To date, CLM has been astonishingly effective. Its job, to help the poorest of the poor permanently improve their lives, would be hard enough under any circumstances. But in Haiti, everything is harder. Problems ranging from the broken or nonexistent infrastructure to the frequency of disasters of all sorts combine to make challenges more challenging and problems harder to solve.

And despite it all, the program’s success rate has been 96%. That is to say, 96% of the ultra poor families that have passed through CLM end up with multiple dependable income sources, assets to insure them should troubles arise, reasonably good health, and a plan to move ahead. Their children eat regularly and go to school.

We have to be honest: We don’t know yet how our dramatic scale-up will affect our success rate. We moved from handling less than two hundred women at a time to ten times that. A number of aspects of the program have gotten even harder as we’ve grown. But we do not expect a significant drop off. We can’t afford one. The cost would be too great. A family whom will fail will continue to face hunger and misery without any concrete hope that their lives could still somehow change. We can’t accept that.

At the same time, as effective as the program has been, it is not uniformly effective. Not in the strict sense. Different women move forward at different speeds. Some take to CLM as though they had been waiting for it all their lives. They jump right in and quickly convert their new assets and their increased know-how into better lives for their children and themselves. Some of them have what seem like intellectual or developmental issues that are severe enough to get in their way. Others seem rigidly resistant to change. It’s not as though they are accustomed to comfortable lives. On the contrary, their lives are terribly hard, filled with persistent hunger, sickness, and suffering of all sorts. But they are resistant to change even though it’s pretty clearly for the better. Or at least it seems pretty clearly better to us.

The international movement of programs like CLM distinguishes between fast and slow “climbers.” I suppose we like to look as the movement out of extreme poverty as an ascent. One thing is certain: the more we know about the characteristics that distinguish fast climbers from slow climbers, the more we can adapt our techniques so that we continue to succeed with almost every family we serve. Staff members who have been with the program for a few years have a lot of stories they can share about the women who made their jobs relatively easy and those who made their jobs hard. But we haven’t really collected our team’s judgments in any organized way. Until now.

For the last couple of months we have been trying to learn some things about how some members, and not others, succeed so well. We’ve been looking at the progress hundreds of new members have made up to the six-month point. We’ve had an Irish intern working closely with some of our case managers to create a simple survey to distinguish fast from slow. And we’ve asked other case managers to categorize each of the members they serve as fast, slow, or something in between.

Now, when you ask case managers which members are fast and which are slow, their first reaction is to ask what criteria they should judge them by. But this very reasonable question misses the point. We don’t yet have the criteria. Appropriate, predictive criteria are what we seek. So the case managers have to work in a manner that seems backwards. They categorize each member first, and then try to define what makes them view the member the way they do. We hope these observations will give us the information that we need.

A lot of what they conclude is predictable. Many fast climbers, for example, have spouses who collaborate with them closely. Many of them take quickly to the social messages that CLM offers: For example, they starting keeping themselves, their children, and their houses clean. They tend to make plans that guide them. Slow climbers lack a steady partner’s support. They lack initiative. They don’t seem very motivated to change.

But even if such conclusions are unsurprising, they’re still useful. We decided to spend more time and energy getting husbands to buy into the program. That might really make a difference.

The case managers’ notes are filled with interesting details.

Here’s what Martinière, a case manager, says about Oclanie, a fast climber: “She keeps her children clean, and she’s learned to write her name. She’s pregnant again, but her husband helps her a lot with her assets. She’ll be able to take care of her husband and kids. Since I started weekly visits, I’ve never shown up to find that her kids hadn’t eaten unless the pot’s still on the stove. When the weekly food stipend ran out, she took the money from her savings account and bought three goats, which she sold right away at a profit.”

Another, Bonissant, says this about Julienne Pierre: “Julienne was a true CLM. She has nine children and had no assets to speak of. Now she has 29,000 gourds worth of animals, including poultry, goats, a pig, and a cow. Her nine kids will be in school in October. She’s learned to write her name and the numbers from one through ten. She’s making quick progress because her husband works hard with her and she really likes both commerce and farming. She’s a fast climber.”

But here’s what he says about Alourdes: “Her social situation is not good. Her home is always dirty. She still can’t write her name even though we’ve been working hard at it. She’s //egare//. She doesn’t know money. Her husband has to keep track of any money that comes her way.” (This requires explanation. “Egare” can mean anything from confused to scatter-brained. “Not knowing money,” means that she can’t identify the denominations of different bills.) Bonissant continues: “She’s progressing very slowly because she lacks good sense.”

Helping women like Oclanie and Julienne is almost easy. They certainly needed us. But they were positioned from the start to take advantage of what we can provide.

Bonissant has his work cut out for him to make Alourdes succeed. He’s already counting on her husband, which is a little bit risky, and he’s getting help from other CLM members that live nearby. Just recently Alourdes went to market with a sack of charcoal for sale, but another member, who also had charcoal, went with her, and made sure they both got the right price.

Alourdes is not our only hard case. Working around the special difficulties she and other women like her present is the key to keeping our success story alive.

Zaboka has a very different look these days. It’s the main town in Deniza, the eastern side of Tit Montay, the hard-to-access region on the northwestern corner of Boucan Carré. Zaboka is one of the areas where our activities are most concentrated. There are almost sixty CLM members living in close proximity to one another in and around the village.

One of the things that first struck us about Tit Montayn when we started working there was the poor quality of the housing stock. Not just future CLM members, but even some of their wealthier neighbors were living in structures that barely deserved to be called “shacks.”

