by Hébert Artus

Luciana “Jésula” Noël: The rebirth of hope.

Jésula was born on 1973, in Tèblanch, a savanna located a couple of miles to the northeast of Mirebalais, just off the main road to Hinche. She’s from an extremely poor family that was not able to send her to school. Like her four brothers and sisters, she stayed at home, working in the fields and doing household chores. At fifteen, she got pregnant and decided to leave home with Solon Marcelus, the man who let her pregnant. At the time, she didn’t really know what it meant for her to be pregnant.

Because she came from an extreme poor family, she and her husband had nothing. They built a little straw roofed house close to her family’s, and there she gave birth to eight children: two boys, and six girls. Unfortunately, her husband was lazy. So she was the one who had to work to feed the entire family and pay to send the children to school.

To do so, she got into business, even without any stable capital. She had never had much of her own capital to start with. She would borrow money in the market itself to buy and then resell anything she could find. She would take the profit she made home and give the capital back to her creditors at the end of the day. She managed to earn enough that way to pay school fees for some of her children. She even bought a couple of goats.

Unfortunately, two of her daughters became sick. “When I asked my husband to help me pay for the treatment they needed, he told me to let them die.” Jésula sold all she had to save her girls. “That was the end of my relationship with him. I couldn’t stand his abuse any more. He would beat me. He wouldn’t do any work.” Having sold what little she had, she couldn’t pay anymore for her kids’ school.

She decided to move forward with a new partner, Jean Louis-Jacques, who already had his own family. She had one additional kid with him, but they broke up a few years later. Now, her youngest child is five years old.

When CLM began selecting members in Tèblanch, Jésula was accustomed to spending as much as a week without any food to cook. She had one goat, but was carefully saving it unless she needed money to pay for a sickness or death. “I was losing hope. I had too many problems. I couldn’t sleep at night. I used snuff to keep my mind away from my trouble.”

Since she joined CLM, she began receiving the food allowance, about $7 per week. She has received two goats, and she will have at least fifteen birds – a combination of chickens and turkeys – by the end of this month. She has now begun to dream.

She wants is to become a “grandanm.” That’s a word used for a wealthy woman. To Jésula, that means owning a cow, goats, and land to build a house on. She also wants to be able to sign her name. She dreams of being a respected member of her community.

She is very happy to be part of the program. She’s already begun learning how to write her name, and has 1600 Haitian gourds – about $40 – in her savings account. She promises that she will graduate from the program. “Now I realize I take less snuff because I have hope. I sleep at night.” Looking forward, it is easy to see her succeeding.

Marie Lourdes Pierre: The search for autonomy and dignity.

Marie Lourde lives in Six Evain, a village close to downtown Mirebalais. She’s a 30-year-old mother of seven children with three different fathers. Only six of her children are still with her, one of the died. Her first was born when she was just 16 years old. Her current partner, Marcelus Espagnol, is an older man married to another woman.

Like many CLM members, Marie-Lourdes does not know how to write her name. Her father never had the means to pay to send her to school. At 30 years old, she has never done anything to earn money. Feeding her family was a heavy duty because Marcelus was the one who earned whatever the family would eat. If he didn’t stop by the house, there was no food for that day. She has no profession, no job, no capital to start a small business, not even a chicken in her yard.

When she joined the CLM program in September, she chose goat-rearing and pig-rearing as her two activities. She has already received her two goats, and will receive the pig next week. She started receiving weekly food stipends from the start, and has saved 3250 Haitian gourdes, or about $77. But her challenge is serious. She has difficulty communicating, tending to merely laugh in answer to any question you ask.

Nevertheless Marie-Lourdes sees her life already changing. “I couldn’t send my kids to school. Even though the school was free, I couldn’t buy uniforms. With CLM, all my kids are attending school this year because I have a little cash to pay for them.”

Her dream is independence. She wants to be able to support herself. And she wants to feel herself respected, just like other members of her community. She has never been invited to any kind of community gathering. The only one she ever attended was a funeral. “Nobody ever invites me because I am poor. When you are poor, you get no respect.” She used to be resigned, “malere pa sou moun” she explains. That’s hard to translate, but it’s like saying, “When you’re poor, you keep to yourself.”

She believes that she will graduate from the program. She will work hard to be successful, because she thinks it is her last chance to get her independence and the restoration of her dignity.

Elienne lives with her husband, Odak, and their two children in Gran Dlo, a small hillside neighborhood that runs along the stream across from the Partners in Health hospital in Bay Tourib. Though she is just 24, and though Odak is only a few years older, they have been married for eight years.

Until this year, they shared a one-room straw shack with Odak’s mother. It was tight quarters, but they managed. But now, thanks to Elienne’s participation in CLM and Odak’s hard work, they now have their own stone house, covered by a good tin roof. “We were able to give the old house to my mother-in-law. It’s close enough that we can be together, but it’s nice to live by ourselves.”

And the house isn’t the only change in their lives since they joined CLM. They used to get by on Elienne’s small commerce. “I would sell rice and oil and things like that.” Since they had no other assets, her commerce was regularly disappearing because as she would have to reach into it to feed her mother-in-law, her husband, and her kids. The couple had no other assets, so each time they ate up the assets in her small commerce, she would have to wait until Odak could earn enough money doing odd jobs to set her commerce up again.

But CLM gave them two goats and a pig, and their animals have flourished thanks to Odak’s care. And several of Elienne’s fellow CLM members hired Odak to build their CLM-financed houses, bringing in additional income that allowed them to add to their livestock and invest more in their crops as well. Odak is proud. “I’m not afraid of hard work.”

Last week, the couple was able to withdraw savings Elienne had accumulated from her six months of $1-per-day food stipends, add some of the money that Odak earned building houses, and buy a horse. It was expensive. They paid 4750 gourds, or almost $120. But it’s a good horse: still young, but big enough to carry a load for the six hours it takes to walk down to the market in Thomonde, and to the smaller markets closer to her home as well. I wanted a horse that was healthy, but also gentle. It has to be willing to carry my wife,” Odak says.

The purchase represents a key moment for a CLM member. It’s a moment we call “asset transformation,” when members take the smaller assets they have accumulated in the early part of the program and use them to make bigger investments. The bigger investment might be a large animal, like a horse, a mule, or a cow. Or it might be a plot of land.

