Wislande Racius lives with her partner and their three children in Gwomòn, a small corner of Dezam, a large rural section of Verèt Commune. She and her family have been part of the CLM program since December.

Before they joined the program, she and the kids were living with her mother and a brother. She didn’t have her own place. She was contributing to the household whenever she could with a small business selling bleach crystals in small bags to folks planning to do laundry. She had about 1500 gourds — something like $15 right now — in the business, money that her partner gave her. He did farming, working sometimes as a day-laborer and sometimes getting paid larger sums for completed jobs.

During their first weeks in the program, they moved to the home of the godfather of one of her daughters, but the man grew tired of their presence in his home, and started to show they were no longer welcome. “He would make fun of us for being mountain people. We had to move.” So her husband quickly put up a small house on a plot of land he had begun to buy through a kind of rent-to-own arrangement.

She asked Fonkoze to give her goats and a pig as her two enterprises, and she got the two goats right away. Before her case manager bought the pig, however, they had a serious talk. Pigs have been dying a lot lately. The CLM team has had trouble getting all the necessary vaccinations for the pigs it distributes. So Daphnée, the case manager, was reluctant to provide a pig that was likely to die. The result of their conversation was that Wislande asked for a third goat in place of the pig. One of the nanny-goats gave birth to a small buck, but it did not survive. All three of the nannies seem healthy, however, and she expects more offspring in the months to come. But though she’s excited by the prospect, she isn’t really sure what she wants to do with additional goats. She doesn’t yet have a plan.

She also wants to get back into business. She hasn’t been selling bleach for a while now. But she has two problems. On one hand, her home doesn’t yet have a door. She is reluctant to go too far without the security of knowing there is a door she can lock. On the other, her youngest child is just a year old, and now that she and the family are in their own house, she no longer has someone obvious to leave the baby with when she goes out. “If your children are young, you have to find someone to leave them with.”

Yoline Dort lives in Ti Plas Mori, near the eastern edge of Dezam. She and her husband, Franslin, live in a small home with their one child.

Before they joined CLM, all the household’s income came from him. He struggled as a day-laborer, work that is both poorly paid and irregular. But things got harder and harder when Franslin became ill. Yoline isn’t sure what is wrong. She thinks that he was poisoned by a neighbor. But he was initially so weak that he couldn’t get out of bed. He’s has gotten a little bit better, but he cannot work yet. “Just the other day, he had to stop to rest three times just to walk to his mother’s house.” The mother’s house is just a block or so away.

His inability to work has impacted the family. Not only have they had much less to eat, but their boy missed a year of school because they could not pay the tuition.

Yoline chose goats and small commerce as her two enterprises. She received two goats from the program, and both are healthy. One already had a pair of kids.

She used the business capital that the program made available to start a business selling laundry products: soap, detergent, and bleach. She sells her merchandise twice-a-week at the large market in downtown Dezan, which is nearby. She can sell out her product in one or two visits to the market, so she is beginning to establish a good stream of income.

But that was actually the second business she started as part of CLM. She bought a sack of cooking charcoal with money from a food and transportation stipend she received during a three-day refresher training, and she sold it to neighbors by the bagful. She has been in the charcoal business ever since. The charcoal sells fast, and though the profit is small — especially with the price of a sack increasing because of the rainy season — she can count on it.

Between the two businesses, Yoline has been able to feed the family even without help from Franslin. She’s even been able to grow the business by participating in a sabotay, a kind of savings club popular in Haiti. She pays a hundred gourds into her club every day, and can plan with its organizer when she would like to receive her savings. She’s also confident that she’ll be able to send her boy to school once more come September. “They don’t ask me to pay the whole tuition at once. I will make payments throughout the year.”

She’s working on another source of income as well. With the program’s encouragement, she planted a small field of hot pepper plants. “My mother used to plant them, but this is the first time for me.” It is taking a lot of work, because she has to water them. The rains haven’t been enough. But when the peppers start ripening, she’ll have something additional she can bring for sale to the market each time she goes.

