I had a pretty likely hunch as to what the problem we were facing was, but I wanted to be sure. I also wanted to hear it from the folks I was working with. So I started the conversation by asking, in a sense, why we were meeting together.

I had been invited to Fayette, a small rural area outside of Darbonne, which is outside of Léogâne, which is outside of Port au Prince. I was asked there to talk to a group of teachers about how they could use the dialogue techniques they have learned through the practice of Reflection Circles in their regular classes to teach subjects like math. They were particularly interested in the small group work that Reflection Circles always include. I have been meeting on and off with these school and adult literacy teachers for three years. For what seemed like a long time, my partner Frémy César and I were going to Fayette almost weekly, helping the team study discussion leadership.

So the teachers knew very well how to use Reflection Circles and the small group work they were asking about, but they were somehow hesitant about using a technique that they’ve already mastered to face a problem they have not faced with it before – like how to teach math. This was true, even through they very much wanted to do just that.

The question I started by asking was not, therefore, just “What are we doing here?” I was able to give that question more precision by asking why they, as experienced as they are, don’t feel as though they can use Reflection Circles for math, and the answer was predictable. Miracle, one of the teachers at the new community school in Fayette, is the one who spoke up. He said that Reflection Circles is just about opinions, whereas when we do math, even if we pursue different routes, we are required to come up with the same answer nonetheless. How, they wanted to know, could a conversation teach a precise, inflexible skill?

His answer was, from my perspective, a stroke of luck. I couldn’t have anticipated that he himself would make reference to the way that different routes to the same answer are possible. So I made a claim: The real mathematical moment is not in the correct use of predetermined methods of calculation. I said that what is more important in math learning is the discovery of means to resolve mathematical problems. And I added that such discoveries could be effectively developed through small group work.

I had to be careful. People here, just as in a lot of places, can be inclined to hear things in black and white terms. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I was saying that right answers don’t matter. So I tried to really emphasize that what I was proposing would remain one part of an approach to teaching math and that the exercises, sometimes repetitive, that they assign their students would remain important. But I wanted them to think about the way they typically teach math and consider whether other means were possible.

This is the way math classes in Haiti tend to work: The teacher puts a problem on the board, almost certainly in French, and then solves it. The students copy it into their notebooks, and then study it at home. The teachers might also assign two or three similar problems as homework. I asked the teachers why they couldn’t put a new problem on the board and then divide their classes into groups. The groups would have the task of figuring out how to solve the problem. Each group would present their solution to the rest of the class. The class – including its teacher – would pose questions to groups about their answers and the reasonings they used to find them.

But all that was just my talk, and though the teachers said they understood and liked what I was saying, it seemed important to try putting things into practice. So we divided into groups. I asked each group to develop a problem that they felt would be appropriate for the level of students they teach. We would then exchange problems. Each group would take one of the problems another group had created and work out at least two different methods for solving it.

I emphasized this last point. Even though they said that they recognized different routes could be valid as long as the answer they arrived at was correct, it would be hard for them to really feel that until they were faced with multiple correct routes.

The exercise turned out to be harder than they had anticipated. A couple of groups proposed problems that could not be solved because key information was missing. The groups who were asked to work with those problems had to add assumptions, which they specified as part of their presentations. For example, one group proposed the following problem: “A man bought six cows for 20,000 gourds apiece. One died before he could resell them. How much should he sell the five surviving cows for?”

The first participants who understood the problem wanted to say, very simply, that he should sell them for as much as he could get. And they were right. But then they decided that they would do a calculation based on an assumption: namely, that the man should retrieve what he spent for the six cows.

So they divided the 20,000 gourds that the dead cow had cost him by five, the number of living cows, and added that quotient, 4000 gourds, to the price of each cow. The answer they got was 24,000 gourds. And they had little trouble fining a second way: One member of the group multiplied 20,000 gourds by six cows. He then divided that product, 120,000 gourds, by 5. He got the same 24,000 gourds for an answer.

The groups with simpler problems, however, had a much harder time coming up with two routes. The problem that caused the most trouble was the following: “A women buys six dozen notebooks for 250 gourds, buys 55 gourds worth of pens, and buys pencils for the same amount of money that she spent on notebooks. How much did she spend in total?” The group simply did the addition: 250 + 55 + 250 = 555 gourds. They could see no other approach.

