Michèl, Jilmèn, and Madanm Lisyen are residents of Lalomas. They are members of a solidarity group called Bondyè Bon, or “God is good,” that’s served by Fonkoze’s Senmichèl branch. They’ve been with Fonkoze since 2003, and are on their fourth loan. Their most recent ones were for 15,000 gourds each, or about $400.

Belonging to a solidarity groups means more than just taking out loans and making repayments together – though it means that, too. It means sticking up for one another. That’s what Madanm Lisyen likes most about her Fonkoze credit. “There’s someone there,” she says, “to help you out if you need it.”

Her group had need of the principle when fellow member Jilmèn ran into trouble. She had used profits from her business to help her husband by a small motorcycle. It was a big investment, but it allowed him to earn another income for them as a taxi driver.

But then the motorcycle broke down. It had tied up enough of her money that repaying her loan became a serious problem. She talked to her credit agent, Brunel, about her plan to sell it, but he advised her to wait. “I told her to talk to her group instead,” he said. “The motorcycle was a good investment. I knew it would be better for her family if she could hold onto it.” She did talk to the group, and they were willing to lend her the money she would need to keep up her repayments. The motorcycle is almost fixed, and once her husband gets back to work repaying her friends should be no trouble.

Jilmèn is excited about her Fonkoze credit because it has really helped her business grow. She’s a butcher, buying livestock in the countryside that she sells as meat in Sanrafayèl, a small city nearby. She has five young children, and though they had started school before she joined Fonkoze, they had had to stop going. Tuition was more than she could afford. Now all five of them are in school, and she couldn’t be happier. “My business helps me care for my children. That’s what matters to me.”

Madanm Lisyen is an older woman. She’s given birth to sixteen children, though only six survived childhood. The youngest is now a 21-year-old eleventh-grader. She has seventeen grandchildren as well. She travels to Okap, Wanament, or Pòtoprens every two weeks or so to buy merchandise that she sells in front of her home in Lalomas. “I sell everything someone could need: food, cosmetics, sandals, underwear . . . everything.”

She used to sell from a stall in the middle of the busy market in Piyon, a regional center, but starting feeling as though she was too old to spend all that time away from home. “It was getting too hard. I decided to sell from my home instead.” But that hurt her business badly. She had to start over, without a client base, and so the business that had been so successful shrunk considerably. “My business got really small. Thanks to Fonkoze, it’s growing again.”

And it’s not just the credit she’s grateful for. She’s part of the literacy class Fonkoze offers free of charge in her center. “I’m old, and so it’s hard for me to learn, but I can already write my name. I’m a little slow, but with a little help I can now sign my name when we get our loans.” She’s not the only one who’s pleased. Her grandchildren love to watch her practice writing her name, and the older ones are quick to offer help and encouragement.

Madanm Lisyen buys in the cities and sells from her home. Michèl’s business works the other way around. She buys charcoal from peasants in and around Lalomas, and sells it in Pòtoprens. With the money she earns, she buys sacks of flour and sugar to sell when she returns home. When she’s busy, she can make the trip as often as once a week. It’s hard, but it’s good business. “It’s helped me raise my children and send them to school.” And that’s no inconsiderable feat. She has twelve of them.

Fonkoze’s credit has helped her expand her business and diversify it all well. “I’ve started buying livestock. I bought a bull a few months ago, and it’s grown so much that I wouldn’t sell it now for 10,000 gourds.” That’s about $265.

“The credit has also helped me do some things just for me. I always set the money I need for reimbursement and for purchasing aside, and I set aside what I need for my household, too. But I had wanted a cabinet to hold my dishes for a long time, and last week I saw one I liked. I told my husband I wanted to buy it, and that’s what I did.”

Michèl, Jilmèn, and Madanm Lisyen with their Credit Agent, Brunel

Elimàn belongs to another credit center, one that meets just down the road. She’s on her fourth loan as well. Hers is for 10,000 gourds. Some women may travel occasionally, even frequently, away from Lalomas to buy or sell. Elimàn spends most of her time away from Lalomas because she does both. She buys cosmetics and other odds and ends in Pòtoprens and then sells them in the large market towns of Ponsonde and Lestè. She comes home once a month to see her family and repay her loan.

It’s a hard life that’s been hers since she was a young girl. “My mother’s business was away from home, and I used to go with her when I was little. When she passed away, I continued the same kind of work.”

Her four children live in Senmichèl with an aunt so they can go to school. Her husband is a farmer in Lalomas, who keeps an eye on the kids and on their home.

“I’d like to sell at home, but my business isn’t big enough. You can’t go back and forth from Lalomas to Pòtoprens unless you have a lot of money to buy with. The transportation costs too much. But Ponsonde is much closer. I can go to Pòtoprens to buy with any little bit of money I have.”

Her business makes it hard for her to take advantage of the opportunities that Fonkoze might offer. She isn’t around to benefit from educational services or even to attend all of the required center meetings. So far, she’s been able to maintain a good repayment record, but her inability to attend meetings or to see her credit agent regularly entails risk. For Elimàn and the women in Lalomas who are like her the challenge is to grow within a system that wasn’t quite designed with a business like theirs in mind.

That’s a challenge for Fonkoze as well. The realities of Lalomas and its remote location won’t allow the problem to be ignored.

