cleaning and laundry to farm work and babysitting — to earn her daily bread.

She never went to school of any sort. But what’s worse, she never was encouraged to see herself as capable of anything. Especially decision-making. Jean Manie was never encouraged to imagine herself doing anything but other people’s hard work.

The first big change that CLM was able to bring to her life was when her first case manager, Sandra, convinced Moussa to send for Jean Manie’s eight-year-old boy, Patrick. As a toddler, Patrick had been shipped off to the home of Jean Manie’s aunt. Moussa had said that he couldn’t afford to feed both him and his mother. Jean Manie would visit him occasionally, when she “really missed him,” by hiking across Boukankare from Moussa’s home in Chimowo to the aunt’s on Mòn Dega.

But that was really only a start, because it quickly became clear that Jean Manie would never make any progress until we could help her leave Moussa’s home. Any investment CLM would make in her would be sabotaged by Moussa’s insistence that his work be her priority. He allowed her to accept the young goats that we gave her, but wanted us to allow him to simply add hers to his. When Alancia, her second case manager, wouldn’t agree, Jean Manie’s goats quickly grew ill. She simply had no time to take care of them. And that wasn’t the worst. The healthy pig we gave her gave birth to piglets — that’s a lot of value — but its death followed shortly after theirs because Moussa would not give her the time she needed to keep them fed.

When Moussa insisted that she should build her CLM house on his land, Alancia put her foot down. A short series of events led to a usefully disastrous deterioration in the relation between Jean Manie and Moussa and his wife. They threw her and Patrick out.

She and Patrick now live in their own small, two-room house near Chimowo. They’ve been there since November and could hardly be happier. Patrick had been a picture of oppression when he lived with Moussa. If he spoke at all, it was in barely audible tones. He wouldn’t look anywhere near you, keeping his sad eyes focused on the earth in front of him. When I spoke to him in November, he said that “they” could kill him. He would not return to Moussa’s house. Not even just to run an errand. Eerie words from such a little boy.

Now he’s a picture of happy boyhood. He runs to Alancia, calling to her, when he sees her approach his mother’s house each week. He climbs on my motorcycle, pretending to be its driver. That is: He now does just the sorts of things that happy boys do. As our program’s director, Gauthier, puts it: “He’s free.”

One key step in their progress came in a manner we could not have predicted. In talking with Claude, the secretary of the Village Assistance Committee that we helped establish near Chimowo, Alancia discovered that he had long heard rumors that he was Patrick’s dad. He admitted that he had relations with Jean Manie on one occasion, though they had never dated. In further conversation, he admitted that Patrick’s resemblance to him was striking. So he talked with his wife, and decided to accept Patrick as his son. Though Patrick would remain with Jean Manie, Claude would make a commitment to helping them out. He’s the one, then, who gave her the land she needed to build her little house, and helped significantly with its construction. He took her goats for her and nursed them back to health, and he now cares for her small cow.

Things started looking up for Jean Manie. Patrick was happy and in school. She and he were in a nice, though small and basic, new home. And her asset base — her livestock — was stable and ready to grow: two now-healthy goats and a cow that she bought with sales from the meat of the dead pig and her savings.

The key would be if she could develop a regular income stream to ensure household expenses, but this problem seemed solved, too. She entered in to relations with a young man. He worked at a local sugarcane mill, and would bring her logs of the unrefined brown sugar that rural Haitians use to make, among other things, their morning coffee. She’d sell them and use the money to put food in the house. He also asked her to look after his pregnant pig. Normally, that would earn her a share of its young.

But the relationship soon deteriorated. Jean Manie went to the hospital because she wasn’t feeling well — an encouraging sign of her sense of responsibility — and was told she had a minor infection. The nurse told her said that she should abstain from sexual relations for about ten days. When she explained that to her new boyfriend, he assumed that she was making an excuse to get rid of him and grew angry. He took his pig, his other belongings, and some things that belonged to her, and left the house. At the Village Assistance Committee meeting shortly afterwards, members decided to talk to him to convince him to return the things he took, but Jean Manie has decided that the relationship is over.

So she is going to have to establish a regular micro business now. She and Alancia have decided she’ll sell kerosene in the local markets. She should be able to make enough money to keep herself and Patrick fed if Claude occasionally contributes as well. And he says he will.

The problem is, that she can’t do any but the very simplest math. She can calculate change for numbers ten or less, but when Alancia asked her how many Haitian dollars she would give a customer who purchased three dollars of kerosene with a twenty-dollar bill, she said, “One hundred fourteen-ten.” That’s “sankatòzdi” gourds, and it makes no more sense in Creole than in English.