After they presented their solution to the group, they admitted that it was the only one they could think of. Job, who had seen that he could multiply and divide the cows jumped right in: He would have multiplied 250 by two, and then added 55. His route was not very, very different, but it was different nonetheless.

In talking over the results, the teachers said they were pleased by our work. Marjorie and Emmanuel both said that they really hadn’t understood what “different routes” meant until Job made it clear. Thomas talked about his own experience as a schoolboy, when a teacher had seen him attack a multiplication problem through addition. He had gotten the right answer, but the teacher hadn’t even looked at anything beyond the fact that he hadn’t applied the method the teacher had expected. Thomas was excited to see us validating the sense of things he had developed way back when.

All this had to happen in a couple of hours. We only had half a day, and that meant much less than half a day because everyone had to get to Fayette. So there was a critical piece of the puzzle we could address.

All the small groups that morning had come up with correct solutions to the problems before them. But to really start teaching subject areas through dialogue, they will need to think about what they can do when the solutions their students arrive at are wrong. They need to learn how to help their students see their own mistakes by posing questions that point them in the right direction.

It is, as they say, “not brain surgery.” In a sense, it is simple enough. They need to learn to ask questions about what they themselves don’t understand in their students’ responses, trusting that such questioning can lead to discovery: their students’ discovery, their own discovery, or both. But until they see examples of such teaching, it will be hard for them to imagine how it works. The temptation will always be to simply tell students that they are wrong, and to present the correct answer, in a manner similar to what they already are inclined to do.

Colladere is at an intersection, about halfway between Hinche and Pignon, on Route Nationale 3 from Port au Prince to Cap Haitien. A right turn takes you toward Cerca Carvajal, near the Dominican border. The town is important to me because that’s where both Saül and Jidit are from, and it’s where her parents and his father still live. Jidit and Saül are my makomè and my monkonpè, the parents of my godson, Givens. They are more than friends. They are family.

The road is to Colladere is terrible, as bad as any major road I’ve experienced in Haiti. Colladere is probably less than 50 miles from Port au Prince, but just to get to Hinche can take four-five hours. And then it’s another hour to Colladere. So I don’t get there often.

I arrived Saturday morning at Kenise’s house. She’s one of Jidit’s younger sisters. They have three even younger sisters, women in their early twenties, and two older ones. They have an older brother, too. I know Kenise because when Jidit was pregnant with her first son, Cedric, she and Saül hired Kenise to work in their home. Kenise spent some time with them.

Then she went off to start her own family. She married a primary school teacher named Beny. They have two daughters. Da is four and Beka was born in August.

But that’s not quite the right way to put it. She has two daughters. Beny doesn’t have them anymore. Or, more precisely, they no longer have him. He died suddenly a couple of weeks ago.

It’s an awful story.

On Saturday the 17th, in the late afternoon, Beny told Kenise he was going out to drive their goats home. That’s the last thing he ever said to her. He took a change of clothes, intending to bathe at the river, and went off.

When he hadn’t returned after a couple of hours, neighbors went looking for him, but had no success. Eventually, Kenise herself went out. It was after 10:00 by then. She figured that well-meaning neighbors wouldn’t look as hard as she would because Beny meant so much more to her than to them.

She was right. She found Beny lying naked at the river. He was already dead.

She telephoned Jidit right away, and Saül left by 5:00 the next morning to attend the funeral, which was held early afternoon. I went by Jidit’s Monday morning to check on her. She recently gave birth. Givens, who’s four, ran to tell me the news.

When I arrived on Saturday, Da ran up to me. She clung to me all through the day, hardly leaving my lap. This was new. She had been shy in the past. There could be various explanations. For one thing, it was the first time she remembered me from a previous visit. The last time I saw her was only two months ago. For another, two months is a long time in a four-year-old’s life. She could simply have changed. But it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that her father’s death, which I can’t imagine that she can understand, has left her missing his warmth. He was a very demonstrative, affectionate dad.

I know nothing bad to say about him. I saw him as a loving father to his own daughters, and uncle to his young nieces and nephews as well. I knew how Jidit and Kenise depended on him to help them help their parents, who are aging and who have two of their younger daughters – young women in poor health – to support. This much I have seen.