Elimàn

I didn’t get back to Kaglo until mid-morning on Sunday. I had been working in the Central Plateau Saturday morning, and by the time I was finished it was too let to get public transportation back to Pòtoprens. So I decided to get a spot on a truck that would leave at 3:00 AM on Sunday. I’d be in Pòtoprens before 8:00, and would have some of my Sunday to myself.

As soon as I got home and changed, I walked up the hill to Mackenson’s house. It’s across the road from where I live, in Upper Glo, about a five-minute walk away.

The house really belongs to Mackenson’s father, Léon. I had been there any number of times, but I remember my first visit well. Mackenson had asked me to become the signer on his report card. His parents can’t read or write, and ever since Mackenson started working with me regularly at math, he began to view me as a reasonable alternative to his signing the cards himself. I told him that I’d be happy to do so, but would have to talk to his mother or father about his grades before I did. I wanted it to be clear that I was signing for them.

So I went to talk to Léon. He’s an older man, though his age would be hard to guess. Mackenson is 18, and has four older siblings. The oldest is about thirty, so Léon is probably in his 50s, though he looks like he could be much older. He’s a farmer and a day laborer. I guess it’s a hard life. His wife lives just up the hill, in Ba Osya, with their unmarried daughters.

What I remember so well is how surprised I was to discover that Léon was living with Mackenson and another younger son in a single-room house, no more than ten feet long and ten feet wide, made entirely out of rough wooden support posts and tin roofing material. A cloth hung over the front entrance in place of a door.

I had seen such houses often enough in Haiti. They are quite common in Cité Soleil, for example. But I didn’t know there were any in Kaglo. The houses I had visited in Kaglo, where I’ve sent much of the last ten years or so, are nice concrete structures. Those that some of the poorer families live in may be a little worse for wear, and I know of one with a straw roof, but they have solid walls and offer real protection against the cool night air and the heavy summer rain. Léon’s house took me by surprise.

Over the course of the past year, though, the house began to change. Four concrete walls went up around it. Léon and his boys stilled lived in the tin structure, but it was like a mollusk growing a newer, larger, harder shell around its existing one. It’s not that Léon’s financial position had changed very much, but he was getting some help from a neighbor, who had decided to help him build a new house.

In any case, when I got to their house on Sunday, work was in progress. The roofing material that formerly was the inner shell was arranged in piles in front of the completed cement structure, and neighbors were helping to arrange the beams they would be nailed to. Mackenson had told me earlier in the week that they were finally ready to put on the roof, and I said I’d come by to give an unskilled hand.

It turned out that “giving a hand” meant sitting and drinking coffee with the older men, whose role was to provide advice while the ones doing the work would try to pretend they were listening to it. There simply wasn’t enough work to go around. The project was too small. Two men were balancing on roof beams, nailing them in place then attaching the roofing, and they couldn’t have more then one or two others passing them what they needed. Mackenson’s married oldest sister was preparing a large pot of beans and rice to share later.

I was happy with my very limited role. I had to head back down the mountain that morning to spend the afternoon working in Cité Soleil, where I would also sleep. Conserving my energy seemed like a good idea. And I was glad to be reminded that Léon likes his coffee strong.

The house isn’t exactly finished. The floor is packed dirt, and it still lacks a door, but it’s a big improvement over what they had. And Mackenson is pleased. He told me that now he has a home where he can receive his friends.

Asilia is a proud mother of four, all of whom are either finished with school or well on their way. She and her husband have sent them to school by working together. Each has had a business. She sold charcoal by the sack to retail merchants in Mibalè, buying them in various corners of the countryside, and carrying them to the market each week. She would also buy fowl – chicken, guinea fowl, and the like – from the folks in the countryside and carry them to the same markets. She told me she might carry more than a dozen large chickens on her head. Her husband sells pills – assorted pharmaceuticals — out of a bucket he carries from market to market in the region.

For whatever reason, her business activities collapsed. The capital she ran them with evaporated. So she was full of know-how, but had no way to put her experience to work. She had no way to earn any income at all.

That’s when she heard about Fonkoze’s Ti Kredi program. It’s a solidarity-group lending program that features extra-small loans and close accompaniment from a specially trained loan officer. Loans start at about $30. The loan periods are short, and repayments are frequent.

Asilia joined together with four other women. They had no need to find co-signers, nor to put up collateral. The five of them guaranteed one another’s loans. That’s one of the reasons it’s called “solidarity-group” credit. The women depend on the solidarity that develops among them, and the lending institution depends on it as well.

Most of the time, reliance on that sense of solidarity is unnecessary. Muhammad Yunus , the founder of the international microcredit movement, which now serves hundreds of millions of families worldwide, has said, “The poor always repay.” And that’s almost true. International repayment rates for microcredit far exceed anything a traditional lender could hope for.

But Asilia’s solidarity group ran into a bump in the road. One of its five members was new to the Boukankare region where Asilia lives, and the other four women didn’t know her well. Generally speaking, Fonkoze insists that fellow group members be close friends, but for some reason that didn’t happen in this case. The new woman paid her first loan on time, as did the rest of the group. The five of them then took their second loan, for just over $40 each. It was to be repaid over the course of two months.

According to Asilia, the woman “wasted” the money. This might mean that she used it to do something important, like buy food for her family or pay for her children’s schooling. But whatever she did do, what she did not do was invest it in her business. When it was time to make the first repayment on this second loan, the woman had nothing left. She left the area, and they haven’t seen her since.

