March 5, 2014

Recently, I was back in court again with Safine. It turns out that her first trip to Judge Patrick’s courtroom did not solve her problems with Maxo, the father of her two youngest children. This time, she was the one filing the complaint. Maxo attacked her, hurting her badly enough that she had to go to the hospital. Normally, her case manager, Hilaire, would have accompanied her through this process, but he had been called away first thing in the morning to help another CLM member, so he asked me to fill in for him.

The woman he needed to help lives in the farthest pocket of Mazonbi, a secluded area in the southwest corner of our territory. Her name is Mimose, and her home is remote even within Mazonbi. Invisible from the narrow footpath that runs about 100 feet above it, you have to know where to step into a field of pigeon peas to find the trace of a path that winds downward through a series of jagged boulders to the small yard.

Mimose had borrowed a telephone the night before to call Hilaire. She was terribly distressed. A neighbor name Marc had killed two of her goats – large, healthy, pregnant ones – when they wandered into his unplanted garden. It was a huge setback.

So Hilaire got on his motorcycle early on a Thursday morning, and went off to see what he could do. When he got to Mazonbi, he found the beheaded goats hanging from a tree at the edge of Marc’s field. He tried talking to Marc about it, but Marc wouldn’t give him the time of day.

So he went to Dumisso. He is the secretary of the Village Assistance Committee for Mazonbi and Laferyè, a neighborhood along a ridge just east of the ridge the Mazonbi sits on. Dumisso told Hilaire that they really needed to do something. He had heard that community members in Mazonbi who had not been selected for CLM were jealous of the CLM members’ progress, and were saying that they would kill any of the goats they got their hands on. Dumisso felt that if we did not take a stand, our members’ losses would start piling up.

Hilaire went from Dumisso to the KASEK. A KASEK is a local elected official. In rural areas, they employ assistants, who are paid a couple of dollars to deliver messages, bring people the KASEK wants to see to him or her, or perform other minor duties. In this case, the KASEK sent his assistant to the man to let Marc know he wanted to see him. Marc responded that the KASEK should mind his own business.

Hilaire then took the assistant to see where the goats’ carcasses were hanging in the tree, and put him and Mimose on the back of his motorcycle so that Mimose could file a complaint in Judge Patrick’s court.

This is where things first got complicated. Our motorcycles are designed to take a passenger, but they are not designed for two. Hilaire is a very strong man, and he has a lot of experience with a motorcycle on bad roads, so he took a chance. He managed to get them up the terrible rocky road that leads out of Mazonbi and down to the highway in Fon Cheval. Going down from Fon Cheval to the courthouse in Trianon should have been much easier. But Hilaire hit a small patch of loose gravel on a sharp curve in the road, and because of all the extra weight behind him, the wheel slid out from under him. He and Mimose were both scraped up in the fall. Nothing too serious, but their wounds needed some attention. He got them to a small clinic just downhill from the courthouse.

By the time they got to the courthouse, we were finishing up Safine’s case against Maxo. Judge Patrick was instructing us all to go to the higher court in Mirebalais the next day. Since blood had been drawn, he said, the case went beyond his authority as justice of the peace. He would prepare a document for the higher judge in Mirebalais, and have us take it down the next day.

When Hilaire and Mimose arrived, Judge Patrick listened to them and agreed to go up to Mazonbi with his security guard and have a look. Hilaire was very sore, but he immediately agreed to lead them there. He asked me to switch motorcycles with him. His clutch had been damaged, and it would have been hard for him to negotiate the Mazonbi road whereas I would just have to coast downhill. So he took my bike, and they went back up the hill.

That evening, I heard from him that things had gone poorly. Marc and his friends had intimidated the judge and his security guard. They had been forced to leave the scene rather than risk a conflict. When Judge Patrick formally invited Marc to a hearing, Marc refused. So Judge Patrick, Hilaire, and the security guard returned to Trianon.

Hilaire was furious. He couldn’t understand why a representative of the government would let himself be chased away by threats. But there wasn’t much he could do. Judge Patrick filled out a warrant for Marc’s arrest, and gave it to Hilaire to bring to the police station down in Mirebalais.

Hilaire took the warrant to the station the next morning while I continued to follow-up with Safine. When we talked midday, he told me that the police had said that they didn’t right then have anyone available whom they could send after the guy.

In the meantime, Marc must have had second thoughts, because when the KASEK sent for him again, he had disappeared. An older relative of his – actually his wife’s cousin – sent word that she wanted to resolve things. She would give Mimose two of her goats if Mimose would let the matter drop.

So Hilaire and I went to Mazonbi with the KASEK, whose name is Lenèl, and Dumisso. Madanm Tibèt was the cousin trying to resolve things. Mimose came with her husband and Madanm Tibèt’s two goats, which her husband, Ozlèn, had already been watching for the older woman.

Madanm Tibèt explained that she couldn’t see why everyone was pursuing Marc. He is a poor man who had killed the goats because they threatened his farmland, which is his livelihood. We explained – with Lenèl’s help – that there are ways to go about things. Haiti’s rural legal code, which dates from the Duvalier years, does allow farmers to kill goats they find eating their crops. But the farmer is supposed to find a local authority to serve as a witness when he or she does so. The thought – I suppose – is that a witness can help a farmer cool down enough to accept monetary damages rather than the life of the goat, which is generally worth much more than the crops that it eats. Marc didn’t bother seeking a witness. He just killed the goats, singling out CLM goats in particular among several goats that were in his garden, and strung them up.

Madanm Tibèt wanted the matter settled because, first, she values peace and her neighborhood and, more importantly, she is a single mother who counts on Marc to farm her land for her. His arrest would be a direct threat to her livelihood.

But there was a problem. Mimose and Ozlèn didn’t want to accept her offer. They gave two reasons. On one hand, the goats Madanm Tibèt was offering were much less valuable than the goats Marc had killed. Their two, large, pregnant goats could have sold for over $70 each. The small mother that Madanm Tibèt wanted to give them with its kid couldn’t have sold for that much combined. On the other hand, Mimose and Ozlèn feel that they’ve had a good relationship with their wealthier neighbor. The fact that she has let Ozlèn care for her goats is good evidence of that. They are worried that her sacrifice will leave a bitter taste in her mouth, that she might come to hold it against them.

Eventually, however, they agreed. Partly, it was because they too wanted the matter settled. Partly, they were convinced when Madanm Tibèt reminded them that she had already lost a goat in their hands. She had left another female for Ozlèn to care for, and it had disappeared. She asked them whether she had ever bothered them about the lost goat, and they had to agree that she hadn’t.

So Lenèl drew up a formal agreement in which Mimose accepted three of Madanm Tibèt’s goats – the two that had been brought to the hearing and the one Ozlèn had lost – in exchange for her two. It was still a loss for her, but it was the best we thought she’d be able to do under the circumstances. So Hilaire encouraged her to sign. Lenèl pleased her by complimenting her for the way she signed her name to the agreement. It’s something she’s learned from Hilaire.

The hearing, held under a tree by the side of the road at the entrance to Mazonbi, took over two hours. It involved a lot of conversation. Much of it was related to the complexity of the problem involved. Some of it related to Dumisso’s desire to make the KASEK, who lives in a distant part of the region, recognize that he wasn’t spending enough time in their neck of the woods. He felt that Lenèl’s inattention was partly responsible for Mimose’s loss, and he said so clearly and at length.

I visited Mimose and Ozlèn a few days later, and they seemed at ease about by the way things had turned out. They were miserably poor when we first found them, but because they work hard and together, they’ve already come a very long way. As such, they present a stunning contrast to Safine, who has to waste a lot of time just working out her final separation from Maxo, a man who doesn’t do the simplest things she would need a partner to do. If this turns out to be their biggest setback, the Mimose and Ozlèn are very likely to be just fine.

Michaël and Heleine with their case manager, Mahotière

Michaël and Heleine live within a few feet of each other in Domon, a remote village far off the main road in southeastern Mirebalais. They joined CLM together three months ago, as part of a group of 150 women. Both were struggling to support their families when they joined the program. They would take the long walk into Mirebalais, and spend a long day doing laundry by hand for wealthier families. They might earn two dollars in a day, once or twice a week, but the work was irregular, and the women who hired them would treat them poorly.

Michaël is a young mother of three. She was excited when she learned that she qualified for the CLM program. “I had lots of problems. I wanted to sent my two older children to school but I didn’t have the money”

But to succeed in the program, she would need to solve one problem first. The problem was her husband. “He never wanted me to participate in anything that outsiders do where we live. When Mercy Corps and World Vision gave away stuff in Domon, he wouldn’t let me take any of it.”

So Michaël took a chance. She joined the program without telling him. She sneaked to her six days of enterprise training and to the launching ceremony, and she managed to start receiving her weekly visits from her case manager, Mahotière, without tipping her husband off. She chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises. “I hid the animals back away from the house.”

But her husband was bound to find out eventually, and when he did he was very angry. Mahotière got a call from a crying Michaël one evening, telling him that he’d have to come by the next day to take back her animals. Her husband was making her drop out of the program. So Mahotière called a member of the local Village Assistance Committee, and asked him to go over and collect the animals right away. He didn’t want to take the chance that the husband’s anger would bring the animals to harm.

