I moved to Haiti in January 2005. I’ve been writing regular essays since then about the various projects that my colleagues and I work on and about our lives in Haiti.
Josianne and her partner, Bastien, live with their two young children in Lakòn, in northern Gwomòn. Unable to afford a place of her own, they lived at her mother’s. They got by on earnings from her husband’s day labor and the occasional sale of a bunch of plantains from their garden. “I wouldn’t waste all the money he earned, and we wouldn’t sell food from our garden just to buy other food.”
When she joined the program, she asked CLM to give her goats and small commerce. She received two young female goats, which became five as they had young.
But her real progress has come through small commerce. She initially used the funds the program made available to buy laundry products, like detergent, soap, and bleach. But she soon changed her business. “At our training they said that you shouldn’t stay in a business that doesn’t sell well. Detergent and soap didn’t sell quickly.”
So she came up with another idea. She began buying five-gallon buckets of cooking oil. She would sell gallons, half-gallons, or quarter-gallons to clients on Fridays. Some bought the oil for home use, but several were merchants who made and sold fried snacks at the side of the road. Josianne sells the oil and delivers it on Friday, and clients pay the following week.
The oil business only busied her one day each week, so she eventually added another. She brings cash to the market on Gwomòn’s three market days, and she buys what she finds. Anything she thinks she can turn over quickly. Often she buys in bulk, then selling what she’s purchased in small, retail-sized portions. But she also keeps her eyes open on the way to the market. She sometimes finds people willing to sell for a lower price to save themselves from having to carry their burden all the way. In exchange for the extra effort involved, she can make her trip to the market more profitable.
And she has already been able to buy two additional goats with profit from her businesses, even as she and Bastien were managing their household, investing in their home, and accumulating savings. They purchased the small piece of land that they built their new home on. “We bought it from my father, so it wasn’t expensive.”
She and Bastien have expanded their activities in other ways as well. They have begun buying sugarcane from farmers in their neighborhood. The rent a local mill, where they extract the juice and boil it down to molasses, which sells to producers of local rum. The profitability of this new activity has entered into Josianne’s broader planning. Her savings and loan association’s first annual pay-out is coming up, and she’s already decided that she will use her share to buy the largest male donkey she can afford. It will help her and Bastien move the cane they purchase.
And the couple have larger plans. By caring for their goats, Josianne hopes to eventually have enough that she can sell some of them off to buy a cow, and, once they have a cow, she thinks they can start think of buying more land, like a space to build a larger house on.
Marie Therèse is a single mother of four from Kamas, in northern Gwomòn. The children have a couple of different fathers, but none of them helps her support the kids. “I am their mother and their father.”
Before she joined the CLM program about a year ago, she had really been struggling. She had once been able to support the family by buying groceries on credit on Gwomòn’s three market days, and then selling them out of a basket on her head as she walked around town. She would pay the suppliers at the end of the day. But that business disappeared a couple of years ago because the merchants who would sell her on credit disappeared from the market.
When she joined the program, she was supporting the family as best she could by purchasing large bunches of plantains out of her neighbors’ gardens on credit, and then lugging the plantains for sale in downtown Gwomòn. It worked to some degree, but as her children grew and their school fees increased it became harder and harder. Her oldest child, a daughter, was ready for the second-to-last year of high school this year, but Marie Therèse had to explain she couldn’t send her. She just didn’t have the money. The girl was understanding, but Marie Therèse was heartbroken. “She was already so far behind. The children who started with her are almost finished with university. But I couldn’t always send her.”
When she joined CLM, she asked the team to give her goats and small commerce, and she received two young female goats and money to use as investment capital. One of her goats had a pair of kids, and the other is pregnant, so that part of her work is flourishing, but her commerce has really been the key for her.
She started with 5,000 gourds, and determined to do what is called “kase lote.” That means to break up and divide into lots. It refers to a kind of business in which someone goes to the market with cash, buys whatever seems desirable in bulk, and then sells in small quantities at the same market. She might buy sweet potatoes or okra or cooking charcoal. She’ll buy it by the sack and sell in handfuls or small piles or bags — however the product in question typically sells. Gwomòn has a major downtown market three days per week, so she could earn well.
But she began to feel as though the business she had chosen was too limiting, both because she wouldn’t always find good merchandise and because it only offered her three days of income each week. So she took some money out of it and bought two different kinds of powdered laundry detergent and two different kinds of laundry soap. It would give her something to sell out of her home on non-market days. “People always need to wash their clothes.”