Asset transformation is important for two reasons. On one hand, it puts a family’s livelihood on a bigger and broader basis. A family might choose to buy a cow, which can provide milk and raised status right away, and large annual chunks of income as it has calves. Or it might choose a pack animal that dramatically increases the potential for small commerce.

On the other hand, the process is important because of the choice it represents. Few of the women who join the program have had the luxury of learning to plan their future. They are too busy thinking about how to get food each day. Asset transformation is an opportunity to make a decision as part of a strategy the woman is developing for her family’s future life. The women get significant coaching from their case managers as they make this decision, but we make sure they are making it themselves.

Now Elienne has to make the choice she made with Odak work. “I go to market as much as I care. My case manager, Thermil, says that if you buy a horse but don’t use it to make money, you didn’t need it in the first place.”

“Our life is different now,” she says. “We had no goats, no pig, no house. Thanks to CLM, things are good.”

Sometimes it feels as though CLM is almost magically effective. That’s not to say that the work is easy. Our case managers and the members they serve struggle very hard for our success – with the elements, with each other, and with the realities of poverty and of rural life. That success thus belongs entirely to them. But approximately 98% of the families that complete the program are sustainably self-sufficient within 18 months. That record can sometimes lead us to expect success to follow us as inevitably as the day follows the night.

And many member families do take off almost as soon as we begin to work with them. The combination of assets and individualized coaching that we offer is enough to set them quickly and reliably onto a good path.

But for others, the road is much longer. All sorts of problems can interfere with the progress they need to make. I’ve written of such cases before, cases like Marie Paul. (See: More About Marie.)

She started the program in debt, and rather than setting the problem before her case manager so they could try to figure out a solution together, she concealed it, liquidating most of the assets we gave her to pay off a loan shark who was threatening her life and then lying about the sale. Even then, her case manager, Martinière, worked out a plan that could have enabled to restart with a reduced asset base and have an excellent chance to graduate nonetheless, but she would not take his advice. She would not even stay home on the day of his weekly visit so they could talk. She missed so many of their appointments, that he eventually became discouraged. Her home forced him more than a half an hour out of his way on his Wednesday route, which was already an especially long and hard one. The two of them never developed the relationship of trust that is far and away the most important element of everything we do. And so she languished. Her new home was never quite completed, and her assets never quite grew to what they need to be. She is very hard working, so we hope that she and her children will eventually be ok. But she could not graduate with the rest of her cohort in eighteen months. It’s a shame.

Lucienne lives close to our base in Bay Tourib. Five of her nine children survive. All are grown, but the two youngest are still unmarried and live with her and her husband. When she joined the program, the four of them were living in a corner of an older child’s house. That was about a year ago. When we began the process of home repair, she decided to add a room to that house for herself , her husband, and the two kids rather than building something separate, and that’s where they live now.

The two enterprises she chose to receive from us were goats and small commerce. We gave her three fertile female goats and made 1500 gourds, or about $ 37.50, available to purchase merchandise for her to build her commerce with.

But it has all more or less gone wrong.

Part of the challenge has to do with her husband. He is crippled by pain in his feet. He can barely walk, let alone work. The whole burden of running the house has fallen on her, and on their kids.

She and her case manager decided to invest the commerce money in beans. With her son’s help, she planted ten mamit. A mamit is a large coffee can, which is a standard dry measure in rural Haiti. But the crop was almost a total loss. They’ve pulled up and dried the plants, and are preparing to hull them, but she already sees that she’ll get a lot less than the ten mamit she planted.

Her goat rearing has not done much better thus far. One of the goats successfully raised its first litter – a single male kid – and is almost ready to give birth again. But another one died. Lucienne was able to sell the meat, but only by letting neighbors buy on credit. It went for 850 gourds, only about a quarter of the goat’s live value, but Lucienne hasn’t yet been able to collect any of what she’s owed.

The fate of the third goat is a more complicated story. The short version is that her son Lorès took it and sold it behind his mother’s back. Lucienne can’t even talk about it without sobbing.

It happened shortly after we transferred the goats to Lucienne. At the time, Lorès was competing with another young man for a young woman’s heart. As Lucienne tells the story, the girl and her family made it clear that they preferred her son. They pressured him to spend money he didn’t have on the girl, and eventually convinced him to sell his mother’s CLM goat towards that end. He caved in, sold the goat, burned through the cash by buying gifts for the girl, and then immediately regretted what he had done.

Knowing that Lucienne’s case manager would insist on seeing the goat during his next weekly visit, Lorès was forced to confess to his mother. That’s when Lucienne first became aware of the stage that his relation with the girl had reached, and she put a maternal veto on any further progress. Her boy chose to stick with his mother and accept her word. But by then she had lost two of her three goats.

A case manager’s first move in a case like this, in which a CLM member or a member of her family sells one of her assets without our approval, is to pressure the member to find a way to replace it. And Lucienne and Lorès agreed to do so.

But the more she considered it, the less sense it really made to Lucienne. Their crops had failed, and there was little beyond their farming that could bring in the cash they would need to buy a new goat. Lorès said that he would sell a small plot of land that Lucienne had given him for him to farm on, and use the proceeds from the sale to buy a goat, but Lucienne could not see the sense in his doing so, and we had to agree with her.

Lucienne speaks very clearly: She is working only for her two kids. That is to say, for her daughter, Jeslène, and Lorès. For Lorès to sell off land that she’s given him in order to return an asset to his mother can only feel like a step backward for her. Haitians describe a step like that as, “//Lave men, siye atè//.” That means, “Wash your hands and dry them in the dirt.” There’s little reason for her to develop productive assets if she can only do so by impoverishing the son who is her reason for developing them in the first place. They need to find another way.

The assets she has to work with are the mother goat and its first offspring, 3400 gourds in her Fonkoze savings account, and the 850 gourds owed to her for the goat meat she sold.

So this is what she and her case manager plan to do: She will have her son sell the young goat. They’ll need to do it quickly. By the middle of August, goats will start flooding the market, as people need cash to pay tuition for their kids’ schools. But if they sell right away, they should be able to get somewhat more than 1000 gourds. By withdrawing almost all her savings from her account, she’ll have over 4000 gourds, enough to buy a good, small horse.