Asilia and the other three remaining women repaid their part of the loan on schedule, but they couldn’t get new credit because the other woman’s $40 plus interest was missing. Fonkoze makes its loans to the groups of five women, not to the individuals they comprise. Therefore, a loan isn’t fully repaid until all five women have repaid their shares. So the four women got together and divided the remaining debt. They exhausted the little savings they had begun to accumulate while repaying the first one-month loan, and it was almost enough to cover for the missing woman. But it wasn’t quite enough, so they appealed to the other members of their center.

A center is a collection of six-ten groups of five. The center meets regularly with the Fonkoze credit agent who serves them. They also work together as they receive the educational services that Fonkoze offers. Finally, the center is also a place where individual women, and solidarity groups as well, can share their problems and their success stories as they try to make progress together. In this case, the rest of the center was willing and able to make up the difference between the debt that the woman left her group and what the group was able to come up with.

Asilia attended the graduation ceremony where members of her center moved out of Ti Kredi and into standard solidarity group credit. She and the other members of her group watched as the rest of the members of her center took out their first larger loans for about $80. It must have been a bittersweet moment.

But not a moment without hope. Asilia and her group eventually took out their third and final Ti Kredi loan about one month late. They are now scheduled to graduate out of Ti Kredi in March. It probably won’t be a big celebration, but it will be a very happy day nonetheless.

Asilia’s Solidarity Group with Fonkoze’s Executive Director, Anne Hastings, and the Manager of the Boukankare branch. They have a young admirer on the far left.

Asilia is glad to have discovered Fonkoze because it’s given her a second chance, a way to get her business started again. “Fonkoze helped me start small,” she says, “and it’s giving me a way to make my way. I will move forward as far as I can go.”

Fonkoze attacks poverty on all fronts. Its approach is comprehensive, increasingly so, in two respects. On one hand, it offers its members and clients a comprehensive range of tools, financial and otherwise, with which to improve their lives. These tools include the solidarity-group microcredit that is its hallmark. Groups of five friends organize themselves to take out their loans, serving one another as guarantees in place of collateral or guarantors.

But they also include other financial services, like life insurance and savings, and educational services that range from Basic Literacy to Business Development Skills to Children’s Rights. Fonkoze is also in the process of hiring a Director of Health Services, whose task will be to facilitate members’ access to healthcare.

On the other hand, Fonkoze reaches to Haitians at all levels of poverty, as long as they have the strength to work. I have written before about CLM, Fonkoze’s Chemen Lavi Miyò or Path to a Better Life program. (See: Beyond Microcredit.) It serves the poorest of the poor, families with no income-generating assets whatsoever, offering eighteen months of very close accompaniment by highly-trained Fonkoze staff that emphasizes education and motivation, free access to health care, housing repair, water treatment, and the transfer of an asset, like a couple of chickens or goats. The goal is to prepare program participants for economic independence, including microcredit if they choose to become borrowers.

Most poor Haitian families do not need CLM. They generally have some sort of activity, whether it is farming, animal husbandry, commerce, or some combination. For most of Haiti’s poor, the appropriate Fonkoze program is standard solidarity-group credit, with loans that start at about $80. The first loan is for three months, and subsequent loans are for six. They loans go as high as $1000. Women whose businesses outgrow such loans can then get individual loans, and for such loans, the sky’s the limit. Fonkoze has individual borrowers with $25,000 or more in their hands.

But there are women whose families cannot be said to need CLM – they have small businesses or at least have the motivation and the minimal know-how needed to start one – but who also don’t have enough of a business to absorb an $80 loan.

Fonkoze knows only too well that lending a woman more money than her business can handle is a great disservice. It almost ensures that she will be delinquent in her repayment, because whether she consumes the extra money or holds it in her hands, it won’t be earning the income that interest payments require. What’s more, standard solidarity groups will not accept such women as members, judging, probably correctly, that they are likely to have trouble. The solidarity-group approach requires women to cover for fellow-members who cannot repay, so women aren’t willing to join together with other women unless they believe in their ability to make the loans work.

So Fonkoze has created an approach just for such women, those on the threshold of readiness for standard microcredit, who just need a little extra something to prepare them to move forward. We call it “Ti Kredi” or “Little Credit.” It’s a six-month approach that combines some of the features of CLM with standard, but smaller, solidarity-group loans.

Ti Kredi helps women organize themselves into credit centers that will eventually function together as regular Fonkoze credit centers do. But for the first six months, they meet with their credit agents on a weekly basis, twice as often as standard solidarity-group credit clients do. They take out a series of three loans. The first, for just a month, is for less than $30. The last, for three months, is for more than twice as much. It’s a way to accustom members gradually to making use of credit.

Because Ti Kredi and standard solidarity-group credit are run separately, the passage from one to the other is a graduation of sorts. Participating women have proven their ability to manage loans and to make their businesses grow. Six months is very little time in which to change one’s life, and there’s no clear data showing that such small loans can do very much for a family’s finances. But the testimony of participants is moving. (See: The Non Graduate.) It suggests that, even if these little loans cannot bring about significant progress by themselves, they can help a woman on her way.

