CLM is a comprehensive approach to poverty alleviation. We emphasize helping our members generate reliable incomes, but we aim more broadly. We want to help them improve almost every aspect of their lives. The women who graduate are not simply wealthier than they were when we selected them. They are different. They are confident and forward-looking, health-conscious and well informed.

This transformation involves a lot of learning. We teach them to take care of their assets, of course, and to use those assets to make money. But we also teach them about ten essential health and life-skills issues – like good nutrition, reproductive health, and hygiene – that can significantly improve their families’ well-being.

And that’s not all. Though we are not able to offer comprehensive literacy services, we help the women learn, at the very least, to sign their name. This is less a question of literacy than of dignity. Those who cannot sign in Haiti mark their acceptance of documents with a thumbprint. Though our case managers handle this process as respectfully as possible, it can’t help but be demeaning.

A few can already sign when they join the program, but not very many. And some who haven’t ever been to school nevertheless learn very quickly. Case managers typically make members buy an inexpensive copybook and a pencil. Each week they prepare a page or two of homework for the member by printing her name a couple of times across the top of each page. The member’s assignment for the following week is to copy it on the lines below her case manager’s model, filling up the page. This very simple procedure is enough to get most women signing their name within a few months. They then turn to their husband’s name, their children’s names, or to numbers: whatever interests them most.

But for some women, learning to write their name presents a significant challenge. Copying something as complex as an entire name is well beyond what they can do at first. Case managers start them with a syllable at a time, or even just a letter. And even this can be a challenge for some.

This brings me to Cenicia. Orweeth, her case manager, has been trying, with very little success, to help her write her name for almost six months. The day I visited her with him, she presented him with her well-done homework: two pages of beautiful little c’s. It turned out that one of her children had done the work for her, which only shows that she’s frustrated enough to want an easy way out of the difficulty. When we asked her to make a c in front of us, she couldn’t do it.

So I decided to sit back and watch as Orweeth offered a writing lesson. He drew a line of c’s across the top of a page, and asked Cenicia to copy one. What she drew looked like something between a u and a v. The second row of letters in the photo below shows what I mean. Each time she put her pencil to the page, she would make a downward stroke, slightly curved, almost like the opening of a parentheses. Once she got to the lowest point of the parenthesis, she would start back upward to make the other side of the u. Each time she started to turn back upward, Orweeth tried to stop her. He apparently imagined that her parenthesis was the c, and that the problem was that she was extending what looked to him to be the bottom part of the c too far, bringing the line back upward. Again and again, he told her with increasing exasperation not to bring the line back upward, not to close the c’s opening. Again and again, she did the same thing. Orweeth wasn’t getting anywhere, but he was getting frustrated, so I asked him to step aside. The photo below shows the work that I then did with her:

As I watched was Cenicia was doing, I made what I thought was a discovery. She was intent on trying to reproduce the c’s half-moon shape. That was, in fact, the way we had been explaining how to make a c: simply trace a half moon. But each time she put her pencil to the page, she made her first move downward. Once she had done so, she had no choice but to turn the line back upwards. Otherwise, the half moon would be incomplete. So instead of telling her to stop turning the line back upwards, I asked her to start by making a line that moved back from the point where she placed it on the page. Having done so, I reasoned, she would be forced to turn the line back to the front, and would thus have her c.

My plan failed. She continued to make little u’s. These are the ones across the second row of the photo. Apparently, my suggestion that she make the first move backwards didn’t make sense to her.

So I thought again for a moment, and then decided that, rather than giving her a new instruction, I would pose a problem. I asked her whether she could see that, while the c’s I made were open on the right, hers were open on the top. They were facing different directions. She said she could see the difference. So then I asked her how she could make her c’s point in the same direction as mine.

Now it was her turn to think. What she then did surprised me. She started her pencil at the rear-most point of the half moon and made the top half of the c with one line. Then she returned with her pencil to the point she had started from, and made the lower half of the c. In the photo, the first one that she made correctly is the fifth one from the top in the left-hand column, and she made all the ones beneath it. We prepared a page for her to do as homework, and we’ll see next week whether she’s on the right track, but she seems to have broken through something that was getting in her way.

Whatever Celicia learned from the experience, I certainly learned more. A human being is not a photocopier. Celicia’s work could not succeed as mindless reproduction. Until she started to grasp the essential points of the simple image we were asking her to make, the task of making even her name’s first letter was beyond her. Time will tell whether I’ll be able to teach Orweeth what I think I learned and whether that lesson, in turn, will help Celicia move forward.

Our initial selection process failed to identify Marie Paul. I’ve written about her before. (See: Field Notes.) She just didn’t show up on our radar screen. The residents of Mannwa who attended the initial Participatory Wealth Ranking meeting didn’t mention her. That’s not uncommon. The extremely poor families we work with are frequently forgotten. They are not considered members of their communities. They don’t matter to anyone.

Our case managers then come across these otherwise invisible families as they go door-to-door, visiting the households who are identified in the meeting as the community’s poor. The team will see a little straw shack that doesn’t appear on the map produced by the Wealth Ranking process, and they’ll take a look. If they find someone inside, they’ll start asking questions. They’ll fill out paperwork if they think the house’s residents might qualify for our program.

But Marie Paul lives far enough from the families that were on our list that we didn’t come across her house. It’s a little bit hidden, sitting on the back side of a ridge, right behind a small church. We learned about her in conversations with Edrès, the man who eventually became the president of the Mannwa Village Assistance Committee. He asked us to look in on her, explaining that her family was in miserable shape. He thought she could probably qualify. Since he had already shown in a number of ways that he understood our program’s goals, we took his advice and went to see her.

Marie Paul has six kids by her first husband, who died a few years ago. She has a seventh, still an infant, with a man who abandoned them shortly after the baby was born. The kids aren’t in school. At the time we met her, she wasn’t able to feed them every day. Selecting her was an easy decision.

After she entered the program, she seemed to be doing well. She seemed to really jump into its logic. She was taking good care of her goats and managing her food stipend well. She was keeping up close contact with other members in the area too, behaving as though they were new members of her family. If we had a criticism for her, it was that she was managing the stipend too frugally, investing too much of it her family’s future rather than in food for herself and her kids. That’s a common problem among highly motivated new members.