That horse should be able to unlock small commerce as a real opportunity for Lucienne. She is no longer strong enough to carry heavy loads on her head, so without a horse she would almost have to sell from out of her home. And the reality in rural Haiti is that women who sell out of their home almost have to sell on credit if they are going to sell at all, and women like CLM members can lack the social capital they need to consistently collect what’s owed them.

But she still needs seed capital to get her new commerce started, so her case manager will have to help her collect at least a substantial portion of the 850 gourds she is owed. 500 gourds or so would be a start, if a very small one, and it would be enough to give us some hope that, despite very substantial obstacles, Lucienne will succeed in the end.

All that will require a lot of hard work, and that’s where we come to Lucienne’s most urgent problem. She’s been really sick. She was rushed to the clinic in Bay Tourib after collapsing in the market nearby. She was very weak, and showed strong signs of anemia. Her blood pressure was extremely low. The doctor gave her iron pills, but those pills don’t address the fundamental issue, which is that despite almost twelve months in the program, Lucienne cannot yet ensure that she and her children eat a meal every day. It is too early to call her situation something as final sounding as a “failure,” but to call it anything less than that would seem to trivialize how difficult her life still is.

The day I spoke with her, it was midmorning, and she and her children had not yet cooked or eaten anything. We gave her a few gourds, which her daughter very quickly turned into a bowl of stew, but such handouts won’t really help her succeed. She will need to quickly turn her horse and the merchandise it carries into food to feed herself and her kids and profits that can help her grow.

It won’t be easy. But we are optimistic. The fact that she lives so close to our base means that we can watch her especially closely, helping her track and manage her commerce as she tries to make it grow. We can also work closely with her boy, who seems very much motivated to make up for his lapse.

So Lucienne’s battle is far from over. Only time will tell whether it is one we can help her win.

Jasmine isn’t from Bwapen, the isolated corner of Opyèg where she now lives. She’s from Delmas, the densely populated residential city just north of downtown Port au Prince. That’s also where she met the man who is father to her two young kids. “We wanted to have children, but he wanted to have them in the countryside, so he brought me here.”

They build a small shack on his uncle’s land, and started a new life. Jasmine learned to farm. “They taught me how they plant beans, how they weed.” She would earn a dollar or so now and again for a day of labor in her neighbors’ fields. She would also wash their clothes or their dishes and get paid in food that she could share with the children. The father returned to Port au Prince to try to earn a living, initially travelling back and forth between Opyèg and the capital. Slowly Jasmine saw less and less of him, and when he would come he’d have less money for his family. By the time Jasmine joined CLM in August 2011, he had stopped coming or sending money at all. She was abandoned.

On entering the program, the first challenge that she and her case manager, Litelton, faced was to find a way for her to build a home. The uncle had been willing to let her continue to live with her children in a straw shack, but when they asked him to sign the small corner of land over to her so that she could build a more permanent shelter, he refused.

This was a significant barrier. CLM helps members build new homes. For us, it’s a matter of both health and security. Without a good tin roof over their heads, families are vulnerable to heavy rains. Without a door that they can close and lock, they cannot securely store either the merchandise or the cash that their small commerce requires. But we don’t build homes for CLM families. We think it’s critical that they do their part. We provide roofing material and nails, and we pay builders, both the one who puts up the frame and the roof and the one who builds the walls. But members must find a piece of land and provide the necessary lumber, rocks, dirt, and water.

Every part of this was going to be hard for Jasmine. She had no land to build on, but also nowhere to cut lumber for posts and planks. And her assets were growing too slowly to help her purchase what she would need.

Litelton would have to help her figure something special out, and that’s what he did. He started talking with her neighbors about Jasmine’s plight, working to convince them that they should help her out. They began to feel ashamed that a stranger was living so miserably in their midst. One family stepped forward. They would sell Jasmine a small plot of land at a very much reduced price. The land they were offering was right next to the home of another CLM member, so moving to it would also help Jasmine reduce her isolation. It seemed like a good idea.

Litelton got the landowner to lower the price even more by talking to the uncle, making him feel how shameful it would be if Jasmine, mother to his niece and nephew, had to move away. This set off a bidding war between two landowners that eventually got the price down to 4000 gourds, or about $100.

Now, Litelton just had to help her come up with that money. First, he went to the carpenter who would be building the house. We would normally have paid him 1000 gourds. Litelton had already hired him to build several members’ homes. He explained the situation to him, and asked him to build this one additional house for nothing, and the man agreed. Then, he talked to Jasmine and the CLM member who would be her new neighbor and got them to agree to building one latrine for both households. The 1000 gourds that would have gone to a builder for Jasmine’s latrine could go towards paying for her land instead as well.

Litelton was halfway towards his goal. He and a colleague then contributed another 1000 gourds each out of their own pockets, and the land belonged to Jasmine. He got the lumber by motivating a group of neighborhood teenagers to carry planks and support posts to the construction site. Jasmine earned the money to purchase a front door herself, by working in the kitchen for three days during a CLM training session.

So she and her children have a nice, one-room house. But helping her create a steady income is proving to be a more difficult challenge. She originally chose goat rearing and pig rearing as her two enterprises. We gave her two goats, but one of them died. The other is only now pregnant. “I haven’t been lucky with animals.” She and Litelton agreed to postpone her purchase of a pig. She didn’t have the resources to take good care of what would have been a very risky investment due to the prevalence of Teschen disease around where she lives.

But now that she had another CLM member as a neighbor with whom she could exchange childcare, Jasmine started thinking about small commerce. Opyèg is a major rural market, so it seemed like a likely choice. Litelton authorized her to withdraw about 500 gourds from her savings account, and she invested it in used clothing. Within a couple of weeks, the clothing had all been sold, but most of the money was gone as well.

Apparently, Jasmine wasn’t good at bargaining. She buys too high and sells too low. The used clothing business is especially dependent on good bargaining skills because very little about the pricing is fixed. So, she and Litelton agreed that they had to make a new start. She still had 2900 gourds of savings from her six months of stipends and 2000 gourds that would have been used to buy a pig to work with. She had invested that money in beans, but had been able to harvest it at a small profit, and it was now available for a new investment.

