Bebe Geffrard

Bebe Geffrard is from Viyèt, an extremely poor agricultural region in northern Boukankare, a county in central Haiti. When she and her family were selected for the CLM program, they were extremely poor by any standard. She was living with their eight children and eight grandchildren in a decaying hut. She provided for the family as best as she could by farming, but couldn’t keep up with all the mouths she had to feed. She had too little land of her own to work. She farmed additional land as a sharecropper, but the one-third to one-half of every harvest that she had to give to the landowner made it impossible to get ahead. Her grandchildren were not in school, and the whole family suffered from persistent hunger.

Because Bebe’s family was so large, she received a cow. She took great care of it, and it gave birth to a healthy calf. She took excellent care of the calf too, and by the time it was weaned and ready for sale, the mother had given birth again. Bebe plans on keeping this second one, a female, so she will eventually have a second calf-bearer. But she sold the first to buy the land that she’d previously worked as sharecropper. Now the whole harvest is hers. There’s more food to go around, and there’s milk as well, so the children are healthier than they’ve ever been.

She received two goats with her cow, because CLM members always start the program with two new assets. As they’ve produced young, she’s kept some, but has sold the males and some females as well. Her first sale enabled her to buy a horse, which is a big help with her farming, and now the horse is pregnant too. She also now has four mother goats, even though she has used further sales to invest in her farming, buying seed, fertilizer, and tools as she needs them.

She doesn’t do much in the way of small commerce. She doesn’t have time during the farming season. She does, however, sell from her harvest, and she uses income from her crop of pigeon peas each November to start commerce that she learned to manage from her case manager, a former Tikredi agent named Alancia Belony. She maintains the commerce until farming season returns in the spring.

Bebe’s life is different now. Her family eats well, the younger children are in school, and they live in a well-built house with a good tin roof. She made it larger than a typical CLM house by having her boys build it and using the money they would have received to buy extra roofing and nails. The older boys still live in the older hut, except when it’s raining. “They like to have a place of their own,” Bebe explains.

Bebe graduated from CLM in July 2012, and she and her family keep moving forward. Her third calf is on the way, and she already knows that she’ll use it to buy more land. She has her eye on a small plot down the hill from her home, along a small stream. The flowing water will allow her to irrigate, so she’ll be able to farm beans, her main cash crop much more reliably.

Bebe’s increased wealth is encouraging. But it’s not the best part of her story. What’s most encouraging about Bebe is the way she’s transformed herself into a strategic, forward-looking thinker. With CLM’s help, she’s both learned to plan shrewdly and acquired the assets she needs to make plans that can work. That transformation gives her good reason to hope for a brighter future for herself and her kids.

We are just starting work with the 361 new families that our team selected in southern Mibalè. I thought that a good way to introduce this new cycle would be to introduce a few of the families who have joined the program. I thought that would help show the various kinds of families we deal with.

Elourdes Joseph lives with her husband, nine children, and a granddaughter in a small house in Yawo, in the mountains the separate the Central Plateau from the plain that envelops Port au Prince.

No one has to tell her how difficult life is when you have that many children. She’s tried family planning, but she never felt comfortable with it. “It made me short of breath. I couldn’t walk up even the little hill next to my house. And it gave me back pain, too.” So she had one child after another, and could only shake her head when her oldest daughter, who is still a teenager, became pregnant and added another child to the household right as Elourdes was pregnant with her youngest son.

She and her husband have always struggled, and by enterprising management of minimal resources they have managed to stay afloat even as their family has grown. Nowhere is their enterprise clearer than in the story of their home.

For the first few years after her marriage, Elourdes lived with her husband in a series of make-shift arrangements: first in the homes of various friends and relatives, then in a tent on her father-in-law’s land. But very early on, her husband bought a tree for 20 gourds. Just a few years of growth and inflation enabled her to sell the tree for charcoal for 900 gourds. They needed 600 of those gourds for household expenses, but Elourdes invested the rest. “I didn’t want all the profit to melt away.”

So she bought a very small pig for 300 gourds, and cared for it until she could sell it for 2500. Then she sold it, and bought roofing material. By then, a local organization was cutting a new road in her neighborhood with a NGO-funded cash-for-work program. Her husband was able to earn enough money to cover the other expenses that building required.

But all that enterprise is not enough to support a family of twelve. Her husband suffers chronic back pain, so he can’t work very much, and they have little land and no livestock to build a livelihood with.

Like many new members, Elourdes is optimistic about the program but a little unclear. She says she wants to “move forward,” with the program’s help, but she not yet sure what that might mean.

One of the criteria for a family’s membership is that it includes a woman who is capable of working and who has at least one child dependent on her. Generally, that means a mother and her children or her child. Sometimes, we come across grandmothers raising their children’s children, or godmothers who have responsibility for a godchild. But in almost all cases, we are dealing with mothers, even if the children on their hands are not their own.

AFH’s cohort of CLM families has three exceptions, however. They are groups of siblings whose parents have passed away. Julienne Dorcé and her younger brother and sister live in Yawo, in a house that belongs to a childless aunt. The aunt moved out when she realized that her sister’s children need the house more than she does.

Julienne’s mother died about a year ago. The father had died long before that. The mother left the seven children, including an infant she had had with another man. That infant died shortly after their mother did, leaving just six. After the baby’s death, relatives took the three younger survivors, having decided that the older children would have a hard enough time taking care of themselves. So the three oldest now live together.

The two younger, Sorel and Maudeline, grew up in Port au Prince, with another aunt, because their mother could not feed them. One hears all sorts of horror stories about the many, many children in Haiti who are focred to grow up outside their parents’ homes. They are often little more than unpaid servants, subject to every form of abuse. But Sorel and Maudeline were lucky. Their aunt took good care of them, sending them to school when their mother could not do that much for the children who remained with her.

They had to return to Yawo and their mother after the earthquake of 2010 destroyed their aunt’s home in Port au Prince. The aunt came shortly afterwards with her children. But by then, both women were sick, and both eventually passed away. Sorel and Maudeline joined Julienne and their siblings in a house that belongs to one of the dead women’s sisters, and the aunt’s children, who are still quite young, moved in next door with another aunt, who is a single mother, and her kids. She joined the CLM program together with Julienne.

Saintanette Denval lives in Demare, a hilly agricultural area behind the important market in Labasti. She and her husband have two children, a girl about eight and a 16-month-old boy.

Demare is not really an area that one would expect to find as full as it is of families who qualify for the program. The land is rich. Sugarcane and corn grow well, and there’s plenty of forage for livestock. In addition, the market is right there. Residents can get their produce sold with very little difficulty.

But for the many landless and almost landless families who live in the neighborhood, Demare offers very little except the chance to earn about one-fourth of the minimum wage – the Haitian minimum wage – for a day of farm labor.

When CLM case manager Hilaire Nozan visited Saintanette in her home during the selection process, he was shocked by what he saw. Her baby was clearly starving. He was fourteen months old and lacked the strength even to lift up his head. Saintanette explains that she could see that the baby never ate anything, “But I didn’t know what to do.”

Hilaire knew he needed to act, so he arranged for the CLM driver to drive Saintanette and her boy to the Partners in Health hospital in Cange the very next day. Doctors there found the boy to be severely malnourished, and they admitted him for treatment. He was in such terrible condition that they had to keep him for almost two weeks, feeding him first intravenously and them with Partners in Health’s special fortified peanut butter.

The boy is fine now. And Saintanette couldn’t be more grateful. “If Hilaire hadn’t taken us to the hospital, my boy would not be here with me.

Guilène is a single mother of two, who lives in Pòsab, right along the national highway that runs south from Mirebalais to Port au Prince. She and her husband were struggling hard together. They had one child, and they started building a new home while Guilène was pregnant with their second.