Often, homes were nothing more than two walls of pressed corn stalks, set to lean against each other. There might be a couple of large, fibrous palm pods folded across the top to help keep the rain out. The triangular back of the house would be made of more corn stalks. More sophisticated homes had walls of woven sticks, covered with dried mud. Palm pods and straw were the standard roofing materials. We regularly heard from women who told us that they would take their children out from under the roof when it rained in order to seek such shelter as they could find under nearby trees. Their homes simply didn’t protect them.

But now the 59 CLM members in Zaboka all have small but solid homes, with good tin roofs. On a sunny day, these roofs shine brightly on all sides, like little mirrors, sparkling in the sunlight along Zaboka’s various steep hills.

The centerpiece to the CLM approach to poverty alleviation is the effort we make to help our members develop reliable income-generating activities. We know that, unless they can earn regular income, they will not be able to address their children’s persistent, health-threatening hunger or to send their children to school. As I often say to groups of our members the first time I speak to them: Every family has problems, but families that have money coming in every day have ways to solve many of those problems. So we provide enterprise training in our members’ choice of two income-generating activities, and we give them both the assets they need to get their businesses started and the ongoing coaching they need to succeed.

But we also know that their businesses will not succeed unless they can stay healthy themselves and keep their children healthy as well. A woman cannot make a steady income if she can’t work, and she won’t be able to work if she is sick herself or is busy taking care of a sick child.

So we also work hard to help our members protect their families’ health. We make sure they have access to free health care at any of the Partners in Health clinics in the region. We provide them with lots of training about health-maintenance and good nutritional practices. We teach them about safe drinking water and ensure that they have everything they need to guarantee that their families’ drinking water is clean. We help them install latrines in their yards. And we help them construct a room that gives them a dry, protected place to sleep.

We have to be careful about this. We never tell our members that we will help them build a house. We can’t afford for them to have an exaggerated sense of what we can do for them. Building a house can be an expensive undertaking. Even CLM members can tend to have dreams much bigger than anything we can satisfy. What we do is very limited: We provide them with enough tin roofing material, nails, and cement to make the roof and the floor of a three-meter square room. If members live somewhere that cement delivery is especially hard, they can take extra roofing material to make a larger house instead of the cement. We also pay the builder who constructs the walls and another who puts on the roof. The members need to scrounge up the support poles and the other lumber that they need, and to provide rocks and sand.

It’s an approach that is hard to implement for lots of reasons. It can be hard to get building materials, even the easier to transport ones, where we need them. Members who don’t own their own land can have a hard time finding a piece of land that someone will allow them to build on or finding the lumber they need to build with.

But the members themselves can also create difficulties. Many of them want much more of a house than we can offer. In Haiti, where mortgage financing is rare, building a house can take years. A family will save up to buy materials sufficient to take one step in the construction process, but then put the process on hold until they’ve accumulated more savings. The version we face in CLM is that members can be unsatisfied with nine square feet, or even with the larger home they can build if they convert their cement into tin roofing. They’ll want to start construction of something much larger, something that they’ll have no hope of completing anytime soon. That might be ok for those who already have a safe place to live, but for CLM members it means remaining in structures that fail to provide even minimal protection from the elements.

Case managers have to argue with the members, convincing them to make the best of what we offer right away, and dream of something greater down the line. It’s not always easy. But in Zaboka, and in almost all the areas where we currently work, it’s a battle we’ve successfully waged. The houses our up, and we’re moving to other challenges.

Saliciane and her Case Manager, Alancia

Saliciane has been a member of Fonkoze’s CLM program since her family was selected in December. Until very recently, she and her husband lived with their children in a small shack in a little valley just off the nearest road in Viyèt, a neighborhood between the center of Boukankare and the mountains to the north. Viyèt has been a fertile territory for CLM, filled with the kind of desperate poverty the program designed to address.

With eleven children, Saliciane’s situation was especially hard. Though they don’t all live with her, many of them do. “Our house is so small. The kids are with me during the day, but every night they scatter to neighbors’ houses to find someplace to sleep.”

Thanks to Bothar, the CLM program was able to offer Saliciane something special: a cow. Cows are much more valuable than the assets that CLM usually offers, but twenty especially large families were selected to receive them from Bothar.

When Saliciane received hers back in January, she was really excited. “I’ve never had a cow before,” she explains, “because I had no money to buy one.” Her friends and neighbors had mixed reactions. “They didn’t really believe that someone would give me a cow. Some of them would keep trying to tell me that something was wrong, that it was the devil’s work. Some people encourage you and some try to discourage you. But my family was really happy.”

Saliciane received more than just the cow. CLM members always receive two different kinds of assets, and Saliciane chose goats to go with her cow. But her choice of two different kinds of livestock left her with a problem: Neither would earn her money right away, so neither would help her feed her large family in the short term. Though she would receive a small weekly food stipend for the first six months of the program, it wouldn’t go very far. It’s only about a dollar per day. Many CLM members use savings from these stipends to buy more assets or to invest in establishing a small commerce. But with all the mouths she had to feed, Saliciane had nothing left over.

But she figured out a solution: she borrowed 1000 gourds from a cousin and started a charcoal business. She buys the charcoal in the mountains above Viyèt, from the people who make it. Then she carries sacks of it down the mountain on her head, and sells it by the sack in the markets in Difayi and Domon. “Before I joined CLM,” she explained, “no one wanted to help me. No one would lend me money. Now that people see what CLM is doing for me, they look at me differently. I have a cow and some goats. I am somebody. People are happy to lend a hand.” The profit she’s making will ensure that her children continue to eat decently even after the weekly cash stipend runs out in June.