Here’s their plan. They will take one thousand gourds and buy a new commerce. They’ll make a point of buying merchandise that requires little bargaining. They’re thinking of rum or kerosene, whose prices tend to be fixed. They’ll also use a thousand gourds to buy a very young pig. It will be risky, but could be very profitable if it works. That leaves her 2900 gourds, and they plan to use it to buy a pack animal. This will permit Jasmine to earn money both at Opyèg, but at the other very different markets in other parts of the region.

We don’t know yet whether the plan will work. Our record of success suggests that Jasmine’s chances are very good, but each case is a new case, and there are no guarantees. Jasmine’s example illustrates clearly how important an enterprising and devoted case manager can be for the families that are most needy. Without Litelton’s commitment and his smarts, Jasmine could never have come as far as she has so far.

One of the simple truths about CLM is that members’ success and failure depend on a lot more than the individual differences between particular members. “Success and failure” may be too strong. Almost all CLM members succeed. But they progress at very different speeds, and the differences can depend on a lot of different things.

The CLM members from the village of Jidipe can serve as an example. They are, as a whole, well ahead of the members from the other parts of Baille Tourrible. They themselves sometimes point to their relatively easy access to the area’s most important market, the one in Thomonde, but Thomonde is over four hours away from Jidipe on foot. What is striking is the strong commitment the members from Jidipe show to getting to market consistently nonetheless.

Magarette is a mother of five. She chose goat rearing and small commerce as her two CLM enterprises. Her goats haven’t yielded very much for her yet. She started with three, and now has only two. Those two are pregnant, but she sold the third when it showed no sign of fertility. She plans to replace it right away.

Her small commerce is another matter. She sells rice, oil, seasonings and other food, mainly at home, to neighbors who buy what they need to prepare a single meal.

We generally discourage our members from selling out of their homes. Women who sell to neighbors come under a lot of pressure to sell on credit, and CLM members often lack the social capital required to make their neighbors pay their debts. But Magarette has no such problem. She hikes down to the Thomonde market every Thursday, where her neighbors sell their produce. She collects what they owe her by seeking them out in the market, and then she does her own buying before she heads home. She started her business with the 1500 gourds of merchandise CLM gave her, and now has over 2500 gourds in it. And she’s managed that growth even as she’s used the business to keep her family fed, and is is ready to grow even more. She managed to buy a horse, which will greatly increase the amount of product she can move around.

The way she bought the horse says a lot about her. She started with 1200 gourds that came to her when it was her turn to receive the weekly payout from her CLM savings club. She and eleven other members put 100 gourds each week into a pot so that one of them would receive a large sum each week.

Magarette used those 1200 gourds to buy two turkeys, which she took care of and was eventually able to sell for 2000. To that money, she added 2500 gourds that she was able to save from six months of food stipends. Finally, she and her husband contributed 1500 gourds that they earned by selling their bean harvest. That gave her 6000 gourds, which was enough to buy a good horse.

Chimène and her husband are a young couple from Jidipe with only one child. She also chose goats and small commerce, but she’s had better luck than Magarette with her goats. Two of the three we gave her have had kids, though only one kid each. The third, unfortunately, died, but she was able to sell the meat.

Her small business is beans, which she now sells in the markets, both in Thomonde on Thursdays and on Saturdays in Koray, about an hour farther up the Baille Tourrible road from Jidipe. She hasn’t been selling them in the market for long. When she first joined the program, Ricot, her case manager, didn’t think she was ready. “I wanted to help her start making money,” he explains, “but I didn’t think she should keep too much cash around the house. She wasn’t used to having cash around. I thought she’d fritter it away.” So Ricot had her buy dry beans with all 1500 gourds, and just stock them as the price increased towards planting season. She only made 250 gourds, but all that money stayed in her hands.

Chimène also managed to buy a horse, though she took a route different from the one Magarette had taken, and did it with only 4500 gourds. She started with 1000 gourds that the CLM program paid her husband for putting up the walls of their house. We make 1000 gourds available for the builder that puts up the walls of each CLM house and 1000 gourds for the one who constructs the frame and puts on the roof. If a husband is able to do this work, the money can stay in the family. Chimène added 2500 gourds of savings, 500 gourds from her bean sales, and 500 gourds out of their own harvest. Her horse may be a good deal smaller than Magarette’s, but it’s able to carry her merchandise to and from both Thomonde and Koray. She still has 1250 gourds in her business, and is now ready to make it grow.

Both women are moving forward quickly, as are all their neighbors from Jidipe. They have cooperative husbands, fertile farmland, and smart and hardworking case managers. But the key is probably their own determination, a determination that somehow pervades the small community where they live.

Jesumène with her youngest son and a grandson.

Jesumène is a mother of eight who lives with her husband and their kids in Upper Viyèt, a large rural valley in east-central Boukankare. 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.

Jesumène been with CLM for almost 18 months, and has flourished in the program. She’ll graduate in July. When she was first selected, things were bad. “We didn’t have food to eat. The children weren’t in school.” The family couldn’t work to make a living because they had no assets to work with: no land, no animals, and no livestock. They got by as day laborers in the wealthier neighbors’ fields.

The depth of her poverty, together with the number of children who depend upon her, led to her qualifying for a special level of support that CLM offered to a few CLM members through a special gift from an Irish organization called Bóthar. Jesumène received a cow as one of her assets, a much more expensive investment than the program can make in most members.

What is more important, however, is that she and her family have made the most of the opportunities that CLM has offered. 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 Jesumène 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.

Jesumène 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 didn’t own even the ground that her shack was standing on. 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.

Her family’s future is now bright. Her focus is on her livestock. “We need to take good care of them. We need to avoid wasting them so we won’t go back to how our life was before.” In addition to her poultry, she has five goats and two cows, the mother and its female calf. She’s now able to rent farmland that she can work with her husband and their kids, and she plans to eventually sell a cow so that she can buy a field of her own.

It’s been a long road for Jesumène. And the route forward may be still longer. But her eighteen months in the program have given her a very good start.