Soon she was carrying her laundry products to market on market days as well. “You can’t help selling them. People stop you on the way to the market and buy before you get there, especially if you’re careful always to speak nicely to everyone.” She’s been adding to the range of products she sells at home, too. Her business now includes some basic groceries, like spaghetti and sugar.
She’s used profits to buy an additional goat, which is already pregnant, and a small pig. And she had already used savings from her cash stipend to buy a couple of turkeys, so she’s starting to accumulate quite a bit of livestock.
And she has a clear plan. When she has enough goats and turkeys, she wants to sell some off to buy a heifer, and when the cow has a calf she’ll sell the calf to buy a motorcycle that she can rent to a taxi driver. The income it earns, together with additional livestock, should enable her to buy more land.
In the meantime, she already has enough money in her savings and loan association to send her daughter back to school next year. And she keeps driving herself forward with a simple motivating thought: “If CLM gave me two, I have to be willing to work hard enough to make it four. I never want to go back to the way they found me.”
Loulouse lives in Ramyè, a hilly rural community in central Laskawobas. It is cut off from the downtown area by an offshoot of the Artibonite River. Another offshoot separates it from Northern Laskawobas and the large open market in Kas.
When she joined CLM almost eighteen months ago, she and her partner were living with their child in a rented room. “We didn’t have our own house, and we didn’t imagine when we might have one.” They were supposed to pay 1,500 gourds rent per year. That’s less than $15, but they hadn’t yet been able to pay that year.
Her husband made the couple’s only income by fishing in the river and its many small inlets. “It is all luck. There are days when fishermen return with nothing.”
She asked Fonkoze to give her goats and a pig. She received two small nannies and a sow, but one of the goats got sick and died. Her other goat is pregnant now. Her pig had a small litter, just five piglets, but they all are thriving. They are about a month old, and she’ll have to figure out how to keep them out of her neighbors’ gardens for another couple of months before she can sell them.
Her real progress has come through membership in the Village Savings and Loan Association that the CLM team set up for her and her fellow members. The association meets once a week, and members bring money to save to each meeting. “It really encourages you to save, because you do not want to get a red mark in your booklet for a meeting because you didn’t come prepared.”
Toulouse initially used money from her weekly cash stipend to have something to save every week, but she and her husband, Revot, quickly understood the value of what they could do. “We agreed not to spend all of our money on food. We always put aside something to save.” When the stipend ran out, they would use money from his fishing or wages from day labor in the neighborhood’s many fields. When it was time for her neighbors to harvest their peanuts, she worked shelling them and invested what she earned in her VSLA.”
She borrowed money from the VSLA so that she and Revot could plant their own crops. They chose cash crops, mainly tomatoes and okra. A second loan helped them buy a cow that Loulouse’s father needed to sell. They have been able to start selling okra, which comes in a little at a time, and that helps them invest more in their VSLA. They eventually decided to join a second one. When the first ended its one-year cycle, they took their savings and bought another goat. They plan to use the payout of the second VSLA to rent additional farmland to increase their earnings. By the time the second cycle of her first VSLA is complete, Toulouse thinks she’ll be able to add the payout to money from her crops to buy a second cow.
And buying another cow would be useful. She and Revot were able to use the assistance that Fonkoze provided to build a small but comfortable house, but that house sits on rented land, and Loulouse wants eventually to buy the plot.
Enel lives just up the hill from Loulouse. I have written about him before. He took over as a CLM member when his wife, who was selected for the program, passed away, leaving their two small boys in his care.
Before the couple joined the program, they really struggled. “I couldn’t even live at home.” He couldn’t find a way to make money in their neighborhood, so he spent time with a brother-in-law in the suburbs north of Pòtoprens, helping with construction work. “I would earn what I could and send it home to help my wife.” He tried working in the Dominican Republic as well, where he found a job on a bean farm. But it meant staying there for months at a time. “When our second boy was born, I wasn’t even there.”
Even with those efforts, the couple didn’t have enough to get by. “When I couldn’t give her any money to take to shop at the market, she’d have to eat at her mother’s house. Or I sometimes went to my mother. She would give me stuff to take home that we could prepare.”
When his wife, Edeline, died, things became much harder. He wasn’t comfortable leaving any more because he didn’t want to leave his boys. He was able to find some local work, however. With the CLM team’s help, several of his neighbors were repairing their homes or building new ones. Though he is not a skilled builder, he does know how to cut down palm trees and turn their trunks into planks, and that was something all these neighbors needed.