She still has problems. One is with the cow itself. It still isn’t pregnant. If it still isn’t at the end of this month, Lissage, the sector specialist for livestock, will sell it for Saliciane and replace it with another. CLM members’ assets have to produce. But Saliciane is optimistic, and she’s already making plans. “Once the cow has a calf, I can sell the calf to buy the land that my little house is on. Right now, it’s not mine.”

But her optimism about the program and the future it offers her children was badly damaged a couple of weeks ago. Her husband died very suddenly. It’s not clear just how. There are no autopsies in Viyèt. The funeral was very expensive. Two of her little boys sold their goats to buy a sack of cement for the tomb, but most of the money for the coffin and the food to serve at the wake was borrowed.

The very progress she had made in her neighbors’ eyes created a financial trap. Whereas previously they might have helped her bury her husband as quickly and as cheaply as possible, her improved status created expectations. They convinced her to buy and expensive coffin, even though she had to buy it with credit. They made her feel as though she needed to provide lots of food and drink to those who came to the wake, even though she didn’t have the cash to buy much of anything. And now Saliciane has no idea yet how she will pay it back.

But her problems are, of course, much deeper than merely the expenses she was not prepared to make. This is true, even if we we only look at the economic side of her loss. “I feel like my arms and legs have been broken,” she told us. “He was the one who worked in the fields. He was the one who took care of our animals. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

She will have to pull herself together. Her children depend on her. And CLM will be there with her. We aren’t yet sure just how extensive our extra help will be. But we will surely give her a hand.

With one of her boys and her late husband, together with their cow

The following is taken from an interview a did while selecting new members of CLM in Tomonn. There are about 40 Haitian gourds to the Dollar.

“My name is Madan Canot I must be 50 or 55 years old. Canot and I live with our youngest daughter in a two-room house that overlooks Bay Tourib, in the mountains above Tomonn.

“I had nine children, four with my first husband and five with Canot, but only four are left. The others all died.

“The hardest to lose was my oldest boy. Canot has been unable to work almost since I met him, over twenty years ago. But my boy always did his best for me. When he saw that his stepfather and I were stuck living in a cornstalk lean-to, he saved his money and bought me a little house. He even began paying to send his little sister to school. Then he told me he was moving to Pòtoprens to find work so that he could really support me. I never heard from him after that. Next thing I knew, someone told me that he was dead. I sold my last farmland to pay for his funeral.

“Without him, and with a husband who can’t work, things are really hard. I go out in the mornings and work in other people’s fields. I can earn 25 or 35 gourds for a half-day’s work. That’s what we live on. Or that and what we can make out of gifts our neighbors give us. Sometimes someone gives us some money or a cup or two of food. Last month, the local peasant association gave me beans to plant in the little plot behind my house. If the harvest is good, I’ll be able to sell some.

“We get by with what we have, but I’m sorry for my girl. She’ll finish primary school this year, but there’s no way I can send her any farther.”

When I last wrote about Marie, we weren’t sure how we could help her. She had sold not only the three goats that we had given her, but a fourth that she had bought with savings she had scratched out of her weekly stipend as well. She did it, she said, to pay an old debt. Although, she was telling us that the small commerce we had helped her establish was functional, we couldn’t tell whether to believe her. There were aspects of her explanations that weren’t matching up with the other information we had. At the same time, we didn’t want to lose her from the program. Her family’s need was too clear. We felt trapped.

But as our director, Gauthier, is fond of saying, CLM always finds a way. And we were determined to find one for Marie Paul. The first thing we needed to do was establish as accurately as possible what her situation was.

We asked her to bring the cash and merchandise that are in her small business home and to allow Edrès, the president of Mannwa’s Village Assistance Committee, to establish how much of the original 1500 gourds we had invested was still there. She had just finished selling the charcoal she made, so she had no merchandise, but she brought the money. Edrès counted 1350 gourds. She had been making money, but also living from the revenue. Her expenses had begun eating into her capital, but hadn’t done much damage just yet.

We next needed to figure out whether she had really eliminated her debt. If we helped her pull herself back together, but she felt forced to hand over whatever she earned to the loan shark, we would have helped him, not her. So we sought contact with the deputy who had, according to Marie, accompanied the loan shark and convinced the shark to declare the debt paid. Though we could not find him, Edrès managed to talk to him for us. He confirmed that Marie was clear.

So it looked as though Marie was in shape to start over again. We would need to find a way to help her replace at least some of the goats she had sold, and to protect her commerce from further deterioration. And we would need to do so without appearing to provide her with additional resources. It could hurt our relationship with the other members in Mannwa if they saw that the one of them who breaks our rules receives more support than those who follow them do.

But her case manager, Martinière, had a resource available that could help. Since entering the program, Marie Paul had been receiving an income replacement stipend of 300 gourds per week, just like all members do. We provide the stipend for the first six months of the program, and the logic is simple. Before we start working with a family, they are doing something to earn a living, however minimal that living is. They may be malnourished and wretchedly poor, but if nothing at all had been coming in, they would have died already. In order for them to spend time protecting and developing whatever new assets we give them, they can have to give up some of the other stuff they were doing before. This leaves a new gap in their livelihood before their new assets are able to earn them anything. That gap could force them to think of liquidating their new assets right away. To protect those new assets, we give them a very small sum, only about $1 per day.