Mirome Agréus and her four children live in a beat-up two-room house that her older sister originally rented to send her own three children to school in downtown Dezam. The sister moved Mirome to the house when the latter had grown so sick that she could not take care of herself. Mirome’s partner had refused to take responsibility and had abandoned her and their children.

The sister took her to hospital after hospital. Mirome eventually spent three months at the Partners in Health University Hospital in Mibalè. When it was finally time to come to the house that had become her home, she could not find a motorcycle taxi willing to bring her from the place on the main road where the pick-up truck dropped her off up to the house. Motorcycle drivers didn’t want to carry someone so obviously sick. “My sister had to put me on her back and carry me.”

By then, the sister’s husband had left her. He felt she had spent too much of the couple’s money on Mirome. She was supporting herself, Mirome, and their seven children doing laundry for other families and selling used clothes.

That fact that neither of the women is from Kristan, the neighborhood of Dezam where they live, complicates a lot for Mirome. “We have no one here to take a problem to.” For one thing, she had no land that she could build a home on. Her case manager, Fabienne, talked to the members of the local committee of community leaders who volunteer to support CLM, and one of them was willing to sell Mirome a small piece of his land for the very-reduced price of 15,000 gourds.

But Mirome simply didn’t have the money. Her sister could give her 5000, but no more. So the CLM team found some extra funds and gave her the other 10,000. She still needs to build her house, and she lacks resources to buy the materials that she is required to provide, but here again the committee has begun to help her out. Various members have donated lumber she’ll be able to use as support posts.

She has received three young female goats from Fonkoze. Like Wislande, she initially wanted a pig, but also like Wislande she came to agree with her case manager that it wasn’t the right time to buy one. One of her goats even had a small kid when she first got it. And though that kid did not survive, Mirome thinks all three are pregnant now.

But even if she succeeds with her goats, she will have a problem. Goats won’t provide the steady trickle of income that she’ll need to manage her children’s daily needs. She will need eventually to establish a daily income, and her most likely path towards doing so is small commerce. But right now she’s reluctant to start one because her youngest child is still nursing. In principle, she could start one near to her new home, but she’s afraid people won’t buy from her because she still feels like a stranger there.

Claudenise Pierre lives in a small house just before the Kashima intersection on the major dirt road that leads to Kas and back towards the Artibonit River. She shares her house with her two children and a young cousin. “My cousin really just sleeps here. He leaves in the morning and spends the day doing any work he can find in the neighborhood.”

She returned to Haiti with her children a few years ago. They had been living with the children’s father in the Dominican Republic. He’s successful auto and motorcycle mechanic, but Claudenise decided to leave him while pregnant with their second child because of frequent abuse. “He would drink, and when he drank, he hit me.”

She went back to the shack that the family had abandoned when they moved to the DR. She did what she could to enclose it. “I wove walls out of straw and palm leaves. I covered holes with dried mud. I did what could.” She asked her cousin, then in his late teens, to sleep in the house with her and the children because she was afraid to be alone with them. She fed the children and sent her older child, the girl, to school by doing odd jobs, like shelling peanuts, sorting charcoal, or laundry. Keeping her daughter in school wasn’t easy. “I sent her, but sometimes she went hungry. I couldn’t give her anything to eat in the morning before she left. I didn’t have even five gourds if she wanted a snack.”

Everything changed for her after she joined the CLM program. She chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises. Like most families in the area where she lives, she lost her pig. It had begun growing well, however, and she was able to sell the meat for 5000 gourds. She used that money to buy peanuts, which she planted. She’s hoping to harvest them in August.

She had much better luck with her goats. Fonkoze gave her two females, and now she has seven. “I would have nine. One of my females just gave birth to two still-born bucks.”

She wants to continue keeping goats because they give her a way to ensure that she can always keep sending the children to school. In fact, the seventh goat was her own purchase.