He kept taking good care of the livestock the program gave him. His two goats were soon five, and one of the five is almost ready to give birth again. And his sow is growing well.
He also took his wife’s place in their savings and loan association. He had seen enough to understand how much he could accomplish by disciplined saving. When his association completed its one-year cycle, he withdrew more than 10,000 gourds. It was enough to clear off a number of small debts that had been hanging over him and to start a business that would help him manage the cost of raising two boys.
He has begun traveling to the local livestock markets. He goes to Kas on Monday, Mache Kana on Tuesday, Laskawobas on Wednesday and Saturday, Kwafè on Thursday, and Domon on Friday. He takes his business capital and buys livestock only to sell it again right away. It takes a good eye and strong negotiating skills, but he can generally turn over the animals he buys without even having to bring any home. He usually makes between 500 and 1,500 gourds at each market he visits. He takes losses some of the time, but his experience has been good so far. He’s been able to increase his capital from 10,000 to 11,000 even as he uses the business both to cover all his household expenses and to continue saving at his VSLA.
So his life has improved a lot. But he is still a long way from where he’d like to be. He still has a clear challenge ahead of him.
With the program’s help, he completed work on a house for his family. They were living previously in a room in his in-laws’ house. But the new house is on her family’s land. To their credit, they think of the land they gave her for the house as belonging to his children now, and are happy to have him stay.
But there’s a problem with that. He’s a young man, and he cannot imagine spend the rest of his life alone with his boys. He feels certain that he’ll never find another woman willing to move into a house that belongs to his late wife’s family.
He wants to buy land to build a new house on, and a friend has offered him land across the river, closer to downtown Laskawobas. It will be good for his boys because they’ll have access to better schools. But because of its location, it will be expensive. His friend offered it for 125,000 gourds, about $1,250, and he thinks he can negotiate his way down to 100,000. But that is still more than he has right now. He wants to talk to talk to the friend about a payment plan, but he isn’t ready to do so until he can offer more up front. If he can keep managing all his expenses through his livestock business, the animals he owns should increase their value, and they may make a reasonable downpayment possible.
Maricline was raised by neighbors. After her mother passed away, her father gave her to a family that was better-off than he was. “Even if I had been raised by a stepmother, she would have been family.”
When she was 16, she left them. She saw no future. They had never sent her to school or rewarded her for all the work she did around their house. “I had spent years taking care of their poultry, and they never gave me even a chicken.” She had no interest in remaining. “I was growing. I knew how to cross a street all by myself.”
She moved to Pòtoprens and found work as a maid, and she stayed there until she she met her first partner and returned to Laskawobas. When the man died, his family took their child. Maricline is now with her second husband, and they have two children together.
Before the program, the couple was surviving through day labor. They both worked in their neighbors’ fields whenever they could find a day’s work. They were living in a room in the old, deteriorating house that once belonged to her husband’s late father. “We didn’t even imagine having our own house, because we always thought we would have to get all the money at once, and a big sum of money never came our way.”
She asked Fonkoze for goats and a pig, and the two goats she received are now four. Her pig is pregnant.
But her real income now comes from farming. She used her weekly stipend to invest in her savings and loan association, and used loans from the association to rent farmland and plant cash crops. Initially it was tomatoes and okra, but her last crop was tobacco. She has repaid each loan with her husband’s help. They have made and sold charcoal to do so.
When her VSLA had its first payout, she was able to make the first payment on the small piece of land that her new home is built on. Though she and her husband were able to construct a the home with the program’s help, they had to rent the land they put it on. They will be able to complete the purchase when their VSLA pays out their savings again.next year.
Roselène and her husband live with two children and one of her grandchildren in a house that belongs to her father-in-law. The older man lives with them as well. Roselène had three children with her first husband, but one is grown and has moved to the Dominican Republic, one lives with his father, and the third lives with Roselène’s mother because the older woman is otherwise alone. “I can’t let my mother live by herself, without anyone.”
Before they joined the program, they were caught in a downward spiral. Her father-in-law has land, and her husband is his only child, so he’s welcome to plant it. But they needed to borrow everything they needed to plant a crop, and when flood waters washed their crop away, they were left with nothing.
They needed to make charcoal to repay their loan, but without their own capital they were forced to buy the wood they would turn into charcoal on credit, and that limited the amount of wood landowners would sell them. They couldn’t earn enough to get out of debt, let alone move the family forward.