The next day, he went to talk to the man. He took the committee member with him. They spent some time with the guy, who was initially hostile but was willing to listen because of the committee member’s presence. Mahotière was friendly, but very frank. “I told him that his wife and children were living very badly, and that I was there to help him change that. I told him that if he didn’t want outside help he should say how he was going to send his kids to school.” It took some time, but eventually the man came around.

Now Michaël is starting to move forward. The progress she is proudest of is her small commerce.

She didn’t get it started with merchandise we gave her. Instead, she started it with money from her sòl. A sòl is a traditional Haitian kind of savings club. Its members make a set daily, weekly, or monthly contribution, and one member then gets the whole pot. CLM case managers help members organize the clubs as a way to help them learn financial planning. Michaël took 1250 gourds of her sòl money when her turn came, and invested it in the kinds of things she could sell right out of her home: rice, cooking oil, laundry soap, etc.

And her business has taken off. She has 1500 gourds in it now, even though she has been using profit to keep her children fed.

Her neighbor, Heleine, has been having a harder time of it, and it is easy to understand why. Her life has been difficult for a very long time. “Before I joined CLM,” Heleine says, “I couldn’t even feed my kids. I couldn’t always send them to school.”

She has had twenty. “I had them by twos and threes.” She’s had three sets of twins, and two sets of triplets. Only five of her twenty children survive. She now lives with her two youngest boys and two grandchildren who were left to her when their mother, who was her daughter, died. “I’m the only mother those little girls know.”

Heleine is raising the children by herself. She’s never had a steady husband. “When you’re living in real misery,” she explains, “you have children with the husbands of other women.”

She’s committed to taking good care of her CLM livestock. “Sunrise doesn’t find me in bed. I get up early to make sure the pig has food and the goats are tied somewhere where they can graze.”

But though she too started a small commerce with sòl money, she hasn’t had Michaël’s success. One of her boys is supposed to take the national primary school graduation exam this year. He finally made it to sixth grade. But his teacher sent him home from school because Heleine hadn’t been able to buy him the books he needs. So she felt she had no choice. She sold out her merchandise, and used the money to buy books. Her commerce disappeared.

She lost 1000 gourds. Though both women received 1500 gourds from the sòl, Mahotière encouraged Heleine to put 500 gourds in the bank. Michaël deposited only 250. That might not seem like a big difference. It’s less than $6. But 500 is easily enough to start a very small business. With only 250, it would be much harder.

Mahotière is clear about his reasons for advising the two women differently. He didn’t think that Heleine was ready to make the sacrifices she would need to make for a business to succeed. So he let her take a chance, but had her keep something in reserve so she’d be able to make a second attempt. If it was up to her, she would be trying again already, but Mahotière wants to take things slowly. “I don’t want to authorize her to withdraw her money until I think she understands what small commerce requires.”

With only three months in the program, it is hard to get either woman to look to the future. Women living in extreme poverty tend to struggle so much with day-to-day issues that they don’t articulate their ambitions. When I asked them what they would like to achieve while they are in the program, they both said that they want to do what Mahotière decides.

But Heleine is a older woman. I told her that I know that young people fall asleep quickly, but that the older you get the more you lie awake, thinking. I asked her to tell me what she dreams of when she lies awake. She smiled. She knew about lying awake. Then she gave me a simple answer. “I don’t want to do laundry for other women any more.”

She wants to feed and educate her children. But more than anything, she just wants an end to the indignities she suffers as she lives the only life she has known.

Dealing with marital relationships, or the relationships between partnered but unmarried women and men, is one of the critical parts of a CLM case manager’s work. Safine’s struggle out of extreme poverty, and that of other women like her, is made more difficult by the drag on their progress that uncooperative partners create. (See: Complex Relationships.) Other women have a much more reasonable chance at success, in part because of husbands or partners who are willing to work hard beside them. (See: Elienne and Odak for an example.)

So we try to to help couples establish good relationships. But I never would have expected that our efforts would lead me to spend part of Sunday evening in a beauty salon in downtown Mirebalais.

I went to the beauty salon with two case managers, Christian Louizia and Sandra Julien. We had gone to ask for help dealing with one of Christian’s CLM members, a woman named Memène, who lives in Demare, a farming community behind the Labasti market. The relationship between Memène and her partner Chiver has been a key issue for Christian for several months, and we do not feel as though we have made much progress.

They are a young couple. Memène is 22, and Chiver is a few years older than that. Each has a small child, but both children are from previous relationships. They do not yet have a child together. When we met them, they were living in a very dilapidated shack with a roof of dried, cracked palm fronds, on a plot of Chiver’s father’s land. The land has several equally dilapidated homes on it, including the father’s, and more than one of the households qualified for CLM. It is an especially poor little neighborhood.

We were troubled when, early on in our engagement with the couple, we heard reports of violence. Chiver was beating Memène severely enough that their neighbors were worried. Tikomè, another CLM member who lives just down the path from them, had pulled Christian aside. Tikomè is the members’ representative on the Village Assistance Committee, and she has started taking her responsibilities seriously. She asked Christian to do something. “He’ll kill her,” she said.

Christian rushed to meet with Memène, and she explained how it was that Chiver ended up losing his temper most recently. He spoke with Chiver as well. After some conversation, Memène decided to leave Chiver. She’d move back in with her mother, who is also a CLM member. It seemed like the obvious thing to do. They would be able to build their houses next to each other on the mother’s land. But Memène didn’t want Chiver prosecuted. Maybe it had to do with the fact that what separated her from her daughter’s father was that he had been sent to prison for theft. Maybe she was afraid of what he might do if he was arrested but wasn’t sent to jail. We were sorry that she wasn’t willing to press charges, but saw it as her choice. Christian planned the move with them both, and Chiver agreed to turn over the livestock CLM had given her, which he had been caring for.

Christian was surprised when he went by a few days later and found Memène back in the house with Chiver. He made sure it was what she wanted. That was about all that he could do. But hearing her say that it was, he talked to Chiver about how important it was that he stop using violence. Christian asked me to come talk to them, too.

So I went by and we had a long conversation. I quick got the impression that they really did want to stay together. Memène talked about the one time that someone from Chiver’s family had been nasty to her. One of his sisters had said some really ugly things that culminated in her naming a pig with an unflattering nickname she had used for Memène. When Chiver came home after his day in the fields and heard what had happened, he was furious, screaming at his sister and mother, who had taken sides with her daughter, and threatening to kill the pig. His father took up Chiver’s side of the argument, and the two women agreed that they had been wrong. They apologized to Memène. But the crucial thing was that Chiver had stuck up for her. And Memène was the one who told me the story. Chiver, for his part, kept insisting that Memène could go if she wanted to, but he was near tears. You could tell he didn’t really mean it.

When I told Chiver that hitting his wife could get him arrested, he started talking about all the things she does to make him lose his temper. Some of those things would have made me mad, too.

I do not blame the victim. All the violence is entirely his fault. She doesn’t force him to hit her. But Memène says some very mean things.

So I cut him off. I put my arm around him because I wanted to ensure that I had his full attention and I wanted him to feel that my intentions were friendly. And I told him that he needed to understand that if he was arrested for hitting his wife, the judge would not listen to his story about the things Memène had said or done. I wanted him to understand that, as soon as he hit her, the court would automatically look at him as the one in the wrong. Even if he was right to be angry – and I didn’t doubt that he sometimes was – he was always wrong to be violent. And I added that he didn’t need to take my word for it. He could ask any of his friends or neighbors. One of the members of our Village Assistance Committee was there, a man not much older than Chiver, and he chimed in to support what I was saying.

I tried to keep my tone friendly but unambiguous. As long as Memène chose to stay with Chiver, I couldn’t let him think of the CLM program as a threat because she and the children would be better off if he continued to collaborate well with Christian. I was inclined to think that she should get out of the house, but it had to be her decision, and she wasn’t making it.

The peace we established that day held up for almost six weeks. And the couple accomplished a lot during that time. They installed their latrine, they put the tin roof on their house, and they began to build up their wealth by taking very good care of their livestock. Chiver added a pig to what we had given them. He bought with money he earned through day labor. The six months of weekly stipends that we gave them took enough pressure off his meager earnings that he was able to invest some of what he brought in.

I went by every week or so just to check in and to see how they were doing, and I always got friendly greetings from both. They were still arguing, but Chiver would call Christian whenever he felt he was losing his temper. He knows he is hot-headed. Christian would go help them work things out. Their relationship was becoming a big part of his job.

But about a week ago, Christian got word that Chiver had attacked Memène again. Memène told him that Chiver had hit her and kicked her. This time, she said she really wanted to leave him. Christian talked with them both to arrange the separation because he wanted to ensure both that Memène would feel safe and that she would keep all the assets we had helped her accumulate.