But she needs to start her business, so she’ll start it small. Alancia will work with her on making change. Jean Manie and Alancia got another CLM member, Tona, to agree that they could set up their businesses next to each other. Tona will keep an eye on Jean Manie as she makes change.

So Jean Manie is set to move forward again, and it’s none too soon. She scheduled to graduate from the program in June or July. She needs to be running a small business that she can count on by then.

“Madanm Sara” means two different things in Creole. On one hand, it’s a kind of bird that lives in noisy communities of dozens and dozens of nests, distributed through neighboring trees. On the other, it’s a kind of businesswoman. It’s a woman who has a “komès tèt machin,” or a business she manages riding on the top of a truck. These women buy produce from farmers or small-scale merchants in rural markets and sell it in Port au Prince or other large cities. Typically, they don’t pay for their ride to Port au Prince. They pay a fee for the transportation of their merchandise, and then just ride with the merchandise on the top of the truck. Very often, a group will travel together, and they talk constantly, loudly, and mostly merrily as they go.

Deline Descartes lives in Kafran, on the road that connects Chanbo, in Central Boucan Carré with the national highway that runs through Domond. She’s just 26 years old, but she’s been a Madanm Sara for over fifteen years, having started when she was just ten. She would buy fruit like sour oranges or avocados in the nearby Dufally market and sell them in the capital. “In those days, you could start a business with very little money,” she explains. “I saved up from little jobs that I did, and started to buy and sell.”

But it was hard to keep her business going. She has four little girls, and each pregnancy hurt her business. “I had to stop working for a while, and there were expenses.” Her girls’ father didn’t help. “He didn’t want to know how I managed to feed our kids.”

When the CLM selection team found her last summer, her business was dead. Her own illness finished it off. “I was sick with cholera. So was one of my girls. We were in the hospital for five days, and even after they let us out, I was too weak to work.”

By the time she joined the program, she was healthy again but was sitting at home because she had no money to buy with. She could have gotten herself back into business by using the loan sharks who are very active in that part of Boucan Carré, but by that time she had no hope that she could get started. She knew what she wanted to do: Go straight back into business. The will had been there, but she lacked the means. She took the 1500 gourds’ worth of merchandise that her Case Manager helped her buy and sold it in Port au Prince. She now goes once or twice each week, leaving her girls for a night with her mother. Just a few months after she started, the business is already worth 2500 gourds, and it’s growing.

Other aspects of her life are changing, too. She didn’t have any savings or animals when she joined the program, but now she has three pregnant goats and a small savings account. More importantly, she now knows how to protect herself and her children from cholera. With CLM’s help, she’s built a latrine and she has a water filter in her home that ensures that all her family’s drinking water is safe. She hasn’t built her new home yet, but most of the materials are ready. It shouldn’t take long.

She’s not satisfied yet. She wants to buy a cow. “That way, I’ll have something I can use if something comes up.” She’s got a ways to go, but things are going well. She’s shown an energy and an entrepreneurial spirit that promise great results.

I’ve written about Jonise before. (See: Jonise And Gladys.) She is a CLM member from Bay Tourib. When I first met her, she was homeless, living with a fellow CLM member because she had nowhere else to go. As I wrote at the time, Jonise “had been living with her children’s father, in a house on his mother’s land, when he decided he’d had enough of her. He threw her out. Her neighbor became fond of her while they were in enterprise training together, and when she saw her out in the street, she invited her into her home.”

At the time I wrote, we had been most struck by the steep challenges facing Jonise. She seemed confused. Not only was she unable to say how old she was — that’s common enough here — but also she didn’t know how old her children were. A neighbor told us that the kids were about five and three. The three-year-old girl died shortly after we started working in Bay Tourib. She also had, and still has a problem with writing. Not only was she unable to write her name, she couldn’t really that copy letters that her case manager wrote for her in her notebook. Here is a photo of Jonise’s copy book. Benson, her case manager, assigned her to practice writing “ni.” You can see the effort she has made, filling the page. But somehow she’s not seeing the letters clearly enough to copy them.

What’s worse, she is one of a small percentage of CLM members who “pa konnen lajan,” or don’t “know money.” In some cases, that means that someone can’t distinguish different denominations; in some, it means that they can’t do the simple arithmetic necessary to calculate change. In Jonise’s case, both were true.