Then one Wednesday evening, Martinière, the Mannwa case manager, came back late to our base in Saut d’Eau in a little bit of a panic. He hadn’t been able to find Marie Paul that day. When he passed by her house, already late in the afternoon, he saw three of her kids, obviously hungry. The baby was crawling in the yard, putting whatever it came across into its mouth.

And he had heard a disturbing rumor. A couple of other CLM members told him that Marie Paul had sold her goats and cashed out her small business. She was without assets. He had spoken to Edrès, who said he had heard the same thing. Edrès added that he hadn’t been able to speak to her yet, but had told one of her older boys that he needed to talk to her.

Our first need was to speak with Marie Paul. We didn’t think it could wait a week for Martinière`s next visit, but he had a full schedule, so I went to Mannwa a few days later, hoping to find her. I didn’t. Since we had a refresher training planned for all members, we decided to focus on getting her to the training. I left a message with Edrès, asking him to let her know that we were concerned about her and that we really needed to talk to her. We very much wanted to see her at the training.

Fortunately, she decided to come. And she told us the following story:

She and her first husband had struggled to send their oldest child to school, and she somehow continued to send the boy after her husband died. But when it was time for him to take the official primary school graduation exam, she was out of money. She owed the school 1750 gourds, less than $45, and its director was holding her boy’s exam ID in lieu of payment. The boy, by then in his late teens, wouldn’t be able to take the exam unless she could pay the bill.

So she borrowed the money from a neighbor, hoping to repay it with a bean harvest. Unfortunately, rats ruined her garden. As time passed, and she had no hope of paying her debt, she disappeared. She moved to Lachapèl, to the west, hoping she’d have a better chance of finding the money she’d need. When her lender from Mannwa found her there, she turned to a loan shark in Lachapèl who said he would lend her the money. By then, she was together with her second husband. He had just planted a crop of pigeon peas, and he told her she could sell the harvest to pay back the loan. So she took the loan and repaid her debt even though she had to agree to 100% interest every six months. Having repaid her first lender, she was able to return to her home in Mannwa.

But once again, rats ate her harvest. And then the man left her, and she was left without a way to pay back the loan. Interest kept accumulating. By the time she joined CLM just a couple of years later, her original debt had grown to more than 8000 gourds.

Then, somehow, the loan shark discovered that she was part of some program that had put assets, and even some cash, into her hands. By then, she had the three goats we had given her along with a fourth she had purchased with savings from her weekly food stipend. He went to Mannwa together with a local deputy to get his money back. He took her goats, she said, and sold them for 6000 gourds. The deputy convinced him to call things square. The debt was thus erased, but Marie Paul was back to zero. She added that her small business was still intact.

The next time Martinière had a free day, he decided to hike up to Mannwa to see her. I went along. Though she expected us, we didn’t find her at home. Her son told us that she was down in Laplenn, in the valley behind Mannwa. We went looking for her, and found her there. She was supervising some charcoal production. She said she had nine sacks of ready for sale, five in a warehouse in the market in Difayi, on the nearest major road below Mannwa, and four more she’d be moving to market in the next days. It would be worth something like 1800 gourds, already a nice profit over the 1500 gourds she started with.

This is where things get complicated. We had asked Edrès to find out what he could, and he came back with a different story about her goats. He said that she had borrowed money for her child’s funeral. One of them had died a few years previously, struck by lightening. The rest of the story corresponded more or less with what she had said, except that he added that he had heard that the loan shark had come to her armed, threatening her life.

And we had also spoken to one of her kids, who led us to think that the lender had not seized the goats, but had pressured her to pay him. The boy led us to believe that she was the one who sold the goats. He also told us that she had gone down the mountain a few days previously with one sack of charcoal, not five.

We couldn’t be sure that Marie was telling us the truth. But we needed to know just what her situation was. Otherwise, we would not be able to help her. So Martinière told her to have the proceeds from her charcoal sales ready to show him on his next visit, but when we went by as scheduled on the following Wednesday, she wasn’t there.

She appears to be ducking us. And we can’t help someone we can’t find.

We’re not yet sure what is next. We are waiting for the Mannwa Village Assistance Committee’s next meeting, scheduled for the last Wednesday of this month. We have asked Edrès to have the deputy there. We want to hear his side of the story. And we plan to come with one of the senior case managers, a man trained as a lawyer. We need to get to the bottom of things.

If we find out that Marie is lying, we could kick her out of the program. I am a former college dean of students, who sometimes had to deal with young people unwilling or unable to respect our school’s rules, and so I sometimes have that inclination. At school, it was often the right thing to do, though never pleasant.

But that just doesn’t work for CLM. Marie is in the program because her family desperately needs it. Her children are hungry. They don’t eat even once a day.

At the same time, we can’t just replace whatever assets she’s lost. Apart for the fact that we our limited by our budget, we can not afford to have members think that they can do what they want with their assets because we’ll always just buy them new ones.

So we will talk to the committee and see what they think. If Marie has lost all of her assets, we’ll need to find an approach that will help her start over again. Martinière will have his work cut out for him.

Ann

Ann is a CLM member from Giyòm. We first met her as she was being selected for the program. (See: Introducing Ann.) At the time she was struggling just to feed her seven kids and her disabled husband with the couple of dollars she could earn each week cutting gwann, or scrub palm, and selling it to people who would weave it into various household goods: sleeping mats; saddles and saddle bags for horses, donkeys, or mules; and produce sacks. She told us that a woman always has something cooking, but her options seemed in fact to be very limited.

Things have begun to change for Ann and her family, but change isn’t easy nor is it swift. Ann chose goat rearing and pig rearing as her two enterprises, but when a Bothar grant to CLM made cows available to twenty of our most needy members, Ann received one of them with her goats instead of the pig. The cow is now pregnant, as is one of the goats, but neither has given birth yet. So they are a long way from generating income.