Marie had been ducking Martinière for weeks, so he had not been able to give her this stipend. When he first re-established contact, he refused to give her the money. He wanted to be clear about how we would help her resolve her problems first. As a result, he had more than 4000 gourds of her money in his hands. That could go a long way towards replacing the goats if we wanted to use it that way.

But we still had a problem. The money was hers. As a CLM member she was entitled to it. But we couldn’t afford to hand it over to her and create even the appearance that she was receiving extra help. It was critical that both she and her fellow members understand that we were taking money we had already assigned to her, the same money that they had been using to supplement their own household incomes, and were proposing to help her use it to start herself back on the road forward.

So Martinière held a meeting about Marie with the CLM members of Mannwa. Edrès attended as well. Martinière wanted their input about our continuing to work with Marie. Assuming that they would agree with that much, he wanted explain to them that he planned to buy her new goats with money that is already hers. She was not getting extra help, except in the sense that Martinière would help her spend her own money.

Apparently, there was quite a discussion, but most of the women felt strongly that we should do what we can for Marie. They understand the 300-gourd stipend well, so they were able to recognize what Martinière wanted to try to do. He decided to move forward.

Friday, he bought Marie two new goats. They are bigger and better developed than any of the three we had originally given her because he bought two goats instead of three. He felt that she had already lost too much time, that she needed her goats to start producing for her right away. The two her purchased should be ready to become pregnant very soon.

Marie also reports that the father of her children has promise to buy her a third this summer, after he harvests his latest crop of beans. That would do a lot to get her ready to make progress again, but we’ll see. She’s gotten herself into trouble before by counting on beans.

Martinière gave her the remainder of the money he was holding for her so that she could invest it in her business. The last time I crossed paths with her she was hiking down from Mannwa with a load of avocados on her head. One of her smaller boys was in front of her with a smaller load on his. Avocados are heavy, and the road from Mannwa to the nearest market is long, rocky, and steep. So there’s no question of her willingness to work hard. She has about a month of her weekly stipend left, as well.

So maybe things will turn out all right. It may be troubling to feel as though we aren’t certain whether we’ve gotten to the bottom of things. But we just have to take a chance.

One problem that Haiti shares with a lot of places is violence against women. It can take all sorts of forms, from subtle to non-too-subtle, from bad but mild to life-threateningly severe.

This violence presents a significant task for CLM. Even if we were to set aside fundamental principles like equal rights and fair treatment of women, even if we were to resist carrying out what could seem like a feminist agenda, the simple truth is that violence against women is a major source of the extreme poverty we’re trying to fight. Until women control reliable, independent sources of income, we will be unable to help them ensure that their families eat regularly and that their children are in school. In Haiti, women are typically the ones who take ultimate responsibility for the well being of the members of their household. Whether it is the woman or the man who manages to bring resources into the home – whether in cash or commodities – it is the women who turn those resources into food on the table and any other purchases that need to be made.

In homes where the women have to protect those resources from violent men who have their own agendas, the family suffers. Children get less to eat. Money for important other expenses gets diverted. Given that women are left with the responsibility for their children’s well being, they must have the power to make decisions about whatever resources are available. Even if violence against them were wrong for no other reason, it would still be dangerous because of the way it threatens a family’s livelihood. We take any violence against our members very seriously, and violence perpetrated by husbands is no exception.

So when Martinière received a call on Thursday night that Ifania, one of his members in an area called Nan Mango, had been beaten badly by her husband, we decided we had to act. We couldn’t go that night. The road to Nan Mango is hard in the best of times. It would have been almost unmanageable at night. But early Friday morning, four of us got on our motorcycles and went up to see what we could do. This delegasyon, or “delegation,” included Martinière, Orweeth, a very senior case manager named Lissage, and me. When we arrived, we found Ifania and Grenn, her husband, with over two dozen other community members of all ages, in front of the small straw shack where the couple lives with their two little boys. A few of the neighborhood’s older men suggested that we all sit around under the roof of the new house that CLM is helping the couple build. The support posts are up, and the tin roofing is in place. Only the walls remain to be filled in. It made for a nice, shaded meeting space.

Lissage did most of the talking for our team. In Creole, his name means “he’s wise,” or “he’s polite,” but everyone just calls him “S.” S explained that we do not permit our CLM members to behave badly towards their family members or neighbors, but that we will not accept their suffering any sort of abuse, either. CLM members are our sisters, our mothers, and our daughters as well. We stand by them. He said that we had come because we heard that Ifania had been beaten. We could see where her face and arm were swollen. We wanted to get to the bottom of things. He said that each would have a chance to tell their side of the story.

Ifania explained that the problem started when she discovered that 500 gourds she had hidden in her shack were missing. The discovery came, she said, just after Grenn had asked her for the same sum to help him get to Pòtoprens, where he had been offered a week of construction work. When she told him that she couldn’t give him the money, he got mad, but initially said nothing. Shortly thereafter, the money disappeared. When she noticed her loss, she looked through the house and discovered that not just 500, but 1500, gourds were missing. This was money she had been saving by putting aside a small portion of the 300-gourd stipend we give to members each week for the program’s first six months.

When she made the discovery, she confronted Grenn, but he denied having taken anything. She later went across the road to his mistress’s house, and asked her for the money. The mistress, rather than telling Ifania that she didn’t know what she was talking about, said that when a man gives her money, it’s hers to keep. That’s all that Ifania needed to hear, because it confirmed her suspicion that her husband had used some of the money as a gift for his other woman.