So Benson started working hard with her. She didn’t choose small commerce as one of her two enterprises. It wouldn’t have made sense for someone who can’t make change. But she could never be really independent without learning to handle money, so Benson started by paying close attention to how he was giving her the weekly 300-gourd food stipend. He would vary it, using bills of different denominations: 25, 50, 100, and 250 gourds. He was careful to insist that she always count the money in front of him. Within a couple of months, she was identifying all denominations accurately. He also started teaching her math, using piles of small stones to help her add and subtract.

He talked to the father of her child, and they agreed that, whether or not the man is together with Jonise, he has a responsibility to his child. So they found one of her cousins willing to give her a small piece of land, and the man put up a frame of a new house for his little boy and Jonise. H covered it with the palm tree seed pods that are the poors’ standard roofing material. Benson then helped Jonise save up 500 gourds from her food stipend, and she used it to pay a builder to put up the walls.

Now Jonise and her boy are in a nice little house. Soon, she will have the roofing material replaced with the corrugated tin that we’ve given her. The house is small enough that she’ll be able to sell some extra tin roofing and use that money for something else. She’s taking good care of her goats and her pig, and may use the money to buy more livestock.

Most importantly and impressively, she’s started a small commerce. She invested only about 400 gourds, about $10, in rice and sugar. She saved that money from her weekly food stipend. Now she runs her little business from out of her home. It brings in just enough to keep her and her little boy fed.

The biggest difference is in Jonise herself. It’s visible. Jonise on the left is Jonise when we first met her. On the right, you see the new Jonise.

She is now cheerful and alert. She chats happily with her neighbors, even advocating for one fellow CLM member who had a problem the day we visited her to get us to go by the troubled woman’s home.

She has a long way to go. We need to help her learn to sign her name, and that won’t be easy. She’ll have to keep working at care for her livestock, and her small commerce as well. But she’s committed to the fight, to working with her case manager to continue to change her life. And she’s seems, to us, very likely to succeed.

With her case manager, Benson Pierre Derat

Sherley is a case manager in Bay Tourib. She and her fellow Bay Tourib case managers have been working feverishly to buy assets and transfer them to the CLM members they’re responsible for. Purchasing and delivering assets, like livestock and construction materials, is time-consuming, and the worst thing about losing that time is that it interferes with the regularity of weekly visits to members’ homes during a phase in the process that is especially fragile.

Members have been trained to take care of their goats, the first income-generating asset they receive, but that training needs regular reinforcement, reinforcement that can only come through weekly visits. Many of our members are unaccustomed to having their own goats to look after. And their poverty makes caring for those goats even harder than it would otherwise be. The goats require grazing, and for families that have little or no land, ensuring proper pasturage is no easy matter. Unless they receive support and direction regularly, many members incline to the easiest solution, free grazing. They simply let the goats loose to fend for themselves.

The problem is that the goats get into people’s gardens — they are especially fond of pigeon peas — and do a lot of harm. Farmers who catch goats in their gardens can react harshly. They throw rocks to chase them away, or do much worse. In the areas where we work, we encourage farmers to capture the stray goats and get payment for their return. That’s one common Haitian solution to the problem. But it’s not always what happens.

Chape is the husband of a CLM member, Elimène, and a farmer in Bay Tourib. Elimène has being doing well so far. She received two goats from us, and they are both pregnant. She’s taking good care of them. She also bought a third, with money that she saved up from her weekly stipend, and it is pregnant as well. Chape planted a small garden with pigeon peas and sorghum, and they were looking forward to the harvest. Things were looking up.

Then one morning, Chape got to the garden and found it ravaged. Livestock had devoured almost all the sorghum. In the middle of the garden, he saw several goats and assumed that they were the culprits. Enraged by the loss of a yield that he had been counting on to feed his children, he reacted badly. He caught four of the goats and killed them. This, too, is a common Haitian solution to free grazing. All four goats belonged to CLM members, two to Marie Rose and two to Milouse. Two of the four had been pregnant, one with two little kids. So the total loss was seven goats: a huge setback for our members.

When Sherley heard the news, she reacted swiftly. She spoke to members of the village assistance committee (VAC) for Fonpyèjak, where the incident occurred. We establish these committees as a vehicle that permits community leaders to play an active role in CLM. By doing so, we bring a range of men and women on board who know the communities we work in and the communities’ residents better than we do and who are, what’s more, in those communities all the time. They help us support our members by extending our reach in several ways, such as adding emergency contacts and field supervisors to our team by putting a community’s own resources to work.