Josamène’s life has been extremely hard. Though she has succeeded wonderfully as a member of CLM, the struggles she has been through are evident as one speaks with her. The sharp contours etched into her face seem to reflect years of hardship. Her speech is barely audible. It comes in short phases, which are sometimes hard to understand at all. As she speaks, she looks to the side or towards the ground.

When you ask her what she thinks of CLM, her answer is simple, “Bagay yo ap mache.” That’s to say, “Things are working well.” She and her husband, Lwidòn, have six goats, a pregnant sow, and a small cow. They have two kids in first grade in a nearby school; it’s the first time any of their children have been to school at all. Things really do seem as though they are looking up.

Josamène was raised by an aunt and then an older sister, her parents having died when she was very young. None of the people who raised her ever called her Josamène. Since she was little girl, everyone has called her Ti Rizib. Even today, it’s the name her neighbors and the members of her family use.

But it’s a terrible name. The Creole word “rizib” comes from a French word that means “laughable.” The Creole word doesn’t have quite that sense, but to call Josamène “Ti Risib” is like calling her a nothing. It’s a very demeaning name, and one she has been living with all her life.

She and Lwidòn have had thirteen children, but only five of them are still alive. As I sit with the two of them on the ground in front of their new home, the first they’ve ever had with solid stone-and-mud walls and a tin roof, Lwidòn points sadly to the places in their yard where they’ve buried their kids, “Two here, two there, two over there.” His goes through the list as he points out their graves. Their five surviving children range from Ti Fanm, a 22-year-old mother of four, to Ti Mèn, a five-year-old girl.

Their home is in Deniza, a mountainside community overlooking the populous and poor community of Viyèt, in central Boukankare. They live with two daughters, Ti Wakin and Ti Mèn, a ten-or-eleven-year-old son, Fràn, and their granddaughter, Manouchecar. Their two older kids, Ti Fanm and their sixteen-year-old son Dieupuissant, live in Mibalè. The latter has been on his own for a couple of years now, supporting himself by washing cars and motorcycles in the river that runs through the center of town and by crushing rocks into gravel with a small hammer.

When our selection team first met them, they had a hard time getting Josamène to talk at all. Her neighbors told us she was egare. That means that she has a screw loose. Her husband said merely that she “konn pale anpil.” Literally, that would mean that she talks a lot. And, again literally, it was almost exactly false. If anything, Lwidòn was the one who did, and still does, almost all of the talking. But “pale anpil” means, more loosely, that someone is a little crazy, and Lwidòn explained that Josamène hadn’t been the same since the death of her last child, who was killed when their straw house burned down.

Like most CLM families, things were really difficult for Josamène, Lwidòn, and their kids when they joined the program. Their problems had been serious enough to drive their boy, Dieupuissant, to seek his own fortune in Mibalè, even though he was just in his early teens. The family didn’t always have enough to eat. Ti Wakin, the young girl born after Dieupuissant, ran away twice in their first months of CLM, and her explanation was simple: She was hungry.

What Josamène likes about the program, she puts simply: “You get the stuff they give you, and you start working with it.” She and Lwidòn have invested a lot of time and effort into developing their assets. Her animals are healthyShe doesn’t have a regular small commerce, but she sells the produce from the fields that she and Lwidòn work in.

We often say that CLM is about more than merely creating wealth. Helping families lift themselves out of poverty is a social phenomenon as well. And one aspect of the social change we try to effect is to work on the way members look at themselves.

A striking example of this came up when Josamène stood up at a meeting of CLM members and introduced herself. On one hand, it was the first time she had been willing to speak in a group setting. She had attended all of her previous meetings with Ti Wakin, her daughter, and she had let the girl do all her talking for her. On the other hand, Josamène refused to refer to herself as Ti Rizib. All through a game in which members introduce themselves and then run through the names of other women in the circle with them, Josamène insisted on the use of her full, real name, Josamène Loreliant, even in the middle of a community of women who had known her only by her nickname for years. Josamène was saying, essentially, “Don’t call me Ti Rizib.” When her case manager mistakenly referred to her as Ti Rizib in the middle of the meeting, she sniped audibly, “You too?” He apologized immediately. Lwidòn still calls her Ti Rizib, and when she’s asked whether that bothers her she jokes, “I just ignore him.”

Josamène will graduate from CLM on July 13th, and she had simple advice for any one else who would follow the same path: “Depi w mache maten, apremidi, ou pral soti.” Literally, that means, “As long as you walk both in the morning and the afternoon, you’ll find your way.” It’s her way of saying that, as long as you do the work the program asks of you, you will succeed. A picture of her daughter, Ti Wakin, in her school uniform is a fitting emblem of Josamène’s success.

When one speaks with a CLM member who is 17 or 18 months into the program, it is common to hear glowing accounts of “what CLM has done” for them. But Jean Manie’s declaration is different, and much stronger. She says, “I can never forget what CLM has done for me. It released me from slavery.”

When our staff first met Jean Manie, she was living “a moun.” That is to say, she was a restavèk, an unpaid domestic servant in her cousin’s home in Chimowo, a rural community along the main road that runs west from central Boukankare to the important market in Feyobyen. She had been living with the cousin for years, having grown up in her aunt’s house after her parents died when she was a very young girl. Life with her cousin and her cousin’s husband, Moussa, was hard. She would get up every day before dawn to make breakfast for the household. Then she would go into the fields. She worked in Moussa’s fields almost every day, unless she was doing the laundry or some other heavy household work.

At the time, Jean Manie was living separated from her young boy, Patrick. Moussa had put Patrick out of his house when he was a toddler, saying that he would feed Jean Manie, but not her son. So Jean Manie sent Patrick to her aunt’s house, where she would visit him now and again when she “really missed him.” Her first case manager, Sandra, told Jean Manie that CLM could only help her if Patrick was with her. CLM does not work with childless families. So the two of them spoke with Moussa, who was initially interested in the program, and he agreed to let Jean Manie bring Patrick back.

Moussa was enthusiastic because he thought that the program would bring resources into his own household. When he learned that we would be giving Jean Manie goats and a pig, he said they we could just put them together with his and that he would take care of them for her. When he heard that we’d help Jean Manie build a house, he said we could construct it on his land.