He worked as a day laborer on a truck that would carry goods from Belladère, on the border with the Dominican Republic, to Port au Prince. One day, his driver took the dangerous unpaved route over the mountains, through Zoranjè to Titayen, so that he could avoid the customs office on the main road. While descending a steep hill, the truck’s brakes gave out. Both the driver and his workers died in the accident. Guilène was a widow, eight months pregnant with her little girl.

So she finished the house in the front of her mother’s yard. Her stepfather did much of the work that she couldn’t do herself. And she began to sell her furniture and her other household items in order to buy food to feed herself and her boy.

The March 8th graduation of 338 CLM members from Bay Tourib and north central Boukankare was an achievement our team was rightfully proud of. Here’s a blog that Mackenzie Keller, of Fonkoze’s staff, wrote about it: http://100millionideas.org/2013/03/07/women-the-backbone-of-society.

And here are her photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/101507663468736938297/CLMGraduationBayTourib?authkey=Gv1sRgCLiO0pTajfe5pwE.

But it merely marked the end of one assignment, not the end of the CLM team’s work. Fonkoze has charged its CLM team with eliminating extreme poverty across Haiti’s Central Plateau, and the only way to make meaningful progress towards achieving that goal is to keep working.

So on the Monday after the Friday graduation, work began on recruiting the next cohort of CLM families. Our team is charged with finding and enrolling 360 this time. THe group will be financed through a gift from Artists for Haiti. Graduation should take place towards the end of 2014. We’ve been in the field for the past couple of weeks.

I had very little to do with the work at the beginning. The team worried whether my presence too early in the process – my white, foreign presence – could complicate their work. Folks are already be inclined to imagine that someone is planning to do something for them when our team starts asking lots of questions about their neighborhood and its residents, and that suspicion makes good information harder to come by. My being around would only make their hard job harder.

But last week we began final verification, and that’s the point in the selection process at which I have to be involved. I’ve written about final verification before. (See: Final Verification.) It’s the last stage of our selection process. It’s when a member of the CLM management team, like me, visits a series of women whom CLM case managers have recommended for the program. Our role is to verify whether the prospective families really need CLM.

Much of this work is easy, especially with a group of very experienced case managers such as the ones on the Artists for Haiti team with me. They are very good at determining the situation of the women they speak with. The great majority of women they decide to recommend obviously deserve the help we can offer. Sometimes a quick look at the hungry small children hanging around their mother, who appears to be without any hope of feeding them, is all one needs to sign the form that will make it possible for us to offer a family such help as we can.

I think of Jésumène and her daughter Rosemène, her oldest child, both of whom I met last week. They live in the same straw shack. They have no land they could farm, and no resources to invest in small commerce. Jésumène’s husband left her to take up with another woman. Rosemène rejoined her when she left her husband because of his abuse. The women have eight younger children between them.

Their main means of support is Jésumène’s twenty-year-old son, her second child, who finds people who allow him to make charcoal for them out of trees that they own. He must give the landowner half the proceeds from the sale, but can give the other half to his mother. A sack of charcoal sells for about $5 in the countryside, so if he can get a couple of sacks out of the wood his neighbors offer him, he can give his mother about that much. Making charcoal takes several days, however, so they would not get that money more than about once a week. It’s doubtful that he can make charcoal even that often. And often the wood that he makes consists mainly of scraps. He may not always get even a full sack.

The kids surely scavenge some. It’s almost mango season, and there’s sugarcane these days too. And the family may receive occasional gifts from neighbors or relatives as well. The boy probably works in neighbors’ fields as well, which would earn him about $1.25 a day. But the picture as a whole for Jésumène and her children is very grim. It was not hard to decide to qualify both women for CLM.

There are borderline cases that are more difficult. One way to look at the decision that we need to make is to ask whether our Ti Kredi program could serve the family we are considering. It offers six months of very small loans and more coaching than our standard credit program does, and prepares women to enter the larger credit program.

So when I met Julienne, I had to give that question some thought. She’s currently only able to send two of her eight children to school, but she and her husband have a relatively decent two-room house and, more importantly, she has both a salt business with about $6 of capital in it and a donkey that she uses to carry the salt from the market where she buys it to the one she sells it at.

So she already has a small business, and she’s had the discipline and the acumen to keep her $6 intact for a while, though it hasn’t been able to grow. I considered referring her to Ti Kredi, figuring it could give her the tools to slowly build her business into something larger. But with her eight children to feed, and the pressure she’ll rightly feel to put more of them in school, I just couldn’t see it. Especially when I saw the handful of younger ones hanging around their front yard late in the afternoon looking very hungry. We come across other women whom I do refer to Ti Kredi. They might seem to have fewer resources than Julienne does. They have neither a business nor an asset as valuable as a donkey. But they have fewer children and fewer signs of hunger.

Another difficult case was Elène’s. She and her husband appear to be in their late sixties, but they have no idea how old they really are. Neither they nor any of their children have birth certificates, and their parents did not even teach them who was president when they were born, which is a standard way to approximately remember birth years in rural Haiti. They live in the front room of a two-room house. It’s a nice house, in good condition, though its roof of straw and palm seed pods probably leaks unless they invest a lot of time in keeping it in good repair. Their youngest child is a twenty-something man, who lives by himself in the back room. He’s not a dependent.

She and her husband wouldn’t come under consideration, but they have a severely handicapped granddaughter living with them. The girl moves the way I remember seeing children with muscular dystrophy move, though I am not competent to diagnose her real problem. Imagine a twelve-year-old girl with muscular dystrophy whose family has never talked to anyone who might know how to develop such capacities as she has. She mainly lies on the house’s dusty dirt floor, and playing by herself. Her mother, Elène’s daughter, left her in Elène’s hands, and the grandparents have no idea what to do for her beyond keeping her fed and as clean as they can.

Elène’s husband has a small yard around their home that he plants with plantains, corn, and millet. They also rent two small pieces of farmland that he works. So life is clearly very difficult for them, but they seem to be feeding themselves and investing in their long-term well being probably isn’t for us. It’s a hard call.

At times, final verification can feel hard. You wander from house to house, hearing the horrible stories of lives on the edge. One hears again and again of hunger, of lost or even absent opportunities, of violence. You are charged with deciding who, among very poor people, is poor enough to require CLM’s help. It feels hard.

But dwelling on its difficulty is a trap. You can’t pretend that such difficulty is meaningful in the face of the misery you encounter, especially since you wander around with the knowledge that soon, if not immediately, you team will be able to begin showing the families you select a path towards hope.

Jésumène Zidor graduated from CLM in June 2012. When she joined the program at the end of 2010, she was one of the poorest women we recruited. She was living with six children and two grandchildren in a straw shack in the upper end of Viyèt, a very poor agricultural area in north central Boucan Carré. Viyèt is all farmland, and the land is fertile, but its concentration in the hands of relatively few ensured that it would be fertile ground for CLM’s selection process, too. Viyèt, and its immediate vicinity, is home to around seventy members.

We measure poverty in various ways when we are selecting families for our program. We use Fonkoze’s poverty scorecard, a survey designed to evaluate poverty across a range of simple indicators. We don’t just look at how much money a family has, but how they live. What kind of house and what kind of land do they have? How many children? What sources of income? What other assets? On this two-page form, Jésumène and her family scored 11.5 out of 63.5. An average score is 31.8. New CLM members sometimes score as much as 20.

Three of those eleven points came on a question about water. Upper Viyèt has a capped spring that gives Jésumène’s family fairly easy access to pretty good water. It’s important, but it doesn’t do much to keep them fed or clothed. In the second section of the questionnaire, which investigates the family’s assets, they score only one point. While the family did own two chickens, they owned no other animals. They owned no farmland, so their only sources of income were day labor, sharecropping, and making charcoal out of scavenged deadwood.