Joining the program changed that. Roselène asked Fonkoze to give her goats and capital for small commerce. She eventually realized that commerce wouldn’t work well because she was ready to give birth to her youngest child, so she asked for an investment the family’s farming instead.
Fonkoze provided the financing they needed to plant a crop of peanuts, but it too was washed away in a flood. She received two goats, but lost one of them when it wandered off from where she had left it to graze and a neighbor came across it, dead. It was pregnant at the time. She suspects someone led it off and killed it but she can’t be certain. Despite that setback, she now has five.
But by saving carefully in their savings and loan association, they had access to loans to invest in the farming and in their charcoal business. Because they can use their father-in-law’s land, they just needed the money for inputs. They’ve planted tomatoes, okra, and pumpkin, and with the okra starting to come in, they have the beginnings of a steady trickle of income. “I bring okra to market every Wednesday and every Saturday.” They can also now buy the wood they make charcoal from for cash, so they can buy more and produce more. Their earnings have this increased dramatically. They have already managed to buy both a pig and a cow with their income.
She’s still nursing, so a lot of the work depends on her husband, but that doesn’t worry her. “He goes out before six and doesn’t come back until after six again. He’s looks like a small man, but you should see how he works! And I help as much as I can.”
Katiana lives in Janviye, a neighborhood in Dezam, the easternmost section of Verèt Commune, in central Haiti. She lives width her husband, the four-year-old, and Katianaś younger sister.
When they joined the program just over a year ago, they were in a bad state. Her husband is a hard-working laborer. “He’ll do any job he can find.” But he wasn’t finding work often enough. Whenever he did find work, Katiana would set aside a few gourds from his earnings to buy candy and crackers, which she’d sell in front of the local school. But the two together could not earn enough to make a reasonable living. They had no home, so they were sleeping in the corner of a neighbor willing to give them a little space, and they were unable to send their daughter to school.
Katiana chose goats and small commerce, and she received two small nannies and 5000 gourds to invest in commerce. She has not yet been able to increase her goats’ value very much. Each of the two she was given miscarried its first litter under her care. Both, however, are now pregnant. She used money from her savings club, or sòl, to buy a third goat.
Her commerce has been much more important to her. When she first received CLM’s investment, she just added to her business, but she soon realized that she had too much money to invest just in crackers and candy. She started making fritay, a generic term that includes a range of fried snacks. When she saw the New Year approaching, she took most of the money out of her various snack businesses and invested in the kind of new housewares that families like to by to start off a new year.
As her business prospered, she was able to invest in various ways. She and her husband worked together to finance completion of the home that the CLM program helped them with. It stands on a piece of land that belongs to her dad.
She started sending their girl to school, and plans to start sending her little sister as well next fall. She also bought turkeys and paid into her savings and loan association.
The savings and loan association investment has turned out to be important, though she was initially skeptical. “[The CLM team] said we all should join, so I decided to give it a try. I didn’t want to appear stubborn.”
When a neighbor needed some cash, he put a cow up for sale for 25,000 gourds. Katiana made the purchase by borrowing 15,000 from the association for a down-payment. She’s been making the scheduled reimbursements on time with her husband’s help, and when the association completes its one-year cycle, she will receive everything that she’s saved, and that money will allow her to pay the balance.
And the cow is important to her. “We used to live in someone else’s house. Now we have our own house, but it’s on my father’s land. We want to buy the land ourselves.”
“Since we joined the program, we feel good. We don’t take the chance lightly. We don’t waste what we have. I want to keep making progress even after it is over.”
Eltha lives in Beke, a hillside neighborhood south of the main road that follows the Artibonit River through Verèt Commune, in central Haiti. She lives with her three children. The children’s father left her five years ago, though their youngest child is still just three. “I have to be mother and father to my kids.”
When Eltha first saw the CLM team walking around her neighborhood towards the end of 2020, she didn really give it a thought. “Other people have come through asking questions. They take your information, some even ask for your ID, but nothing ever comes of it. I went along with it anyway because they didn’t ask for my ID, so I had nothing to lose.”
She joined the program just over a year ago. At the time, she was really struggling. She and her kids lived in a room in her mother’s house. They had no place of their own. She supported her children by selling mabi, an herbal drink popular in Haiti. It was a good business for her in a sense, because it requires only a minimal investment — just a couple of dollars — which is all she had, and it earns small but reliable income. She could spend three days each week at the large markets in Ponsonde and Lestè, leaving the children with her mother and sister, and she managed to get by. “My children ate, but not the way they should have been eating.”