The goats do not, however, ensure steady income. She cannot sell a goat to buy food every day or even every week. So, Claudenise wanted to start a small commerce as well. Small commerce was new for her, but her case manager encouraged her. She took money she saved from her weekly CLM stipend, and bought what she needed to begin selling peanut butter on bread or kasav, which is a Haitian flatbread made from manioc, in front of a nearby clinic. She also sells groceries.

Together, her various products are keeping the family fed and allowing her to grow. She saved money through the first year-long cycle of her savings and loan association. When that cycle ended, and a new one was ready to start, she decided to save with three separate memberships. Two are for her, and one is for her girl. She plans to buy a cow with the money she’ll save in her two shares, and her daughter’s share will help her ensure that the girl always has what she needs for school.

Nicole Olman lives with her partner and their two younger children just down the road from Claudenise. Her older boy, now just 16, left home earlier this year to seek work in the Dominican Republic.

When Nicole joined the CLM program, she was struggling. “I didn’t have anything, anything at all. The day the supervisor first came to my house, I was barefoot. I had bought sandals for my children, but I didn’t have money left over to buy them for me.”

The children’s father went around doing odd jobs for the family’s neighbors, but Nicole had no income herself. “I was just sitting there.”

When she realized that she might have a chance to join CLM, she was delighted. The program had already worked with other families nearby, so when they came by her house to ask questions, she knew what it was about. “I was so happy. I told them I didn’t have anything. That they could ask around. If anyone told them I owned stuff, it was just to keep me from the program.”

Like Claudenise, Nicole chose goats and a pig, and like Claudenise, she had no luck with the pig. “My first one died. Then I bought a second one and it died, too.” And also like Claudenise, she’s done better with her goats. She now has ten.

Much of her progress has depended on a small commerce she started with money she borrowed from her savings and loan association. She initially tried selling basic groceries — rice, flour, oil, sugar, and the like — but it didn’t work well. Too many people would buy on credit. So she switched to seasonings and moved her business to the local markets. She sells garlic, leeks, bouillon cubes, hot peppers, onions, etc. She goes to Kas on Mondays, and to Tomond on Thursdays. “People don’t expect to buy seasonings on credit, and everything you sell at the market is for cash.”

The business is profitable. It enables her to keep her family fed and to save money too. Every Monday, she contributes 1000 gourds to a savings club at the Kas market. When it’s her turn to collect, she’ll get 10,000 gourds. She plans to use 5000 to buy another goat and pour 5000 into her business. She also saves 750 gourds each week in two savings and loan associations. At the end of the associations’ year-long cycles, she plans to buy a second cow.

Things have accelerated for Nicole in recent months for a reason she did not anticipate. She was unhappy when her boy left for the Dominican Republic. He didn’t tell her he was going, having called her to let her know where he was only after he arrived. But he’s been sending money back to her since he first got there. “It isn’t always a lot, but he always sends something.” He’s doing really well. Much of what he sends is just to help her support the household, but he’s begun sending back larger sums as well, trusting her to invest for him.

Mirana Mauricette and her five boys live in Osedi, much farther off the main road than Nicole and Claudenise. It is a hike down a narrow path, along peanut fields and across a narrow ravine, from her home to the the secondary road that branches of the road to Kas in Kashima. Her youngest children, twins, are almost nine, and she hasn’t seen or heard from their father since he left for the Dominican Republic shortly after they were born. She’s had to raise and to support her children on her own.

Before she joined the CLM program, she managed to do so through a small business. Her mother’s cousin has a bakery in nearby Tyera. Five days each week, he would sell her 250 gourds of bread on credit, and she would carry it around her neighborhood, selling it from a basket on her head. She would bring him the money in the afternoon, after she finished her sales, and she would have 250 gourds for herself and her kids. When the CLM selection team came by her home in late 2019, her kids were evidently hungry.

The two goats that CLM gave Mirana are now nine, and she bought a second small boar to raise alongside the one the program gave her. Like the other women, she hopes to keep raising goats because they offer a convenient way to make sure she has funds to keep her kids in school. “The kids have to go to school. They have to keep making progress.”