To see a pdf file that explains Fonkoze’s battery of programs for each level of poverty, click here: Inserts_Borrowers (pdf)

To see photos from a Ti Kredi graduation ceremony in Boukankare, click here: Boukankare Graduation.

When Abner, Benaja, and I arrived in Latanye, it was midday. We had left Matènwa late in the morning, hoping to observe an afternoon session at the literacy center meeting. We hadn’t been down to the Latanye center in a month, and wanted to check on its progress.

The ride down the mountain and then westward along the coast takes about two hours. On one hand, the current dry season means that the deep pits of gooey mud that make the trip so challenging whenever there’s been rain have disappeared. On the other, the flour-like dust is now inches thick all along the road, and it both chokes you and covers you. For one reason or another, the trip is hard any time of the year.

Latanye is Benaja’s hometown, and the first news we heard when we got there was that his mother was leaving that very day for St. Marc. One of her sons-in-law died suddenly several weeks ago, but she had been sick at the time and, so, hadn’t been able to attend the funeral. Now that she was feeling better, she was anxious to see her daughter.

Sailboats leave Latanye every few days for St. Marc or Arkaye, on the Haitian mainland. Their departure times are irregular. They depend on factors like the wind, the current, and the speed with which they load. We rushed down to the beach to try to catch her before she sailed.

As we got to the shore, the boat was pulling away. I thought that we had missed our chance. We stood waving to Koyotte, Ben’s mom, from the shore, and cursing our timing. But soon Ben was talking with a fisherman, and a few minutes later he and I were sitting in a leaky dugout canoe, paddling into the bay. Abner chose to wait on the beach.

We rowed out to the sailboat, and before I could finish paying my respects Koyotte was handing me a thermos full of hot coffee. When Ben got to her – he was in the back half of the canoe – she handed him a large bag of roasted peanuts, some salted and some covered in sugar. Then she sent us on our way.

We made it most of the way back to the shore before the canoe began to sink. The waves weren’t anything to speak of, but they were more than enough to swamp a vessel already taking on water through a half-dozen or so small holes. Especially since my awkward lack of balance had us dipping to one side or the other every few feet. A beach full of spectators had a lot to talk and laugh about as they watched the two of us wading through waist-deep water, fully clothed, with our precious coffee and peanuts carefully held above the water that was drenching us.

Koyotte had not known that she’d see us that day, so the coffee and peanuts were not waiting for us. She was, however, faced with a sailboat ride to the mainland that might take anywhere from eight to twelve hours. She was at the mercy of the wind and the current, so she couldn’t know when she’d arrive. Not only that, but her daughter probably did not know that she was coming. Telephone communication with Latanye is almost impossible. So Koyotte didn’t know when she’d be able to eat again. The coffee and peanuts were her snack.

But she decided that it was more important to her to give her food to her boy and his friends than enjoy tit herself. She was doing what she could, in a very tight spot, to receive us in her home. I can’t be certain whether she was acting out of her love for her son or out of her strong Haitian sense of hospitality. I suspect it was probably both.

She may have gone hungry that day, or she may have found a fellow passenger willing to share. I don’t know. But her gift was not lost on us. It made for wonderful snacking as we sat through the hot afternoon, waiting for the late-afternoon literacy meeting, our clothes hanging in the hot seaside sun.

Trying to learn a little bit about how people learn math has been one of the most interesting pieces of my apprenticeship here in Haiti. I’ve written before about my frustrations at the way bright and serious Haitian children work with numbers. (See: Needing Permission, Boul Does Math). Many of the children I know are, I think, held back by an approach to teaching math that has them memorizing processes rather than puzzling with quantities. They don’t use their good sense. They use fixed procedures – often poorly remembered – instead.

One teacher who has been for me a pleasant exception to the rule is Millienne Angervil. She teaches second grade at the Matènwa Community Learning Center. (www.matenwa.org.) I’ve written before about her teaching style, which I very much enjoy watching. (See: Starting Where They Are.) When I returned from the States with new teaching materials for math to try out, it was only natural for me to ask Millienne whether she would be interested in experimenting with them.

The materials I brought were created by a company called Friendly Math. (www.friendlymath.com.) The program helps kids develop basic quantitative skills. That means learning to do the four basic operations, but also gaining a sense of shape and size and an ability to estimate. Generally, it helps them towards a sense of quantity and form. Part of its premise is that such work can be done most effectively through play. Ruth Champagne, whose husband is interim president of Shimer College, developed the program. I found out about it through him, and he gave me several of their books to try out.

The particular activity Millienne and I set out to try with her students involved shape puzzles. The kids would get a certain number of brightly colored shapes – triangles, squares, diamonds, trapezoids, and hexagons – and then would get a larger shape that they’d have to somehow fit them into. The activity has two main goals: to help the kids practice reasoning with one another and to sharpen their sense of space. The Friendly Math book also talks of measurement, but since all the game pieces are measured in inches, a unit that the Matènwa second-graders don’t know yet, Millienne and I decided to leave that piece out for now.

Just to make the activity work, Millienne and I had a lot to prepare. Part of what’s so good about the Friendly Math books is that they come with all the materials that you’d usually need. There were three pages of small geometrical forms to be cut out, and lots of puzzles to solve with them. But the books are not really designed for a school that would have one book in a classroom of 22 kids. To make them work, Millienne and I would have to keep track of how many puzzle pieces we’d need, and create extra copies of the puzzles we wanted to use.