Normally, that would not be a serious problem. Many of our members use their savings clubs to accumulate a lump sum that they can then use for small commerce. Each week, members put part of their food allowance into a pot. One of the members then received the whole amount. It’s a way for members to organize a lump sum of cash. Thus, even if members chose two different kinds of animal husbandry as their two enterprises, they can nevertheless start a small commerce, too. That’s important, because commerce can bring them at least a small income they can count on every day.

But when Ann’s turn came to receive her club’s 1500-gourd pot, she used it to buy a third goat. She didn’t want to start her commerce yet. “I can’t carry stuff on my head, and I don’t have a horse. And on the mountaintop where I live, no one will come to buy stuff I try to sell from my home. So it’s better for me to save up until I can get a horse.”

The problem is, that she has been in the program since December, and her seven children still don’t get even one meal every day. She can’t count on her husband to farm. He was almost paralyzed with back pain when we first met him, and though he’s recovered remarkably, he can’t do hard work. “I’m just glad,” Ann says, “that he can take care of my cow. He can’t do anything in the field.”

Ann has been receiving her 300-gourd (about $7.50) weekly food stipend from CLM, but she hasn’t been spending it on food. She’s been sending half of it to her savings club, and depositing another 100 gourds in her Fonkoze savings account. “I’m saving to buy a horse.” Just 50 gourds remain to buy food with each week. That’s about $1.25. She still makes a few dollars selling gwann, but that leaves her with less than $8.50 a week with which to feed herself, her husband, and their seven kids. It’s just not enough.

She knows it’s a problem, but she’s not willing to risk postponing her purchase of a horse by using more of her food stipend to feed her kids. “Nou oblije reziye nou,” she says. That means, “We have to resign ourselves.” She’s so forward-looking that she’s will to look past the misery in front of her every day. The one child she had in school has now been sent home for non-payment three times since the beginning of the year. “He’s just going to have to wait until next year,” she explains.

For the CLM program, Ann’s case is difficult. We are reluctant to interfere with her ambitions, but we can’t sit and watch her invest in her future when she and her kids have nothing to eat. So we cancelled her savings club after its ten members each had a chance to take home the pot. We hope this will enable Ann to spend more money on food. The gwann season is coming to an end, so she’ll need to have some income she can rely on.

>>//Her Cow//<<

One thing that we know for certain is that our CLM team cannot do everything that our members will need in the short time we’ll spend with them. We train them to generate income through management of a few simple assets, we give them the assets they need to get started, we follow them closely with weekly visits for eighteen months as they begin to manage their affairs, we educate them regarding a few crucial personal and familial health and live-skills issues, and we ensure both that they have access to free medical care and that they know how to use that access.

It sounds like a lot. I suppose it is a lot. But the economic and social facts that have kept our members in extreme poverty are both stubborn and complex. Achieving the near-perfect record of success that CLM has achieved so far requires that our members get support from multiple directions, not just from one case manager. They need support that is always there for them, not only during weekly half-hour visits. They have no phones, so help must closer than a phone call away.

CLM starts as a comprehensive intervention into a family’s life that is targeted to reach those families who really needed it. But the challenge we face demands that we transform ourselves into something greater, into a community development initiative that fundamentally changes the social dynamics in the places where we work. That is the purpose behind the Village Poverty Reduction Committees. We help leaders in each village build committees that support our efforts and thus work towards eradicating extreme poverty in the communities they live in.

The first step towards forming these committees is selecting the people that will serve on them. That process begins while we are in the final stages of selecting new CLM members. We ask each prospective member to tell us whom she turns to in her community when she has a serious problem. We ask them whether there are community leaders whom they can ask for advice or for small gifts of food or money when hunger or sickness threatens to overwhelm their homes. We then develop a list of potential committee members for each community, trying to add key local actors – such as school principals, veterinary workers, successful market women, and elected officials – whenever we can. Our case managers then hand-deliver an invitation to an organizational meeting to each potential member, explaining CLM in general and the role of a Village Committee in particular in some detail.

At the first meeting, a case manager leads the session as CLM members elect the person they’d like to serve as the committee’s president. Once the president has been chosen, he or she takes over the meeting, leading members as they elect a secretary and a treasurer. They also elect two representatives from among the CLM members to serve on the committee. After that, the committee will meet once each month to discuss members’ problems and work out solutions. Case managers working in the area attend the meetings as consultants.

But the majority of a committee’s work happens outside these meetings. Its members become resources, helping CLM members protect and manage their assets, aiding them resolve conflicts with neighbors, and providing emergency assistance. Say, for example, a CLM member, through thoughtlessness or inexperience, lets her goat into a neighbor’s garden. That neighbor might decide to kill the goat. A committee member would help the CLM member convince the neighbor to charge a reasonable fine instead. A committee member might lend another woman a mule or a horse so she can get herself, her husband, or her child to the hospital in an emergency. Or maybe he or she would work to convince a local school principal to accept school fees in small monthly payments, rather than in a lump sum, to help a CLM member send her kids to school.

What’s crucial in all this is that committee members are members of the community they serve. The committee structure gives these men and women a way to organize what have previously been piecemeal efforts to help their neighbors, and it gives our program a way to organize a substantial presence in each community, one that will remain long after our staff’s activities have been completed.

The photos below were taken at organizational meetings for Village Committees in a range of communities. They were held in a church, a cockfighting ring, a community school, and in someone’s backyard.

//Our case manager, Martinière, explains the purpose of the committee to members in Mannwa//

//CLM members in Dega listen to an explanation of the voting procedure//

//CLM members in Byeneme, Boukankola, and Dega vote for their committees’ leadership//

//The new president of the Byeneme committee explains the election to members//

Beverly lives in lower Viyèt. She’s been a CLM member since December, and she’s made some progress.

Her case manager, Sandra, visits her every Wednesday, and they spend a half-hour or so together. They talk about Beverly’s family, her kids and their living situation. They talk about her assets and how she’s managing them. They discuss one of CLM’s series of ten health-awareness issues. And they work on Beverly’s reading and writing. Beverly had never been to school when she joined the program, but she can already sign her name. She’s started learning to write her daughters’ names, too.