She started screaming, raising a ruckus. Grenn came and tried to drive her out of the other woman’s yard. In the struggle, Grenn hit her in the face. In the course of dragging her back to their house, he hurt her arm. When they got back, he continued to hit her, pushing her into and knocking down their shack. He then ran off to spend the night with his stepbrother. She found a kind, older neighbor, who helped her stand the shack back up so that she and her little boys would have a place to sleep.

Grenn’s version was different. He said that Ifania was making a lot of noise over nothing, that he hadn’t beaten her, that, on the contrary, she had fallen while trying to attack the other woman, and that she either lost the money or still had it because he didn’t know anything about it. He is the man, he said. He doesn’t take money from his wife. He gives it to her. He is the one who brought her the support posts and the planks that are being used to construct her new house. (CLM only provides the roofing material and a little cement.) He also has added a pig and a goat to the animals we have given her, and he takes care of both her animals and his own.

I’m making it all sound clearer and more orderly than it was. There were multiple interruptions. Three or four people would talk at once. A couple of times, Grenn seemed to want to leave, but S would call him back. Several times, Grenn would start shouting his defenses and explanations while others were talking. Once, S started to get fed up. He told Orweeth to go down the road, where he’d get a cellphone signal, and call the nearest justice of the peace. “Ask him,” he said, “whether we should bring Grenn to jail in Chanbo or Domon.” Grenn settled right down, and a couple of older men asked Orweeth to hold off.

After about an hour of discussion, S announced his decision. Grenn would have to give Ifania 1500 gourds. His reasoning was interesting. As I discovered later, he was completely convinced that Grenn had taken the money, but he said he couldn’t prove that Grenn had stolen it. He was careful to say several times that he was not accusing Grenn of theft.

Nevertheless, he argued that Grenn was responsible for its loss. After all, he explained, by taking a mistress right across the road from his wife’s house, Grenn was asking for trouble, especially since he wasn’t able to provide for Ifania and her children well. S said that he hadn’t come to tell anyone that they can’t have two or three or four wives, but you have to be able to give them what they need to live well. He cited a Haitian proverb, “Chenn grangou pa jwe.” That means, “a hungry dog doesn’t play around.” It was, he said, only natural that Ifania, living in poverty with their two boys, would be especially sensitive to signs that some of Grenn’s money was going somewhere else. If Ifania hadn’t been provoked by this – as, he said, any woman would – she would not have gotten angry enough to lose track of the money.

In addition to giving her the money, Grenn would have to take Ifania to the local hospital for a check-up, just to be sure the beating did her no serious harm. This would be his chance to take personal responsibility for her health.

Grenn accepted the ruling, and said he would sell his pig to give Ifania the money that very day. Here S did something especially smart: He refused to let Grenn make the sale, realizing that the pig was an asset that Grenn had already committed to supporting Ifania and her kids. Selling it to give her cash would not help her. Instead, S convinced Ifania to let Grenn owe her the money, paying her out of his earnings when he returned from Pòtoprens.

What was most striking in it all was the authority that S was able to wield. He has no official status in Nan Mango, or anywhere else for that matter, but he was accepted as judge and jury. One can’t help but feeling that if he had hiked up the hill on his own, things would have been different. But instead he came to a secluded, rural neighborhood at the head of a team of four men on motorcycles.

“Gwo ponyèt” means “big fist.” It’s used to refer to a show of force. My last words, after the matter was settled, and the only words I said at the meeting, were that as a foreigner it was not my place to make decisions for Haitians, but that my team’s job was to support families who are in a bad way. I added that if I needed to come up the mountain with four or five guys to do that, I would. If I needed ten or twenty or thirty, I’d do that too. It was meant to be taken as a threat, and I spoke it looking Grenn right in the eyes. I said that, as far as I understood things, he and Ifania had come to an agreement, but that nothing like this better happen again.

We then got up to leave, and were careful to shake hands with Grenn and wish him well. We may be naïve, but we are hoping that Ifania and he can patch things up. He and Ifania have been together for seven years, and Martinière has said that Grenn was previously one of the most cooperative of the husbands he works with. He helps take care of Ifania’s animals together with the one or two that he has added to their stock and is cheerfully helping her build her house. Martinière hasn’t seen signs of previous abuse, and none were mentioned at our informal trial. It is certain that Ifania will have a better chance to succeed with a partner’s help, so if, through a combination of coaxing and intimidation, we can get Grenn back on her side, it is likely to be for the best.

CLM is a comprehensive approach to poverty alleviation. We emphasize helping our members generate reliable incomes, but we aim more broadly. We want to help them improve almost every aspect of their lives. The women who graduate are not simply wealthier than they were when we selected them. They are different. They are confident and forward-looking, health-conscious and well informed.

This transformation involves a lot of learning. We teach them to take care of their assets, of course, and to use those assets to make money. But we also teach them about ten essential health and life-skills issues – like good nutrition, reproductive health, and hygiene – that can significantly improve their families’ well-being.

And that’s not all. Though we are not able to offer comprehensive literacy services, we help the women learn, at the very least, to sign their name. This is less a question of literacy than of dignity. Those who cannot sign in Haiti mark their acceptance of documents with a thumbprint. Though our case managers handle this process as respectfully as possible, it can’t help but be demeaning.

A few can already sign when they join the program, but not very many. And some who haven’t ever been to school nevertheless learn very quickly. Case managers typically make members buy an inexpensive copybook and a pencil. Each week they prepare a page or two of homework for the member by printing her name a couple of times across the top of each page. The member’s assignment for the following week is to copy it on the lines below her case manager’s model, filling up the page. This very simple procedure is enough to get most women signing their name within a few months. They then turn to their husband’s name, their children’s names, or to numbers: whatever interests them most.