I’m left-handed, and as bad with scissors as many lefties are. So cutting out the little pieces was for Millienne. I traced multiple copies of the various figures that the kids would have to cover by figuring out how to deploy their little game pieces.

I also made a giant puzzle for the blackboard. I made a couple of eight-inch squares and four similarly sized triangles out of plain paper. On the board, I traced one possible way to assemble them. Millienne and I both felt that the easiest way to help the kids understand the task at hand would be to lead them through one puzzle together, and doing one big enough for everyone to see seemed as though it might be the key.

The kids took some time getting the puzzle on the blackboard right, partly because of the way I had them work at it. I asked volunteers to come to the board one at a time to tape one puzzle piece into position. By the time four of them had positioned their pieces, they had left two pieces that couldn’t be combined to cover the last bit of space. But after a couple of tries, they got it right, and, more importantly, they got clear about how the game was supposed to work.

Millienne organizes her classroom in several different ways, depending on the activity she’s leading the children through. But it’s furnished with five tables with benches. The kids sat around the tables and, so, were organized into obvious teams of four-five. We chose three of the puzzles from the Friendly Math book, and gave one to each table. We told the kids that the first table to finish would win.

The class that followed was a funny mixture of periods of loud, seemingly chaotic chatter and surprisingly quiet intervals. The kids really worked at the puzzles. And though the different tables worked at different speeds, and though some of the puzzles were distinctly more challenging than others, they were consistently able to finish them in a reasonable amount of time.

It turned out that, not too surprisingly, the kids ranged pretty significantly in their initial ability to work the puzzles out. But what was most important was how willing they were to play with them. Rather than stand back and wait for the answer to appear, most of them became very hands on. They would simply start placing pieces, and see where they got. Generally speaking, one of the kids at each table would dominate, at least until he or she got stuck. That is: until they got to a point at which the pieces that remained could not be fit into the remaining space. Then another child would take over, often with a different idea about how to get started.

Millienne and I were pretty hands-off-ish. We wanted, at least this first time, to see how things would play out. And several points became clear:

First, most of the kids really liked the work. They were engaged and showed that they felt distinctly rewarded each time they got a puzzle right. This was true, whether their table was first or last. None seemed to mind being the fifth of five groups to win.

Second, groups of five children were too large. Two, or at most three, in a group would work much better. Five made it too easy for kids to hide if they were inclined to doubt their own ability to figure things out. I saw one little boy, sitting at his table, with his back turned to the other kids who were at work. When I asked him why he wasn’t participating, he insisted repeatedly that he couldn’t do it.

Third, and in the same line, Millienne thinks that what she might need to do is work individually with several of the weaker kids on days when she can assign the rest of the children something to do on their own. It might be hard, given how much the kids like the puzzles. Those to whom she assigns something else will be drawn to the puzzles and her. But she manages her classroom well, so should be able to overcome the challenge.

What will be interesting to try to gauge is how this and other Friendly Math games – Millienne has already assigned me to return to Matènwa with more – affect her students as learners as math. For now, her optimism is enough for me, with or without further evidence. That optimism was linked mainly to the enthusiasm and the beginnings of teamwork that she saw in her kids, two very promising signs.

Spring is supposed to be the season of new beginnings, but for students and teachers – and I’ve been one or the other all my life – things are much more likely to start in September. At least in most of the places I’ve lived and worked. In any case, January 1st has never really felt like the beginning of anything, except the new calendar year.

But this last week has marked the beginning of two of the interesting initiatives I’m involved in here. They have very little in common beyond their starting dates and their adherence to certain core principles. But their very differences argue for writing of them together. They offer a broad view of the very different levels of intervention my work here involves.

The Active Learning Center

Fonkoze’s Active Learning Center is a new branch opening in Lenbe, in northern Haiti, in Mid-January. Normally, opening a new branch, though a challenge full of problems that must be overcome, would hardly be news for Fonkoze. The Lenbe branch will be its 34th, with two or three to be opened closely following it. Fonkoze’s core strategy, but also its style, involves charging hard towards expansion. Its mission is not to change a few businesswomen’s lives, but to change the economy of the nation. And expanding the reach of its services – geographically and otherwise – is a key element of its plan.

But the Active Learning Center is not an ordinary branch. It is designed to be a super-branch. This requires explanation.

The plan to open a branch in Lenbe grew out of a request for a proposal that Fonkoze received. A significant social investor was planning an integrated development project in the Lenbe area, and one element of its plans required microfinance. It asked Fonkoze to take responsibility for that element. So we wrote a proposal, and it was accepted. Finally securing that piece of the financing turned out to be a long process, but Fonkoze succeeded in the end.

Then Fonkoze, along with other microfinance institutions in Haiti, received an invitation from USAID to submit a request for support. USAID’s goal was to encourage innovation in the Haitian microfinance sector. Institutions would be eligible for up to $100,000 to support creative new ways to get things done.

We were excited by the opportunity, but in a very restricted sense. Fonkoze is experimenting with new approaches all the time. Microinsurance, extreme poverty alleviation, social performance management, and new education programs: These are just a few of the innovations Fonkoze is currently managing. In fact, if anything, the amount of innovation going on within Fonkoze all the time is always in danger of exceeding Fonkoze’s management capacity. The “innovation” that Fonkoze needed was not so much a new program for its members and clients, but a new way to study its programs, both old and new, and to make them as strong as they can be.