When we first met Beverly, she and her children were living with a man in a straw-and-reeds shack near her mother’s house. (See: Barbara And Beverly.) They were really struggling just to eat. The man, whom we described as her husband, had been sick that year, so he hadn’t planted any crops to harvest. All they could really do was look for farm work, which pays only about sixty cents to $1.25 per day. They were missing meals for days at a time.

A lot has changed. Beverly no longer lives in the same house, she no longer lives with the same man, she no longer goes days without anything to feed her girls, and she no longer lives without hope of things to come.

She moved out of her house when her mother left the neighborhood to live in a more populous area. Her mother had built a small, tin-roofed house when she was in CLM, and Beverly used the money that the CLM program would normally spend on housing repair to buy it. So she and her girls now face the upcoming rainy season with a home that will keep them dry.

Along the way, she sent the man she had been living with away. Beverly didn’t want to live with a man who wouldn’t help her with her girls. “He used to farm, but when they gave me the goats and started giving me food money, he stopped working,” Beverly explained. What’s worse, he wanted her to have more kids. “He started living with me when I was pregnant with my little girl. She’s just a baby, but he was already pressuring me to have another child with him. I have two girls already, and I’d rather take care of them.”

A young uncle was already living in her mother’s house before Beverly moved into it. He’s her mother’s little brother. Beverly asked him to stay when she bought the house, and he helps her care for her goats. He also contributes food to the household, which is important because Beverly doesn’t have a real income yet. She was supposed to start a small business, but as she and her case manager thought about the kind of business she’d like to do, they realized that she wouldn’t be able to get started until her baby is a little older. So they took the money that they would have spent on the merchandise and bought a small female pig. It has the potential to earn income for her eventually, but it will take time.

Madolie and her case manager, Sandra

The pillar that our program stands on is the close accompaniment we offer our members. In practice, that refers first and foremost to the visits our case managers make to our members’ homes every week. These visits help us maintain close contact with members. They enable us to keep track of their progress, and thus give us a way to ensure we know when and how to support our members in their struggle.

And there’s nothing casual or informal about the visits. They follow a procedure that has remained more or less fixed since the program was in its pilot phase. There’s even a laminated checklist our case managers are supposed to bring into the field with them outlining the rigid ten-step process.

One of the most important of these steps is the discussion of the weekly issue. In the course of adapting the program to Haiti, Fonkoze identified ten lessons that we believe are most critical to our members to learn as they attempt to change their lives. These lessons all involve changing behaviors with respect to certain key aspects of their lives: Nutrition, management of drinking water, hygiene, pre- and post-natal healthcare are examples of areas we discuss. Each week the case managers discuss one of them. At the end of ten weeks, they return to the first issue and repeat the series.

One of the most important of these issues is family planning. It’s complicated. We can tell someone how much vitamin a they should consume and where they’ll find it. We can tell them how to treat their water. But we cannot tell them how many children they should have.

At the same time, we need to talk to them frankly about the consequences of having a lot of kids. Though we have members with only one or two, the number who have six or seven or eight is striking, and the extra difficulties that very large families will have as they try to move forward are not hard to figure. Each kid is a treasure, but also a regular expense and an added risk of catastrophic, livelihood-destroying major expenses as well.

Sandra, one of our new case managers, and I met Olienne, a new CLM member, while she was bringing her infant to downtown Boukankare to have it weighed. This is part of a regular postnatal health program provided by Partners in Health, the local healthcare provider and the most important provider of health services across the Central Plateau.

The baby is Olienne’s fourth child, and the only one that is with her. She gave away the other three – who have various fathers – because she was too poor to keep them even minimally fed. This fourth child, a boy, was not fathered by the man she now lives with, but that man has said that, as long as the boy is raised to call him “dad,” he will take responsibility for him.

So Olienne presents a case in which a real understanding of family planning seems urgent. At the same time, Sandra’s conversation with her about it was extremely difficult, in two ways.

First of all, Olienne has a hard time at this point really focusing on anything that Sandra tells her. Each week, before they talk about a new issue, case managers review the issue they had discussed the previous week. Olienne claimed to remember nothing at all of the issue Sandra had last discussed – basic nutrition – and had a hard time even repeating or summarizing parts of this week’s issue as Sandra went over them with her. Sandra would repeatedly ask, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” And though Olienne would claim that she did, she would not be willing or able to say what she had understood.

Second, Olienne does not see herself as a decision maker with respect to her own reproductive life. She says that her current partner will not agree to contraception because he wants a daughter. He himself has denied this in separate conversations with Sandra.

But what is most interesting about this is the way Olienne frames the issue: “Lè w kay moun nan, se pa w k ap deside.” That means, “When you live in someone else’s home, you’re not the one who’s going to decide.”

But the translation doesn’t really communicate the force of the phrase. To live “kay moun” or “in a person’s home,” generally means something specific. It’s the phrase used to describe restaveks, the children in Haiti who live in domestic servitude. If Olienne sees herself as living kay moun, she does not see herself as an adult but as a child, without rights of her own.

So Sandra will have to figure out a way to communicate effectively with Olienne, and to help her see herself as an adult with responsibilities and rights. Only when she is successful in these basic aspects of her work will she have any chance of communicating effectively about a more specific question like family planning. But the whole conversation seems not only important, but urgent. Maybe even too late. Because though Olienne’s boy is only six months old, she shows signs that she is pregnant again.

After talking to Olienne, we went to see Madolie. She is a woman about 40 years old. If you ask her how many children she has, she’ll immediately switch to the past tense. She’ll say, “I had ten, but I lost four of them.” Her six surviving children, ranging from girls in their late teens to a boy about six, live with her and her husband in Pyèlwiblan.

Madolie seems firm when she says that she’ll have no more kids, and cites the youngest boy’s age as evidence that she’s no longer in any danger. But though she feels no need to learn about family planning for herself, she was extremely interested for her two older girls. Neither is the child of her current husband, but she says he treats both of them well, as though they were his own. Madolie’s oldest had a baby in July, and her second – who’s just 16 – had hers in January. Neither father is providing the least support for mother or child. The younger girl has been unable or unwilling even to identify the father. If you ask her, she just looks at the ground and shakes her head.