Sherley went to see all three members affected with Emonès, a leading member of the committee, and the two CLM members who serve on the committee as member representatives. They made a preliminary decision to confiscate the assets we had given Elimène, pending a decision. Some of the committee members had wanted to insist that Chape and Elimène pay for the goats he had killed, but Emonès pointed out that, if the couple had had that kind of money, they wouldn’t be in CLM. The committee members went to the couple’s home, and led away all three goats. They also took away the roofing material we had given them for home repair. The members’ initial thought was that we should consider removing the family from the program entirely.

Killing the goats, even under serious provocation, seemed to them a very grave offense, especially since Emonès concluded that the goats had not done the real damage to the garden. He observed the damage done to the sorghum, and concluded that it had been eaten by animals taller than goats — horses or cows — and also noticed that the pigeon peas — which larger animals don’t feed on — had been left alone. As the dry season continues, owners of large livestock sometimes let them loose to feed at night, not knowing how else to get them fed. This is a crime against the neighbors in whose fields they graze, but it is one that is very hard to uncover.

The committee didn’t want to make a final decision, however, without a hearing. They thought that it would be better to let a few days pass so that cool heads could prevail, and they also wanted CLM’s leadership to have a say. So we scheduled a hearing for Tuesday evening. I got to Bay Tourib Sunday afternoon, so I would CLM’s representative.

On Monday night, I had a long talk with Emonès. He said that Marie Rose and Milouse were very different victims. Both had obviously let their goats roam, but Milouse was known to have done so regularly. Marie Rose never had. Her goats had gotten free because she had rushed to the hospital in Tomonn with her husband, who had been suffering with prostate problems. The person who had agreed to look after her goats had failed her.

I told him that I wanted to avoid removing Elimène from the program. She was in it because she needs it. Kicking someone out solves nothing. I proposed that we return the roofing material to Elimène and ask her to give a goat to Marie Rose and one to Milouse. That would distribute the harm that had been done. Emonès agreed.

But we had the hearing the next night, and that’s not what we finally decided. We started a hearing with a report from Sherley. We asked her for a general summary of the facts, as she understood them. Then we asked Elimène, Marie Rose, and Milouse each to respond. Milouse defended herself against the claim that she habitually lets her goats roam. Marie Rose explained how unhappy she was that her goats had gotten free. Elimène talked about how much she and Chape had counted on their harvest and how little they had to show for all their farm work now.

When they were finished talking, I announced the decision I had made, but I framed it as a proposal. I asked for their feedback.

At first, everyone agreed. But then Emonès spoke up. He had, he said, been thinking about the matter constantly since he and I had spoken about it, and he wasn’t quite comfortable with what I had proposed.

He had not previously known Elimène. He met her when he went to her home with Sherley and the other committee members to seize her assets. He had been very much impressed by the way she conducted herself: polite and helpful. His original thought when he had heard about the incident had been to remove her from the program, but when he visited her home he realized that she was just the sort of person the program had come to Bay Tourib to help.

Though he could not condone the killing of the goats, he had been thinking about ways to minimize the damage all around. He knew that the two women had sold meat from the slaughtered goats. This is common. If it’s sold quickly, it can bring in some money, though not much. He suggested that Elimène be asked to give each of the other women only the difference between the money from the sale of the meat and the price of a goat. He had done a rough calculation. Elimène might still have to sell a goat to generate that money quickly. She probably didn’t have it on hand. But she’d still lose only one goat instead of two. We all agreed that this seemed like the best solution, and left it in Sherley’s hands to help the women make it work.

Emonès was, obviously, the star of the evening. His patience, first as an investigator, then as a sheriff, and finally as a juryman and a judge, brought us to what was perhaps the best solution of an unhappy case. And it went a long way to helping us through the process without rancor, too. He exemplified the role we try to give to leaders in the communities we work in. If we could help such leaders establish themselves everywhere that we work, that would go a long way towards guaranteeing the success of the members whom we, and also those leaders, serve.

by Wilson Ozil, Regional Director, CLM

Mecianie Casseus is a forty-seven-year-old mother of ten. She has children with four different fathers. Two of the fathers are dead, and one of them doesn’t care about his children. She only has one kid with the man she is living with right now.

Before joining the program, she said that her life was upside down. The earthquake destroyed the straw house that she had been living in. She was lucky enough to receive a tent from Concern worldwide, so she could shelter her family. She had no land and no productive assets. The most she had was a little goat someone gave to her to look after.