But his neighbors can not speak enough about his neighborliness. He was, it seems, someone they all counted on, too. He tended to teach the lower grades of primary school, and his students loved him. He was one of the two lay deacons that ran his church. I spent Saturday night with Saül’s family in Hinche. A young mechanic lives with them. His name is Tolo, and he grew up in the family’s home in Colladere, helping with the farming. When he came of age, he moved to their house in Hinche to learn a trade. But he used to walk to Colladere every Saturday to practice with a church choir there, walking back to Hinche on Sunday afternoon. Saturday, he told me he couldn’t go it was too sad. His church was Beny’s church, and he couldn’t bear to be there. He, a guy in his mid-twenties, wept openly as he explained.

Kenise herself told me that the death is simply a mystery. Beny, she said, was loved by all. She spent five years married to him and said that she had absolutely nothing to reproach him with.

But Beny’s co-deacon said that there’s reason to think that Beny was murdered. Not because he could imagine why someone would do such a thing, but because of the condition the body was found in. It will be hard to pursue the matter. The body was buried less than a day after it was found, and there is no police presence anywhere nearby. Kenise showed no interest in pursuing the matter as we chatted on Saturday, but the deacon is trying to make inquiries.

Kenise and Beka

I suppose that, if Beny was in fact killed, I would be glad to see justice done, but I’m really more interested in Kenise and the girls. Da started preschool this year, and that is only one of the expenses that Kenise will have to deal with. Soon enough, she will have to turn her attention to how she will move ahead with her own and her daughters’ lives. She has a supportive family – supportive, at least, as they can be – but she’ll have to figure out a way to make a living. Since their marriage, she has worked only within their home.

I suspect that things will sort themselves out financially. More or less. Kenise is smart and capable, she has some basic assets – like farmland and livestock – to work with, and she has friends and family she can count on for help.

But as Da sat with me throughout the day, I kept having the same simple thought. Neither she or her little sister will remember the wonderful father they had. She and Beka, and Kenise and Beny, deserved much better than that.

About a week ago, Salomé and Junior came up and spent the night at my place in Ka Glo. They are two of the leading members of IDEAL, the group of young men I meet with in Cité Soleil.

They have been speaking on and off for months about the need for another free school in their neighborhood. The subject had come up again earlier in the week, when a visitor I brought to their bakery asked a little boy who likes to give them a hand why he wasn’t in school. He answered that his parents can’t afford to send him. The guys started talking again about the need to do something for him and others.

In the year since I met the group, I had taken representatives of IDEAL to a couple of community schools I know of: one, the excellent and very well-established school in Matènwa, and another much younger school, still struggling, that was founded last year by literacy teachers in Fayette. Each visit created a certain amount of momentum for establishing a school of some sort.

But there’s a lot for that momentum to overcome. The guys face a range of barriers when they try to move forward. I’m reluctant to call any of the barriers they see “imagined” because the fact that they perceived something as a barrier has the effect of making it real. Instead, I’ll say that some of the barriers appear as soon as they try to imagine themselves moving forward and might be easy enough to surmount if they could just see them differently. Facing others can mean much more than a change in perspective. I any case, helping the guys both see the barriers before them accurately and figure out how to overcome them continues to be the most important help I can give them.

We’ve traveled what seems like a long road together since we met just over a year ago. The initial meetings were memorable, and not only or even principally for the gunfire. Gunfire is not interesting. What was most memorable was my sense of what they guys were asking of me. They said things that I had never imagined anyone would say to another human being. They professed to be unable to do anything. They said they needed a savior. They used that very word, “savior.” They said that they had chosen me. Someone, what’s more, whom they did not know. They were discouraged to the point of despair.

So we held group discussions. Weeks of them. And over time two priorities emerged: They wanted to learn English and they wanted to be organized. They understood being “organized” as being an organization with a structure, with officers, by-laws and the like.

I couldn’t really see the sense in either of their priorities. They don’t really have people they need to speak English with, and all the organizational structure in the world would mean very little unless put to work achieving a more specific goal.

At the same time, it seemed to me critical that they figure things out themselves. I did not want to become an authority figure, making their decisions for them. So we held English classes, and we wrote by-laws. They named the organization “IDEAL,” which stands for “Independence, Development, Equality, Association, and Lawfulness.” We also visited some other organizations and attended some meetings together.

What I noticed was that, whatever my sense of their chosen priorities had been, the fact that they were achieving what they set out to do was having an effect. They were, if nothing else, beginning to feel better about themselves. Their ambitions were beginning to grow.