Both babies have thus become additional mouths for Madolie and her husband to feed. So when Sandra starts to talk about contraception, Madolie is glad to have her call the girls over to join the discussion.

We can’t and shouldn’t decide how many children our members should have, or whether they use birth control, or what kind of birth control the ones who choose to use it should use. But the link between their poverty and their many children and the barrier additional children will present to their progress mean that we must at least do what we can to ensure that they feel entitled to make decisions and that the decisions they make are well-informed.

Sandra talked with Madolie’s daughter, too. Here she listens, holding her young son.

Monique has been a CLM member since we brought 300 new families into the program in October. She’s a widow who lives with her children in Danton, a neighborhood of southwestern Sodo that has a very high concentration of CLM members.

I first met Monique in September, during the final verification process. I was the one who visited her home for her interview, and I was struck by what I found. It was midday, and she had not yet been able to provide food for herself or her kids. Nor did they have any prospects for eating later in the afternoon or evening. Their best hope was a little bit of corn a neighbor had given her. She was letting it dry so she would be able to grind it the next day. I wrote about the experience at the time. (See: Final Verification.)

I have been curious to learn about her progress, so I asked Chedlin, her case manager, if I might join him on his rounds.

Her yard was quiet. It was empty when Chedin and I arrived. Her children are now all in school. In September, none were or ever had been. They now attend an inexpensive local community school where tuition is less that $4 per child per year. She pays an examination fee of about $2 more each semester for each kid. These fees had been beyond her means.

This small total is a bigger lump sum than Monique can muster even now, but CLM doesn’t pay it for her. Nor did we ask the school’s leadership to forgive it. The solution was much simpler: We just asked that she be allowed to pay a little bit at a time. The school’s leadership agreed, and the arrangement has been working.

And school attendance means much more than education for her kids, because a large international NGO funds a feeding program at the school. Monique’s kids are thus guaranteed a substantial hot meal everyday in addition to whatever she can offer them at home. Thus they had been hungry, missing meals regularly, or even for days at a time, because Monique was unable to make a $4 lump-sum payment for each of them. And their hunger meant so little to those around them, it was such an invisible part of that community’s life, that there was no one to help Monique ask for a payment plan.

She’s managing her new assets well. Her two goats have both had kids, and her pig is pregnant.

More importantly, she’s been buying chickens with her own money. Some of that money comes from the travel allowance we gave her during her six-day enterprise training. (She walked rather than spending the money on travel.) Some of it she saves from her weekly subsistence allowance. What matters is that this is money she’s accumulated by her own careful spending decisions. Her three chickens are laying eggs that she and her children can eat or sell. She also can hatch some of the chicks and raise them for meat or sale or just add them to her stock. And she’s managed to do all this while contributing much of her subsistence allowance – at first half, but now two-thirds – to a sòl, a savings club.

She uses most what she gets out of her subsistence allowance on her kids’ schooling. That’s how she spent the money she got the first time it was her turn to collect the money from the sòl, and she continues to make payments. She has learned to buy some basic food items in large quantities, which saves her a lot of money. And though she has stopped hiring herself and her boy out as farm laborers, she does sharecrop, which helps her keep food on the table.

Monique isn’t out of the woods yet. Though she is doing a good job developing her assets, her cash flow is still weak. The day I visited with Chedlin, she had not been able to feed her kids before they went to school. The fact that they would get a meal there might make this seem less urgent, but it’s not what we want. Or, more importantly, what Monique wants either. She was waiting anxiously for Chedlin’s arrival, because she was counting on the subsistence allowance he would bring to buy something she could serve them for supper and then for breakfast the next day.

But she has time. She’s been in the program for only about four months, and has two months of weekly subsistence allowance and fourteen months of weekly visits ahead of her. The next time it’s her turn to receive the sòl, she’ll use the money to establish a small commerce, which will strengthen her ability to bring in small amounts of money every day. She’ll also add a pair of turkeys to her livestock. They are vigorous, reproduce well, and are very much saleable.

Given what she’s been able to do thus far, her prospects seem very good.

//Monique and her case manager, Chedlin.//

The heart of our case managers’ work unfolds in the visits they make every week to our members. Each case manager is responsible for fifty families, and these visits are our best chance to track and to facilitate their progress. Our job is not simply to give them the assets they need to change their lives, but to ensure those lives change. The assets we give them are important, but would not be enough because most of our members lack the knowledge and the mindset to make something out of their assets. They need close accompaniment, and that’s what our case managers offer.

And we want the accompaniment to be as regular as possible. We try not to let things interfere with our seeing each member every week. So if Martinière, for example, has to be someplace else, we prefer to have someone cover for him. Wednesday, he was helping us distribute goats to some new members who hadn’t received theirs yet, so he couldn’t make his regular rounds of Manwa, Ti Deniza, and Gapi. So I set off early in the morning to make his rounds for him. These notes about my hike through the hills can serve as a survey of the different sorts of problems that our members face.

The first member I met with was Manie. She’s an older widow, with three children. Only the youngest still depends on her entirely. Her oldest daughter is married and has children of her own. She too qualified for CLM, but her husband forbid her from entering the program. As much as we tried to convince them, we failed. Her second child is a son in his early twenties. He comes and goes, staying with her for days or even weeks at a time, but then disappearing to work odd jobs in Port au Prince, Ponsonde or whatever else he might find them. Her third child is Jackson, whom I’ve written about before. (See: Jackson At School.)

We talked about a number of things but a couple stuck out. First, she has a problem with one of her goats. It’s important that she keeps them tied up. If one of them gets into someone’s garden they could just kill it. If garden’s owner is gentler, they’ll confiscate it until Manie pays damages. She might be able to afford to pay, but she certainly has better things to do with her money. So she’s conscientious about keeping them tied. But if you tie them, you need to keep an eye on them, because if they get themselves twisted in the rope, they can panic and do themselves harm.

The first thing Manie said when we sat down together was that she had something to confess. One of her goats had gotten one of its legs twisted in its rope and panicked until it got cut. She had run to the local veterinary worker, and he had dressed the wound, but it hadn’t completely healed. She was following the veterinarian’s instructions, treating the wound with ashes from her cooking fire, and she was hopeful, though upset at what she sensed as her own negligence.