So, we took advantage of the fact that Lenbe was one of the regions that USAID named as one of its priorities to ask it to invest in the very same branch that our other donor was already funding. The innovation would be the creation of a master branch, or an active learning center. It would differ from an ordinary new branch in two respects: On one hand, it would start with all of Fonkoze’s programs already in place, rather than just the most important core programs; on the other, it would open with a staff selected from Fonkoze’s highest-performing employees, who would live together at the branch, rather than new hires living in homes scattered around town.

The branch would serve Fonkoze in four ways: First, it would be a model branch, a showpiece; second, it would be a place where other employees could come serve short apprenticeships with Fonkoze’s best; third, it would give Fonkoze a place where its very best staff members could experiment with new programs or, more importantly, new approaches to existing ones; finally, it would be a place for field study, where Fonkoze could collect and analyze data that help it better understand both the rural Haitian economy in general, and the finances and lives of its members and clients in particular.

The branch is to be opened later this month, but we decided to start things off with a two-day retreat for its staff. That retreat took place this past weekend.

The retreat had a couple of different objectives. The most obvious was to give the members of the Lenbe staff, who come from all over Haiti, the chance to get to know one another before they begin working together. We also wanted them to accept a detailed set of objectives for the branch and develop a plan for meeting them. Finally, we wanted them to develop the principles with which they will govern the space that they will live and work in.

The weekend’s work included various activities. There were skits. (I played an American missionary, who had to be persuaded not just to change dollars at Fonkoze but also to open a U.S.-dollar account.) There were presentations, like the PowerPoint I gave detailing the history of the Lenbe plan and its overarching goals. There were general discussions, the most important being a detailed look at the financial and social objectives that Fonkoze Director Anne Hastings and I, as grant writers, had presented to funders. And there was small group work, like the time we spent when separate parts of the team – the credit group, the education group, the operations group, and the social performance group – studied the objectives they would most especially be responsible for. They modified the objectives, and developed action plans for attaining the objectives as modified.

In the end, every member of the team, from the branch director to the custodians and security guards, signed a series of four posters we created that had all the objectives written on them. This marked the team’s commitment that they would work together to ensure that every objective would be attained.

The goals are ambitious, far in excess of any expectation we would normally make of a new branch. But the investment we are making in Lenbe is extraordinary, too. The final budget includes funding from four external sources and Fonkoze’s own money as well. It will cost more than three times what Fonkoze usually spends to open a branch, but it will all be worth it if the branch becomes an engine of change within Fonkoze. This doesn’t mean that it will develop lots of new products and services, though we wouldn’t mind if it did. It means, more importantly, that it should discover and test better ways of doing the things we already do and then help us spread that kind of innovation throughout Fonkoze. Fonkoze has 50,000 members and 120,000 savings clients, so even minor institutional improvements can affect very many lives.

The IDEAL Community School in Belekou

This week also marked the opening of the IDEAL Community School in Belekou. I have already shared photos of the first day’s work. (See: TheFirstDay.) But I wanted to write something more substantial about the project.

Since the first time I met with the group in Belekou, one of the needs they expressed was for a school that would offer more kids in the neighborhood the chance for an education. At the time, their idea was that I would simply create a school, much as other foreigners have opened schools in Cité Soleil. They also mentioned a clinic, a library, a water and sewer system, and various other projects.

This was all perfectly sensible on their part. Other foreigners that have been in Cité Soleil have entered with significant resources and predetermined plans. As Haitians say, “mande pa vòlò.” That means, “Asking isn’t stealing.” Belekou is a neighborhood with lots serious problems. Everything they mentioned was a perfectly real need. And they were looking for someone who would address one or more of them.

When I explained that I really only do two things, talk and listen, half of the sixty or so folks in attendance disappeared. A week later, the conversation continued with about thirty, and it’s continued with that same thirty ever since. In the months that followed, they’ve established a bakery and a street-cleaning team.

But the school was their most ambitious project. What started as something as general as a felt need began to take clearer shape when I invited two members of the group to go to Lagonav with me for a visit to the school in Matènwa, a very strong community school, which has been functioning at a high level for years. (See: AnotherExchange.) Other members of the group visited a much newer, less established community school in Fayette.

These two experiences helped the team to begin seeing what a community school could look like. It would be different than anything they had experienced themselves. Non-violent, student-centered teaching and a respectful attitude towards students and parents alike would be the two cornerstones of their approach. In addition, all the little requirements that stand between some kids in their neighborhood and other free schools – uniforms, occasional fees, various other demands that can be hard for parents to meet – would be eliminated.

But even as the guys’ vision cleared, they hesitated. I think they were simply afraid. The two schools they had seen had been opened and were staffed by very experienced educators. They had no reason to imagine that they could do anything similar themselves.

The final push came from a third visit. I took them to see a school near downtown Pétion-Ville, only about an hour’s walk from where I live. It had been opened over two years ago by a community organization that was founded by a group of young people not unlike the guys in Belekou. They too had felt the need to provide education to their neighbors’ kids. (See: www.sodahaiti.org.) Seeing a school that was flourishing in the hands of such young people turned a felt need into a hope with all the shape that the two other visits had given it. What remained was to develop an approach to making their hope real.