The second survey we use is a food security index, which helps us assess a family’s nutritional situation. Jésumène’s family scored as badly as it possibly could, indicating that they were consistently missing meals, sometimes going for days at a time by foraging, without ever lighting a fire. She had had to send three of her children to live as servants in other families because she simply couldn’t feed them.

Most striking was their score on a third survey we used. It’s called the PPI, or Progress out of Poverty Index. It was developed by an international team from the Grameen Foundation to allow comparison between levels of poverty in different countries. On this ten-question form, Jésumène’s score was zero.

Jésumène described the situation straightforwardly: “We didn’t have food to eat. The children weren’t in school.”

Jésumène flourished in the program. Because she and her husband were so very poor, with so many children on their hands, they qualified for a special benefit. Thanks to a gift from Bothár, an Irish development organization, we were able to offer them a cow as one of their two types of income-generating assets.

The hardest challenge for those who receive cows is establishing a daily income. Cows take a long time to produce anything they can sell. But Jésumène managed her secondary asset — she received two goats — well, and also invested savings from her six-month stipend in poultry. In addition, she took some of that stipend and gave it to her husband to work with. He makes and sells chairs, having used his wife’s initial investment to start buying the materials he would need.

Jésumène loves CLM, and her reasoning is simple: “Tout sa yo di, se sa yo fè.” That means, “Everything they say they’ll do, they do.” She adds, “They helped us build a house. We had been getting soaked every time it rained, but now we can stay dry. We have a good house. We have livestock. We even have a latrine.”

But the progress that has meant most to her is just as simple. She says, “M gen yon ti kal tè pou m chita.” That means, “I have a little spot of land where I can sit down.” Before joining the program, she and her family were sleeping on straw mats on the floor of a hut that didn’t belong to them on land they didn’t own. She was renting, having to figure out each year where to find the money to pay a landowner who didn’t really want her on the land. She made a first down payment with sale of some of her goats’ offspring and completed payment for the land with the sale of her cow’s first calf.

When she was preparing to graduate from the program, she and her case manager considered how she could best move forward. She decided she’d start a small commerce, so they made a plan for her to join Fonkoze’s Ti Kredi after graduation. She would use the loan to start her commerce.

Ti Kredi is a six-month introduction to microcredit. Members take out three loans, the first for one month, the second for two months, and the third for three. The loan values increase as well, starting from 1000 gourds, or about $25 and growing to 2500. After graduating from Ti Kredi, members typically go on to standard solidarity group credit, where loans start at 3000 gourds and can grow to more than ten times that.

When Jésumène took out her first loan, she bought bread and sugar and sold them mainly from her home. But when she took out her second loan, she started to discover that simply adding to the amount of sugar and bread she would buy didn’t increase her profits because it didn’t increase her sale.

So she continued to sell bread and sugar, but put some of the capital aside. She went into the hills behind the area where she lived, and bought a sack or two of charcoal. She then carried the sacks down to the market downhill from Viyèt, where she sold them at a profit. She would only make about 50 gourds of profit on a sack. That’s about $1.25. But by turning the money over quickly, a couple of times each week, she was able to make a useful addition to her income. She took out her third loan, the one for 2500 gourds, and with her two businesses working well, she is paying it back easily.

But she is already thinking about her next step, and plans to change her business again. “I don’t have a horse yet, so I can’t carry enough charcoal to market to make that business grow.” She plans to buy a horse with proceeds from the sale of some of her small goats, but isn’t ready to just yet. Instead, she will become a voltijè. That means she’ll go to the market early in the morning and buy livestock as cheaply as she can. She won’t go home with it. She’ll turn it over again before she leaves. If she is disciplined and astute, and is willing to hike to several different markets, she will be able to make a good profit three or for times a week. It could turn into pretty good living.

Jésumène dreams of moving forward even farther with her life. She wants to keep investing in livestock and land. She has lots of kids and would like to leave them something when the time comes. And she has good reason to hope for further success. Her willingness to think creatively, flexibly about how to build her business is a promising sign.

Women end up in extreme poverty for a variety of reasons. Some suffer catastrophic expenses – often an illness or a death in the family – that send them spiraling backward. Some become responsible for a household before they are ready, whether through rape, seduction, or simply an imprudent decision. They just have no capacity to manage a home. Some have too many children too quickly, and so their families become too large for the means they have to support them with.

Orana Louis was born into her poverty. She joined CLM in August 2011, and her mother joined the program at the very same time. Orana was living with her husband and children by then, and her mother, Mirana, still had her youngest child living with her, so they qualified for the program separately, and joined it together.

Orana and her husband, Sòn, live with their five children in Fonpyejak, a hilly neighborhood on the outskirts of the central village of Bay Tourib. When we first met them, they were struggling to get by with farming. They had no assets to speak of except their land – just two chickens – and had very little money to invest in crops. They didn’t have a home of their own. The seven of them were living in a small house that belonged to one of Sòn’s brothers.

Their main sources of income were working in their neighbor’s fields and the little they could realize from the sale of bean crops that depended on beans they would borrow from a local peasant organization. Sòn would go to the Dominican Republic now and again to work for a few months, and when he returned to Haiti, he’d try to come with some extra money. Orana would then use it to buy plastic sandals in Tomond, which she’d then sell in the rural markets around Bay Tourib. Each time she would restart her business it would work for a while, but eventually collapse. Often the problem was pregnancy. She’d be unable to sell for a few months, and would feed her children with the money in the business until it disappeared. They were hungry most of the time.

When Orana joined CLM, she chose goats and small commerce as her two assets. She wanted commerce because she liked the possibilities it offered, even though her previous success had been very mixed.

At first she struggled. Her goats didn’t do very well. Of the three that we gave her, two died within a couple of months. The third eventually gave her two kids, which she was able to sell to make another investment. But if it had just been for her goats, she would still be very, very poor.

What really helped her was her commerce. Once she joined the program, it took off. Her success is mainly rooted in her willingness to work hard, to work smartly, and to work in concert with her husband, but her membership in CLM has been a big help as well. First, she received 1500 gourds of start-up capital. That’s almost $40. Second, she received six months of weekly cash stipends that helped her keep her family fed between crops so that she could leave her capital in her business. Third, she and Sòn received coaching that helped them connect the dots between her frequent pregnancies and their poverty. As a consequence, they made a commitment to family planning that allows her to focus on the kids she already has.

Her business really took off. She began sending Sòn to do her purchasing in Port au Prince, where she can buy more varied and less expensive merchandise. By buying well, and turning over her inventory regularly, she was able to set aside almost enough money to buy a mule. She just had to add proceeds from the sale of her goat’s first two kids to accumulate the 12,000 gourds she needed.

Buying the mule, in turn, made a big difference because it meant that she was no longer limited to the amount of merchandise she was able to carry on her head for the hour and a half it takes to get to Regalis or Zabriko, two of the three markets she’d sell in every week. In addition, it opened up a secondary business that eventually became very important to her: She would buy mule-loads of produce in Bay Tourib, and carry them to market in Tomond, a five-six hour hike away.

Then something happened which might have seemed like a disaster. On a trip to Port au Prince, Sòn lost 3500 gourds. He doesn’t know what happened to the money.

But it wasn’t a disaster. Orana just moved on. “I still have some sandals to sell. And I have a load of corn and beans to bring to market. Once I get that sold, I should have enough money to send Sòn to buy again. It was a big loss, but we’ll manage.”

Her well-considered sense that she and Sòn will manage, despite the loss, is a major victory for them. They have succeeded not just in building a better life, with children in school and eating well every day, but they have established a resiliency in the face of misfortune.

There will be bumps in their road forward. But Orana and Sòn have proven that they can face and overcome a pretty large one.

Mannwa is the first CLM region that I really became attached to. That attachment started with the difficulties the region presented.