By this point, however, things had gotten a little complicated. For example, the couple had built their house by putting her roofing material on a structure that was already his, on land that belongs to his family. They had also used CLM money to pay the skilled labor that installed the roof and built up the stone walls which replaced the original mud-and-sticks ones. We couldn’t get the skilled labor back. That money had been spent. But Christian and Chiver calculated how much Chiver would have to pay Memène if he kept the roofing material, and he agreed to the sum. It would be more sensible that removing the roof and returning the material to her. Chiver and Christian even created a realistic payment plan.

We thought we had things worked out. But when push came to shove, Memène decided, once more, to stay with Chiver. This only proved that Christian and I were in over our heads, that we didn’t know how to help Memène.

And it’s why we ended up in a beauty parlor. The beauty parlor’s owner and head beautician is Minouche, and she is the one we had come to see. The Haitian government includes an important ministry that is especially charged with seeing to the affairs of women. It’s called the Ministère des Conditions Féminines, and it has representatives throughout Haiti. They organize women’s groups and special activities and celebrations for women. They advocate for issues especially important to women. And they work closely with local police and courts to protect women from abuse. We needed both expertise and clout, and we went to Minouche hoping that she’d be able to provide them.

She said that she’d be happy to help out. She’d had heard of our work, had been admiring it from a distance, and was glad contribute.

Christian made sure that Memène and Chiver would be a home Tuesday afternoon, and we brought Minouche to their home in Demare in a CLM truck. She spent almost three hours with the couple.

She began by introducing herself, her office, and her role. She was there, she said, neither for Memène nor for Chiver. Her job was to help them both solve the problems they had with each other. If the solution was separation, she would help them through that process step-by-step, guaranteeing the Memène would get all the protection she needed. If they wanted to stay together, she would help them figure what they each would need to do to make that work.

One of the issues we regularly face in dealing with the two of them is that Chiver is very comfortable talking and Memène is not. He is both friendly and outgoing. Though he started angrily, showing that he resented our having turned him in, that anger passed before he even finished his first set of explanations. To Minouche’s pointed question as to whether he wanted Menène to stay with him so that they could spend the rest of their lives together, he finally said that he did, though it took him a lot of avoidance before he could get to that point. When she asked him what Memène would have to change for him to feel as though he could make their partnership work, he said that the only thing about her that he could not accept is that she leaves the house for hours at a time with letting him or anyone else know where she is going. He repeated several times that this was the only thing. Minouche was careful to say that she agreed with him that neither husband nor wife should wander off without letting the other know.

Minouche now passed to Memène, and this is when her work started to get hard. Memène is shy. She still has trouble even looking at people whom she isn’t used to, let alone talking to them. But Minouche persisted. When she asked Memène whether she wanted to stay with Chiver, Memène initially said that she didn’t. Asked to explain, she said that he kept hitting her. Minouche then asked her whether, if we could change that about him, she would want to stay with him. And she said that she did.

This took some persuasion on Minouche’s part. She talked about Chiver’s good qualities, and how easily Memène could end up with a partner who was much worse, always agreeing, however, that Chiver would have to stop hitting her.

Talking to Memène took a lot of time, both because she was reluctant to speak and because Chiver kept interrupting to defend himself. The more he defended himself, the more heated he became. And as he became heated and louder, a crowd of neighbors began to gather, ready to enjoy the spectacle. Minouche started to get frustrated, put off by the regular interruptions our spectators’ laughter and commentary produced, so she had us move into the one-room house. There was no space for chairs inside, but there is a larger bed for the two of them and a smaller one for the kids. We sat on the beds and continued to talk.

The more we talked, the more we learned that there were issues we needed to face beyond what they each were initially willing to admit. On Chiver’s side, the most serious thing was that Memène was always hurting his feeling with things she would say. He didn’t put things that way, but he didn’t need to. He was on the verge of tears several times as he talked of times that her words had cut him to the quick. On Memène’s side, she talked more and more of her little girl. Though Chiver repeated said he had two children in the home – his son and Memène’s daughter – and that both felt like his, Memène complained that he didn’t treat them equally, and that when he was angry he would use terribly ugly words to yell at her girl.

Minouche had succeeded at getting to a deeper layer of their conflict, so she asked them once more, at this more serious level, whether they wanted to spend their lives with each other. Chiver affirmed that he did, but Memène had a hard time answering.

Here I interrupted to ask her and Minouche whether it might be better if Chiver and I left so that they could talk privately, woman to woman. Minouche thanked me, and so I led Chiver back out of the house. He took me down to look at their pigs.

When Minouche call us back in, she said that Memène had agreed to stay with Chiver. She explained that she would create an agreement between them, specifying the conditions each would have to respect in order to make their relationship work. They each would sign the agreement and she would file it in her office and in the courthouse in Mirebalais. This took a few more minutes. It was getting dark as we got in the truck to head back to Mirebalais.

We don’t know whether Minouche’s intervention will prove successful. We have our doubts. Christian believes that the couple will split eventually, and we just hope that, if they do, we can facilitate a split that is safe and that leaves Memène the best possible chance at future success. We hope that making them feel that they live in a community with laws they must abide by will help them find their way to a good future, whatever that future might turn out to be.

I was back in Judge Patrick’s court the other day. He’s the justice of the peace in Trianon, and has helped our team through conflicts involving CLM members before. (See: Justice of the Peace.)

Hilaire is one of the case managers I work with, and he had asked me to go to a hearing for him. One of his CLM members had been called before the judge, and Hilaire had to be elsewhere. We don’t protect our members from the legal consequences of any ill they do, but we want them to feel supported as they go through the legal process that determines whether they did ill in fact. Safine had been called to court because of a formal complaint that had been filed against her.

The complaint had been filed by her husband, and the story had struck me as unbelievable when I first heard it. I simply assumed that there was something important I was missing.

Safine and Maxo have been together for years. They have two children. She has also children from a previous relationship, and Maxo splits his time between her and another woman and other children farther up the mountain in Terre Rouge.

Safine has been focused and hardworking since she joined CLM. She and her children had been living in a house that she built with money that she earned in a cash-for-work program run after the 2010 earthquake by an organization called Mercy Corps, but the house was on land she had rented, and making the rental payments was always a problem. Maxo is a truck driver, but he does not own a truck, so he depends on owners to hire him to drive for them. None have recently, so his contribution to the household has been minimal. And he hasn’t been willing to do other sorts of work he might find, preferring to wait around for the relatively large payday he can expect if he gets to drive a truck. Safine chose goats and small commerce as her two CLM enterprises, and though she works hard at her commerce, she’s struggled to keep the household fed without Maxo’s help.

But she had a clear objective. When she learned that CLM would help her build a house, she decided that she wanted to build it on her own land. She’s from a different part of the Central Plateau, so her family has no land in Redout, where she now lives. She would have to buy a plot.

Talking to neighbors, she found someone willing to sell her a space she liked for 20,000 gourds, just under $460. She would have to pay 15,000 by January 1st, and could owe the rest. Maxo wasn’t interested, but she was determined. She started saving money. She was afraid to keep it at home because she worried that Maxo would spend it, so she asked the local KASEK, the neighborhood’s elected leader, to hold her money for her. Asking a wealthier neighbor to hold money is a common way of saving in rural Haiti.

She started by going to visit her family in Boucan Carré, where she found a brother willing to give her 2500 gourds. She went straight to the KASEK with the money, without even stopping by her home. She then sold most of the house she was living in. It was relatively large, and she realized that, if she sold off most of it – some of the doors, support posts, and lumber and tin from the roof – she could still keep enough basic materials to build a much smaller place on her new land. She also sold the new roofing material CLM gave her, realizing that the unsold tin from her current house would be enough to cover a small one-room home. She raised 11,000 gourds from these sales, which brought her within 1500 gourds of her goal.

At this point, she went to Maxo to ask him what he could contribute. He gave her 1000 gourds, but it was just before New Year’s Eve, and January 1st is the most important holiday on a Haitian calendar. They hadn’t yet done their holiday shopping, so Safine told Maxo she’d have to take 500 gourds for groceries and would only be able to add 500 of the 1000 gourds to the money she was saving to buy the land.

She now had 14,000 gourds, so she went to the man she was buying the land from and asked him to accept the slightly smaller down payment. He agreed to do so on one condition: He would hold her receipt until she has given him the remaining 1000 gourds. Safine didn’t want to agree to that. She couldn’t be sure when she would have the money ready, and had learned from Hilaire that she should not hand over a large sum like that without a receipt. But the seller said that if he didn’t get his money by January 1st, he’d sell the land to someone else, so she went to the KASEK and asked for her 14,000 gourds.

At first the KASEK refused to hand it over the money at all. Not out of dishonesty, but out of kindness. She had watched how furiously Safine had scrabbled to amass the money she needed, but it was December 31st, and she worried that if she gave her the money before the holiday, Safine would feel pressure to fritter some of it away. But Safine insisted. She said that she had saved up the money because she knew what she wanted, and that the KASEK didn’t have to worry about her on that score. The KASEK brought Safine her money, and they started talking about the 1000 gourds. When the KASEK heard that Safine would have to hand over the money without a receipt, she agreed to lend Safine the last 1000 gourds. She said Safine could repay her whenever she had the money.

So they called the seller, a couple of his friends, and Maxo to the KASEK’s house to do the paperwork. In the countryside, the KASEK is responsible for land transactions. She would write out the receipt, have each party sign, have witnesses for each party sign, and then add her own signature.