Joining the program, she took advantage of the flexibility it now offers members as to their choice of the businesses that want us to provide. She chose to receive only goats. In the past she would have been required to choose a mix of two different businesses. By choosing just goats, she was able to get three despite the increased price of them. Those three are now eight, even though she lost one to disease.
And she has plans for them. “If you take care of them, they can lead to bigger things, like a cow or even land. I built my new house on my mother’s land, but I’d like to have my own.
She and her case manager were comfortable with her taking only goats because she already had a plan for her small commerce. She was part of a sòl, a traditional Haitian savings club, with several of her fellow CLM members. When her turn came to receive the sòl‘s entire 1200-gourd pot, she invested it all in commerce.
But she saw that there was no point in putting all that money into mabi. It isn’t a business that can absorb much investment, at least not the way she knew how to manage it. So she took her money to the market to see what she could find. She decided to invest in over-the-counter medications. She would become a traveling pill merchant. She began with a small bucket, mostly containing generic pain killers, like ibuprofen and the like, and the business has steadily grown, from her small bucket to a washtub full of products that she carries around on her head. And she’s been able to make it grow it even while using it to support her family, to invest in building her new house and latrine, and buying a small pig as an additional investment.
She explains her success simply, and does so in a manner that shine a light on her further ambition. “If you are down in a hole and someone extend a pole to you, you need to use the pole to pull yourself out. CLM offered me the pole, so I have to pull myself out of the hole I was in. Someday I want to be able to offer a pole to someone else in that same hole.”
Elizabeth lives in Nan Jozef, a hilly area well off the main road in northern Gwomon. When she joined the program, she was not as poor as some of its poorest members. She and her husband Jean had a chicken and a goat. They farmed, and Elizabeth bought fruit in the countryside, which she sold in Pòtoprens.
The couple and the two children still with them would occasionally spend a day without a meal, but not often. And both kids were attending a local community school. Two of her older children had already set out on their own, and her oldest daughter had taken one of her younger boys to live with her in Pòdpè, the coastal city north of Gwomòn.
But things were getting worse for the family. Elizabeth was sick all the time, and the couple found themselves spending all they could on remedies. Elizabeth went to various clinics in the area. but staff could not tell her what was wrong. She also went to see traditional healers, who would keep her on treatments for months, but nothing seemed to help. The expenses really added up. As Jean says, “Elizabeth was getting to the point that she couldn’t even buy herself underwear.”
In the first weeks that Elizabeth spent in the program, the CLM team did medical screening for all the members of each of the 200 families that were part of her cohort. Elizabeth saw one of the Haitian doctors whom CLM hired to do initial consultations, and he warned her to get screened for cervical cancer. He thought she showed worrying symptoms. She went to get tested a first time, and the results that came back from Pòtoprens a month later were uncertain. She was tested again, and after another month the test came back positive. The cancer was clear.
Elizabeth didn’t really know where she would find the help she needed or how she and Jean would pay for it, and that is where membership in CLM really helped. The CLM nurse in Gwomon made arrangements with the CLM team in Mibalè to receive Elizabeth there. Mibalè is home to a university hospital managed for the Haitian government by Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian affiliate of Partners in Health. Zanmi Lasante has worked in close partnership with Fonkoze since CLM was first established to provide healthcare to CLM families, and the hospital in Mibalè has an oncology department where Elizabeth could get care.
Like the CLM team in Gwomòn, the one in Mibalè has a nurse on staff who could help ensure that Elizabeth knows how to get through the processes she has to manage in the large and complex hospital, and when she visited Mibalè, Elizabeth could stay in the CLM office/residence there. She’dd know that she’d be among friends, and it would help the CLM ensure it was covering her expenses. Her second chemotherapy treatment is scheduled soon, and she is getting ready to travel to Mibalè for it.
Like all CLM members, Elizabeth is happy about the support she and her family are getting. She’s glad to have livestock, to have a latrine, and to been on her way to having a safer and more secure home. But when she talks about the difference that CLM is making in her life, she understandably mentions medical care first.
But it is not all she mentions. She is quick to talk about how happy she is that she can now sign her name.
“Even at the hospital, they ask me to sign my name. And now I can. Even my last name.”
Dieula and her husband Mathurin live with their three children in Wodo, a small, very rural area in southeast Tomond. It sits well down a long dirt road that runs eastward from the main national route through the middle of the Central Plateau.