It is, first of all, beautiful but challenging terrain. Haitians say, “Dèyè mòn gen mòn.” That means, “Beyond mountains there are mountains.” It’s a useful proverb, with numerous meanings. But in Mannwa the proverb is very literally true. It’s a ridge that extends northwest to southeast in north-central Boukankare County, rising up in the west from a mountain stream that separates it from Tit Montay, the county’s isolated western section, and reaching to the east, where it merges with the Balandri ridge that defines much of the border between Boukankare and Tomond, to the north. These two ridges mostly enclose a more-or-less triangular valley. But the valley is not shaped like a cup or a lens or a lemon wedge or like anything regular at all. It’s crisscrossed by a series of lower, but also steep ridges that likewise belong, broadly speaking, to Mannwa. So hiking around Mannwa means constant climbing and descending. It’s rough work.

But that wasn’t the real challenge that attached me to Mannwa. I quickly came to enjoy the hiking. I have to admit that I was very hard pressed any time I had to follow Martinière, our case manager there, along his whole route, because it meant walking farther than I can easily walk in a day and, therefore, walking too quickly as well. He would start his Wednesdays at our satellite base well to the west at Zaboka, in Tit Montay, and then had to visit eleven homes, scattered widely throughout the area. But any chance I had to hike through the region, visiting with only a few of the members, was always a pleasure.

So the primary challenge there was never the geography. It was selecting CLM members. Mannwa was one of the first places where I did final selection without help from other members of our program’s leadership – normally we go out in twos or threes to sweep through a neighborhood as quickly as we can – and when I finished selecting families who seemed qualified for the program, about half refused to join.

It is not that unusual for a family to decline our invitation to join CLM. There are always a few. Generally, they have heard rumors about terrible, crazy sounding things that will happen to them if they join. Sometimes, after families have been in the program for a while, they will tell us the rumors that they heard. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or to scream. A young woman from Mannwa once told me that she heard we would make her dance naked. Her husband said that he was told we’d kill him. A woman from Tit Montay once told a gathering that she had heard that we were going to take all the men to Port au Prince and replace them with others. She added that her husband wasn’t much to speak of, but that she was used to him and didn’t want to change.

But in Mannwa an unusually high number of families refused the program. I can’t say whether it was connected to the prominent role that I, the only non-Haitian on our staff, played in the process or if it had something to do with the peculiar character of the neighborhood and its residents. Though I try to be aware of the effects my foreignness can have on our work, I case reason to believe that, in this case, Mannwa’s peculiarity was party responsible. It is the first place we worked where we were able to discover only one community leader whom the poor could name as someone they could turn to for occasional help.

We had seven members in the area along and behind the main ridge, but had as many families who declined. We invested some extra time in trying to change their minds. I went door-to-door, asking each of the families to reconsider. I then organized a meeting for leaders in the community, at which one of our case managers and I talked to them about the program and what it could offer.

I was especially anxious about one young woman, Micheline, an 18-year-old mother, who had been abandoned by the father of her child. She and the child were living with an older sister, but our surveys showed that she owned almost nothing of her own and was going hungry much of the time. She was almost as poor as a mother of only one child could be. But her sister was refusing to let her join. I couldn’t convince her. Even after she appeared to agree to enter the program, she got cold feet at the last minute. She didn’t show up for the first week of enterprise training. When we had to replace her, we added Sorène, a very poor woman with multiple small daughters, who managed to join us by leaving the husband who did not want her to participate.

So although our data showed us that the Mannwa area had numerous families qualified for CLM, we were forced to start with just seven in Mannwa itself and four more in Deniza and Gapi, on the southern side of the ridge.

The most memorable moment from those first stages of work in Mannwa was the visit I made to Rose Marthe in her home. She had given birth to a daughter only days before I met her, so she could not get up from the sleeping mat she was resting on while we spoke. Haitian women tend not to go outside of the home for about the first week after giving birth. I sat on the ground in front of the house as I spoke to Rose Marthe – she had no furniture – and she answered my questions from the mat inside her small shack, where she lay.

When she looks back on the days when she joined CLM, Rose Marthe speaks in striking terms. “CLM has been very good for me. I was hungry. You could almost say I was naked. Now I eat well, and my kids eat well. They go to school. I have my animals and my commerce. Things are good.” The day I went to see her, six months after graduation, she was unhappy because she couldn’t feed me. It wasn’t that she didn’t have food in the house. She knows, however, that I am a vegetarian and she and her daughter had already prepared their meal with goat meat. It wasn’t a holiday. That’s just how she eats now.

Her life had always been difficult. She was born in Regalis, a market town in southwestern Hinche. When she was a young girl, her parents sent her to live with an aunt because they couldn’t afford to keep her fed. She spent two years with the aunt, travelling between Gonaïves and Okap, helping her aunt manage her business.

She left the aunt when she had had enough of her abuse, and she returned to Regalis. “She beat me too much.” But she didn’t stay long. She went as a teenager to Pétion-Ville, and found a job as a housekeeper, where she spent eight years working in the same woman’s house. She was finally forced to leave when she became pregnant with the woman’s brother’s child. “He came to the house all the time, and started to like me. But when I got pregnant, I had to leave.”

She went back to Regalis and started to raise her child. She couldn’t do it alone, so she hooked up with a man. The boy was about six years old when she got pregnant again. Her second child’s father abandoned her before the next boy was born, but by that time she had gotten together with Sepavre.

His real name is Julius Vil, but you won’t find him in Mannwa by asking for Julius. There’s a lot to be said about nicknames in Haiti, especially in rural Haiti. “//Se pa vre//” means, “It’s not true.” I have no idea how that becomes someone’s name. But that’s what everyone who knows Julius calls him.

Sepavre was already married at the time, but Rose Marthe was willing to be a second wife because Sepavre would help her raise the child she was pregnant with when they met. Her first child died during that second pregnancy, and Sepavre buried the boy and organized the funeral.

So Rose Marthe and Sepavre started their life together. She lived in a small straw shack, with her infant boy and a little girl, his daughter from a previous relationship. The shack was just a few hundred yards uphill from his other wife’s house. Sepavre would split time between them.

He was very hard working, but most of the assets he worked with belonged to his other wife. Rose Marthe had very little she could give him to work with, so he had very little he could bring her in return. They got on well together, but as they had more children, their poverty only deepened. She would work as a day laborer in wealthier neighbors’ fields to earn a little cash. The only way she and Sepavre could plant their own fields was to borrow the beans, repaying them with interest when the harvest came in. The interest rate would vary seasonally, but could range as high as 100%.

That’s when CLM came to Mannwa. Rose Marthe now credits CLM for very much improving her life, but her path through the program was not easy. With a newborn in her hands as we got started, she had no way to begin with a small commerce. So the two assets she chose were goats and a pig.

Goat rearing went well for her from the start. We gave her two goats, and she bought herself a third with proceeds from a savings club that she joined with fellow CLM members. Wòch Djèp, the western corner of Mannwa where she lives, is good country to raise goats in. There is plenty of forage, so they’re likely to do well as long as you can keep them out of your neighbors’ fields, which is something that Rose Marthe and Sepavre were very careful to do. Six months after graduation, Rose Marthe had eight goats, even though she had sold several in order to make other investments.

Pig rearing was another story. Rose Marthe joined CLM just as an epidemic of Teschen disease, an incurable and usually fatal pig disease, was sweeping through Haiti’s Central Plateau. Her pig caught the disease, and died.

She was determined, though. She raised what she could from sale of the meat, added some of the money she saved from her weekly food stipend, and bought a second pig.

This second one was just a piglet. It would have taken a lot of time and energy for it to generate a return. But pig rearing, though risky, can return a very high profit. So she and her case manager decided to give it another try. When the second pig died, Rose Marthe wept.