But for some women, learning to write their name presents a significant challenge. Copying something as complex as an entire name is well beyond what they can do at first. Case managers start them with a syllable at a time, or even just a letter. And even this can be a challenge for some.

This brings me to Cenicia. Orweeth, her case manager, has been trying, with very little success, to help her write her name for almost six months. The day I visited her with him, she presented him with her well-done homework: two pages of beautiful little c’s. It turned out that one of her children had done the work for her, which only shows that she’s frustrated enough to want an easy way out of the difficulty. When we asked her to make a c in front of us, she couldn’t do it.

So I decided to sit back and watch as Orweeth offered a writing lesson. He drew a line of c’s across the top of a page, and asked Cenicia to copy one. What she drew looked like something between a u and a v. The second row of letters in the photo below shows what I mean. Each time she put her pencil to the page, she would make a downward stroke, slightly curved, almost like the opening of a parentheses. Once she got to the lowest point of the parenthesis, she would start back upward to make the other side of the u. Each time she started to turn back upward, Orweeth tried to stop her. He apparently imagined that her parenthesis was the c, and that the problem was that she was extending what looked to him to be the bottom part of the c too far, bringing the line back upward. Again and again, he told her with increasing exasperation not to bring the line back upward, not to close the c’s opening. Again and again, she did the same thing. Orweeth wasn’t getting anywhere, but he was getting frustrated, so I asked him to step aside. The photo below shows the work that I then did with her:

As I watched was Cenicia was doing, I made what I thought was a discovery. She was intent on trying to reproduce the c’s half-moon shape. That was, in fact, the way we had been explaining how to make a c: simply trace a half moon. But each time she put her pencil to the page, she made her first move downward. Once she had done so, she had no choice but to turn the line back upwards. Otherwise, the half moon would be incomplete. So instead of telling her to stop turning the line back upwards, I asked her to start by making a line that moved back from the point where she placed it on the page. Having done so, I reasoned, she would be forced to turn the line back to the front, and would thus have her c.

My plan failed. She continued to make little u’s. These are the ones across the second row of the photo. Apparently, my suggestion that she make the first move backwards didn’t make sense to her.

So I thought again for a moment, and then decided that, rather than giving her a new instruction, I would pose a problem. I asked her whether she could see that, while the c’s I made were open on the right, hers were open on the top. They were facing different directions. She said she could see the difference. So then I asked her how she could make her c’s point in the same direction as mine.

Now it was her turn to think. What she then did surprised me. She started her pencil at the rear-most point of the half moon and made the top half of the c with one line. Then she returned with her pencil to the point she had started from, and made the lower half of the c. In the photo, the first one that she made correctly is the fifth one from the top in the left-hand column, and she made all the ones beneath it. We prepared a page for her to do as homework, and we’ll see next week whether she’s on the right track, but she seems to have broken through something that was getting in her way.

Whatever Celicia learned from the experience, I certainly learned more. A human being is not a photocopier. Celicia’s work could not succeed as mindless reproduction. Until she started to grasp the essential points of the simple image we were asking her to make, the task of making even her name’s first letter was beyond her. Time will tell whether I’ll be able to teach Orweeth what I think I learned and whether that lesson, in turn, will help Celicia move forward.

Our initial selection process failed to identify Marie Paul. I’ve written about her before. (See: Field Notes.) She just didn’t show up on our radar screen. The residents of Mannwa who attended the initial Participatory Wealth Ranking meeting didn’t mention her. That’s not uncommon. The extremely poor families we work with are frequently forgotten. They are not considered members of their communities. They don’t matter to anyone.

Our case managers then come across these otherwise invisible families as they go door-to-door, visiting the households who are identified in the meeting as the community’s poor. The team will see a little straw shack that doesn’t appear on the map produced by the Wealth Ranking process, and they’ll take a look. If they find someone inside, they’ll start asking questions. They’ll fill out paperwork if they think the house’s residents might qualify for our program.

But Marie Paul lives far enough from the families that were on our list that we didn’t come across her house. It’s a little bit hidden, sitting on the back side of a ridge, right behind a small church. We learned about her in conversations with Edrès, the man who eventually became the president of the Mannwa Village Assistance Committee. He asked us to look in on her, explaining that her family was in miserable shape. He thought she could probably qualify. Since he had already shown in a number of ways that he understood our program’s goals, we took his advice and went to see her.

Marie Paul has six kids by her first husband, who died a few years ago. She has a seventh, still an infant, with a man who abandoned them shortly after the baby was born. The kids aren’t in school. At the time we met her, she wasn’t able to feed them every day. Selecting her was an easy decision.

After she entered the program, she seemed to be doing well. She seemed to really jump into its logic. She was taking good care of her goats and managing her food stipend well. She was keeping up close contact with other members in the area too, behaving as though they were new members of her family. If we had a criticism for her, it was that she was managing the stipend too frugally, investing too much of it her family’s future rather than in food for herself and her kids. That’s a common problem among highly motivated new members.

Then one Wednesday evening, Martinière, the Mannwa case manager, came back late to our base in Saut d’Eau in a little bit of a panic. He hadn’t been able to find Marie Paul that day. When he passed by her house, already late in the afternoon, he saw three of her kids, obviously hungry. The baby was crawling in the yard, putting whatever it came across into its mouth.

And he had heard a disturbing rumor. A couple of other CLM members told him that Marie Paul had sold her goats and cashed out her small business. She was without assets. He had spoken to Edrès, who said he had heard the same thing. Edrès added that he hadn’t been able to speak to her yet, but had told one of her older boys that he needed to talk to her.