Like the other two women, being able to build a small commerce has been more important than her livestock, as important as that is to her as well. She got started by using 2500 gourds she saved from money Fonkoze gave her to buy a tree. She turned the tree into charcoal, and it was enough to yield four loads.

When it was time to sell it, she told her case manager, Islande, that she wanted to take it to Pòtoprens. She knew she could get a better price. “Islande asked me whether I knew Pòtoprens, and I said that I didn’t. But she encouraged me to give it a try, and I sold the charcoal for 8000 gourds.

She invested that money in another business. Each Friday, she crosses the border into the DR, and takes a truck to the international market between Beladè in Haiti and Elias Piña. She buys housewares — like curtains, sheets, towels — but also clothes. Then she brings them back for sale at the markets in Kas and Tomond. The business is flourishing. She already bought a cow and a large hybrid billygoat out of her profits. She hopes the latter will improve her stock of animals.

When asked how she has made so much profit so quickly, Mirana credits her case manager. “She taught me to save money. I used to just spend everything I made. Now I know that, even if I have just five gourds, I can’t spend all of it.”

But she describes a second, perhaps more important, kind of help that Islande provides. She says that she’s always had business ideas. And every now and then, she’s had some money she could invest. But she’s always hesitated. Before she could decide, the money would have melted away. She was managing a lot of expenses. Islande provided encouragement she had never found anywhere. As soon as she has means, she can share her idea with Islande, and she quickly makes her investment.

And she’s determined to continue to make progress. Even though she won’t have Islande’s weekly visits anymore, she’s confident that she can. “I won’t go back to what I was. I have to be both mother and father to my kids.”

She’s planning to use her savings and loan association to save to buy another cow next year. The one she has is pregnant, so she could soon have a small herd. And she’s getting ready to return to work on the home that she built with the program’s help. “It’s made of palm wood. I don’t want to wait for it to collapse on me. I’ve been following the price of cement, and I’m beginning to collect rocks.” She hopes to replaces the wooden walls with ones of stones and blocks, and to cover the floor with cement soon.

Béatrice lives with her five children in Kamas, a community well off the main road that leads north out of Gwomòn towards Pòdpè. Abandoned by the children’s father, the job of caring for her children has been all her own. Before she joined the program, she would borrow money from a woman who herself borrowed it from a microfinance institution. Béatrice would use it to buy plantains from the farmers around her, bringing them to market for sale. “I could make a little profit after I paid my friend back. And I would also take home any single plantains that broke off the bunches. We eat them.”

But the situation of the woman she was borrowing from changed. She no longer had anything she could lend Béatrice. So Béatrice’s life became much more difficult. Though she was used to being able to feed the children every day, the family was now going hungry often, and one of Béatrice’s children was beginning to show signs of malnutrition.

In the couple of months since she joined the program, things have started to improve. She’s been using most of her food stipend to buy food, and the family’s eating better. “You might not be able to make rice, but you can make cornmeal.” She used 1000 of the 1500 gourds she collected from the savings club she’s in with other CLM members to pay money she owed at her children’s school, and used the other 500 gourds to buy plantains, so she’s back in business. She still owes the school another 1000 gourds, however, and she doesn’t have the money right now, so she’s not out of the woods yet.

On Friday, Béatrice came to the livestock market in downtown Gwomòn. The CLM team was buying goats, and two of them were for her. She’s excited to have goats to raise. When she joined the program, she owned nothing but a single chicken. “I have already built my goat shed.” Her plans for the goats are clear, too. “I’ll take care of them, and if they produce young, I’ll have a way to pay to send my kids to school.”

The other asset she chose is small commerce, and she has no doubt how she will invest the money the program makes available. “I’ll buy plantains. That’s the business I know.”

Ketline lives with four of her children in Ba Kamas, a long ride on a secondary road through a corner of northern Gwomòn. She and her partner had seven children, but the man abandoned her and the children for another woman. 