That’s when the trouble started. The KASEK wrote out the receipt, putting Safine’s name down as the buyer and Maxo’s name as a witness. Maxo was furious. He is, he said, the man in the house. His name should be together with Safine’s as a buyer. He refused to sign unless he was listed as a buyer, and he filed a complaint in the justice-of-the-peace’s office when the sale went through despite him.

And that’s what I couldn’t understand. How could an unemployed man who contributes 500 gourds out of 15,000 so that one of his two partners can make a down payment on a piece of land imagine that he had a right to insist that he be listed as one of the buyers?

I heard a couple of different explanation. Someone told me that he had just insisted that, as the man of the house, he ought to be named in such an important transaction. Another said that he claimed that, if his name were not on the receipt, Safine would have the right to kick him out of the house any time she wanted. A third explained that he had other children and that he didn’t want them to be excluded from the inheritance. (Haitian laws about inheritance are strict. Property must go to one’s children.) Since he had been living with Safine in a house she built on land that they rented together, he felt that he had a stake in land purchased with proceeds from the sale of the house.

None seemed like plausible claims. But all seemed like things someone might assert. I hadn’t spoken to Maxo myself, nor had I spoken recently to Safine, so I was anxious to hear what they each would actually say once they were in front of Judge Patrick.

As the plaintiff, it was Maxo’s role to speak first. He made a long, rambling speech explaining why he had wanted his name on the receipt for all the reasons I mentioned above, but claiming again and again that he accepted Safine’s decision to do things her way.

I began to wonder why we were sitting there if he had decided to accept her decision when he finally came to his point. He wanted to split with Safine, and he came to the justice of the peace because he wanted to do it clearly and publicly. He is the man of the house, he said, and it had gotten to the point that she had “done too much” for him. As the man, he explained, it is his role to give, not to take. He could not live in a house built with his wife’s means on land purchased with his wife’s money. He had to leave.

They were not married, but had been together for years. Because she was not local, he worried that, if she ran into problems, her family would come to him for explanation. He had come before the court to declare that they were separating and that he would no longer be responsible for her.

I struggled through his speech to keep track of what he was saying. The small courtroom was full of noisy observers. But I was sitting in a corner with Safine on one side of me and a member of our local Village Assistance Committee on the other. So with many questions and explanations, sometimes repeated, I think I followed. I was encouraged as I tried to follow Judge Patrick’s responses on his face. He’s a very focused listener, but doesn’t bother hiding behind a poker face. It was clear that he was surprised, and even a little amused, by what he was hearing.

When it was Safine’s turn to speak, she laid out the relevant part of the history of her finances: how she had paid for the first house and how she had used that first house to buy the land the second would be built on. She talked about how she had had to sneak around the household with her money, bringing it all to the KASEK to hold, because she couldn’t trust Maxo not to spend it on trivial things for his own amusement. Even as she was succeeding with the commerce that Hilaire helped her establish, she was struggle to feed their kids because Maxo was contributing nothing except added expense. When Judge Patrick asked her whether she agreed to split from Maxo, she quickly answered that that was what she wanted too.

But Judge Patrick told them things were not as simple as they wanted them to be. As a justice of the peace, he is the lowest-level judge in the Haitian legal system. The law prescribes the kinds of cases he can decide and the kinds that are beyond his authority. He said that he cannot separate a family, that they would have to go to Mirebalais, to the next higher level, to do that.

This started a dialogue, which he facilitated, about whether it would be worth going to Mirebalais to do what they wanted to do. Maxo started by insisting that he wanted to go there that very minute. But he was clearly posturing. He wasn’t tone deaf enough to have failed to notice how ridiculous the courtroom observers found him. And Judge Patrick seemed to want to make him feel that he was walking down a dead end.

So they decided that they would try to work things out in Trianon, and then Judge Patrick brought up another, more important issue. The kids. Safine and Maxo were welcome to split up, but who would take responsibility for the kids? He told Maxo that, even if he left Safine, he would have to continue supporting his children. At first he said that he would take the kids.

Safine initially said that she would agree to this, but asked where he would raise them. When he said he would take them to his other household in Terre Rouge, she scornfully asked who would take care of them. He said he’d give them to his wife there – he is no more married to her than he is to Safine – and Safine could only snort her contempt.

That contempt resonated throughout the tiny courtroom. Judge Patrick and the observers seemed to want to say something simple, like “What?!” Maxo’s reaction to the collective gasp of disbelief only made things worse. “Well, I’ll just find another woman and give the children to her.” People simply laughed at him.

So they agreed that Safine would keep the kids. Judge Patrick told them he would enter an agreement between them into the court record, one that guaranteed that they would not bother each other and that Maxo would pay support. So he started writing in a notebook he uses to draft things for the record. He got to a point and stopped. He looked up at Maxo and said, “How much child support will you pay each month?” Maxo tried to claim that the exact amount shouldn’t be an issue, that he would pay money whenever he had it, but Judge Patrick insisted on an amount for the agreement.

When Maxo wouldn’t answer, Judge Patrick turned to Safine. She asked for 5000 gourds. It’s a pretty modest amount, a little less than $115, but it’s certainly more than Maxo would be able to pay without finding someone to let him drive a truck. He could resign himself to other work – whether farm labor or other odd jobs – but he wouldn’t earn 5000 gourds. And he hasn’t shown much inclination to do anything other than drive a truck.

So, the argument continued.

At this point, I had to step out of the courtroom. Another CLM member saw me at the hearing and asked to talk with me. She had been served a summons too, and wasn’t sure what she should do. So we talked outside for a few minutes and got the man who had filed the complaint to agree to postpone their hearing until the following week. That would give us time to clarify what the matter was about.

When I turned to go back, I was surprised to discover that the hearing was over. Patrick had gotten Safine and Maxo to agree to stay together.

I wasn’t sure what to think about that, especially when Maxo told me, as we were leaving the courthouse, that he was happy to be back with Safine but that she would have to learn to listen. So I kept my peace, waiting to speak to Hilaire.

He got to the office early in the evening, after a long day of work in the field, and he was quick to ask me how it had gone. I gave him a detailed account. He listened closely, but impassively, smiling only when he heard that Maxo had said he would go find another woman to take care of his kids.

None of surprised him, and he told me why. Maxo was not contributing to the household. Though he had filed a complaint against Safine, Hilaire never imagined that he would leave her. He has it too good. But Hilaire added that he doesn’t think the relationship will last. Other CLM members, Safine’s friends, have told Hilaire that Safine could do much better. They say that she’d have an easy time finding another partner, one willing and able to do more for her that Maxo does.

And Hilaire thinks it’s just a matter of time. Safine is one of the most ambitious and disciplined of the women he works with, but she is dragging behind because of a partner who does nothing but make her job harder and complain about things as he does. Not a very promising basis to build a relationship on. Perhaps I should be more sentimental, but I’m inclined to trust Hilaire.

We will not advise Safine to throw Maxo out. That’s the kind of decision a woman must really make on her own. But we will assure her that we’ll be behind her whatever she decides. In the meantime, Hilaire will be back to see her next week, and they will start to plan to build her house and set up her latrine on her new piece of land. And she’ll move forward. That is, above, what she is determined to do.

Nine months after the graduation in Bay Tourib, which is still the largest single graduation we have ever celebrated, a lot has changed in the mountains that overlook Tomonn. When I rode up for a visit in the summer, in the middle of the rainy season, the road had deteriorated badly enough that I gave up before I got to the town. For that trip, I went with my godson, Velicène. He’s a medical school student and was going to spend a week assisting the doctor there. We left my motorcycle by the side of the road in Jidipe, and hiked the last hour or so in the rain. But in the early fall, the Haitian government put heavy equipment to work in preparation for the parish festival in November, and the assorted tractors and graders did a lot of good.

For now, at least until next year’s rains wash the new, improved road out, the ride from downtown to Tomonn to Bay Tourib is easy. Motorcycle taxis go up and down the road for only 150 gourds, or less than $4. The old price was 500. And at 500 gourds, one had to get off the motorcycle to walk in a couple of places that were too difficult for even a professional driver to take with a passenger. Just as importantly, trucks without four-wheel drive can now get to the town, and one has started coming up to Bay Tourib regularly to buy the fruit that grows abundantly there and to transport it for sale to Port au Prince.

Previously, fruit would rot on the ground. People would have more than they could consume, but they would have a hard time getting it to market. That should no longer be a problem. If the truck focuses on produce, rather than charcoal, it will be an unmixed good for the region. But I had heard about the road. It was not really what I was curious about. I was much more interested in discovering how CLM graduates were doing. I had heard disturbing rumors of livestock lost to disease and to hungry dogs, so I was concerned.

Mirana lives with her husband in Senflè, uphill from the residence at the Partners in Health hospital. I remember her very well from my first visit to her in the spring of 2011. She had just lost one of her older sons, the one who had been her principal source of support ever since Canot, her husband, had grown sick and incapable of hard work. The younger man had earned enough money to buy her a small house, had helped her keep their family fed, and had even paid to send his little sister to school – the first of Mirana’s children to see the inside of a classroom.