The other thing that stuck out was something she said about her sòl. That’s a kind of savings club that is very popular in Haiti. A group gets together and agrees to contribute a certain amount every day, every week, or every month. They then take turns receiving the whole pot. If, for example, there are ten of us contributing 100 gourds each week, every week one of us will get 1000 gourds. Manie and the other members from Manwa and vicinity have a  sòl. Martinière organized it for them. Each week the ten of them give him 100 gourds from their 300-gourd subsistence allowance and he gives one of them 1000 gourds.

But last time Martinière had visited the area, he had distributed two weeks’ worth of subsistence allowance to each member, so they paid two weeks’ worth of contribution to their  sòl. Manie had gone along with it, because she looks at Martinière, who’s managing the  sòl as an authority figure, but it turns out that she hadn’t really understood why she was paying 200 gourds. So when I gave her the 300-gourd subsistence allowance, and asked her to give me back her  sòl contribution, she tried to give me 200 gourds. She insisted that Martinière had taken that much.

When I refused to take more than 100, she accepted that just as she had accepted the fact that Martinière had taken twice as much. Since I didn’t really understand the problem until later in the day, when I had spoken to another member, I couldn’t really explain things well to her. But I passed the word to Martinière so that he knows he’ll need to talk with her about it next Wednesday.

It was Rose Marthe’s turn to receive the  sòl, so she and I spent most of our time talking about how she wanted to invest it. She had her two CLM goats, but wanted to buy a third with the  sòl money. It’s not really a great investment, because the goat that she’s likely to buy for only 1000 gourds will be too young to get pregnant. It will take some time for her to make much from this. But she had her heart set on it. She likes taking care of the animals, and doesn’t feel pressed to make money more quickly because she and her husband have enough food coming in from the fields right now that they are able to keep themselves and their children fed.

Omène lives with her husband and their children in a home in her in-laws’ yard. And that has become a problem. Her husband comes and goes. He sometimes leaves for weeks at a time when he can find agricultural work in the fields of Ponsonde or Lascahobas. When he’s not there, his folks are nasty to his wife, treating her like a child that they can boss around and even punish. When she said that she would go to spend a few days visiting her own parents, they forbid it, threatening to beat her if she disobeyed. It was the last straw. Martinière had heard this from her. She had explained to him that she would be moving out of the house to get beyond their reach. He had asked her to have her husband there for his next visit. He wanted to hear the husband’s side of things. He was committed to taking Omène’s side come what may. That’s his job. But the problem has a very different look depending on whether the husband is with her or against her. He wanted to make sure he had the full picture.

It turns out that he’s with her. 100%. He’s ashamed of the way his parents treat her, and anxious to get her into a new house as quickly as possible. He’s already cleared a piece of land in the corner of a small field that he’s been farming for years, and he’s begun to collect the materials he’ll need for construction: rocks, sand, support poles, and the palm seedpods that the poorest peasants use as roofing material. I asked him and Omène to be sure to coordinate the move with Martinière. On one hand, that will help ensure that Omène continues to receive our support. On the other, Martinière will be able to provide construction materials – a little cement and some tin roofing – that will make a small house better than it would otherwise be.

Marie is the last member I saw on the way out of Manwa before descending into Deniza. She’s an older woman, but when I arrived at her home she had an infant on her lap. Haitian say, ”lè w pa gen manman, ou tete grann.” It’s a way of saying that you make the best of things: “If you have no mother, you nurse at your grandmother’s breast.” I had always thought that it was just a saying, but there was Marie, nursing her grandson. One of her older children had abandoned two young children to her care.

Marie is doing well by a number of criteria. She’s been managing her subsistence allowance carefully, and has been able to buy several animals – beyond the ones we have given her – already. But there’s a problem: When I arrived at her home at about 2:00, she hadn’t made food yet that day. She was waiting for her subsistence allowance to go to the market. She wouldn’t have any food prepared to early evening. Her youngest son – a boy about ten – was getting ready to grill some hard kernels of corn over a fire for himself and some friends just to ward off the hunger pangs.

Marie seems to feel so much pressure to augment her assets that she is using the money we give her to feed herself and her kids right now to plan for a better future. While that’s admirable in a way, it leaves her children and grandchildren suffering needlessly in the short term. We are in a hurry to see her make progress, just as she’s in a hurry to move forward, because we all know that 18 months is not a lot of time to change a life for good. But 18 months is still 18 months, not 18 days. If we can convince her to trust the process, she could spend a little more money now to improve her children’s lives right away. That’s something for her to talk about with Martinière.

The last woman I’ll mention is Gertha. She’s one of our poorest members. She has no home at all, having to live with her son in the corner of another CLM members home. She had to leave her own home because every time she would accumulate any sort of possessions of value, they would be stolen. Her children’s father had abandoned her, but his family continued to feel free to take anything she had. She met Oranie at the training session we held in December for new members, and moved in with her and her husband.

She’s starting to make some progress. Her goats are pregnant, and she bought a turkey with savings from her subsistence allowance.

But turkeys like to wander, and hers made it into a neighbor’s yard. The neighbor’s kids were chasing it off by throwing rocks, and hit it in the head. So it died.

Unfortunately, Gertha is only too accustomed to losses. And the truth is that there’s no use crying over spilled milk. So we talked about how she can keep anything like that from happening again. For now, she’ll put savings into her bank account instead and use the money to set up a small commerce when it’s enough. She might have to wait until it’s her turn to receive the  sòl.

As we start our weekly visits with our new CLM members, we begin to face new issues. Each member has a story. Each faces her own set of difficulties. Our case managers’ first challenge is to get the members to share the problems they face, to talk about them frankly. That’s when our real work begins. Helping extremely poor women begin to strategize about their lives, helping them to look at their lives as something they can change, is the key to everything we do.