Here they might have been stumped, not by perceiving lack of know-how, but by lack of know-how of a very real sort. But the group got lucky. Abner Sauveur, the Haitian director of the Matènwa Community School ( See: www.matenwa.org.) was inspired by their earnestness and their young but clear commitment to ideals he’s been fighting for for much of his life, and decided to do what he could.

With all his years of experience both as a teacher and as a principal, he was able to do a lot. He took advantage of two visits to Port au Prince to lead long planning meetings for the Belekou guys. Other Matènwa professors got interested. One of them, Benaja Antoine, led a workshop on Creole orthography. Another, Matènwa’s excellent first-grade teacher Robert Cajuste, actually came to accompany the guys through their first week of school.

Meanwhile, IDEAL members who had no interest in teaching, or no confidence that they could become teachers, took responsibility for creating a suitable space or helped in other ways. One team renovated my bedroom. Another made the furniture the school would need.

A third team took to the streets, looking for children they could serve. We had a fairly specific profile of the kind of student we wanted. We had no interest, for example, in taking students from already-functioning schools. We wanted none who were already in school and none who were young enough that they might easily wait and start in another school next year. We wanted exactly those kids that existing schools had failed to reach.

The guys found fifteen, and twelve came on the first day. Some are too young, and some have been to school before. As they say, the best laid plans . . .

But the first two days have been wonderful. The kids come more than an hour early, and don’t want to go home. The guys feel their sense of accomplishment, visibly so. Additional parents are already trying to send their kids, and it will be hard to refuse them, as the guys must. But if that is their biggest problem, they’ll be in very good shape.

***

The center in Lenbe and the school in Belekou are fruits of two very different sorts of work. Though I will continue to support the work in Lenbe, visiting whenever I can, consulting with staff, and writing reports, the most important piece of my involvement is over. It consisted mainly of close consultation with Fonkoze’s Director as we developed the idea and wrote the grant proposals that secured the necessary funds.

This might seem like a far cry from my work as a teacher. But the fundamental idea that guides the opening of the Lenbe center is that Fonkoze can improve as a learning institution through the center we are establishing there. And that learning will be participatory and active, just as I believe all learning must be.

Opening the school, on the other hand, has involved close collaboration with the IDEAL team, hours and hours of discussions both with them alone and with people I’ve been able to bring them into contact with. It’s a kind of support that will have to continue, I suspect, for quite some time. Even when they’re doing things very well, they still need to be told that they are. And sometimes they need to be pushed to make the best use of their natural problem solving skills and the wisdom that can come when they listen to one another.

There’s a lot to be said for a job that confronts me with such diverse and different work. It feels like a remarkable, multi-directional extension of the classroom experience that’s long meant so much to me.

Here is a book the children created on their second day of school. It’s about their first day: Firstbook (pdf)

When, occasionally, I feel really sick, I leave my various homes and I move in with my godson, his parents, and siblings. There I count on my makomè, my godson’s mother, to look after me. Jidit’s now a mother of three – Christiana was born in October – and they keep her hands full. But there’s a spare bed in the dining room, and though the space in their two small rooms may appear limited, it’s never been limited enough to keep me out. It didn’t squeeze me out when there was only one room, and it doesn’t now that there are two.

I am entirely at home in their home. It’s the kind thing that means I don’t ask for what I want. I just take it. And they are at home with me. Just this morning I was watching with pleasure as my five-year-old godson, Givens, ate the food off my plate rather than off of his own. He simply knows that he’s entitled to it. His mother laughed, only remarking that he feels alèz, or at ease, with me.

Depending how one counts, I have at least two homes in Haiti. I generally tell people that I live in rural Pétion-Ville, the suburb up the mountain from Port au Prince. The part I stay in is called Ka Glo, and I’ve been spending my time in Haiti in Ka Glo since John Engle placed me in Madan Anténor’s house in June 1997. I’ve spent enough time there to see a generation of young people grow up in front of me, Madan Anténor’s own three children among them. Little kids have become teenagers, teenagers have become young adults, etc. I moved into my own house in February of 2005, and have been there as much as possible ever since.

Often I also mention to people that I have a place in Cité Soleil as well. It’s just a small room, and I’ll soon have to wedge my mattress in between benches when it turns into a school in January. I’ve been sleeping there once or twice a week since the end of last year, as my collaboration with the guys – now the young men and women – of IDEAL have moved forward. I only rent the room – it costs about $100 a year – but the space seems distinctly mine, even if there are two other people who sleep there whenever I’m around.

One could easily point to additional places around Haiti, in Matènwa, Lower Delmas, and Hinche, where I am at home as well.

I was thinking of homes all the way down the mountain this morning. In part, I suppose, it was because I was on my way to a mid-afternoon flight to Florida, for visit to my parents’ home. I am very much an American, and the United States is my home. I don’t currently have my own apartment or house there, but there are a handful of places where I stay very comfortably, some of them regularly. I think of my parents’ house in particular. Even if it’s far from the home they raised me in and even if I’ve never spent more than a couple of days there at a time.