Before 2019, the couple was relatively prosperous. Dieula stayed at home, managing the household. Mathurin was a farmer, but his and the family’s main source of income was lumber. He prepared and sold wood, mostly for furniture. He would buy trees, and then hire an assistant to help him fell them and then cut them into planks. Then he’d sell the planks either at the large market in Ench or in Potoprens. “If CLM had come through the neighborhood back then,” he explains, “they wouldn’t even have spoken to us. They’d have walked by our house. We didn’t need them.”
Disaster stuck one day in May 2019 when he was setting up a large tree to be cut into planks. Haitian lumberjacks work in pairs, using a long saw with a handle at each end to slice trees’ trunks. They lift the log onto a frame they erect onsite. Then one man stands on the log, and the other stands below it as they saw. Mathurin’s frame collapsed, and the log fell on him, badly breaking his leg.
There is no good time for such a horrible accident, but the timing for this one could hardly have been worse. The big hospitals in the Central Plateau, the ones who might have been able to help Mathurin, depend for their medical staff on Pòtoprens. They commute from the capital on Mondays and return on Fridays. But the socio-political upheaval in Haiti meant that their trips to their places of work were uncertain. Roadblocks might interfere at any time. So the staffing for hospitals was uncertain as well. Mathurin was afraid that he would get to a hospital without its best doctors, and they’d just want to amputate.
So he joined his younger brother, who lives in the Dominican Republic, and went to a hospital there. He received care, but it was expensive. He sold his saw, the couple’s livestock, and finally their farmland. They sold everything of value except the small parcel of land their house was built on to pay his medical costs.
The leg was set with screws, but something went wrong, and it would not heal. Months went by, and Mathurin was still unable to walk, or to put even a small weight on his foot. He was in constant pain.
His income, of course, disappeared. Dieula managed to borrow a little money from a friend and start a small business. She carried groceries to nearby markets on her head, and sold as best she could. But when the CLM selection team passed through their neighborhood in late 2019, the family was really struggling.
When they joined the program, they chose goats and peanut-farming as their two enterprises. With no farmland left of their own, they had to find a plot to rent, but they managed to do so with savings from their cash stipend. Their garden prospered, as did their collection of goats. They now have nine, even though they have sold some of them to get their kids back into school.
Dieula also used savings from her cash stipend to invest in her business. Careful management has increased its value to about 7500 gourds, or about $75, even though she uses most of what she makes to feed her family and she also uses its revenue to buy shares each week at her Village Savings and Loan Association.
At the end of the association’s first one-year cycle, she used the payout to pay debts. She had been feeding her family by buying on credit from local merchants. She needed credit because her business was not big enough to feed the whole household. But she wasn’t able to repay the merchants who trusted her. She hopes to use the next payout to add to her livestock.
So the family was turning things around, but they were still limited because Mathurin wasn’t contributing at all. “My wife really does everything.” The team realized it needed to see whether it could help Mathurin with his leg, so it took him to see an orthopedist at the public hospital in Ench. The doctor was sorry to say that he couldn’t help. He could see Mathurin’s problem in the x-ray. The broken bones weren’t healing correctly. He suspected that another surgery would be necessary to reset the leg, but he explained that the type of screws that had had been used to set the leg were not the kind used at Haitian hospitals. He had no access to the special tool it would take to remove them. He said that Mathurin would need to go back to the DR.
This would be complicated. Though Dieula was building up her earnings, she didn’t have enough to pay for the care that Mathurin needed. The CLM program ensures its members and their families access to free medical care while they are in the program, but generally depends on Partners in Health. an important international organization the works closely with the Haitian ministry of health to provide it. There has been a three-way agreement between the ministry, PIH, and Fonkoze for over a decade. Because Mathurin needed to return to the DR, PIH’s free services would be unavailable.
That’s where the CLM emergency fund comes in. It is a small amount of money that the program sets aside for each family, design to protect them against the de-capitalization of their new wealth while they are in the program. Most often, it is used to help offset funeral expenses. We don’t want a sudden expense to wipe out the first steps of progress that CLM families make. The fund is less than $50 per family, but since most families don’t need it at all, it can usually cover even large expenses for the few families who need it to. Mathurin’s care would cost well over a thousand dollars. There is no way that he and Dieula could have paid for it, but the CLM program had the funds they needed.
But the couple had another problem. Graduation was scheduled for August, and by then Mathurin still had not been able to complete his treatment. A range of problems, including especially complication connected to gas shortages, political unrest, and COVID 19, delayed things. In addition, the treatment itself turned out to need time. Rather than another operation, the Dominican doctor treatment with medication over a series of weeks and months before deciding whether a new operation was even necessary.