Licia lives in Chipen, in the corner of Tit Montay farthest from our base in Zaboka. Her home is high on a ridge that divides Boukankare from Ench, one of its neighbors to the north. The hike up to Zaboka from Viyèt, where we leave our motorcycles, is already almost four hours. Our team makes that trip every Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning, Martinière leaves early from Zaboka to walk to Chipen, almost two and a half hours away through the hills. He is Licia’s case manager, and he starts with her first, because she is the farthest of all. Then he works his way back downhill towards the lower end of Chipen before he hikes back to Zaboka.

When we got to Licia’s house, she announced that she was leaving the program. Martinière asked her why, and what she said shocked us. She’s cursed. The people around her hate her and will block her. Nothing can change her life.

By way of explanation, she told us the following story: For the first six months that CLM members spend in the program, we give them a small cash stipend, just a little more than a dollar per day. It’s designed as a way to protect their new assets. As small as it is, it helps them guarantee that they can feed themselves and their children without selling the animals we give them or reaching too deeply into the commerce they’re trying to build up. Our expectation is that by the time they’ve spent six months in the program, their assets will be earning them enough income to do the work the stipend has been doing.

But many of the women choose to invest these stipends rather than spending them just to buy food. They buy livestock, mostly fowl. It’s not really what the stipends are intended for, but we are so glad to see the women thinking in terms of investment, that we don’t worry too much. We just try to see to it that they have something to feed their kids as well.

Licia decided to buy a turkey. It would be a big investment, but it could pay off handsomely. Turkeys are hardier than chickens, and this is a major consideration this time of year, when many chickens die in the relatively cold weather. Turkeys reproduce well, and are easy to sell for a decent price. So she went to the market in Nansab, in southern Ench, and bought a young female for 600 gourds, or two weeks’ stipend. She had a number of errands to run in the market, so she left her little boy to keep an eye on the turkey, and went her way.

Unfortunately, the little boy was more interested in a soccer match than in his mother’s new turkey. He went off to watch the match, and when his mother returned, the turkey was gone. She looked all over the market for it, but could find no trace. Her investment disappeared the same day she made it. She felt so discouraged by the loss that she decided to leave the program. There was no point in continuing. She was obviously cursed.

Fortunately, she was open to listening. Martinière talked a lot. But the heart of what he said was simple: She should look at the loss as a lesson. Her boy is not mature enough to be left with such a serious responsibility. Haitian’s say “se mèt kò a ki veye kò a.” This means that a body’s owner is the one who should keep an eye on it. Martinière encouraged her to realize that she herself must take responsibility for the decisions she makes and the assets they bring her way. But for her to leave the program right as it is starting would not solve anything. After some discussion, she relented. She will continue with us, maybe a little bit wiser for her loss.

The problem with Léonie is more serious. We are not sure we can keep her in the program because we can’t get her to tell us the truth. I’ve put together her story from evidence we’ve collected from her neighbors, including the local KASEK, the government official who resides in the zone.

Her partner, the father of her youngest child, is married to another woman. Léonie has been living in a small, dilapidated shack made of mud and sticks and covered with straw just a short distance from the man’s fairly nice house. One day, her partner was doing some work for her in her garden when his wife brought him a midday meal. Léonie was furious. She decided to leave him on the spot. So she left the house and went back to live with her mother.

This wouldn’t normally be a problem. It is not unusual for a CLM member to move. They do it from all sorts of reasons, including because they decide to break up with the man they’re with. But her mother lives well across the Boukankare border in Ench. While we plan to enter Ench eventually, we’re not working there yet. If that’s where Léonie lives, we can’t help her right now.

What’s worse, Léonie has been trying to hide what’s she’s doing from us. We know that she comes to the house she used to live in early on Monday morning so that she’ll be there when Martinière comes for his visit. Even if we had no other way of telling, the emptiness of the house and its yard speak volumes. But we’ve spoken to several witnesses as well who confirm that she doesn’t live there and that her children don’t either. She even borrowed a neighbor’s baby, claiming it to be her own, to show Martinière that they are both in the house. Unfortunately for her, Martinière was smart enough to catch her in the lie. For whatever reason, she is conspiring with the man she has left so that she can stay in the program and receive the assets that we offer.

But the situation really is complicated. We’ve heard that she isn’t actually at her mother’s house, either. We’ve heard that she has moved in with another man. The man lives in another area of Tit Montay, an area that we are currently serving. So it would resolve the problem if it turned out to be true. But until we can get her to speak clearly with us, we can’t move forward.

In the meantime, she and her partner are making visits to Chipen difficult for Martinière. They have spread the word that he comes carrying cash for CLM members, having the man’s older children loudly asking him to bring money to them, too. This makes the trip more dangerous than it needs to be.

For now, all I could tell her is that we can’t help her until we feel confident that we understand her situation. Her lies, I said, mean that we need to take more time. We have no choice. We have to put her on hold. Martinière will continue to visit her, but he will provide no stipend and give her no assets.

A third case: Tuesday morning, just after dawn, as the four Zaboka case managers and I were preparing to go our separate ways, an irate man came to see us. He is the partner of a new member from lower Zaboka. He told us the following story.

He has children by his wife, who is not the CLM member. One of his boys has a goat that he asked the CLM member to look after. When the boy risked being sent home from school because of non-payment of the tuition, the man decided he would have to sell the goat. It would be a big sacrifice because the goat was pregnant, but he felt he had no choice.

When he went to the CLM member to retrieve the goat, she refused to give it to him. She said that she had spoken to her case manager, Orweeth, and that he had told her that she could keep the goat and that he would arrange for her to get legal papers. The man said that, if that’s how CLM works, he would wreck the woman in CLM. Orweeth was there with us as the man spoke, and he gave every assurance that he had told the woman nothing of the kind. Orweeth promised to go by to see her at the end of the day.

As I was leaving Zaboka, I went by her home, and the man was there along with a crowd of neighbors. I asked the woman about it, and she denied outright that she had said any such thing. I told her in front of everyone that I did not automatically believe that she would say such a thing, but that since I wasn’t from the neighborhood, I couldn’t tell who was lying and who was telling the truth. But everyone should understand that CLM will be buying her two goats, but would never simply grant her possession of something that’s not hers.