Over the course of many conversations, it became clear that their next priority was to establish a business. We grasped at the first opportunity that presented itself. We tripped over what looked like a chance to begin producing small solar panels to charge cell phones. We knew that the market for such panels would be strong. But we just could not establish the set of partnerships we would have needed to make the enterprise happen. That was discouraging for the guys, but they got over it easily enough.

I then came up with what I thought was a great plan. My experience with Fonkoze has made me believe in microcredit. I thought that, if IDEAL had a loan fund it could manage, teams of three or four members could borrow the money they would need to start small businesses. If they repaid the loans with a little interest, the fund could grow and might, eventually, put them in a position to make enough money to significantly affect their lives.

They were excited about the plan when I proposed it, but within a week had come back to me with a very different idea. I had seen that a principal advantage of my idea would be that they could divide into teams of their own choosing. This would simplify collaboration and communication for each of them. I thought it would allow them to work more quickly, more effectively.

But it turned out that division was just what they did not want. They still liked the idea that I would help them borrow money, but they wanted to use that money to establish a single enterprise. They proposed a bakery, and I was surprised, but also pleased. It was a well-considered decision: There was clearly a market for bread in their neighborhood. Merchants were walking considerable distances across into Port au Prince to get the bread they sell. As importantly, the plan was distinctly theirs.

They borrowed the money they needed, and opened the bakery, and in a sense it’s been one problem after another ever since. Conflicts have emerged within the group around division of labor and control of finances, equipment has broken down or proven inadequate, and sales have slumped because of a mixture of increased local competition – they weren’t the only ones who saw the opportunity – and some correctable work-habit issues. Almost all of their loan repayments have been late.

At the same time, in another sense, it’s working. They’ve addressed most problems as they’ve surfaced, learned to handle their money transparently and to the whole group’s satisfaction, and improved their way they share the work. And though almost all their payments have been a little late, all of them have been made. They are, currently, up to date.

So now they say they’re ready to open a school. I took them last Friday to a school I have worked with in Pétion-Ville, one founded and entirely run by young people not too much unlike themselves. After the visit, three of us just continued up the mountain to my place for an overnight conversation about it.

They’ll have a lot to overcome as they try to take on this new responsibility. Whether they will be up to putting all the necessary pieces together is, I think, an open question. But it is, once again, very much their plan. They are asking me to find them outside expertise for them to consult with. They want some minimal training from people who have open and run schools. Finding them such help should be easy enough. I have several colleagues who would, very certainly, be delighted by what they are trying to do and pleased by the opportunity to lend a hand.

There is, of course, a danger. The wrong kind of advisor could try to run rough shod over their views. But I have lots of confidence that the people I know will be able to respond to IDEAL’s hopes without imposing their own vision. And I am increasingly confident that IDEAL has the confidence to assert itself.

The expression “student-centered education” seems redundant to me. I don’t see how education could be anything but student-centered.

The educational process doesn’t take place inside a teacher who leads a class. Much less does it take place inside the books or the information that a class is using. It takes place inside students. Whether I am working with an individual or a group, I can only define my success as a teacher in terms of the progress they make. And their progress is something they do, not something I do for them.

And this simple point has implications that can lead a long way. In the classroom, it means letting students’ questions and opinions serve as the starting point of inquiry. And in working with groups, it means being guided by the groups’ process of shared discovery.

My most recent trip to the Matènwa Community Learning Center offered an interesting example. (See: http://www.matenwa.org.) The school has a growing reputation for providing non-violent, active-learning-based education. It is increasingly being asked to host small groups of teachers from schools in other parts of Haiti, who spend a week or several weeks watching and apprenticing with its staff.

When the school has visitors while I am there, they are always encouraged to participate in the work we do together, and this time was no different. There were about ten teachers from Answouj, a small coastal city northeast of Gonayiv. The Matènwa teachers and I had planned to spend two two-hour meetings discussing a short essay by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, called “Education for Peace: Is it Possible?” The visitors joined us.

The essay was chosen for study by the Learning Center’s Haitian Principal, Abner Sauveur, whose original motivation for founding a school was very much tied to his dream of providing a non-violent alternative to traditional Haitian education. He found it in a book of essays by Piaget that I had lent him with a view to following up the very successful workshop on the psychology of learning that he, his teachers, and I led for other Lagonav teachers this past summer. (See: Lekol Nomal Matenwa.) Its title appealed to him before he even read it.

It’s a short piece that Piaget wrote between the 20th century’s two great European wars. He was watching from his home in Switzerland as nationalism and conflicting ideologies were growing throughout the so-called “developed” world. In the context, the question that gave the essay its title must have had a ring of despair.