Normally, work for a cohort of CLM families closes with graduation. Fonkoze completes expenses and sends a final financial report to its funding partner. But Opportunity International, the partner funding Dieula’s cohort, was happy to extend the deadline for expenses related to the cohort, so all Fonkoze needed to do was free Dieula’s case manager to continue to give the couple a small amount of guidance and get the funds they would need into Mathurin’s hands.
Thanks to Opportunity International’s flexibility and to the persistence of Dieula’s case manager, Manno, Mathurin did get the care he needed. His doctor decided against an operation. He was able to manipulate the leg by strapping Mathurin in place as he pulled and twisted.
As bad as that all might sound, the results have been encouraging. Mathurin now walks pain-free. He’s not ready to walk very far or to work the leg hard, but he’s happy with the progress he’s made. “I can walk again.” He is afraid to go back into the lumber business, but he already has another idea. Once he is strong enough for longer hikes, he plans to return to the market, this time as a livestock merchant.
He and Dieula are targeting purchase of a horse as their next goal. It will help Dieula get her merchandise to market and help Mathurin get around.
Laumène is a mother of seven children with five different men. She lives in Dipwi, in northern Gwomòn, with the father of her two youngest children, their two kids, and two of the man’s children from a previous relationship. His young teenage daughter, Laurène’s stepdaughter, is now also Laurène’s makomè, the godmother to Laurène’s one-week-old baby.
Laurène is from Dipwi, but seventeen years ago she was living in Pòtoprens, supporting herself through small commerce. She sold used clothing and cosmetics. Then she became pregnant with her oldest child, and she moved back to Dipwi. The child’s father wanted her to move to his family’s home in Plezans to have the child, but she was unwilling. The five children who do not live with her are all living either with their father or their father’s family. She keeps track of them, and thinks they are all well.
She alternated through the years. When she had young children to manage, she sought help from a series of partners. As they grew, and she could leave them with other children, or on their own, she would try earning money herself. The father of her fourth and fifth children, who also lives in Dipwi, used to help her with her kids. He wasn’t willing to pay for school for the ones that weren’t his, but he gave her his harvest to sell, and he bought their own children what they needed.
That was, however, some time ago. She hasn’t had her own business in some time. She can’t right now, while she’s nursing her infant, but she plans to return to small commerce in about five months. “As soon as I can leave the baby with his godmother.” The young girl smiles when she hears Laumène mention her future responsibilities.
Laurène chose goats and a sheep as her two enterprises, and she’s excited to have them. “I have my little brother and my uncle. They can help me take care of them.”
She knows what she wants to do with them. Her objective is clear. “I own my house, but I don’t own the land it’s on. If the animals produce young, I want to use them to buy a small piece of land to build on.”
She explains her situation. The house stands on land that her grandparents left to her mother and her aunt. A couple of years ago, the aunt told her that the side of the plot that Laurène had built on belongs to her. Laurène had no idea. She didn’t think the grandparents had parceled-out the land specifically that way.
The aunt hasn’t been pushy about it, but she’s made it clear that she’d like Laurène to put her house elsewhere. Though Laurène knows that neither the aunt, who lives in Pòtoprens, nor her cousins, who are generally well-off, particularly need the land, the situation has become uncomfortable for her, and Laurène would like to move on.
In the meantime, she is managing things, even in her current state, so that her family keeps moving forward. Last time her case manager saw her, just a day before she had her child, he gave her a week to finally get her latrine enclosed. She agreed that she’d speak with her father and her brother. Here is the note the case manager left in her information book:
“You should speak with your father and your brother about enclosing your latrine so you can use it, because you will need it.”
When he arrived today, it was walled-in with new roofing tin. Quite an accomplishment for someone the week she gives birth.
Renia Similian lives with her younger son in Janlwi, a small neighborhood in northern Gwomòn. That son, René, is fifteen now. Her firstborn son, René’s older brother Odalin, is almost twenty. He left home a few months ago to move in with an aunt in Pòdpe, the major city on the coast, north of Gwomòn. He decided to go to try to make a living, and has begun to learn masonry through apprenticing at odd construction jobs.
For about fifteen years, since shortly after René was born, Renia has been a single mother. The children’s father moved out of the home and left supporting the family entirely to Renia. She would get by doing agricultural day-labor, earning 50 to 100 gourds, whatever the usual rate at the time was. As small as her earnings were, she would try to safe a little, building it up until she had something like 500 gourds. Then she could invest the money, buying pigeon peas or avocados — whatever was in season — and bringing them to the local market for sale. It enabled her to send her then-young boys into school, and to keep them fed.