Ketline continued to support the children herself by doing laundry for families in downtown Gwomòn. She also sells candy out of a wooden box on legs, called a “bak” in Creole, in front of her home. It was enough to keep them fed most of the time, but there were days when they had nothing to eat. Her family eventually took three of the kids to live in Gwomòn. Ketline herself couldn’t afford to send them to school. “But I keep an eye on them. They are doing well.”

When members of CLM’s selection team started coming around, collecting information, Ketline didn’t know what to make of it. “I started asking myself a lot of questions.” She imagined that there must be a program involved, and she hoped it would help her. And though she hasn’t been in the program very long, she is already pleased by the progress that she’s made. “I already learned to write my name, and they’re teaching me how to manage what I have.” 

She’s already bought herself a small pig out of savings from her weekly stipend. “It wasn’t enough to buy a sow, so I bought a young boar.” She plans to raise it until she can sell it to buy something more valuable. “I’ll buy a cow if I can, or a piece of land.”

She chose goats and small commerce as her two enterprises, and though she hasn’t received either yet, she is expecting them soon. She wants to start a business selling chicken meat. She can buy it frozen, by the case, at the market in Opoto and sell it in her neighborhood. She doesn’t plan to give up doing laundry, however. It’s hard work, but she likes the steady income.

Nolita Sevil lives along the main road that leads north out of Gwomòn towards Pòdpè. She and her three teenagers share a home that sits on her mother’s land.

She was together with the children’s father for years. He had a job, and she managed a small commerce, and together they took care of their kids. But the man lost his job, and they decided he should go to Pòtoprens to look for work. He was always able to find things to do, but his visits gradually became less frequent and the support he was providing for the couple’s children decreased, too. 

Nolita struggled to provide for the three children on her own, but she became ill. She couldn’t manage her small commerce, and she needed medical care. When she contacted the kids’ father to help her see a doctor, he just told her family that they should take care of her. She was theirs. “That’s when I decided to leave him.”

She eventually got together with another man. He’s a baker, and because the couple had their own oven, they were able to do fairly well. The man was happy to help her send her children to school, and together they were able to keep the family fed. But when the earthquake that hit Gwomòn and much of northwestern Haiti in the fall of 2018 destroyed the oven, they were left to struggle. The capital they had available to buy flour and rent ovens from others started to dwindle. Nolita had already sold her last goat to pay for her kids’ school. The family was often going hungry.

Even so, Nolita almost lost her chance to join CLM when Fonkoze’s team passed through her neighborhood. She told her interviewer that she and her partner had a bread oven, so the interviewer assumed they were too wealthy to qualify. Fortunately for her, neighbors who heard that the team was not considering her for the program asked why. When they heard that it was because of the oven, they informed the team that the oven was unusable. Further follow-up led the team to invite her to join the program, and she did.

She chose goats and a pig as the assets for Fonkoze to give her, and though her pig has still not reproduced, her goats are flourishing. She started with just two, and she now has eight. She has a large yard around her house, and she’s decided to leave it unplanted, letting grasses and weeds grow so that her goats have plenty to eat. She is hoping soon to be able to buy a cow, too, and she could already buy one easily if she was willing to sell several of the goats, but she hasn’t been able to make up her mind to do so just yet. She thinks of them as the key to sending her kids to school.

More important than the livestock, however, is the way that she’s been able to get herself back in business. She started by using the small travel stipend that CLM provides to members when they attend training workshops. That stipend was originally supposed to pay members’ transportation, but few have ever used it that way. Most buy food for their family for the days they are in training, but some, like Nolita, find a way to invest it.

Nolita gave the money to her nephew, who went off to Gonayiv to buy a single gallon of gas. He brought it back to Nolita in Gwomòn. At the time, socio-political upheaval in the country had made the supply of gas irregular. Gas stations would open for a few days, then close for a few. While they were closed, merchants would sell gas out of barrels, gallon-jugs, or even small soft-drink bottles by the side of the road at highly inflated prices. Nolita made enough on her first sale of a gallon to buy two-and-a-half gallons the next time, and the business quickly grew. Soon an original investment of about 200 gourds was worth 4000.