Things started to unravel as Moussa began to understand that CLM was a chance for Jean Manie to achieve independence. By that time, Jean Manie had a new case manager, Alancia, and Alancia made sure that Moussa understood that the assets we were giving Jean Manie were for her, not for the household. We tried to put an understandable spin on things: We explained that we thought it important that Jean Manie herself learn to take responsibility. But the message must have been too clear. Moussa wasn’t ready to simply send Patrick back to the aunt’s house, but he was willing and able to interfere with any progress Jean Manie might make. He would send her out into his fields to do farm work all day, forcing her to leave care of her animals to Patrick, who didn’t know how to take of them and too small to do so without direction. Her goats were soon in very bad shape, her pig had piglets, but they died of neglect. The sow died shortly after her young.

Jean Manie was not, however, alone in her struggle. Nor was Alancia the only one anxious to help her. The CLM program establishes village assistance committees in all the communities we work in. They are made up of local leaders who agree to lend a hand as we try to combat the extreme poverty around their homes. We established a committee for the area just east of Feyobyen, and the representative for Chimowo was Claude, a local farmer who also teaches at the little primary school in the area.

Claude attended one of the workshops we offered to committee members, and what he heard made him think of Jean Manie. “They said that I should pay closest attention to the women who have the most problems, and I saw that Jean Manie had big problems.” He began encouraging her to take better care of her animals, though he could see that she needed more than mere encouragement. He watched helplessly as the piglets and then the sow died and the goats’ condition deteriorated.

Jean Manie’s problems increased as she and Alancia started thinking about her house. Alancia vetoed Moussa’s idea. She would not allow the house to go up on Moussa’s land unless Moussa would deed a little piece of the land to Jean Manie. Ultimately, the land owner is the homeowner, so Jean Manie would have no guarantee unless her house went up on her own land. As Alancia started helping Jean Manie look for someplace to build, it became clear that Moussa would try hard to hold onto her. Alancia got initial agreement from their church’s pastor to sign over a very small corner of the church’s land to Jean Manie so that she could build. But when Moussa heard, he went to the pastor and threatened to leave the congregation if the pastor followed through with his promise. Rather than lose a relatively wealthy congregant, the pastor apologetically went back on his word.

Things took a turn for the worse one-day when Moussa and his wife sent Jean Manie to Mibalè, where they keep a home for children who are in secondary school. They sent her to do laundry for the kids. At the end of the day, they were angry because they felt that she ruined a new shirt. Not only did they refuse to give her money to pay for her transportation back to Chimowo from Mibalè, but they didn’t feed her that day. What’s more, they made her pay them for the allegedly ruined shirt. But Jean Manie still had nowhere to go with Patrick. She felt stuck with Moussa and his wife, the only home she knew.

The crisis came when Alancia and Jean Manie arranged for Claude to take over management of her surviving goats. Moussa was so enraged that he threatened to beat Jean Manie. The threat was real. She had been suffering physical abuse since she was a girl.

Alancia heard about the threat, and she sent Moussa a counter-threat of her own: If he laid a hand on Jean Manie, he would see what Alancia could do. The threat was vague, but its vagueness itself might have helped it. Alancia is, in any case, a strong and robust, six-foot woman who would tower over a man like Moussa. Rather than call her bluff, he decided to be done with the whole thing, and he threw Jean Manie and Patrick out.

Without a home to return to, they arranged, through Alancia, to move in with a fellow CLM member, who had just finished constructing her home. Tona had two children of her own, but she was willing to give a corner of her one-room house to Jean Manie and Patrick. Idana, another CLM member who lived closer to Moussa’s house, finished her house soon after that, and Jean Manie and Patrick moved in with her instead, even though she had four children and a husband in her little home.

None of that, however, offered anything like a permanent solution, and this is where Claude’s commitment really began to show. He owns several pieces of land, and decided to deed a small plot to her. It would be just enough to allow her to build a home.

Our program, however, does not simply build homes for its members. We provide roofing material and some money to pay builders, but members themselves have to supply the lumber and the rocks and dirt or palm-wood planks that are used to build up the walls. We think it’s critical for member families to have to work hard for the progress they make. But Jean Manie really had no resources at all to work with. Her assets were in bad shape. They hadn’t yet created any new wealth for her to invest in lumber or other materials. And she had no other land where she could find the lumber she’d need.

So Claude cut the lumber for Jean Manie on his own land, and helped her carry it to the small plot he had given her for her house. The plot itself had the dirt and rocks she would need for walls. Jean Manie had to prepare food for the workman who did the building, which was a real expense by her standards, but it was also a contribution she was capable of. She also hauled the water for the mud walls. She and Patrick moved into the house as soon as the first of the two small rooms was ready.

So Jean Manie escaped from Moussa, and began a new life with Patrick in her own house. Looking back, she’s come to understand that she was a slave. But when she talks about what makes her maddest about all the years she spent with Moussa, she doesn’t mention physical or other abuse. She doesn’t mention being hungry or exploited. She talks instead about something that happened one Sunday after church. Patrick was hungry, so he dug up a sweet potato in Moussa garden and boiled it. When Moussa saw, he was furious. He told Patrick never to take anything from his garden again. Jean Manie says, “I was so angry. All the years that I’ve planted and harvested those gardens, and prepared all the food the family eats, and Moussa can’t let my boy eat a sweet potato.”

Finally in her own home, things started to look up. She even took money from the sale of meat from her sow, added savings from six months of income replacement stipends, and was able to buy a very young bull. Claude takes care of it for her.

Once the door was up on her house, she was able to start a small commerce. Initially, she sold kerosene. She would give Claude the money to buy it for her in Domon, where it’s cheaper, and then she would sell it in the local market in Feyobyen. But Jean Manie felt that it wasn’t selling well enough, so she decided to sell kabesik instead.