So she turned her focus towards the goats, but also made an important change in the way she farmed. She bought the beans that she needed for planting with cash from her savings. That meant the whole harvest was hers. She and her children would have plenty to eat, she would keep some to plant, and she’d still have something to sell. She added some of her savings to the proceeds from her first cash-based harvest, and was able to begin a small commerce. She’d buy produce – beans or corn, usually – in a either Zaboka or Regalis, remote mountain markets where prices are low, and then she and Sepavre would carry sacks on their heads to other less rural markets where they could be sold at a profit. It might mean hiking four or five hours with their load, but the money was good.

She finally was able to earn enough that she was able to use some of her profits, together with proceeds for the sale of a couple of goats, to buy a mule. It cost 11,500 gourds, or about $275, but it can carry much more than she can, so it has enabled her business to grow even more. In addition, she was able to set aside enough beans that she now lends them to neighbors at a profit.

So economically, even though she has struggled, Rose Marthe has succeeded wonderfully. But she almost lost everything she had midway through her experience in the program when she came down with cholera.

Under the best of circumstances, cholera is dangerous, but when you live in a remote area such as Wòch Djèp, the danger is much greater. Rose Marthe shouldn’t have been vulnerable to cholera. She knew better. Her case manager taught her about cholera every week. She learned about the importance of washing her hands. CLM gave her a water filter. And we helped her build a latrine in her yard. But she was probably careless while snacking in a market. None of the other members of her household caught the disease, but another CLM member who lives nearby and walks to market with her did.

Rose Marthe tells the story: “I started to feel sick and to vomit early in the day. I had diarrhea, too.” Her neighbor, Edres, is a Partners in Health extension agent, so he had some medication on hand. “I drank what I could, but things got worse and worse. By the time my husband knew I was sick, I was too far gone to make any decisions.”

Partners in Health has a free cholera center in Boukankare, a two-three hour walk from their home, but Sepavre and their neighbors carried her to a private center in Zaboka, instead. It was no closer, and was expensive, but Sepavre is from Zaboka, and he wanted her to be near family. He would need to stay with the kids, but didn’t want her to be at the clinic by herself.

I happened to be in Zaboka the day after she was brought to the clinic, and even with a day of intravenous fluid in her, she looked bad. But as dangerous as cholera is, it appears to be relatively easy to cure, and Rose Marthe pulled through without lingering effects.

It takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to hike from Rose Marthe’s place east to the closest CLM member, Magalie. About the same distance east of Magalie’s house is a separate, north-running ridge. The area from Magalie’s house to this second ridge is called Lalyann. On the southern side of that ridge, close to where you begin a steep climb up to Mannwa, lives Omène. Chrismène lives at the ridge’s northern tip, just when it begins to descend into a narrow ravine.

When we met Chrismène during the member selection process, she told us that her husband, Elgué Jean Pierre, had abandoned her to seek his fortune in the Dominican Republic. Chrismène was just 23 when she joined CLM, with an oldest daughter who must have been eight or nine. At the time, she had little with which to keep her children even minimally fed: just a small plot of land that she would farm, and two chickens.

Her original Poverty Scorecard is confusing. The Poverty Scorecard is the longer, more detailed of the two surveys we use as part of the selection process. Together, they collect a range of information that helps us judge a family’s standard of living. Chrismène’s Scorecard reports her, on one hand, as having a partner who would work the land and was responsible for more than half of the household income. It also says, on the other, that he had left her and gone to the Dominican Republic.

Her other form, the Food Security Survey was much clearer. She scored as badly as one could have. She and her children were regularly going hungry, depending on her husband’s family for an occasional handout to keep themselves going.

But from her first entry into the program, Chrismène flourished. She took excellent care of her animals, and they multiplied. She invested cash that she saved from her stipend in her farming, and was rewarded with strong harvests. And she worked quickly and with discipline to take advantage of the materials the program made available for her to repair her home and build a latrine.

We were at first surprised to see how quickly she was able to get her house built. Home repair is one of the areas in which we tend to see a big difference between the women who live with supportive partners and those who are single. This is because there is a lot we insist that members do towards building their own home, things more easily done with a husband’s help. Though we provide roofing material and nails, along with cement for latrines, members must provide all the lumber, sand, rocks, and mud that construction requires.

Chrismène is a small woman, and her children are still too young to help her. When the program started, she didn’t yet own a pack animal. Though she could help get the building materials to her home, she would need someone to do the heavier lifting. Getting building materials from Kafou Jòj, the nearest approach a loaded truck could make, up the slope to Mannwa, and then back down the other side to Lalyann would be no joke. And with Elgué in the Dominican Republic, we were not sure how she’d manage.

It turned out not to be a problem. Plentiful help came from what at first seemed a surprising source. Omène is a slightly older woman, and is married to Elga Jean Pierre, who had been introduced to us by Omène and Chrismène as Elgué’s twin brother. We were continually impressed by his willingness to come to his sister-in-law’s aide. He helped her collect the lumber she’d need to build her house, to get her materials to Lalyann from Kafou Jòj, to work in her fields, and to manage her animals.

It also turned out to be less surprising than we had thought. One day, Chrismène’s case manager, Martinière, was passing through the neighborhood, and went by a meeting that Edres was holding for all the mothers in the area. Both Chrismène and Omène were there, and one of their neighbors, looking at how well they seemed to be doing since entering the program, remarked that Elga’s wives were looking good. Martinière looked at the two women and they looked at him. The three of them could only laugh.

Elgué never went to the Dominican Republic. He is, in fact, Chrismène’s son. Her husband is actually Elga, the same man who is husband to Omène. The women explained that they had been afraid to tell us the truth, worried that we would accept only one of the two wives into the program. So they conspired to deceive us – not that they needed to – and they succeeded for a while.

Elga and Chrismène

The real Elgué, Chrismène’s son, on the right. On the left is Benole, Omène’s son and Elgué’s brother.

In French, a “matelot” is a sailor. The word appears to be connected to the word for mattress. Two sailors would share one hammock by sleeping at different times. The shared sleeping arrangement turned into a name for the class of sailors themselves.

The Creole word “matlòt” is most likely derived from a feminine version of the French, but its meaning is somewhat different. Matlòt are woman like Chrismène and Omène, who share the same husband.

It’s not an unusual arrangement in rural Haiti. We regularly come across situations in which men have two or three wives. They may be married legally to one of them. With or without a legal marriage, community members may recognize one of the women as the madanm marye, or the real wife. In Elga’s case, Omène is the madanm marye. But the men are not necessarily legally married to any of them. Sepavre is married neither to Rose Marthe, nor to the other woman who lives nearby. In fact, he left the other woman a few months after Rose Marthe graduated, quickly taking up with a new second wife. Sometimes the men have reasonably stable relations with all.

And it is, perhaps, not surprising that such families are very well represented in CLM. Men who establish two or more households are bound to have more trouble supporting their wives and kids. Both their harvests and whatever cash they might earn have to be spread around more thinly. Omène and Chrismène are two of the more fortunate examples of a phenomenon we see all the time: Polygamy is a rich source of extreme poverty.

Chrismène also had more than Elga to aide her. She also received help from her older sister, Joceline, who is also a CLM member, but who lives with her husband in another part of Boucan Carré. The sister returned to Lalyann while Chrismène was building the house to help collect the stones and the mud that construction would require.

Chrismène wasn’t born in Lalyann, but in Pidem, a small, hilly region of western Boucan Carré, close to the river that cuts the commune almost in half. Her parents died when she was a little girl. By then, the family’s poverty had forced them to send Joceline away to live as a domestic servant in Elga’s parents’ home. When the parents died, Joceline asked Elga’s family to take her little sister in as well, and they agreed to do so. Chrismène moved into their home when she was about seven or eight years old.

Elga started flirting with Chrismène just a few years later. “I wasn’t quite ten,” she explains. Within a few years, she was pregnant with their first child. She could only have been thirteen or fourteen. That first child died, but they had their second only about a year later. Not long after that, Elga started dating Omène, whom he eventually married. He and Omène have five children together, and he has three surviving children with Chrismène. Though Elga and the two women are clear as to who his legal wife is, he says he is unswerving in his commitment to Chrismène. “I could never abandon her, “ he says, “I’ve made her suffer too much.”