But she didn’t want to stay in the gas business. It depended too much of the ups and downs of the political situation. So, she used the money to set up a small hotdog stand. There’s a club just down the road that is open on the weekends, and the owner is happy to have street merchants outside it catering to his customers. She sells grilled hotdogs with ketchup or mayonnaise for 25 gourds, or about a quarter. She can go through three-four cases on a good night, and can make 300 gourds on a case. It has enabled her to join a sòl, a Haitian savings club, where she deposits 500 gourds per week.

It has also helped her and her partner to get back into baking. She has used earnings from it to pay weekly contributions to a Village Savings and Loan Association, and she’s used credit from the association to invest in flour and the other things that bread-making requires. They still have to rent oven space, but now they can now work with enough flour to make the rental worthwhile.

By the time she had graduated May 20^th, she was also on her way to her first loan from SFF, the Fonkoze Foundation’s commercial sister organization. That loan is for 10,000 gourds, and it is enabling her to expand her business even more. Her plan is to take out larger and larger loans. Eventually SFF can provide much larger ones than she could ever get from her association.

And she’ll be able to make good use of the money because repairs to the couple’s oven are almost complete. Baking bread in their own oven will allow them to grow their wealth even more quickly. Eventually, she wants to start travelling back-and-forth to Wanament, in far northeastern Haiti, along the Dominican border. She’ll buy flour wholesale there, for herself and to sell to other bakers, and she’ll also look for other merchandise she can purchase.

Larose and her partner live in Koray, a narrow, hilly corner of Gwomòn, north of the downtown area. The long, winding road that leads into Koray from the main road to the north crosses and recrosses the same river, over and over, making the area hard to reach after heavy rain.

They have five young children. The oldest is eleven. The two oldest go to school, but Larose worries that they have fallen behind. “They missed some years because we didn’t have money.”

The couple was never wealthy, but they used to manage more or less. They farmed their owned land and other plots that they would rent. They planted peanuts, beans, corn plantain, and cassava. Larose also managed a small grocery business, selling both at the local market and out of the couple’s home.

But all the means they once had at their disposal disappeared. Their third child, a five-year-old boy is severely disabled. He struggles just to sit and has trouble supporting the weight of his head with his neck. He can whisper a few indistinct words, but cannot say very much.

The couple took him anywhere they thought they might be able to find help for him, bringing him to several large clinics in Pòtoprens, but they got no help. Their last visit was to a clinic run by an American non-profit, where they received an estimate of over 160,000 gourds for a brace and the follow-up that would be required.

That’s about $2000. By then, however, the couple had nothing. Larose’s business was gone. They could not afford to rent farmland or even to plant their own land. Her partner would look for day-labor — 100 gourds or so — in the neighbors’ fields. It isn’t even enough to feed the children consistently. Sometimes Larose depends on gifts of food that neighbors send.

She is looking forward to the opportunity that the program is offering her. She’d like to receive money for small commerce and to plant their fields. She thinks the she and her partner will be able to support themselves and start saving in a local savings and loan association. Saving money is important, she says. “When I have some means at my disposal, I want to have somewhere that I can lay my hands on some money when I need to.”

In the long-tern, she’d like to move away from Koray. She wants to live in downtown Gwomòn because she thinks that she’ll have more opportunities there.

Edeline, her husband Enel, and their two small boys joined the CLM program last fall. They were living in Ramye, a small and secluded area between Wòch Milat and downtown Laskawobas.

The selection process missed them at first. At the time, they didn’t have their own home. They were staying in Edeline’s mother’s house, and no one mentioned Edeline, Enel, and the kids as a separate household at the CLM team’s community meeting. As the CLM team began to work in the neighborhood, however, the couple’s need became clear. Fortunately, Fonkoze was able to add 50 families to the 100 it initially selected in the area, so Edeline and Enel were able to join in.