The case is not simple, though. The woman explained that she has been together with the man for years, that they have children together, but that he’s never done anything for her. She pointed to her home, in terrible disrepair, and added that he hasn’t helped with her farming either. She was breaking up with him, but suggested that confiscating the goat was simply a matter of taking something she is owed. Normally she would receive a kid when the goat gives birth as the price of taking care of it for him. She feels understandably cheated. I asked her to talk about the problem with Orweeth when he comes by at the end of the day, and she said she would. An important part of our job is to ensure that our members get what is their right. We have to help them protect themselves from exploitation and abuse. But we have to find ways of doing so that make sense to the communities they live in.

Taking the man’s goat might be the right thing to do, but it will require discussion. That’s part of what we’re there for.

The hike to Zaboka is hard and long — almost four hours — but also lovely. It starts in the hilly farmland above Viyèt, and winds through Boukankola and Akildiso. It then threads a narrow pass alongside a waterfall. After that, it climbs up and down the steep, narrow slopes that cut through Tit Montay. The pictures below were taken next to the waterfall. Martinière Jasmin, whom I photographed, took the picture of me.

Gauthier, the extraordinary person who leads the CLM program, told me I had to write this story. It has to do with a $50 investment I made last week.

When he recruited me into the program, he warned me that I would find myself reaching into my own pocket once in awhile. We deal with people who are, especially when we first meet them, miserably poor. “Miserably” here not just a word. It reflects the fact that they are hungry, sick, unprotected from most of the harms that might come their way, and without the social or financial resources to change their own lives.

The warning was especially true during the verification process, which preceded our enrolling new members into CLM. The process involves visiting homes in which the program is not yet at work. You see the poverty, but you’re not yet doing anything about it. You find yourself arriving in the mid to late afternoon, with children crying because they haven’t eaten all day and have no prospects of getting a meal before going to bed. The mother tells you her story, and you find yourself giving her 50-100 gourds, or a little more than $1-$2, if you have them, so she can buy what she needs to cook a meal for herself and her kids. It doesn’t feel like a very meaningful gesture. The family needs much more than 100 gourds. But it makes you feel a little better because it means they’ll eat that day.

But we’re past verification now. Our comprehensive intervention into members’ lives has begun. So the desire to hand out small change has faded. But things still come up.

I hiked up to Manwa a few weeks ago, needing to talk to some prospective CLM members. Manwa is on the top of a mountain, and the first structure one sees as one crosses over the ridge is a small church. It houses a small community school, which serves local kids, taking them through the third grade.

When I reached the school, I found Jackson standing in front of it, taking in the scene as the schoolchildren played. It must have been recess. He’s the youngest son of a new CLM member, a 16-year-old boy whom I met when I visited his mother’s house during the verification process. I didn’t know the homes I needed to visit in Manwa, and I thought Jackson would, so I asked him whether he’d be my guide. He said he would, so we spent most of the day hiking around together. At the end of the day, I paid him a little bit for his time, and we chatted as we walked back down the hill together. I asked him what he was doing up at the school. It’s a steep, half-hour’s hike from his mother’s house. He said that when he has nothing to do he likes to watch the children in school. To watch them. He’s never been to the school himself. His mother hasn’t been able to afford it.

So when I went back to Manwa to visit our members with their case manager, Martinière, I was looking for Jackson. He was, as usual, at his mother’s house. Martinière and I spoke to her first. She seems really devoted to the boy, just as he seems devoted to her. She wants him in school, and hopes that the goats and pigs she will raise through CLM will enable her to send him next fall. Her other children are older. It’s probably too late for them to start, but in Jackson she has one hope. We told her that she’d need to get ready for next year, but that we wanted to get Jackson started now, before it’s too late, and that we’d pay for it. She agreed.

When we were finished talking with her, we asked Jackson whether he could take us to the school principal’s home. We didn’t tell him why. When we got there, we asked the principal what we would need to do to get Jackson in school right away. Jackson’s draw dropped. As we negotiated and then paid the school fee for the year, Jackson could only watch. We then took him aside and asked a few questions. We needed to know whether he had shoes, socks, underwear, and pants and t-shirts that could be cleaned to look ok. Though he’d eventually need a uniform, that would take some time. The principal was willing to let him come right away, “in civilian clothes” as they say here, but he’d need to look more or less decent anyway.

Jackson had nothing but a ragged pair of shorts and a t-shirt, also ragged. No amount of cleaning would make them presentable. He’d need a whole new wardrobe. So Martinière agreed to meet him at a nearby market, on an off day, so that they could buy everything he’d need.

When we said our goodbyes and headed down the hill, Jackson’s last words were “lendi m pral lekòl.” Or, “I’m going to school Monday.” The matter-of-fact-ness of these words, their expression of a simple, unexpected realization was as striking as the excitement behind them.

If there could have been any doubt about his enthusiasm, it was eliminated the day he met Martinière in the market in Domond. I said that it’s near Manwa, but “near” is a relative word. It’s easily a four-hour hike each way. And Jackson’s lame. He stubbed his toe painfully walking around in his front yard, ripping off a toenail, and limps badly. But he and his mother made that walk and spent an hour in the market with Martinière. Jackson didn’t know how to try on clothes. Martinière told me that it was as if he’d never done it before. At 16, he was trying sneakers on the wrong feet, choosing pants much too large or much too small, picking the first of everything he would see. Maybe he was just afraid that if he took too much time over things, it would all turn out to be unreal. Martinière had to give lots of firm guidance. But they got their shopping done. Jackson even came with a handwritten list of books he’d need. The principal wrote it out for him. They bought those, too. All told, we spent about $50.

So Jackson’s excited. We hope it lasts. He has a tough road ahead of him. As a big and growing teenager, he’ll be sitting in class with kids half his age, kids who are now well ahead of him. He’s got a slight speech impediment due to a significant overbite. He’s surely in for some teasing. Limping to the Domond market and back showed a lot of determination of a certain kind, but the determination to face the small, daily difficulties that will follow is another matter.

In a sense, his situation is emblematic of what our members face as they join our program. They suddenly find that they have access to resources and support that they could hardly have imagined. They have assets to manage, food to eat, and a well-trained advisor to guide them. But their daily struggle to change their lives has just begun.

Jackson and his mother, Manie