Kabesik is low-grade rice. It consists mostly of broken grains. It’s imported from the Dominican Republic, where it’s used mainly as feed for livestock. The Dominicans call it “cabecita,” which means “little head.” The Kreyòl word comes from the Spanish. In Haiti, kabesik is a staple for those families who can’t afford anything else. Jean Manie buys 600 gourds worth of kabesik on Fridays, in the market in Domon. That’s about six large coffee cans of it. She’s able to sell five of the coffee cans for the same 600 gourds in one or two days in the market. She uses the sixth coffee can to feed herself and Patrick. Between that rice, and the various things she can scavenge, she’s keeping the two of them fed — Patrick has even put on some weight — but she’s not able to make the kind of progress we hope for.

There is, however, another factor. She is a young woman, and at various times over the years she’s had suitors. Nothing much came of the relationships while she was living with Moussa and his family. He acted as her parent. Suitors had to go through him. He would insist that they help her work in his fields, and his demands would eventually discourage them.

Things changed when she moved into her own home. Shortly after she finished her house, a local agricultural laborer moved in with her. Things were going well for a short while. He works at a sugar mill, and would bring her logs of the dark brown sugar called “rapadou,” which is popular in the Haitian countryside. She’d sell the logs, and it was a nice addition to her income.

The relationship unraveled when Jean Manie got sick and went to the hospital. The doctor told her that she had an infection and that she should refrain from sex during the couple of weeks of treatment she’d need. The man got angry, and he moved out. A couple of weeks later, he wanted to move back, but Jean Manie said she wouldn’t take him. He said that he would have sex with her whether or not she was willing. Fortunately, she told Alancia, who reported him to the police before anything could happen. She also spoke to the guy, letting him know that she’d have him arrested if he carried out his threat.

Eventually, another man started showing interest in Jean Manie. This time, Jean Manie sent him to talk to Claude. She chose to have Claude play the parental role. So Claude talked to the new boyfriend about his prospects and intentions, and he liked what he heard. He’s a middle-aged widower with grown children. He shows no interest in having more kids. He has his own productive farmland, so he is able to contribute to the household. He initially wanted to have Jean Manie and Patrick move in with him, but Claude insisted that Jean Manie she stay in her own home, and the guy eventually agreed. For now, the relationship seems promising. Claude seems optimistic: “It hasn’t been easy, but I pulled her through. Some day, I want to hear people say, ‘Look what Claude did.'”

Jean Manie will graduate in July, though her situation is still precarious. She has goats and a cow, but can’t really manage them. Claude does it for her. Her income is small, just about enough for her to feed herself and her son, but it isn’t yet likely to grow very much. She hasn’t shown much evidence that she’s a capable businesswomen. Even with the intensive work she’s done with Alancia, it’s only support from fellow CLM members that has enabled her to get her little business going. Her best hope right now depends on her new relationship working out.

But her life now is nothing like what it was. “The best thing is,” she says, “that when you live in your own house you get up when you want and go to sleep when you want to too. With Moussa, I used to have to get up at 2:00 every morning to make breakfast for the rest of the household before I went out into the fields.” The difference is even more visible in Patrick. At Moussa’s, he was silent, scared. He was always looking at the ground. Now he’s playful, full of cheer. He’s a happy, healthy boy. He’s about eight, and he finally was able to finish first grade this year. His mother dreams that he’ll be able to go much farther than that. And maybe he will.

Several weeks ago Jill and Steve and I had the privilege of following Gauthier and one of his caseworkers to visit three CLM clients, or sisters, as Steve Werlin has suggested. The case manager, Shirley, was one of the rare females willing to perform this job, which demands the ability to maneuver a motorcycle along Haiti’s back roads (substitute creek bed for road here).

After two hours of being knocked into one another in the back of an SUV, our delegation arrived at the outpost that serves as the caseworkers’ home for much of the week. Feeling giddy over our safe arrival, I was trying not to think about the drive home, and one dicey precipice in particular, where I had wondered whether it might be useful to our driver if I screamed.

Once landed, we climbed the footpath leading up from behind the small school, and arrived at the home of the first CLM client. She came out to greet her Fonkoze team with a graceful welcome, obviously at ease with the relative invasion of Americans, I presume this was because her beloved Gauthier had brought them. She wore a t-shirt, a hand-me-down from the States, created no doubt for an American teenager, but its message seemed to sum up with perfect precision the way that Gauthier and his team view their sisters in the program. The shirt read, “as a matter of fact, the world DOES revolve around me.”

This woman was doing well in the program and showed us the work that she and the Fonkoze team had so far performed on her new home, a dwelling that was to house her family of ten.

The second client/sister was waiting for us in front of her newly completed house, two of her children sat on the front stoop, her husband helped to hang the laundry. She had a sleeping one-month-old baby in her lap. Shirley and Gauthier spoke with this pretty young mother, joked with her, asked how she was dealing with her new her goats, her new ceramic water filter. Before we left, Gauthier asked what she thought of the new tin roof on her home.

“Before, when it used to rain, the house would fill with water.” She answered. “But now, when the rains fall at night, we lie in our beds and sing.”

The third sister we visited that day had several children, one of which looked to be about nine, and who had been born with a correctable but untreated condition that affected her vision. Gauthier and his team had managed to save some of her sight by taking her to a distant hospital for surgery. This young girl stood folded in Shirley’s arms as Gauthier told us her story.
At one point during our visit this girl’s mother proudly brought out a small workbook, which revealed her own carefully rounded cursive. She was learning to write her name for the first time.

We asked if we could take a picture of her. She nodded yes, took a deep breath and froze in a half smile. The photo was snapped, and she released her tense shoulders, letting go a suppressed puff of air.

It was at this moment that I understood how brave these women must be. Imagine allowing someone, some organization to enter your life for evaluation. Imagine taking them through your home, peering into corners, sifting through your finances, relationships, gathering all of the information needed to turn your life in a sustainable direction. Bettering your lives and the lives of your children, yes, but how brave you must be to take this first step. Like tensing at the sight of a needle, you understand that it may save your life, but still, you gulp, wince, and then, whew, … begin to breathe again. You do this for your children and your children’s children. You suffer this scrutiny for those you love.

And now imagine the one who scrutinizes. Imagine the delicacy required of Gauthier and his team. Imagine one who possesses the tenderness to carefully pry open a life of chronic poverty in order to offer help, one who can intrude without being intrusive. This is a rare variety of human being, a highly infrequent specimen found occasionally in the remote back hills of Haiti’s Central plateau. This is Gauthier and his remarkable family.