They had been really struggling. Their main source of income was construction jobs that Enel would take in Pòtoprens. He has a brother-in-law who’s a builder, and he’s happy to take Enel onto his team as a laborer. That would mean leaving his wife and their boys for weeks at a time, but Enel was resigned to it. “Things are hard. If you can get a job, you take it.”

Early in 2020, Edeline got sick. Their second son was an infant, and Enel was really concerned. “I did everything I could.” He took her to two different Partners in Health hospitals, and she eventually recovered. But the expenses of getting her to and from the care ran through most of their money, even though the care itself was almost free of charge.

When they joined the CLM program, her health was much improved, but the improvement did not last. Edeline grew sicker and sicker until she passed away in February. Enel was left as a single father of boys two and three years old. The CLM team decided to continue to work with him in Edeline’s place.

By this point, Enel and Edeline had moved into their own small house, built with the program’s assistance, on a piece of land that Edeline’s mother gave them. Enel took care of the livestock that the program gave them. His close attention to their goats have kept them flourishing even as other goats in the neighborhood have suffered from a shortage of food during the dry season. Their pig got sick and died, and though they were able to sell it quickly to a butcher, all the money that came in from that sale passed through their hands to pay Edeline’s medical expenses. Burying his wife forced Enel to take on debt.

Since her death, Enel has continued to struggle. The only way he can think to earn income would be to go to Pòtoprens and work for his brother-in-law, but he doesn’t feel comfortable leaving the boys or, for that matter, his goats. Right now, he depends on irregular charity from his friends.

Recently his sister called him. Through her, his brother-in-law was offering him two weeks of work. He doesn’t see how he can refuse, but he wants to talk to his case manager before he decides. He thinks he can drop his younger boy off with his mother, who lives down the river from Ramye, near Bagas. The older boy is in school, so he will ask the sister-in-law, who lives next door, to look after him. A local teenager has been sleeping in his home with him and the boys since Edeline died, and that boy is willing to look after the goats.

A life mostly away for his boys, however, is not what Enel wants. He knows they need him. And he has an idea of a way to start a business that would allow him to live at home. He wants to buy and sell livestock. He would go to the market in the morning, buy low and sell high. It can be a lucrative business for someone who really knows animals and is a strong negotiator. He could start with chickens, work up to turkeys, and move on to goats when he has enough capital. If he’s careful about taking care of goats, he can also by sick, low-value goats, and care for them until they recover their value, and then sell them.

But even just getting started with chickens will take some capital, and after the funeral expenses, he just doesn’t have it. If he goes to work for his brother-in-law, he might make enough to begin in a small way. He is also saving money in the savings and loan association that Edeline joined when she entered the program, but he’s afraid to borrow money. “If something happens to money you borrow, it’s a problem.” And the association won’t pay out his savings until the end of the cycle, which is months away. This is something his case manager will have to help him figure out.

And his desire to start and build a business fits into a larger plan. On one hand, he is not comfortable living on land that belongs to his deceased wife’s parents. They have been unwilling so far to even talk about selling it to him. They want to him to think of it as his. They tell him that they owe it to their daughter’s kids. But he worries. He’s not yet even 30, and though his wife died only recently, he knows that he won’t want to live his life alone. He doesn’t think a woman will be willing to move into a house built on his first wife’s family’s land. And even before Edeline’s death, he always told his in-laws that he wanted to pay for the land. He thought and still thinks of buying the land that his family lives on as a man’s responsibility. So he wants to discuss a purchase with them, and they just won’t talk about it.

On the other hand, he doesn’t see himself living in Ramye forever. He doesn’t like how remote it is. He dreams of moving with the boys to a house closer to downtown Laskawobas. With its easy access to multiple large livestock markets, it would really help him build the business he hopes to establish, and it would also mean better schools for his boys.