Our first need was to speak with Marie Paul. We didn’t think it could wait a week for Martinière`s next visit, but he had a full schedule, so I went to Mannwa a few days later, hoping to find her. I didn’t. Since we had a refresher training planned for all members, we decided to focus on getting her to the training. I left a message with Edrès, asking him to let her know that we were concerned about her and that we really needed to talk to her. We very much wanted to see her at the training.

Fortunately, she decided to come. And she told us the following story:

She and her first husband had struggled to send their oldest child to school, and she somehow continued to send the boy after her husband died. But when it was time for him to take the official primary school graduation exam, she was out of money. She owed the school 1750 gourds, less than $45, and its director was holding her boy’s exam ID in lieu of payment. The boy, by then in his late teens, wouldn’t be able to take the exam unless she could pay the bill.

So she borrowed the money from a neighbor, hoping to repay it with a bean harvest. Unfortunately, rats ruined her garden. As time passed, and she had no hope of paying her debt, she disappeared. She moved to Lachapèl, to the west, hoping she’d have a better chance of finding the money she’d need. When her lender from Mannwa found her there, she turned to a loan shark in Lachapèl who said he would lend her the money. By then, she was together with her second husband. He had just planted a crop of pigeon peas, and he told her she could sell the harvest to pay back the loan. So she took the loan and repaid her debt even though she had to agree to 100% interest every six months. Having repaid her first lender, she was able to return to her home in Mannwa.

But once again, rats ate her harvest. And then the man left her, and she was left without a way to pay back the loan. Interest kept accumulating. By the time she joined CLM just a couple of years later, her original debt had grown to more than 8000 gourds.

Then, somehow, the loan shark discovered that she was part of some program that had put assets, and even some cash, into her hands. By then, she had the three goats we had given her along with a fourth she had purchased with savings from her weekly food stipend. He went to Mannwa together with a local deputy to get his money back. He took her goats, she said, and sold them for 6000 gourds. The deputy convinced him to call things square. The debt was thus erased, but Marie Paul was back to zero. She added that her small business was still intact.

The next time Martinière had a free day, he decided to hike up to Mannwa to see her. I went along. Though she expected us, we didn’t find her at home. Her son told us that she was down in Laplenn, in the valley behind Mannwa. We went looking for her, and found her there. She was supervising some charcoal production. She said she had nine sacks of ready for sale, five in a warehouse in the market in Difayi, on the nearest major road below Mannwa, and four more she’d be moving to market in the next days. It would be worth something like 1800 gourds, already a nice profit over the 1500 gourds she started with.

This is where things get complicated. We had asked Edrès to find out what he could, and he came back with a different story about her goats. He said that she had borrowed money for her child’s funeral. One of them had died a few years previously, struck by lightening. The rest of the story corresponded more or less with what she had said, except that he added that he had heard that the loan shark had come to her armed, threatening her life.

And we had also spoken to one of her kids, who led us to think that the lender had not seized the goats, but had pressured her to pay him. The boy led us to believe that she was the one who sold the goats. He also told us that she had gone down the mountain a few days previously with one sack of charcoal, not five.

We couldn’t be sure that Marie was telling us the truth. But we needed to know just what her situation was. Otherwise, we would not be able to help her. So Martinière told her to have the proceeds from her charcoal sales ready to show him on his next visit, but when we went by as scheduled on the following Wednesday, she wasn’t there.

She appears to be ducking us. And we can’t help someone we can’t find.

We’re not yet sure what is next. We are waiting for the Mannwa Village Assistance Committee’s next meeting, scheduled for the last Wednesday of this month. We have asked Edrès to have the deputy there. We want to hear his side of the story. And we plan to come with one of the senior case managers, a man trained as a lawyer. We need to get to the bottom of things.

If we find out that Marie is lying, we could kick her out of the program. I am a former college dean of students, who sometimes had to deal with young people unwilling or unable to respect our school’s rules, and so I sometimes have that inclination. At school, it was often the right thing to do, though never pleasant.

But that just doesn’t work for CLM. Marie is in the program because her family desperately needs it. Her children are hungry. They don’t eat even once a day.

At the same time, we can’t just replace whatever assets she’s lost. Apart for the fact that we our limited by our budget, we can not afford to have members think that they can do what they want with their assets because we’ll always just buy them new ones.

So we will talk to the committee and see what they think. If Marie has lost all of her assets, we’ll need to find an approach that will help her start over again. Martinière will have his work cut out for him.

Ann

Ann is a CLM member from Giyòm. We first met her as she was being selected for the program. (See: Introducing Ann.) At the time she was struggling just to feed her seven kids and her disabled husband with the couple of dollars she could earn each week cutting gwann, or scrub palm, and selling it to people who would weave it into various household goods: sleeping mats; saddles and saddle bags for horses, donkeys, or mules; and produce sacks. She told us that a woman always has something cooking, but her options seemed in fact to be very limited.

Things have begun to change for Ann and her family, but change isn’t easy nor is it swift. Ann chose goat rearing and pig rearing as her two enterprises, but when a Bothar grant to CLM made cows available to twenty of our most needy members, Ann received one of them with her goats instead of the pig. The cow is now pregnant, as is one of the goats, but neither has given birth yet. So they are a long way from generating income.