The thrust of the answer that Piaget offers is against fluffy moralizing. He writes that education for peace cannot succeed as a sermon. It means, rather, designing classrooms in which children develop the skill of getting along with others. He argues that children need to learn to recognize the real interests other children have that oppose their own.

The Matènwa teachers were excited by the piece, because they saw in it a confirmation of things they already knew. And not only knew, but were implementing in all aspects of their work. They recognized that Piaget was calling for practices like small-group work among students and student/teacher dialogue, which already are the cornerstones of much that the Matènwa teachers do. So, for them, it was an encouraging piece to read.

What was more interesting than how they reacted, however, was how their guests did. These guests had just arrived in Matènwa. They hadn’t yet seen very much. Or, rather, they hadn’t yet looked very deeply. They were experienced teachers. Several of them had risen to become principals. But they were experienced at running the text-centered and teacher-centered classes that are traditional in Haiti and in a lot of other places as well. And what was worse: They were accustomed to being in such classes. So when we sat down to discuss the essay as a group, some of the results were predictable.

They sorted themselves into two subgroups. Two of them spoke directly to me, at great length, about the importance of speaking in class about peace issues. They spoke of making peace a part of the morality they preach to their students, of raising their students’ consciousness regarding the issue. The other teachers from Answouj sat in silence.

This demonstrated poor skills on two levels: poor reading skills and a poor sense of dialogue. On one hand, the speakers showed that they misunderstood the text. What they were reacting to was the words of the title. They knew that we were to talk about education for peace. But they hadn’t really followed the little that Piaget tried to say about the subject. They failed to notice that the strategy they were proposing for raising it – preaching sermons – was directly contrary to what he was arguing for.

On the other hand, their rush to speak directly, and a great length, to the person present who most appeared to them to be an authority figure, ignoring their fellow participants in order to hear what I, their discussion leader, had to say, showed that they weren’t thinking in terms of collaboration. They weren’t thinking in terms of real dialogue. They weren’t thinking in terms of understanding the diverse perspectives in the room.

Under the circumstances, I was faced with a choice. I could simply explain to them my reasons for thinking they had misunderstood the text and why, therefore, the approach they were proposing seemed to me likely to be counterproductive. But doing so would have risked reinforcing two misunderstandings. First, it would have confirmed in practice the habit I was hoping to help them overcome. It would position me as the authority in the room, the one who provides the right answers. Second, it would have confirmed that what we were meeting to talk about was Piaget’s ideas, that the class was appropriately centered on the text, rather than on their thoughts about classroom teaching.

So instead of trying to refute their particular interpretations, I pushed the group away from interpreting by asking them to talk about things they were already doing in the classroom that they felt could contribute towards peace. The teachers from Matènwa spoke up quickly. One talked about Reflection Circles, another about Open Space. These are pervasive practices at the school. They also spoke of the importance place they gave to dialogue in managing behavior issues that arise and of the use of small-group work in most of their classes. They had, in other words, lots of experience to share, and most of them were good at sharing it.

As the Matènwa teachers spoke about specific experiences, those of the Answouj teachers who had been silent began to speak up. Whereas they had been shy about speaking about a short, difficult text in French in front of professional colleagues they scarcely knew, they were interested to hear the teachers talk about the very practices they had been observing in the days since they arrived from Answouj. They asked questions, and compared the Matènwa practices to their own more traditional way of doing things. They could see that, insofar as the goal of an education is peace, they could learn a lot from the teachers of Matènwa.

I could have told them that, but it wouldn’t have meant very much. Letting it emerge in a dialogue that pushed them to compare their own experience with new observations gave the discovery a power it could not otherwise have had.

Fonkoze’s standard solidarity-group microcredit has been proven to be an effective tool to help poor women help themselves out of poverty. Groups of five women organize themselves to receive and reimburse their loans together. They act as guarantees for one another, eliminating the need for collateral and for someone to cosign.

Loans start at about $85 and can increase to more than $1400, and the success women have at managing increasing loan amount is only one small sign of the progress they make. Fonkoze has a battery of data that demonstrates clients’ progress out of poverty by showing how their standard of living improves: better houses, more children in school, and better nutrition are typical results.