Both women transformed their lives during eighteen months of the program. When they were evaluated for graduation in late June 2012, both women scored perfect 10s, meeting or exceeding all graduation criteria. They could have graduated with scores as low as seven. Omène, the less wealthy of the two, had succeeded in accumulating assets worth over 18,000 gourds – or about $440. That’s more than three times the assets that are minimally required for graduation. Chrismène had over 21,000 gourds’ worth – more than $520 – mostly in livestock. She had turned the two goats that we has given her into seven; she had bought a horse that had already given her a colt; she had a small pig and five chickens; and was continually earning new income by farming the small plot that was hers. A few months after graduating, she sold three goats, a live pig, some pork meat, and part of a crop of beans to buy a cow.

Her success was the source of some jealousy. Omène was not able to buy a horse until shortly after she graduated, and she seemed to resent the fact that Chrismène was ahead of her. But she didn’t let her resentment amount to anything. In general, she remains the same woman who joined in the conspiracy about her husband that they thought would be necessary for both her and her matlòt, Chrismène, to be accepted into CLM.

Elga and Omène

Both Omène and Chrismène are facing hardship six months after graduating from CLM. Chrismène woke up one morning to find that her horse had died. Fortunately its colt is old enough to survive, but it is a very big loss. In Omène’s case, the mother horse is fine, but its first colt was stillborn.

But both are confident that they can overcome their difficulties. And they have reason to feel confident. They are resilient now, capable of managing the steps backwards that they’ll face now and again. Chrismène has her cow, her colt, and three large female goats. Two of the three have kids, and the third is pregnant. Though food is not right now as plentiful in her home as has been recently – she’s reached the last weeks before her large millet harvest – she still has plenty of yams and pigeon peas to ensure that she and her children manage well enough. They aren’t hungry. Omène has eight goats and her horse, and a small field of plantain trees right next to her house. They both have chickens that they use for eggs, meat, or can sell if they need a little cash.

Most importantly, all three women – Chrismène, Omène, and Rose Marthe – are truly graduates in the sense that they have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty and are now leading different, sustainable, and still-improving lives. Talking with them, one senses their optimism. One feels that they each have plans and the capacity to carry their plans out.

Wideline is a single mother. She lives with her little boy, Alinsky, right next to the Partners in Health clinic that is our base in Bay Tourib. They share the small house that her father built for her with the resources that CLM made available.

Like many of our members, she joined the program without appearing on our initial selection lists. We create those lists at community meetings that we hold when we first start working in an area. In Wideline’s case, members of her community didn’t mention her because they didn’t think of her as an adult. She is in her late teens, and was living with Alinsky in her parents’ home. “We had food to eat, but I had nothing of my own. No way to get started.”

Her story is simple. She had made it as far as the sixth grade, but she failed the national primary school exam. Before she could decide whether or how to continue in school, a man from the neighborhood raped her. Alinsky is the product of that rape. She wanted to have the man arrested, but her parents decided against going to the police. “They’re church people. They don’t believe in the government.” The parents just took their grandchild into their home, where they were already raising three other grandchildren. The three youngest of their own kids were also in the house, and her mother was pregnant with what she hopes will be her last child.

Alinsky’s father lives nearby, but he doesn’t come to see his boy. Wideline is determined to have nothing to do with him. “He can’t come here. He has no child in my house.”

When she joined the program, she chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises. The larger of her two goats got into a neighbor’s field, and he killed it. It was pregnant at the time. “That’s why he and I don’t speak to each other.” The smaller one took some time to grow, but has finally given her its first kid. She decided not to take the pig right away because she was worried about the epidemic of Teschen disease that was killing many of the pigs in the area. So she deposited the cost of the pig in her bank account, and waited to decide what she should invest it in.

Her real break came when Fondation KANPE, which funds CLM in Baille Tourrible, decided to help all the schools in the region pay teachers for a year. Baille Tourrible doesn’t have a lot of educated people. Those who make good progress in school move to Hinche, Thomonde, or Port au Prince. That’s where they see their opportunities. So even though Wideline hadn’t graduated from elementary school, she was relatively qualified to teach a class, at least in one of the lower grades. So her case manager helped her apply to teach at a small private school a short walk from her home. She’s now in her second year as a first-grade teacher.

She took the money that she had received to buy a pig, put it together with savings from her salary, and bought a cow. She’s saving money from her second year’s salary to buy another cow. “My father and my little brothers can take care of them for me.”

So Wideline is starting to accumulate some wealth, and she has a regular income that enables her to take good care of Alinsky. But she’s not satisfied. She wants to go back to school. “Next year I’ll stop teaching so I can go through sixth grade again. I want to pass the exam and then move to Hinche to go to high school. I can live with my older brother there. My mother can take care of Alinksy for me.”

She’s not sure where she wants her education eventually to take her. That’s probably ok. The more successful she is, the longer she’ll have to decide. But with her growing wealth and her secure little house, she is restarting her life with good reason to be hopeful.

Things are starting to look up for Lucienne. Her progress as a CLM member has been slow, but she finally seems to be settling into a new and better life.

I’ve written about Lucienne before. (See: Still Hungry. I’ve made a few corrections since I originally wrote the piece.) Lucienne lost most of assets in the program’s first few months. She invested her funds for commerce to plant beans that returned a very poor harvest, and she lost two of the three goats that we gave her. She was left with just the one adult female goat and savings from her six months of food stipends.

We know very well that CLM is 18 months of hard work and invention. Gauthier, our program director, is well-known for saying, “There’s always a way.” So Lucienne and her case manager made a plan. She would sell a young billy goat, the survivor from her nanny’s first litter. She would then take the proceeds from that sale, add most of her savings, and buy a small horse. The horse would make it possible for her to start a small commerce. A good plan.

The problem is, she didn’t follow it. Her son, Lorès, sold the goat for her, but they decided to invest the money in another crop of beans. She figured that a decent harvest would allow her to buy a bigger horse and leave her plenty of additional money to invest in the commerce itself. But this second bean crop failed badly, too. She did not harvest even enough to plant another crop. And her savings alone were too little by themselves to allow her to buy the horse.

So she was moving backwards. She still needed to dramatically increase her asset base. She wouldn’t be able to graduate with just the one goat and her savings. More importantly, she’d have very little chance of sustainable success unless she could establish a stronger foundation.

But all that remained for her was the one goat and her savings. We encouraged her to use the savings to buy a couple of smaller animals, and she wisely chose to invest diversely. She split almost all of her money equally between two purchases: a large nanny goat and a 40% share in a neutered pig that Lorès bought. That left 500 gourds, or roughly $12.50, that she used to buy a big male turkey.

Now her first nanny goat is pregnant again and she thinks that the new one may be as well. The pig is growing under Lorès’s care. The turkey is a bit of a problem, because until she buys a hen it will tend to wander off and it won’t offer her very much return. But she’ll have a little farming income in the upcoming month, and she knows that a female turkey must be a high priority.

So things are looking up. Though she lost two crops of beans that she and Lorès planted for sale, she’s had good returns on her millet this year, so there’s plenty of food in the house. She also had a good harvest of pigeon peas. They don’t bring in as much money as the black and red beans that she planted, but they are giving her something to work with.

Now her biggest worry has to do with her daughter, Jeslène. She’s a 20-year-old woman, the only child whom Lucienne was able to send to school. Jeslène made it to the sixth grade, though she was unable to pass the national primary school graduation exam. Not long ago, Jeslène told her mother that she was ready to marry. She has been dating a young man from the neighborhood. He’s a farmer, and he’s worked hard enough to build a small house for Jeslène already . Lucienne had hoped the Jeslène would remain with her a little longer, waiting to marry until she was older and better established. She had also hoped to send her back to sixth grade and then, if she graduated, to try to send her even farther.