She caught a break when one of her older daughters married a guy who took her to live in a small town outside the capital. The daughter agreed to take five of her other children with her, leaving the mother with only the four younger ones to take care of. Even after that, things were still very difficult. She got by going to the market for her better-off neighbors. In return, they would give her loose change, which she would use to buy food for her children. At other times, she would travel to a nearby town to wash clothes for people. She said that she would find money in their pockets, and would return it, so they came to trust her. Because of that trust, they would also take her to sell plantain with them. They would let her gather the loose ones, and she would sell them to take something home to her family.

She explained that after she was selected for the CLM program, she went and told her older daughter because she couldn’t believe it. It seemed too good to be true. Her daughter told her to give her name instead of her own just in case it was something cursed, that would kill her. The daughter would then die in her mother’s place, and the mother would be left to care for the other kids. She used the name Assedie Simonise.

It took her six months for her to realize that the CLM program is truly there to help her, and that she has nothing to fear. That is when she told us her real name, Mecianie Casséus. That is also when we started teaching her how to write her own name, because she had been learning how to write her daughter’s name before.

She explained that things were so bad that when her oldest daughter was younger, the girl had only one little dress. Whenever it was dirty, she would take her to the river, and while the girl was bathing, she would wash the little dress and open it to the sun, waiting for it to dry before they would go back home.

“My life has changed since I joined CLM. I remember the first training days when I received 75 gourdes a day for 6 days. I used that money to buy some clothes, because I didn’t really have any, and a chicken. What was left, I used it to buy food for the kids.”

She said that the program has done so much for her. At asset transfer, she received two goats and a pig. She now has five goats, two pigs, a horse, a cow, few turkeys and some chickens. She said that her husband didn’t contribute much to the house before CLM. He had other women and he wasted the little money he made as a day laborer on them. Now he is working together with me to help the family build a good asset base. She mentioned that as a matter of fact, he is the one encouraging her not to waste but to save.

Mecianie is proud of what she is accomplishing, “I am no longer the person I was before CLM.”

When Primène first joined CLM, she was struggled badly just to feed her children. “I had no resources, just a little goat that someone gave me to look after for them,” she explains. “My husband has two women, so he’d disappear for days at a time. I couldn’t count on him. There were days when my children were hungry because I had nothing to give them.” She has six children, the youngest being twins who were infants when she joined the program. With them on hand, it was hard for her to find the time to work to feed the others.

Primène was lucky. Thanks to a special gift from Bothar, twenty CLM members in Boukankare received a cow as one of their productive assets, and she was one of them. But a cow takes time to begin generating income, whether through the young or the milk they produce. The cow alone would not have helped her solve her immediate needs.

So together with her case manager, she thought about what she could do with the other resources that CLM could provide. She gave her older boy responsibility for the two goats she received as a secondary asset, and she now has five. In addition, a neighbor who was impressed by the care he took of her goats gave him another to take care of, so the family now has six. But even that wasn’t going to help her with the family’s basic needs. She needed a way to ensure a regular income stream.

But she saw an opportunity: Primène lives next door to a gagè. That’s a cock-fighting ring. Cockfighting is a popular activity in rural Haiti. The men who attend cockfights like to smoke and drink while they watch and bet. Primène began to sell rum and cigarettes at the cockfights, and her business took off. She hasn’t grown the business very much, but it has remained steady at about 700 gourds, or just under nine dollars. It generates enough income that she’s able to keep her family fed.

In the meantime, she’s been building up additional small assets. She doesn’t want all of her money in one place. She has two female pigs — a mother and her daughter — and assorted barnyard fowl. With savings from her business and the stipends that the program provided, she was able to buy a horse as well. As her twins grow older, she’ll be increasingly able to use the horse to develop larger and more profitable commerce at the rural markets around Boukankola, where they live.

“My life is different now. It used to be that if my children needed something simple, like a pair of sandals, I’d have to wait for my husband to give me the money to buy it for them. Now I can do it myself.” And it’s not just her economic situation that has changed. Her attitude has changed as well. Graduation is still six months away for Primène, but she has no doubts about herself. “Even if CLM were to leave me now, no one would have to worry. I feed my children twice a day without any problem.”

Primène still has work to do. She doesn’t yet own farmland, which is one of her ambitions, and her children still only eat twice each day. But she has a pregnant cow, almost ready to give birth, a very small but thriving business, a variety of productive assets, and a determination to succeed. She’s well on her way.

Research and photos for this piece by Ellien Delice.