But microcredit is not the answer for all of Haiti’s poor. Over 50% of Haitian households function on less that $1 a day, and some of these are so poor that they would not be able to absorb and make good use of a sum as large as $85. For some of these, Fonkoze has created a special program of mini-microcredit, with even smaller loans – they start at less than $30 – shorten repayment periods, and closer accompaniment from specially trained credit agents. It’s a six-month program that prepares a woman to enter standard microcredit by giving her some additional structure.

Even this program, however, can’t reach the poorest of the poor. It depends, after all, on a woman’s capacity to take $30 and invest it immediately into a business that will enable her to make repayments and generate profit. But if a woman has no business, has never had a business, then she can hardly invest money in one. If her children are consistently hungry, she cannot even be expected to invest money that comes her way. She needs to buy food.

Fonkoze is now experimenting with a program designed to help these poorest of the poor, It’s called “CLM” or Chemen Lavi Miyò, which is Creole for “the Road to a Better Life.” It features education, close supervision, some subsidies, and the transfer of income-generating assets. At the end of 18 months, participants have sustainable incomes, small bank accounts, and can move into regular microcredit without need of further subsidies. It’s based on a program that has been developed of the course of ten years of research and practical experience in the field by BRAC, one of Bangladesh’s large NGOs. Fonkoze is piloting the program with 150 participants in Haiti, spread out through three locations: Lagonav, Boukan Kare, and Twoudinò.

I spent the day yesterday on horseback, slogging through the deep, black mud of Boukan Kare, meeting program participants. It was stunning.

Anyone who’s spent even a little time in Haiti has seen poverty of a sort that we in the United States are unaccustomed to. But CLM participants endure poverty that is even harsher that what one generally sees in Haiti. They have no income-generating assets of any kind. They own no animals. They own no farming land. If they own a home, it’s one room, with a mud floor, walls of woven sticks packed with mud, and a straw roof. They might go a day, even two days, without eating. They tend to have large families, but none of their children can go to school. What little they have comes from begging. They are, of course, sick all the time.

Adeline can serve as an example. Her mother was chosen through an exhaustive, three-step selection process to be a program beneficiary. First, Fonkoze organized a meeting in her neighborhood at which community members identified the poorest households in their area. Then, Fonkoze field workers visited the homes of the families the community had identified as its poorest to complete detailed surveys of each household and create a preliminary list of recommended participants. Finally, Fonkoze’s CLM Program Manager visited each recommended household to confirm that it qualified for the program.

Adeline’s mother was selected. She had Adeline and six other children to support with a husband who wasn’t helping her. She had no income except what she could beg. She would go, as Adeline told me, for a week at a time without lighting a cooking fire.

And then she died. Adeline was the oldest surviving child. A couple of older siblings had died. Her father was ready to send her away to live in domestic servitude in Mirebalais, the nearest city. Instead, Fonkoze offered her the chance to participate in the program in her mother’s place. She would have to become the de facto head of her household at the age of only 14, but she would get to stay with her little brothers and sisters and have the means to help them to a better life.

So she received extensive training in the care of goats and chickens. Those are the two businesses she chose to enter. Then she received seven chickens and three goats. Her weekly visits from her Fonkoze Case Manager include coaching directly focused on her businesses, but also lessons in nutrition, hygiene, and health. They also include literacy training – Adeline’s never been to school – and lots and lots of encouragement. Fonkoze is helping her repair the dilapidated shack her family lives in, and is partnering with Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health to guarantee them free access to essential health care. Finally, she receives a stipend of just under $1 a day to free her from begging to support her siblings so that she has the time she needs to take care of her animals and go to school. She’s starting first grade this fall.

Adeline is excited to be part of the program. Her goats are doing well: There are four of them now, and one of them is pregnant. She’s been managing to save almost $1.50 per week of the stipend she receives. That will be important down the line as she prepares to enter microcredit. And she and her siblings now eat every day.

She still has problems. One is her father. He’s been unwilling to help her at all, even by just building a simple coop to protect her chickens. Several have died. And it must be awkward for both of them as he watches her assume responsibility for her own and his other children’s lives. And make no mistake: She is still very, very poor.

But already her life is very much better than it was. That’s what she says. The question for Fonkoze is whether that improvement will sustain itself beyond the program’s 18 months. Is CLM a short-term relief from hunger, or truly the road to a better life? If the experience in Bangladesh is any indicator, it will be very much the latter. BRAC has been able to help a high percentage of participating families there remove themselves from extreme poverty. But Haiti is Haiti. It should work here as well, but only time and experience will tell.