That son had gone of to Port au Prince, promising to find work and to earn a real income so that he’d be able to support her well, but the first news Mirana had heard of him was that he was dead. She had sold off what little she owned just to pay for his funeral.

The household was going hungry most of the time. She had planted a couple of cups of beans that had been lent to her by the local peasants association, but she, Canot, and their daughter were surviving mostly on handouts.

What was most memorable about that interview was when she expressed her greatest sadness. She said, “We get by with what we have, but I’m sorry for my girl. She’ll finish primary school this year, but there’s no way I can send her any farther.”

While Mirana was part of CLM, her case manager helped her figure out how to send her daughter to school in Tomonn. The young woman would live with a relative. Mirana would send food and money down as often as she could. That way, the girl would seem less like a beggar, and more like a regular part of the household.

And the first person I saw in the yard when I passed by on Christmas day was that girl. She’s still in school, but had come home for vacation. Mirana has not continued to accumulate much in the way of assets, but she has been able to keep herself, her husband, and their daughter decently fed, and the girl in school. The girl will take the national 9th grade examination this coming summer.

I asked Mirana about the rumor that some CLM graduates had been losing goats to packs of hungry dogs. She answered that she had lost one herself. But she still has one mature female. It’s now pregnant, and its most recent kid is a female on the verge of sexual maturity. So she should soon have a couple more. Both were tied in her yard, right in front of the house. She now brings food to them there instead of tying them where they can find food. It’s the best way she has to protect them from the dogs.

She had also been raising a pig, but had become concerned when several of her neighbors’ pigs had died. So she sold hers. Bay Tourib’s farmers were harvesting their beans just then, so she invested the money she earned from sale of the pig in dried beans. She’s holding on to them. By waiting until planting season to sell them, she will be able to turn them over at a significant profit. “I’ll be able to buy a pig again with money from the beans.”

Mirana’s older daughter, Orana, lives in Fonpyèjak, with her husband Bob and five small children. Bob works hard as a farmer, and is able to keep the family fed while Orana earns cash with a business selling plastic sandals at the markets in Abriko, Regalis, and Koray.

Before CLM, they struggled in three ways. First, Orana had to carry her merchandise on her head because she had no pack animal. That severely limited her ability to earn. She was further limited by frequent pregnancies. On the other, Bob was unable to farm consistently because he had to leave home to look for work every time they faced a significant expense.

CLM helped them build up assets until they were able to buy a mule. That made it possible for their business to grow. They worked together so well that even when most of their capital was stolen during a purchasing trip to Port au Prince, they were able to get themselves going once again by selling off some of their produce.

Orana and Bob have not added new livestock since Orana graduated, but they added something important to their yard, something that reflects their growing prosperity.

A kolonbi is a grain depot built on long stilts to protect the harvest from rats. As I walked up to the front of Orana’s new home, the one she built while a member of CLM, I noticed that the straw house they had been living in before joining the program had been demolished. When I had been talking with Orana for a few minutes, she asked me proudly whether I had seen her new //kolonbi//. I hadn’t noticed it. It was hidden behind the new house. They used the lumber from the straw house, but then bought used tin roofing material to cover it. Orana was excited about it. Because Bob no longer had to take time off to earn cash, they had enough of a harvest to require storage. And her nice, new kolonbi provided a good space to store it in.

The family seems to be doing really well. The children are healthy and in school, and Orana uses family-planning services offered by Partners in Health. And Orana reports that her business is steady.

When Gladys heard I was in Bay Tourib, she came to the residence to see me. She was anxious to tell me how well she was doing.

I knew she had been involved in small commerce when she graduated from the program, so I was concerned to hear that she had wasn’t selling anymore. Then she explained why: Her horse had died. She can’t carry merchandise to market. It’s too far. When I asked her whether she had had problems feeding her two girls because she had let her business disappear, she explained that the harvest had been very good, so that they were doing well.

Like other graduates, she had been concerned when people started to lose goats to hungry dogs, but she had protected herself. She had sold off her remaining goats, and bought a pig instead. The pig had had six piglets, which were starting to grow. She was planning to let them grow until she could sell them and buy a mule. Then she would go back into business.

It was, generally, an encouraging visit. It is always exciting to see CLM graduates who have accumulated significant assets by the end of the program. But talking with women like Mirana, Orana, and Gladys is more encouraging still. Their wealth has ebbed and flowed since they joined CLM, but they have shown resilience because they have learned how to develop and work from a clear plan. They are still very poor. There is no mistaking that. But they are making progress, not as passengers riding a tide, but as actors charting a new course for the families they lead.

Guilène’s husband used to work loading and unloading a truck that carried imports from Elias Piña, in the Dominican Republic, into Port au Prince. The truck’s brakes gave out as it was going down a dangerous mountain road to avoid the customs station on the main road into the capital. He never made it to a hospital.

After he died, Guilène moved back to Pòsab, a small community near the market in Labasti, right on the main road that leads from Port au Prince to Mirebalais. She had neither land nor livestock of her own, and she lacked both the capital and the know-how to start a small commerce. Her husband had been the provider in their home. She had only had to manage the money he brought to her. So she moved into a shack on her stepfather’s land with Jovensonne, her son, and Guinya, a daughter who was born just after the husband died.

Guilène kept them fed at first by selling off the household goods she had accumulated as a married woman: her bed, her curtains, her sheets, her dishes, pots, and pans. When she had nothing to sell, they went hungry.

As her relationship with her mother deteriorated, life just became harder. She got on well enough with her stepfather, but the two women would argue and fight. Chimène, her mother, had problems enough of her own. She had numerous younger children she struggled to feed. They fought over everything and over nothing. Chimène wanted Guilène to respect her authority. Guilène resented the way her mother took advantage of her need to sell off her things. She had expected help. Instead she felt her mother cared about nothing but getting a good deal.

Since they were two separate households, we qualified both for CLM. And each got quickly to work.

When Fonkoze adapted BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra Poor, or TUP, program for Haiti, we were reluctant to change very much. BRAC had shown that the program could be successful in Bangladesh. We became convinced by the approach, and sought mainly to replicate it. But there were some things that had to be changed. Haiti’s mountainous terrain and the way its population is distributed each required minor adjustments in the way the program is administered.

But one standard part of Haitian culture integrated itself seamlessly into the work as TUP turned into CLM. It is what Haitians call a sòl. It’s an important financial strategy for many classes of Haitians, and it quickly became a central part of CLM.

A sòl is a savings club. A number of people get together and contribute a set amount every day, every week, or every month. Each time they contribute, one of the members collects the whole pot. If there are ten members, and they each contribute 100 gourds a week, one of the ten will get 900 gourds each week. It’s a way that Haitians, who can be under a lot of pressure to spend what they earn every, force themselves into a discipline that permits them organize a lump sum.

During the first six months of the program, CLM members receive a cash stipend of 300 gourds each week. That’s about $7. We called it the “ti tchotcho lamanjay,” which means “little food money.” It was initially designed to take the edge off a family’s hunger during the first six months, when they are just beginning to develop their new assets.

We quickly discovered, however, that our members wanted to do much more with their tchotcho than feed their kids. They would make small deposits in the savings accounts we would open for them, or they would buy small assets, like chickens.

And they also wanted to organize a sòl. Most would put aside 100 of their 300 gourds. They would collect their share more or less often, depending on the number of women who were in the sòl with them.

Our case managers quickly discovered how useful a part of the CLM process a sòl could be. One of the most important challenges that a case manager faces is to teach CLM members to plan. Most members have spent their lives struggling to find food each day. They haven’t had the leisure to think about the future.

But each time a CLM member is scheduled to received the money from her sòl, she and her case manager take some extra time to plan what she will do with the money. She might use it to pay school fees or to start a small commerce or to buy livestock or to invest in farming.

When it was Guilène’s turn, she used it to address her biggest problem. She added its 1500 gourds to 500 she had left from the sale of her bed and put the 2000 gourds down as a first payment on a five-year lease on a small plot of land. The total price was 5000 gourds, but the landowner likes Guilène, and was willing to take a partial payment. She quickly built an ajoupa, a tent-like structure that has a peaked roof that comes all the way to the ground. Its only walls are small triangles in the front and back. An ajoupa is generally made of sticks and straw, but Guilène was able to cover hers with the old roofing tin that she brought with her from her house in Belladère. That got her out of her mother’s yard, and made it possible for her to start to feel better about her life.

Her first major problem struck as she was having a neighbor dig the hole where she would place her latrine. The hole made an attractive place to play for Jovensonne and his uncle, Chimène’s second-to-youngest son Lukachòn, who’s just a couple of years older than he is. One day, when Jovensenne was in the hole, Lukachòn let a heavy iron pick they were playing with fall in. It landed on Jovensonne’s foot, and cut all the way through.

One measure of the hostility Guilène felt towards Chimène is that she accused her of indifference to the damage Lukachòn had inflicted on her boy. She was so angry that Chimène sent Lukachòn to Port au Prince to stay with another one of her older daughters. She was afraid of what Guilène might do to him.