But I had also been thinking of Junior, and his place in one of my Haitian homes. Junior is my new roommate. He moved into the house in Ka Glo just over a week ago. He’s a 26-year-old carpenter from Upper Glo, the poor neighborhood just up the hill, across the main road from where I live. He grew up in his grandmother’s house, raised by her and by a wonderful aunt, who was still with her mother. The aunt died very suddenly last year, and another one of his aunts moved into the house. This other aunt – I don’t know her – is said to be a fine person as well, but she moved into the grandmother’s home with several children of her own. So Junior decided there wasn’t really room for him. He collected his things and moved about a hundred yards to his parents’ home.

That’s when his troubles began. Junior is the third of his mother’s nine kids, and his oldest brother still lives with them. Junior and his older brother shared a room, the younger children shared another, and their parents slept in the third.

I want to avoid judging Mito, the other man, too harshly. As Haitians say “wòch nan dlo pa konnen mizè wòch nan solèy.” That means that a rock in the water doesn’t know the suffering of a rock in the sun. I don’t have a lot of experience with Mito, and I haven’t discussed the tales I’m about to tell with him. But I have always found him difficult to get along with, and I’m not the only one.

What’s more to the point than whether we get along, however, are the insistent expectations he’s had of Junior and the rest of their brothers. He decided long ago that his future was not in Haiti. He would immigrate to the United States. Mito had no way to immigrate legally, but various illegal options are said to be possible. Mito squeezed his family for all the money he could get out of them, and found people who said they could get him to the States.

The problem was that they were liars. Mito threw away a lot of money that his three younger working brothers earned. And he didn’t seem to learn anything from the experience. As soon as he got back to Glo, he began hitting up Junior for the money he’d need to leave again. The second brother, Kevins, is married now and living in his own home. He and Mito are not on speaking terms, so Mito knows he won’t get anything from him. The fourth of the grown brothers, Sonson, lives and works in construction in Santo Domingo. At times, he’s done pretty well for himself. But he’s been sick, however, and Mito’s one visit to see him didn’t bear any fruit. So Mito’s been leaning on Junior.

Junior does have a small, regular income. He works in a carpentry shop, and makes something like $50 a month as long as the workshop is getting orders. But Junior is a major contributor in his parents’ household. He’s been putting a couple of his younger siblings through school, and paying as well for his own continuing education. He keeps signing up for various professional courses. Right now, he’s finishing a nine-month class in videography. So he resents Mito’s demands. He did what he could the first time. A brother is, after all, a brother. But doesn’t see how he can pay for Mito to throw away a bunch of money again. Or why he should.

This meant conflict in their small bedroom, and Mito actually went so far as to throw Junior’s things into the yard. Their parents objected. They reminded Mito that he wasn’t the one who built the house. But he ignored them. Junior tried sleeping with the younger kids, but they are noisy – Why shouldn’t they be? – so it wasn’t really working.

I learned all this because I asked Junior how he was. He had come by to see me. He thinks of me as his godfather. There are various ways to become a godfather in Haiti, and I am Junior’s godfather in what is, perhaps, the most trivial possible sense. Junior made me his by inviting me to attend his videography-school graduation. It’s something I’ve done for a couple of young people, but Junior has taken it more seriously than others did. He stopped addressing me by my name, using the title “godfather”, or “parenn”, instead. This is true even though he hasn’t yet graduated. And he started coming by regularly to pay his respects.

Junior told me the story, and added that he now had to find another place to live. I told him that he could stay in my house for a while if that would help, and it was settled right away. He now appears to have moved in for the long term. He told me that he has land near his grandmother’s home when he will build a house, and that he hopes to start saving up for it soon.

So now Junior has a place to stay, too, though he doesn’t yet appear to feel at home there. One can see him walking on eggshells, trying hard to please. He’s taken over the housework that Byton, the house’s builder and other resident, and I are, frankly, too lazy and too disarray-tolerant to do. Today, on his rare day off, he got up well before 5:00 to make me breakfast. I like the way the house is now cleaner, but I hope he relaxes soon.

Thinking of Junior – and, for that matter, Givens, Jidit, my parents, and the guys who sleep with me in Cité Soleil – has suggested one harsh fact about what it really means to have a home.

Junior did not have a real home because he couldn’t be at ease once he left his grandmother’s house. If he and I play our cards right, he’ll settle in soon and have a home in some sense.

The case of Givens and Jidit is more complicated. For years, they’ve been living in a small building in the yard next to a large house off of a street called Delmas 75. Saül, who is Givens’ father and Jidit’s husband, has been the live-in custodian for the organization that rents the house. But that organization plans to move out of the house next summer, and Saül’s future with them is unclear. At the very least, the will have to find a new place. They are being cast out through a decision that is not their own. They have a number of options, but it’s bound to be stressful nonetheless.

So I think that having a home is more than the warm fuzzies we get about the places where we are at ease. It’s surely about safety and comfort, but it’s about authority as well. My home is a place I can make decisions about. I have the power – a power no one else has –to decide who will live in the house in Ka Glo. Though I only rent in Cité Soleil, it would not have occurred to anyone to put a school in the room unless I had suggested it first. Various friends know that they can stay any time in either place, and some come without asking, but no one would just move in.

Home is where my heart is. That’s true enough. By that standard, my homes are a little hard to count. They are on three continents and a small island. They speak four languages. And the lifestyles they represent cover quite a range.

But home is also someplace where I have authority, where I have power. It’s not a beautiful truth, perhaps, but I think it’s true nonetheless.