Normally, that would not be a serious problem. Many of our members use their savings clubs to accumulate a lump sum that they can then use for small commerce. Each week, members put part of their food allowance into a pot. One of the members then received the whole amount. It’s a way for members to organize a lump sum of cash. Thus, even if members chose two different kinds of animal husbandry as their two enterprises, they can nevertheless start a small commerce, too. That’s important, because commerce can bring them at least a small income they can count on every day.

But when Ann’s turn came to receive her club’s 1500-gourd pot, she used it to buy a third goat. She didn’t want to start her commerce yet. “I can’t carry stuff on my head, and I don’t have a horse. And on the mountaintop where I live, no one will come to buy stuff I try to sell from my home. So it’s better for me to save up until I can get a horse.”

The problem is, that she has been in the program since December, and her seven children still don’t get even one meal every day. She can’t count on her husband to farm. He was almost paralyzed with back pain when we first met him, and though he’s recovered remarkably, he can’t do hard work. “I’m just glad,” Ann says, “that he can take care of my cow. He can’t do anything in the field.”

Ann has been receiving her 300-gourd (about $7.50) weekly food stipend from CLM, but she hasn’t been spending it on food. She’s been sending half of it to her savings club, and depositing another 100 gourds in her Fonkoze savings account. “I’m saving to buy a horse.” Just 50 gourds remain to buy food with each week. That’s about $1.25. She still makes a few dollars selling gwann, but that leaves her with less than $8.50 a week with which to feed herself, her husband, and their seven kids. It’s just not enough.

She knows it’s a problem, but she’s not willing to risk postponing her purchase of a horse by using more of her food stipend to feed her kids. “Nou oblije reziye nou,” she says. That means, “We have to resign ourselves.” She’s so forward-looking that she’s will to look past the misery in front of her every day. The one child she had in school has now been sent home for non-payment three times since the beginning of the year. “He’s just going to have to wait until next year,” she explains.

For the CLM program, Ann’s case is difficult. We are reluctant to interfere with her ambitions, but we can’t sit and watch her invest in her future when she and her kids have nothing to eat. So we cancelled her savings club after its ten members each had a chance to take home the pot. We hope this will enable Ann to spend more money on food. The gwann season is coming to an end, so she’ll need to have some income she can rely on.

>>//Her Cow//<<

One thing that we know for certain is that our CLM team cannot do everything that our members will need in the short time we’ll spend with them. We train them to generate income through management of a few simple assets, we give them the assets they need to get started, we follow them closely with weekly visits for eighteen months as they begin to manage their affairs, we educate them regarding a few crucial personal and familial health and live-skills issues, and we ensure both that they have access to free medical care and that they know how to use that access.

It sounds like a lot. I suppose it is a lot. But the economic and social facts that have kept our members in extreme poverty are both stubborn and complex. Achieving the near-perfect record of success that CLM has achieved so far requires that our members get support from multiple directions, not just from one case manager. They need support that is always there for them, not only during weekly half-hour visits. They have no phones, so help must closer than a phone call away.

CLM starts as a comprehensive intervention into a family’s life that is targeted to reach those families who really needed it. But the challenge we face demands that we transform ourselves into something greater, into a community development initiative that fundamentally changes the social dynamics in the places where we work. That is the purpose behind the Village Poverty Reduction Committees. We help leaders in each village build committees that support our efforts and thus work towards eradicating extreme poverty in the communities they live in.

The first step towards forming these committees is selecting the people that will serve on them. That process begins while we are in the final stages of selecting new CLM members. We ask each prospective member to tell us whom she turns to in her community when she has a serious problem. We ask them whether there are community leaders whom they can ask for advice or for small gifts of food or money when hunger or sickness threatens to overwhelm their homes. We then develop a list of potential committee members for each community, trying to add key local actors – such as school principals, veterinary workers, successful market women, and elected officials – whenever we can. Our case managers then hand-deliver an invitation to an organizational meeting to each potential member, explaining CLM in general and the role of a Village Committee in particular in some detail.

At the first meeting, a case manager leads the session as CLM members elect the person they’d like to serve as the committee’s president. Once the president has been chosen, he or she takes over the meeting, leading members as they elect a secretary and a treasurer. They also elect two representatives from among the CLM members to serve on the committee. After that, the committee will meet once each month to discuss members’ problems and work out solutions. Case managers working in the area attend the meetings as consultants.

But the majority of a committee’s work happens outside these meetings. Its members become resources, helping CLM members protect and manage their assets, aiding them resolve conflicts with neighbors, and providing emergency assistance. Say, for example, a CLM member, through thoughtlessness or inexperience, lets her goat into a neighbor’s garden. That neighbor might decide to kill the goat. A committee member would help the CLM member convince the neighbor to charge a reasonable fine instead. A committee member might lend another woman a mule or a horse so she can get herself, her husband, or her child to the hospital in an emergency. Or maybe he or she would work to convince a local school principal to accept school fees in small monthly payments, rather than in a lump sum, to help a CLM member send her kids to school.

What’s crucial in all this is that committee members are members of the community they serve. The committee structure gives these men and women a way to organize what have previously been piecemeal efforts to help their neighbors, and it gives our program a way to organize a substantial presence in each community, one that will remain long after our staff’s activities have been completed.

The photos below were taken at organizational meetings for Village Committees in a range of communities. They were held in a church, a cockfighting ring, a community school, and in someone’s backyard.

//Our case manager, Martinière, explains the purpose of the committee to members in Mannwa//

//CLM members in Dega listen to an explanation of the voting procedure//

//CLM members in Byeneme, Boukankola, and Dega vote for their committees’ leadership//

//The new president of the Byeneme committee explains the election to members//