But that won’t happen now. Jeslène is determined, and Lucienne admits that she is old enough to decide. She also admits that she likes her future son-in-law and that Jeslène could do much worse. What’s more, Jeslène is pregnant, so marriage seems like a reasonable choice. Perhaps the best way to put it is that Lucienne wishes that it wasn’t so. She’s ready to celebrate in January nonetheless.

Jeslène will remain within shouting distance, but Lucienne says she’ll miss her. She and her husband will still have Lorès, but he’s getting older, too. They also have two grandsons on their hands, and are very happy that they can now send them to school without difficulty. But those small boys could become more than they can manage if Lorès eventually moves out.

In the meantime, Lucienne will keep struggling to move forward. She knows what she’s working for: She seeks a better future for Lorès, who is her youngest. “Everything I have is for him.” And with the small but solid foundation she’s finally established, she has good reason to hope.

Lucienne and Jeslène:

Elimène lives in Fond Pierre Jacques, a hilly neighborhood just southeast of the town of Baille Tourrible. It sits along both sides of the road that winds from Thomonde up towards the Partners in Health clinic that is our base in the region. It’s just beyond and uphill from the clinic. The region has nothing but houses, trees, and farmland. Residents of Fond Pierre Jacques plant fields both there and in the unpopulated region further to the east, along the path that leads to Platanal.

She wasn’t one of the women originally selected to be part of the CLM program in the Baille Tourrible region. We had not initially even visited her house when our selection process began. Somehow, she didn’t get onto our list for home visits. It’s not that unusual. Sometimes potential CLM members are so isolated from their communities that the local residents who help us develop our lists fail to even consider them. They don’t exist.

In Elimène’s case, though, that’s hard to imagine. Her house sits right along a major path, and it’s a substantial house, though it was in very bad disrepair. It’s much more likely that she and her husband learned to conceal their poverty, their regular hunger, from their neighbors. We develop our lists at public meetings, so if her neighbors had learned to overlook her poverty, her name would have ended up on a list of families that don’t need CLM.

Final selection of CLM members is complicated in all sorts of ways, from the basic need to get to the truth out of people who have every reason to think they should hide it to the funding-driven need to find exactly a certain number of members. The latter issue means solving a puzzle. Nothing ensures that the number of people who need CLM in a region is equal to the number we can serve. In fact, it’s pretty unlikely. To launch a cohort with exactly the number of members that a grant requires, we must piece together pieces of a territory that give us the number we need and figure which other areas we can most sensibly leave out of the program until the next funds come along.

We invited the right number of women for our new cohort to the first enterprise training in Baille Tourible, but by the end of the training we knew we had a couple of slots to fill. Several of the families whom we had invited to join decided not to participate, and a few of the families we had thought qualified turned out to have additional assets that we hadn’t initially seen. So by the end of the training we were short a few families.

Our case managers are always looking for families that need the program so that we’ll be ready when an opportunity arises. One of the ones working in Elimène’s neighborhood was Wesly, the most experienced one we had on the original Baille Tourrible team. Wesly noticed Elimène’s house, and thought that it deserved a closer look. And when we realized we needed to fill out the cohort, he interviewed her at length. He felt that she was qualified, so he had her meet Emile Mésidor.

Emile was helping us manage the launch of the CLM program in Thomonde. He would have the final word. Elimène remebers her meeting with Emile very well. “He asked me a lot of questions, about what I had and how we lived. He asked where we kept our cow, but I told him we didn’t have one. He asked about my horse too, but I said it belonged to my husband. I didn’t have any animals of my own at all. He ‘s the one who said I could be in CLM.”

They were living at the time with their youngest son and a granddaughter who had been left in their care, supporting themselves by farming and with a small tobacco business. Elimène would buy the tobacco in Hinche or Thomonde and then sell it in one of two markets in Baille Tourrible.

She was making a small profit now and again, but she couldn’t sustain it. Whenever it came time for heavy agricultural work, the commerce would collapse. She wouldn’t have time to buy or sell. She’d drain it of capital to buy food for her family until harvest. And even then, they never had enough. They were always hungry until their crops came in. Even in good years, they might have stretches of several weeks when they had little to eat. In bad years, things could be much worse.

So we invited her to join the program. She chose goats and a pig as her assets, and got right to work.

Goat rearing didn’t start very well. We gave her two goats, but they were small ones. One of them quickly became sick. Elimène, however, was determined. “I struggled and struggled with it. It finally pulled through.” The other was healthier, but they both were small when she received them. They have finally produced offspring, but it took much longer than it should have.

Pig rearing was more successful. It is risky business. Mortality among pigs is relatively high. But it can be quite profitable when it works. Elimène’s pig managed to raise four piglets. She sold three of them, and is now raising the mother and a younger female. She chose to sell them very young. It is less profitable, but a lot less risky and a lot less work. Pigs require a lot of care. She figured she’d have an easier time if she wasn’t managing too many of them.

She took the money she got from selling two of the pigs and bought beans at harvest, when their price was low. She’s now storing them until planting season, when she’ll be able to sell them profitably.

Her biggest success, however, has been with small, regular commerce. “They didn’t give me commerce, but Titon [her case manager] said I should try to start one if I could.” She talked to him about the tobacco business she once ran, and they agreed that she would try again. “You have to sell something that other people don’t sell. I’m the only tobacco seller in Baille Tourrible.”

So she took some of the money that she had saved up from her weekly food stipend, added the money from the third piglet, and went to Hinche to buy. There, she discovered a new product. “I always sold local, Haitian tobacco. But people were asking for the darker imported tobacco that they like to use for snuff. Now I sell both.” She found that she could get a cup of prepared snuff in Hinche for 200 gourds, or about $5. But she could buy the unprocessed foreign tobacco it’s made from for half that much. She makes the snuff by drying the tobacco in the sun, and pounding it into a fine powder. She then discovered that she could cut her costs even further buy blending the darker tobacco with the less expensive local product.

So her tobacco business is more profitable than it ever was and, what is just as important, she has come to see its fundamental importance. “I won’t ever let the business collapse again. Even if I can only sell on Saturdays and Sundays, I’ll keep it up because it means we always have food in the house.”

And her ambition is now larger than food on the table. She wants to start buying more land. As committed as she is to commerce, she really sees herself as a farmer. “Whatever you think I look like, I know how to work with a hoe and a sickle.” She wants more farmland so she can make more from her crops.

Her plan is simple: “I’ll keep taking good care of my animals, and put away money whenever I can. If you can sell a couple of goats or pigs, and can add some money from a harvest, you’ll already have enough to buy a small plot.” In a couple of months, she’ll buy a horse so she can get larger crops and the fruit from the trees in her yard to market, too. That will add a lot to her income.

It is pretty clear that Elimène is well on her way to a better life. She has solved her family’s hunger problem, and is looking to a future with an ambitious but very well-founded hope.

One of the fundamental criteria for selection for the CLM program is that a household must include an adult woman who is capable of working. We can stretch the meaning of “adult” so that it can include mothers as young as fifteen or so and, in certain unfortunate instances, older sisters who are even younger than that.

It’s harder for us to compromise on the question of ability to work. The key to CLM is that its members work their own and their families’ ways out of poverty. We have very few women who have minor handicaps of various sorts but who have families that can do their work, under their supervision, for them. But we also come across households that turn out to be, in a sense, poorer than the poorest of the poor because they depend on a woman who is too old, too sick, or too handicapped to earn a living. We can do nothing for them.

But it is not always easy to evaluate who will be able to work. The distinctions are more fluid than the straightforward yes-or-no form of the question might suggest. Some of the most difficult cases we deal with are women whom we think to be able to work but who for various reasons find working very, very hard.