This happened on a Friday morning. Guilène’s case manager, Nerlande, wouldn’t be in the neighborhood until Monday. Guilène had no money to get Jovensonne to the hospital. Though the care would be free thanks to Partners in Health, there would be transportation to pay for and food to buy if they had to stay a long time. She could have called Nerlande, but she had just joined the program, and was not yet used to thinking of her case manager as her most important partner in the struggle to improve her life. So she carried Jovensonne to a neighbor, who stanched the wound with cotton and poured in some alcohol.

By Monday, when Nerlande and I went by, the wound was badly infected. Jovensonne was stuck in bed with a high fever and a foot swollen to twice its normal size. I put him on the front of my motorcycle and rushed him to the hospital. He went through agony as nurses carefully removed each thread of cotton from the ugly wound. An x-ray showed that the pick had passed through his foot without breaking any bones. In that sense, he was lucky. The doctor who saw him gave him a course of children’s Tylenol and amoxicillin, and he was starting to heal within days.

The experience would have shaken any mother, but it was especially hard for Guilène because of her special relationship with Jovensonne. Since she became a widow, Guilène has gotten used to referring to him, though he’s not yet ten years old, as the man in her house. She is always raving about how loving and helpful he is. Not only does he refuse to complain when she can’t feed him the way she’d like to, but he begs her not to borrow money or buy food on credit because he doesn’t like to hear people speak roughly to her when she cannot pay. Haitian children are generally raised to share, but Jovensonne is especially good about doing so. Nothing falls into his hands without his mother and his little sister get something first.

A couple of weeks ago, we were glad to see that Guilène had started a small commerce. It is an important step towards assuring daily income. When she joined CLM, she had asked us to give her goats and a pig. Each member chooses two activities she would like us to help her start. Guilène takes good care of her animals, and they should eventually earn her significant profits. But they could not help her feed her children in the short term. She needed a way to earn at least a few gourds every day, and small commerce seemed the most likely way for her to do so. We wondered where Guilène had gotten the money to start her commerce because we knew that the down payment she made on her lease had more-or-less cleaned her out.

Guilène told us that after she pays 100 gourds into her sòl each week, she takes 25 of the remaining 200 gourds and gives them to Jovensonne. To an American accustomed to a culture in which even young children get an allowance, this might seem like an obvious thing to do. But of the 2400 who have graduated from CLM thus far, and the 1350 currently in the program, Guilène is the only one we know of who has done something like this.

Jovensonne spends 15 gourds on whatever treats happen to catch his eyes – always sharing with his mother, his sister, and his friends – but he puts ten gourds into his own weekly savings club. He had seen how a sòl had helped his mother, so he wanted to be part of one too. Each week, he and his friends all contribute their ten gourds, and one of them gets the whole pot, which is 400 gourds.

When it was Jovensonne’s turn to receive the pot, he gave it all to his mother and told her she could start a small commerce. She got off to a successful start based only on the money her boy gave her, selling cookies, crackers, and hard candy from a basket at the side of the main road. Eventually she was able to add her own cash when her second turn came around. That allowed her diversify the range of products she can sell. She added peanut butter sandwiches and coffee that she roasts and grinds herself. She also occasionally fries dough or sweet potatoes.

Guilene

So Jovensonne started his mother in business, and proved that, at nine years old, he is a real partner in her struggle to lift her family out of poverty.

One final note: The accompaniment CLM offers is not focused narrowly on members’ economic/financial development. We are committed to help them improve all aspects of their lives. Nerlande believed that a better life for Guilène and her children would depend, in the long term, to healing the wound separating her from her mother. So she invested a lot of extra time over the first few months talking to both women about their conflict.

And we are glad to report that her encouragement has yielded results. Guilène decided to go to her mother and make up. “We can’t both be members of this great program and not be friends,” she explained. So they are friends once more. When Guilène has to leave her business for a few minutes, her mother sends Lukachòn or his little brother Dinaldo to cover for her together with Jovensonne.

Dieumette entered CLM as what we call a “ka espesyal,” or a “special case.” That means that she did not show up on the lists that we develop with community input at the beginning of the selection process. Our first step is designed to give us a list that includes all households in a neighborhood, organized into about five different categories based on their neighbors’ sense of their relative wealth. We then interview all the households that fall in the two poorest categories as we search for families who might qualify for our program.

But we know that some of the neediest households will fail to turn up on those lists. For various reasons, members of the community do not think of them. Some of these families are simply invisible. They live in such isolation even from their closest neighbors that people can forget that they exist. But many are young single women, who live with one or more children in a house or yard that their neighbors identify as part of a larger family. Such a woman might just use a corner of someone else’s house as a place to sleep with her children, or she might live so close to parents that neighbors fail to see her independent need. Our case managers have to be on the lookout for such special cases as we work through the selection process. They include some of the families who need us most.

Dieumette lives in a small, one room house in Platon Sous, a small neighborhood about twenty minutes off the main highway that leads from Mirebalais to Port au Prince. It’s high above Mirebalais, with views that extend widely, to Montay Terib in to the west and to the mountains that cut through Boucan Carré to the north. She has two girls, with two separate fathers. Abandoned by both men, she is raising her daughters on her own. But her little house is close to those belonging to her mother and her aunts, so her neighbors did not count her when they were listing the households in the area.

But she needed help. She was struggling to feed herself and her girls with a small business, buying and selling pigeon peas, using capital that she borrowed from two different people.

She started that business by borrowing 250 gourds from one friend and 500 gourds from another, a total of about $17. She would take that money to the small markets nearby in Gran Boulay or Dalon, where she’d buy a sack of pigeon peas. She’d then take it to Port au Prince, where she would sell it in smaller measures. Her profits were steady, even after her transportation costs were calculated.

Then one day, she bought herself a “bwat sekrè,” or a “secret box.” That’s something like a piggy bank: a box with a small hole that allows someone to insert money, but not to take it out. Dieumette explains: “Every time I came home from the market, I would put a little something in my secret box. I needed money to feed my girls, but I knew that if we ate everything, we’d never get ahead.”

As spring turned to summer, the price of pigeon peas got so high that she couldn’t afford to buy a sack full any more, not with the very little money she had borrowed. And then her friends said they needed their money back.

So she cracked open her secret box and found that she had saved up 450 gourds, a little more than $10. It wouldn’t be enough to buy beans, so Dieumette thought about what else she could buy. “I bought a case of soap and four buckets of salt, and I started selling them in the market.” She kept turning them over and adding little bits of profit to a new secret box. And before too long she had 900 gourds, which was enough to buy a very small piglet, one barely weaned. But she is taking good care of it. It’s already worth twice what she bought it for, and it’s still growing fast.

Her business took a hit this month, as she has had to draw on it to send her little girls to school, but she already bought a second piglet with money from the savings club she’s in with her fellow CLM members, so she’s making good progress. And Dieumette already has a clear plan, too. When her pigs are big enough, she’ll sell them off to buy a cow. “I really want a cow, because once it starts giving you calves it can really help you.”

So, though she was regularly hungry when she started the program, she was all set to begin succeeding almost as soon as she joined. She had the financial discipline that she developed by using her secret boxes and the good sense to shift her investment when faced with a situation that called for a new plan. One of the ways we articulate the criteria for joining CLM is that we should not take families who could succeed with credit. Looking back, it looks as though Dieumette might have been able to.

But I don’t regret her selection, because I think that to assume that she could have succeeded with credit would have been a poor bet. She started with neither a husband to back her up nor assets like livestock that would have been sufficient to insure her against bumps in the road. And she wasn’t able at the time to feed her girls well. For someone like her, failure at a credit program was too easy to imagine.

Extremely poor families often live in isolation. They lead lives that may be parallel to those their wealthier neighbors lead, never touching the points of intersection that give a community the unity that defines it.

Many of them cannot send their children to school, and often those who can do not feel entitled to go to a parents’ meeting. They have no regular place at the local market because any little produce that they bring with them is too insignificant to require a fixed point of sale. They carry it around on their heads, or go straight to a wealthier retailer who will buy their load cheap. They don’t belong to community organizations. They would not feel comfortable at meetings. And no one would think to invite them to a celebration.

It’s not as though they are feared or avoided like lepers. It’s just that no one ever thinks of them.

So one of our principle social goals for CLM members is to help them become members of their communities. That is one of the reasons for establishing village assistance committees. Our members get used to attending meetings with friendly community leaders and even to speak up. The committee members’ work brings them to our members’ homes as visitors, a habit that sticks when the CLM members show the committee members that the visits are welcome. The relationships they will establish with these leaders as they start to develop their own economic means can protect them from returning to their former isolation, even as the livestock they accumulate can protect them from returning to extreme poverty when their livelihoods run into inevitable rough times.

So when a community has its own tools for managing problems and conflicts, we think it is to our members’ advantage for us to guide them towards those tools. That’s not to say that we never intervene strongly ourselves. Sometimes we do. (See: DeleGasyon.) But if we don’t have to manage things ourselves, we’d rather not. So when the case manager who serves the town of Trianon, which sits along the national highway in southern Mirebalais, explained the situation that had developed between two of the families he works with, I referred him to Judge Patrick, the justice of the peace.