I wish all of you in this room could have the opportunity to follow Gauthier up into the hills to visit his CLM sisters. I know it would give you hope, and courage, like a new tin roof. So that when the rains fall in your own lives, you too might lie in bed and sing.

One of the important pieces of the package of support that CLM offers to members is home repair. When members talk about the program, they consistently cite their new home with its good tin roof as one of the biggest changes that CLM has brought into their lives.

And it’s easy to understand. Most of the families we select for the program are living in terrible circumstances when we find them. Their shacks are thrown together out of the materials they can find: straw, sticks, and palm seedpods. Some of the women have the energy and the focus to make something more-or-less habitable out of the very limited resources available, but it is striking how many of them don’t. They fail to see the opportunities that even they have to make minor repairs to their houses because the small improvements in comfort or security that they could achieve are hidden by the daily search of something minimal to eat. Patching a roof or a wall, even when it would be helpful and easy, can’t seem very important to someone who has nothing to feed her kids.

All that is before women join CLM. We think of home repair as important for at least three reasons. First and most importantly, it is preventative healthcare. Families cannot stay healthy without a dry place to sleep. Second, it is economics. Members cannot engage in small commerce without a reasonably secure place to keep merchandise and cash. Finally, it is a matter of dignity. It is hard for a woman to become and to feel like a well-regarded member of her community if she lives in a shack that neighbors will always look down upon.

At the same time, we don’t look at housing as something we can just do for our members. They need to get used to doing things for themselves, and home repair is a good place to start. We give them roofing material and nails, and we pay the builders who put up the walls and raise the roof, but the members themselves have to provide the lumber they need along with the mud, rocks, or wood that they use to make the walls. It’s a big investment for our program: something like one-sixth of our total budget. And a big investment for our members: collecting the lumber and other materials can involve hard work, relatively big expenses, or both.

Here are some photos of homes before CLM home repair and one before-and-after shot:

All this is just a way of explaining why Monday afternoon’s activities in Bay Tourib seemed so odd. I went to two different CLM homes with a team of case managers and a carpenter who’s also a member of the local CLM support committee, and we removed the roofs from the houses and walked away with the tin.

The first case was straightforward, and we felt good about it. A CLM member had built her house on land that belonged to her partner, next to his mother’s house. He was abusive, and she had had enough. She wanted to leave him, but was worried that she wouldn’t be able to rebuild what she had with him. She was afraid to go by herself to take the assets that CLM had given her. So she talked to her case manager, and he talked to the team. He also talked to the man. The result of it all is that we went to the house as a team, with the man’s agreement, and collected her things: the tin roofing material, the roofing nails, some cement, her water filter, and a few personal items. There was a large and loud crowd, but the only sign of conflict was an argument between her and the guy’s mother over ownership of a spoon.

The second case was much more difficult. Moïse and his wife were selected for CLM because they were having a hard time just feeding their kids. A few months into the program, Moïse’s wife left him.

Normally, CLM would continue to support the woman, but we couldn’t in this case. She had abandoned Moïse and all their kids. So we decided to stick with the children, registering a daughter as the household’s nominal member. Titon, the case manager, would meet weekly with Moïse and the little girl, and they would come together to CLM trainings.

But it hasn’t worked out.

It isn’t that unusual for CLM members to be dishonest early in our experience with them. Why would they trust us? What must look like the best things we do for them — giving them assets to manage and home repair assistance — must also look too good to be true. Especially when they are surrounded by jealous neighbors, who are encouraging them to believe that we are up to no good. Distrustful members will sell a goat and then lie to us about it, claiming it was stolen or that it died. They decide to burn through their assets before we take them away again. Generally, we stick by the members as they learn that we are really looking to support them over the long haul, and things work themselves out.

Moïse’s case didn’t work out. He sold two of his daughter’s goats, lying to Titon to hide what he had done. When Titon confronted him with evidence that he’d sold the goats, he changed his story, claiming that he had sold them because he had an urgent need for cash to by clothes and supplies to send his children to school. When Titon spoke to the children in his absence, they denied that their father had given them any of the things he had pretended to buy. Titon confronted him with this additional lie. By that time, Titon had spent some time asking around, and he learned that Moïse had spent the money on another woman he was trying to attract.

Moïse agreed to buy a goat to replace at least one of the ones he had sold off, and Titon agreed to keep working with him. A couple of weeks later, Moïse showed Titon the goat he had purchased. Titon asked to see the goat’s papers. He wanted proof that the goat in fact belonged to Moïse, and when Moïse showed them to him he hoped that he had worked through the worst of the lying and that they could now move forward. He decided to hold onto the papers for a little bit just to be sure.

His hope didn’t last long. The goat, it turns out, belonged to one of Moïse’s neighbors, an older woman who had asked Moïse to look after it for her. He convinced her to lend him the goat’s papers as well, but when she asked him to return the papers and he had to explain that he couldn’t, she decided to make a lot of noise.

For Titon, it was the last straw. He felt he needed to do something to show that the agreements we make with members mean something. They sign a contract in which they promise not to sell the assets we give them without our permission. Not only had Moïse broken the promise more than once, he had lied about. Other nearby CLM members were also telling Titon, who is loved and respected by most, that Moïse had been encouraging them to do as he had done.

So we decided to suspend Moïse and his family from the program. We went to their home, removed their roof, and took their water filter. Their two remaining goats are already in the hands of a committee member, who’s holding on to them pending a final decision.

Taking the roof off a poor person’s house is very far from what our role should be. Moïse’s yard filled with neighbors as we worked, talking quietly and staring in disbelief. After we had removed the first few sheets of tin, I heard someone say, “//tout bon//?” That’s like asking whether what she was seeing was real. Would we really carry out the threat Titon had been making to remove Moïse from the program? I think we did the right thing. I don’t think Moïse left us any choice.

But I was chatting with another CLM member as we were removing the roof, and we had to agreed that it was an ugly, if an appropriate, thing to do. It’s the wet season, and as heavy rains fell late that night, I had to wonder how Moïse and his children were making out. I was dry, lying in a comfortable bed, in the residence we share with the Partners in Health medical staff.