Lemène Louis is from Regalis. That’s an important market in rural Hinche, just over the Hinche – Thomonde border from Bay Tourib. From our residence, it’s less than an hour’s hike. And hike you must, because there are no roads of any kind leading to the market. As large a market as it is, everyone who comes to buy or sell arrives on foot. Larger merchants have pack animals, but most carry their merchandise or their purchases on their head.

When we met Lemène during the CLM selection process, she was living in Koray, the corner of Bay Tourib closest to Regalis. One hears the saddest stories during selection, stories of families stuck in extreme poverty and of the miserable circumstances they endure. But few of those sad, sad stories are sadder than Lemène’s.

She is a small woman, perhaps around fifty. She and her first husband had ten children. She lost the first nine. Only the tenth survived. He is with her still, a ten-year-old boy named Leyonel. She lost Leyonel’s father, her first husband, when Leyonel was just learning to crawl. About a year and a half later, she got together with her current husband, Mèsidye.

They lived together for a time, but he eventually decided to take another woman because Lemène did not have a child with him. He built a small straw shack in the back of their yard, and moved Lemène and Leyonel into it so that his new wife could move into his house. Lemène wanted to leave Mèsidye – Who could blame her? – but when she tried to return to her family, they sent her back. They said they could do nothing for her and that Mèsidye would at least help her take care of her boy.

So she returned to Koray, and settled into the shack. She would earn a few dollars now and then by working in other people’s fields. Mèsidye also continued to provide some help. But the two together were not earning enough for her to do more than barely survive. She and her boy were hungry almost all the time, regularly going for days with nothing to eat but what they could forage, lighting a fire in their kitchen no more than once or twice each week.

When she joined CLM, she chose goats and poultry as her two enterprises. We gave her two young female goats. She took care of them, but they never produced for her. Each pregnancy ended in miscarriage. We’re not sure why. Eventually, she sold the goats and bought replacements. One of those new goats became pregnant, but the other was killed by Hurricane Sandy.

When it came to buying poultry, she was reluctant to take all that we wanted to offer her in birds. She asked us to buy her a small pig and several chickens. She’s taken good care of the pig and it is growing. She still has some chickens, but she can’t keep their numbers up. Partly because she sells them whenever she needs cash to cover a pressing expense, partly because they are stolen by neighbors or eaten by local predators. She always seems to have a few around the yard, but not as many as she would need to use them as the basis for strong progress.

She was careful with the weekly food stipend she received for the first six months. She managed to save over 2000 gourds, and that money is still in her savings account. In addition, she participated in a savings club with other CLM members in her neighborhood. Each week, the women would contribute 100 gourds, and one would get the whole pot. When it was Lemène’s turn, she used the money to buy another pig, one larger that what she already had. But that pig died of Teschen disease.

So Lemène is really struggling. She is managing, more or less, with her animals. She hasn’t made great progress, but she and Leyonel are in a nice little house with a good tin roof and, even more importantly, Leyonel has started to attend school.

But it is hard for her to earn a steady income because it is very hard for her to work. She’s asthmatic. She rarely suffers real attacks, but her breathing is labored almost all the time. Heavy farm labor is out of the question. Small commerce would be difficult because she can’t count on her ability to walk to the markets in the region. If her goats would produce for her, she could sell some young and add the proceeds to her savings to buy a horse. That would make it easier for her to go to market, but it isn’t clear whether, given her asthma, it would really become easy enough.

But buying a horse or another large animal is not really her priority. She wants to buy land. She doesn’t own the land that her CLM house was built on. She has no land of her own. It was built, instead, on land that belongs to Mèsidye. He has offered to sell her the land cheaply, but she isn’t interested. She is worried for her boy, and he is the one thing that really matters to her. Mèsidye has other children, both young ones with the woman who replaced her and adult children from a previous relationship. Her boy, however, is not his son. She worries that if anything should happen to her, Mèsidye’s children could drive him away with nothing. She doesn’t believe in Mèsidye’s ability to sell her the land in a way that will convince other interested parties that it is definitively hers.

So we need to find her a way to start earning a steady income, be it ever so small, that is not physically taxing. That will relieve the pressure on her livestock so that she can wait for them to increase. Perhaps it will make it possible for her to realize her dream.

Jonise Decaillon presents another sort of problem. She is a young, single mother of two. Her first boy, Abèy, is about four years old. Then this summer she had twin girls, though one died suddenly just this week.

I’ve written about Jonise before. (See: Jonise Decaillon.) She seems to have developmental issues. Her case manager, Benson, spent considerable time when he first started working with her just teaching her to add and subtract. Almost all the women we deal with, whether or not they are literate, can do numbers in their heads. But Jonise couldn’t do even the simplest subtraction. Benson would take small rocks and move them from pile to pile to help Jonise understand.

We began to feel as though she was doing better. She had been living in a corner of another CLM member’s home. Abèy’s father had thrown her out of his house. But Benson was able to pressure him into building a house for Jonise on land that a cousin of hers offered. She began to look better, healthier, less lost.

But then she became pregnant. She was already hard-pressed to take care of her boy, but things became much harder when she was with child. She never was especially good at finding the forage she needed to feed her pig. She seemed to have trouble really focusing on the task. It began losing weight. She had two goats, and one had a kid. But the other goat died. She just couldn’t take care of it. And as excited as we had been for her about her home, it created a problem as well. It was a little out of the way. She was more-or-less alone, without another adult around to give her the help – really the direction – that she needs every day.

When she gave birth, and she turned out to have been carrying twins, we could only groan. We doubted her ability to manage them without much more help than she knew how to organize. Within a month, they were losing weight. Our partner, Partners in Health, was willing to send her some infant formula to supplement the breast milk she gave them, but I suppose it was not enough. I do not know if the baby died of malnutrition, but I know that she had very little chance to prosper.

Even for Jonise, there is hope. She has come to realize that her current home isn’t good for her. She feels too alone. And she has spoken to one of her older sisters about moving her house to the sister’s yard. Abèy’s father likes the idea. He is only interested in his son, but he sees it as a good thing for the boy. Benson was able to convince him to take responsibility for moving the house once the sisters have agreed. We don’t yet know the sister, but have heard well of her. We hope that she is willing and able to be much more than a neighbor. Jonise needs close supervision all the time, and we’re not sure where else she’ll find it if this plan doesn’t work out.

We certainly do not regret the decisions we made to invite Lemène and Jonise into the program. Neither Lemène’s asthma nor Jonise’s inability to focus on the task before her presents an obvious enough handicap to justify excluding them, especially when one considers that there is currently no alternative for those we cannot take. We have to hope that they can learn to do enough to improve their lives, and then try to create a situation that makes lasting improvement possible.

If during the few months that remain before graduation, we can get Lemène into a simple small commerce that she can manage without much reliable physical strength, we will have put her on the way towards caring for Leyonel as she would like to do. She regularly gets offers from people who would like to take Leyonel for her. “He’s such a good child,” she likes to explain. He has an older sister, Lemène’s stepdaughter, who has pressed the point often, thinking that’s she’d be helping both her brother and Lemène. But Lemène can’t bear to part with him. “He’s all that I have.”

If we can get Jonise into a house of her own in her sister’s yard before her pig and her last goat die, she may be able to turn things around. We’ll still need to help her find a reliable source of income – we have some ideas – but the presence of a strong, guiding, sisterly hand might be what she needs to ensure that she succeeds.

To have prejudged that either woman would be certain to fail in CLM would have been almost understandable from an administrative point of view. Each started the program with special barriers that were more or less evident from the start. Neither has shown herself capable of the work she needs to do.

But we must go through the selection process assuming that the chance we offer is the very last chance that our members will have to live a different life. We have no reason to think that there are other programs out there that will work with those whom we can’t help. Under the circumstances, the only reasonable, the only human thing for us to do is to take on any family that might possibly succeed, and then do anything we can to make sure that they do.