The two families are neighbors. Dénius is the son of a woman named Osiane who was selected for the program. He became responsible for himself and his 14-year-old younger brother when Osiane died, probably of persistent malnutrition. Their father had died two years previously. Genel is his cousin, the husband of another woman we selected for the program. Dénius’s father and Genel’s mother were brother and sister. The mother is still alive.

Genel is about five years older than Dénius, a married man of 25. He’s also bigger and stronger than Dénius. Dénius may be 20, but he looks much younger. More important, Genel is tougher than Dénius, who is very sweet but probably lacking in what would be useful grit.

Not that he doesn’t try to stick up for himself: When Genel went into the land his father left him and lopped a fruit-laden branch off a mango tree to make charcoal, he complained, enough apparently to annoy Genel. Genel finally explained that he had been asked to make the charcoal by his mother, so that Dénius should complain to the mother instead. Dénius complained again when Genel cut down a tree on another plot of land that Dénius believed that his father had left him – Genel thought it had been left to the whole family by their grandfather – and made enough noise to make Genel angry and threatening.

Dénius then complained to Michel, their common case manager, who decided to sit down with them both. In the course of the conversation, Genel became angry again. He finally said, in front of Michel, that if he came across Dénius when the moment was right he would cut him to pieces. That was when Michel came to me.

Fortunately, Trianon had just been assigned a courthouse and a justice of the peace. Fortunately again, the justice of the peace is Judge Patrick, who had previously been assigned to a court in Tit Montay, where he became very familiar with CLM. So we were assured of a sympathetic hearing.

I had Michel help Dénius file a complaint based on the threat to his life. This would require the court to send Genel a manda envitasyon, something like a formal demand that he present himself in court for a hearing, but much less serious than a warrant for his arrest would be.

Judge Patrick’s sympathetic understanding was important, because our goals for the hearing were complex. Both Dénius and Genel are part of CLM. We needed to do what we could to help Dénius feel save and to clarify the land ownership issues that invited the conflict. We also wanted Genel to see that it was, for us, simply a matter of using a fair process to clear things up, and that we continue to see him as part of our CLM family – every bit as much a part of it as his more vulnerable younger cousin is.

Judge Patrick was wonderful, talking and listening respectfully to both men. He got Genel to admit that he had been hotheaded and to agree that he must manage any conflicts with Dénius in some other way.

He also identified the source of the problem as their different understandings of the way the land was left to them, and we were lucky enough to have a satisfactory way to define things. Their aunt, their parents’ older sister, came to the hearing. She is a childless older woman who has more-or-less moved in with Dénius and his brother, Amison. She keeps quiet and manages her affairs separately from them, though they share what they have with her and she shares with them. They speak to her with gentleness and respect, and she seems fond of them.

Judge Patrick asked her what she knew about the land in question. Did it come to Dénius as an inheritance from his father or did her father leave it in common to them all? There were no papers of any kind to establish the old man’s intentions, but the land is between a small garden that belongs to her sister and another that belongs to her. What, if anything, did she know?

The aunt had a simple answer: She remembered that her brother once told her that their father had given him that piece of land. He had never cleared it for planting because he wanted to leave it as a source of lumber in case he and his children needed it to build a home.

Her declaration satisfied Judge Patrick, and it satisfied Genel as well. He said he was sorry, that he hadn’t understood things that way, and that he’d stay off the land from now on.

Dénius now asked the judge to make Genel promise to leave him alone. Genel started to get angry when he heard this, so that’s when we felt we had to intervene. Genel had already said three times that he’d avoid problems with Dénius, but Dénius was still scared.

I was sitting next to Genel, and as he started to speak I held his hand and asked him to let me respond. I said that Genel had already promised in front of the judge that he would not bully Dénius. To continue to ask for guarantees was to doubt his honesty. And no one had shown any reason to do that. I’ve gotten very close to Dénius, so when I said this, he relented.

Then it was time for Judge Patrick’s final maneuver. He wrote an agreement of reconciliation into the courtroom’s official record. There were a number of points in the agreement, but the central one was that Genel and Dénius would agree to act as brothers. Dénius would look to Genel as and older brother for protection and advice, Genel would protect and advise him. Judge Patrick made them sign the agreement and then hug. All in front of a crowded little courtroom. It was not the warmest of embraces, but I think it did what Judge Patrick wanted it to do.

On the way out, I pulled Genel aside for a chat. On one hand, I wanted him to understand that we would hold him to his agreements. On the other hand, I wanted to communicate my friendship towards him. For various reasons, I have grown very close to Dénius. I haven’t with Genel. But I wanted Genel to see that our team is committed to helping them both. We talked mostly about his very beautiful little girl and about one of the goats that the program had given his wife, which seemed a little sick. I also asked him to contact me if there was any more trouble between him and Dénius, and he said that he would.

Using the legal system in Trianon gave us a way to protect a scared young man from another who is stronger and tougher than he. But it also made their conflict, and its resolution, a part of the formal comings and goings of the community that surrounds them both. Making it a public matter served to bring both young men farther into the public realm as well.

One of the formidable challenges at the center of our extreme poverty program is ensuring we select the right families. We have a process that always involves three steps: community input, initial screening, and final verification. But sometimes there’s also a fourth step. Fonkoze’s Social Impact Management Unit – which is our research and evaluation team – takes 25% of the families that the CLM staff selects for the program and re-evaluates them. They then follow the families through the program so that we have a way to independently confirm the work that our case managers do.

Earlier in the month, we got an initial report on the 360 new members we are currently working with. The data it included about the first 64 members whom they will follow confirmed a lot about our selection. But there was one problem: One member, Elsie Fénélon, appeared to be completely unqualified for the program. Social Impact’s survey found that she owed three goats, a horse, and a cow before she even joined the program. While that would hardly qualify Elsie as wealthy, it would disqualify her for CLM, especially since we knew she was managing a small commerce and had been able to send her kids to school last year.

I asked her case manager to follow the report up. He’s an especially smart and experienced man named Christian, and I’ve learned to value his judgment greatly. I wanted him to find out about the livestock and to let me know his overall opinion of the household.

This is what he reported: There were in fact three goats, a mother and her two bucks. They had not yet been weaned. She had been given the mother by Mercy Corps, an NGO that had been working in the Mirebalais area at the time. She also had purchased a horse, really just a colt. A younger brother had offered her one for 2000 gourds because he wanted to help her out. She didn’t have that much, but she had 1500 in a savings club that she was in with other market women. So she paid that money down, and her brother agreed to wait for the rest. The cow belongs to her husband. Right around the time she was selected for the program, he finished a job for a neighbor who planned to pay him by selling a young bull. When the neighbor couldn’t get the price he was seeking in the local market, the husband agreed to take the bull in lieu of payment. Unfortunately, however, Elsie is not the husband’s only partner, and he does not contribute dependably to the household.

So she has more in assets than a CLM member typically would at the start, a lot more. And with her existing small commerce, she might seem like an excellent example of an extremely poor woman who could be served by our Ti Kredi program, rather than by CLM. Her business – she sells powered laundry detergent by the cup full – is 100% dependent on credit. She has none of her own money invested in it all at. She buys a sack of detergent at a time with no money down, and has to sell it off to pay for it before she can get another.

Our team occasionally refers to “original” CLM members. These are the ones who are the worst off, the ones who have nothing at all when we find them: No children in school, no assets of any kind, and no economic activity beyond day labor and begging. We find a lot of families like that, and Elsie was not one of them. We knew that her business was working for her – it had enabled her to pay into the 100-gourd-per-week savings club that made it possible for her to buy the horse – and, even if we discounted the cow as an asset she couldn’t depend on, the goats would give her something to fall back on if her commerce took a bad turn.

But not all of our members are “original.” Some are slightly better off, even though they are still extremely poor. Christian still wanted to keep Elsie in the program. He felt that she was really struggling to feed her family, and that her lack of decent housing in a neighborhood where housing is relatively expensive would put her at great risk.

I needed to take his view seriously, very seriously. I can’t pretend to judge more astutely than he. But I also know that he tends toward including marginal cases. It is a predictable consequence of seeing as many miserably poor people as we do: You want to help them all, and the weight of their poverty tends to play with your sense of who it is who is poor enough. Deciding, even correctly, to exclude a hungry household from the program because it is not quite poor enough becomes harder and harder as you go along.

So I went to talk to her myself. I wanted to figure out if I could why we had missed the assets when we first interviewed her. Had she simply lied? And needed to decide, more importantly, whether she belongs in CLM.

I went by to see her early in the morning, hoping to catch her before she went out. By the time I got to Labasti, where she lives, she was already out in the street, trying to sell the last couple of scoops of detergent so she’d be able to pay for it and get a new sack the next day. But she hadn’t gone far, and when word got to her that I was there, she came running home. It took her a few minutes to catch her breath before we could start to chat.