She began to make progress in a surprising way. A neighbor of hers died, and the family was unable to find a woman to bathe the corpse. It was not an easy job. Disease had badly disfigured the woman, who had been her friend. But Renia girded up her courage, and she did the job. She split the 500 gourds she was paid with the man who helped her, and she played the lottery with the 250 gourds that remain to her. She won almost 900 gourds. She invested some in peppers and some in spinach, and sold both at the local market at a large profit. Eventually, she began selling okra, too. “That business saved my life. It sent my kids to school, and it helped me make friends.”
She spent most of her time in downtown Gwomòn, running her business. By then, her mother was living in her home, with Odalin and René.
Things took a bad turn in 2015, when her mother became ill. It soon became apparent that Renia would have to abandon her business to take care of her mom. “My mother was always apologizing for the problems she was causing, but I would tell that it didn’t matter. She had given me life and suffered a lot just to raise me.” By 2019, when the older woman passed away, Renia’s successful business was long gone. Once again, she was supporting herself and her sons with field work. “I would sometimes asks friends for money, but I wouldn’t ask just anyone. I had to know the person well.”
She chose goats and small commerce as her two activities. She received two goats, and one is now about two months pregnant. The other is still young, but it should be ready for breeding soon. She should be receiving her small commerce in the next days. She plans to start by trading in peanuts.
She is excited about her new latrine. Single women often finding it challenging and expensive to install a new latrine, mainly because they have to hire someone to dig the pit, which is a big and difficult job. People dig a pit about 15 feet down, but it needs to be narrow for it to hold the cement cover safely. Prices vary widely by region, but it is often, rightly, an expensive job.
Renia was unwilling to mess around. She dug it herself. “I didn’t have the money to pay someone, and i don’t like asking for favors.” So her latrine was installed quickly, almost as soon as the materials that Fonkoze contributed were available, and she walled it in and covered it right away after that.
She has another year in the CLM program before she graduates, and she’ll need the time. Not just because she needs time and coaching to build up her business activities to where they’ll need to be, but also to construct her vision. She doesn’t yet know what she wants to accomplish. She’s a lively, chatty woman, but when you ask her what her goal is, what she hopes to accomplish, she goes silent. After a long pause she says, “I don’t want to say just anything. I have to think about it first.”
Yvette lives with her partner Edson and their boy just behind and beneath the main church in Ramye, which sits on top of a hill. Since she joined the CLM program, she has started to construct a vision. She has been able to carry out needed repairs on her home, and she plans to buy a cow by the end of the year, when her VSLA’s first one-year cycle ends.
She chose goats and poultry as her enterprises. The goats have made some small progress. She received two from Fonkoze. They are healthy and growing, but have not yet reproduced. She thinks they might finally be pregnant. She bought a young buck recently to add to her collection.
Her poultry has been less successful. She received three turkeys, but one died and one disappeared. It is hard to know what happened to the one that disappeared, but turkeys are subject to death and theft.
She says that would like to start a small commerce, but she doesn’t see how she can. She has nothing to invest, she explains.
This is where things get curious. She has been able to make the maximum weekly contribution to her VSLA every week because her partner is happy to give her the cash. He gives her all the cash she uses for household expenses, and he bought the materials for their home repair. He is showing himself to be a willing partner. He works sometimes fishing, sometimes felling trees and cutting them into planks. But when her case manager Dieunel asks Yvette whether she could ask Edson for money to invest in small commerce, she hesitates.
This is a very common way for a woman to start a business in rural Haiti. A man gets paid for a farming job or some other kind of labor, and he gives some of the money to his partner so she can start commerce. It helps his family a lot. He may continue to be the principal earner, but if his money continues to come in occasional lump sums, having a partner with even a small daily trickle of income can make a big difference.
So one would imagine that he’d be happy to support her initiative. There are men who are afraid of the measure of independence that a woman with her own income has. And there are women who are afraid that, if they start to earn an income, their partner will stop helping them out. Yvette knows her partner better than we do and she knows herself, too, but it all seems like something that would be worth looking into.
So Dieunel will need to talk more with her about the possibility. This could involve conversations over a couple of weeks’ of visits. Depending on what she tells him, he may want to talk with Edson, too, or with both together. Ultimately, any decision stands to affect both of them and their boy.