I already knew that her small commerce was on the edge. I had seen her the previous day in the small market in Trianon, trying to sell the same last bit of detergent she was walking with. The Trianon market is failing. Very little is sold there. But a few desperate merchants sit around, hoping that something will happen. If her sales were thriving, she wouldn’t have wasted a day there. So things weren’t going well. The day I saw her she was on her way to Terre Rouge, a long uphill hike from her home. She thought she’d be able to sell out her product if she went to the various fried-foods merchants who set up there for passing traffic. They don’t have time to do much shopping, so are often glad when the things they need come to them. It would be a long day, with low potential for return, so she must really feel the need for a few gourds of additional sales.

We talked about her goats. She told me that she had received one as a gift from Mercy Corps, but that she had offered it to her brother when she could not figure out how to pay her kids’ tuition bill when the school year was coming to an end. The brother offered her the 2000 gourds she needed, but then said he’d rather she kept the mother goat. He would take the goat’s first two young, instead. When the goat had a litter of two, he turned the kids over to Elsie’s oldest boy to take care of. He has now just sent for them from Port au Prince. It is also true that she has a horse, though it is not all hers and it’s much too small still to bring her anything but the extra work of taking care of it.

But as I talked to her, and looked at both her and her young children, I just thought “CLM.” Their house is a wreck, and the boys were scavenging something to eat in their grandmother’s corn. The ears are dry, ready for harvest, but the boys grill the whole kernels and then count on their good teeth to snack on them. Anything like a real meal would have to wait until the afternoon, probably late because the trip to Terre Rouge and back would take Elsie all day.

I could be wrong. Maybe Elsie would be a good bet even with Ti Kredi. I know that I’m subject to the same pressures that I see acting on case managers like Christian. But Elsie’s household is struggling by any measure, I know that CLM can help, and I’m not certain that Ti Kredi is really an option.

So I decided to make what was certainly the easy decision, the one to keep her in the program. I’m pretty certain that she will succeed. A lot of the entrepreneurship we seek to teach seems already there.

Monday morning, I spoke with Denius. He’s a boy about 19 or 20, though he looks several years younger. He’s his mother’s oldest child, one of her four surviving boys. His father, who was also father to Amisson, the next younger boy, died a few years ago. The mother, Osiane, died just as the CLM program was starting. Her death was probably related to malnutrition. The last time we saw her, she was weak and a little disoriented. And she had a scarf tied around her stomach as poor Haitian sometimes do when they are suffering hunger pangs. We just didn’t get to her soon enough.

Relatives decided to take the two younger boys, but to leave Denius and Amisson, who’s 14, to fend for themselves. They’ve been managing. Not very well, but they’re learning.

During the first few weeks we were discouraged to see how little Denius was willing or able to do for the household. CLM depends largely on members’ deciding to work hard with the advice and the assets that we offer them, but Denius seemed to be mostly sitting around.

When I started to press him, he admitted that physical exertion made him dizzy. The shock of losing his mother was combining with continued hunger to make him weak. I couldn’t do much about his sadness – the cure for that seems to a combination of time and Amisson, who is unswervingly playful – but I could help with the hunger. An American intern had just finished six months with us, and she left a large quantity of powdered protein drink (chocolate flavor) behind. We brought most of it to Denius and Amisson, and added a care package of some more conventional food that had been left over after six days of the new members’ enterprise training. Denius has been saying that he feels much better, and we see new energy in the work that he’s started to take on.

But he was a little panicked when I saw him Monday morning. Sunday night, the relatives who had taken the youngest boy, Bernardo, changed their mind. Bernardo is two, and had been getting sicker and sicker since his mother’s death. I suppose they didn’t feel as though they could take responsibility any more. So they brought him back to Denius and Amisson, along with a sack of his dirty clothes, and walked away.

Denius didn’t know what to do. It is hard enough for him to have to raise Amisson without their parents’ help. But Amisson clearly understands their situation, as much at least as he could be expected to, and he had made himself much more manageable than anyone could expect. Bernardo, especially a sick Bernardo, would be a different story. At the same time, Denius was clear: “I can’t just throw him away.” He was stuck, and he’d have to figure out a way to be father to the little boy.

When Denius and I first spoke on the phone, he was most worried about a high fever. “I put Bernardo to sleep in the middle of the bed, between Amisson and me, but every time I rubbed against him, it felt like fire against my skin.” I told him to start bathing Bernardo in cool water to see whether he could bring the temperature down while I was on my way.

By the time I arrived, the temperature was down, but Bernardo was lifeless. He was sitting in the middle of the bed – he would cry if Denius tried to make him lie down – but he could barely keep his eyes open. More striking was the terrible rash that covered his head. Blistering sores and cracked scabs were all over his scalp. Every once in a while Bernardo would make an effort to scratch the scabs, but mostly he just sat there.

So I had Denius wrap him up and get onto the back of my motorcycle, and we rushed to the PIH hospital. We had to wait for most of the morning. I asked Denius whether he had eaten anything, and he hadn’t. So I went out and got him a large plate of boiled plantain and meat sauce. The women who surrounded him, the only man in the line waiting with a child to see the pediatrician, seemed to enjoy watching him feed Bernardo as he ate.

They eventually saw a doctor, who gave them a seven-day course of liquid erythromycin and two large tubes of ointment for the rash. On the way home, we stopped by Mirebalais’s one grocery store, and bought some powdered milk and some instant oatmeal.

After I dropped them off in Trianon, I continued up the hill to Yawo, which is on the road leading west along the ridge from Fon Cheval. I wanted to see Elourdes. She’s a new CLM member whom I’ve written about before. (See: DifferentShapes.) I had visited her on Thursday and found her struggling with a painful burn on her right calf. She had taken a spill when riding on the back of a motorcycle. The muffler had landed on her leg. We had a tube of good ointment for burns in our office, so I brought it to her. Monday, I wanted to find out whether it was helping.

Her yard is generally a loud, busy place. She has nine children. One is a girl in her mid-teens with a child of her own. But Elourdes was sitting on her front porch, with four of five of the young children sitting listlessly around her. She, her husband, and I had a good talk. The ointment was apparently helping a lot, but they were more interested in the goats we had given her on Saturday. The husband wanted to know whether he was allowed to mark the goats, and we talked about the advantages of doing so.

He and Elourdes remained cheerful throughout our chat, as did their oldest boy, a youth in his late teens. The younger kids, whom I knew to be inclined to play, were distinctly cheerless.

The reason was obvious. It was late afternoon, and they had not yet had anything to eat. Elourdes has been in the program for a couple of months, but she has nothing like a steady income stream. She, her husband, and the oldest boy were able to joke about how one has to live with hunger when there is no food in the house, but the little kids were miserable. I pulled the son aside on my way back to my motorcycle, gave him some money, and asked him to go buy something they could feed his brothers and sisters. He thanked me, and I rode off.

On my way back down the hill towards Mirebalais, I stopped in Pòsab. I wanted to see Guilène, whom I wrote about in the piece that mentions Elourdes. I had particularly wanted to see her boy, Jovensonne. I had taken him to the hospital the week before, and I wanted to see whether his foot was healing.

The moment I saw him limping over to greet me, I knew he was doing well. The week before, he had been unable to walk because his foot had been pierced by a sharp tool in an accident that occurred while he was playing with his uncle, who is a small boy not much older than he is.

Jovensonne had a plate of rice in his hands, which was another good sign. He tried to get me to eat some of it, but when I wouldn’t he finished about two-thirds, then gave the rest to a hungry-looking child from a neighboring house.

He then went back to his play. He had taken a coconut leaf and stripped off the foliage, leaving only the woody, saddle-shaped stem. He had then tied a stick across the narrow end. He was sitting on the wide end, holding the cross-piece, and sliding around the yard on this improvised motorcycle, pretending to honk the horn just as he had when he sat in front of me on my motorcycle as I drove him home from the hospital the previous week. I could hardly have felt more encouraged. “He has a good body,” his mother explained. That’s a Haitian way of saying that someone tends to heal quickly.

As I think about these stories, I think about the fundamental challenge I face when I write about CLM. It is easy to talk about how worried I was about Denius and the difficulties he would face as de facto father to his two-year-old brother. It’s easy to focus on the sick feeling in my gut as I watch Elourdes’ young children, listless from hunger, and how I feel a little better when I’ve left some cash in their brother’s hands. It’s easy to talk about the fun I have playing with eight-year-old Jovensonne, who tells his widowed mother that he wants me to be his dad. But I think it’s important to remember that I am not the story, neither my frustrations nor my joys. Everything important about CLM centers on the extremely poor families we work with, the problems they overcome, and our case managers, whose creativity and devotion enable those families to transform their lives. The story of CLM is their story, and my situation as a close observer is a privilege that I hope I know how to appreciate.

A final note: Things may work out for Denius. When Bernardo’s father got word that his boy had been abandoned by the relatives who had said that they would raise him, he came and took him himself. I don’t know what his situation is financially, but he must be in a better position to raise a toddler than Denius is.

Denius is upset because the man apparently took the boy gracelessly. “He didn’t say anything nice to me about the way we took Bernardo to see a doctor and get the medicine he needs,” he complained. But he is also very relieved. He had started to worry that his hopes of returning to school this fall, after missing the last two years since his father’s death, would fall apart if he had a toddler on his hands.

Here, in any case, is a photo of Denius and Bernardo, taken during the day they spent as father and son:

Bernardo