Category Archives: After Graduation

Yvrose a Year After Graduation

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Yvrose almost missed out on the chance to participate in CLM. She was recommended for the program by the case manager who first went by her home to interview her. She had no wealth to speak of. She and her husband, Jean Gaby, had three chickens, but little more. At the time, Yvrose had no income at all. The family depended on the little that Jean Gaby could earn as a mason’s helper, mixing concrete with a shovel or carrying buckets full to where the skilled mason was working. He also did a little farming. The couple was living with their two younger children next to their church in a shack that had been thrown together with old building materials that no one wanted. Their pastor had it built for them when he saw that they had nowhere to live.

But when the supervisor who interviewed her for verification spoke with her, he learned some things that didn’t make sense to him, so he rejected the initial recommendation. Yvrose was sending the two children who still lived at home with her to school in downtown Laskawobas. Somehow, she and Jean Gaby were paying both the school fees and for daily rides to and from school for their kids on a motorcycle taxi. The supervisor couldn’t understand where all that money was coming from. The school fees might be owed. Jean Gaby might make small lumps of money that would, with enough sacrifice, eventually add up to cover them if they were carefully managed. But the taxi rides would have to be paid for regularly. The supervisor felt that someone who could afford those daily rides for two children couldn’t really be poor enough for CLM.

Just after a cohort of 150 families launched in the program, and the new members had received their first six days of training, it became clear, however, that one of the women who had been invited to join the program would decline to participate. That left an open slot. And Figaro, the case manager who had first visited Yvrose, remembered her.

Case managers are taught to do more than just fill out forms for the families they visit during the selection process, but to think of themselves as advocates. He talked to the supervisor who rejected her, and learned that the taxi rides had been a real sticking point. Then he looked into the rides, and he discovered that they were paid for by another member of the couple’s church. He asked another supervisor to consider Yvrose’s case once again, and she was quickly given the available slot.

Yvrose had once been able to earn something by purchasing produce from farmers who were bringing it to market. She and her family live right on the main dirt road. Lots of sellers from the hills south and east of Laskawobas walk by on their way to market. They were happy to sell to Yvrose if she gave them a reasonable price. It saved them the trouble of carrying their burden the rest of the way into town.

Jean Gaby had had a relatively good income as well. He worked on a large, profitable farm in Tomond, the next town to the north. He was paid a salary, and managing his earnings had enabled the couple to buy their land. The plot they purchased was large enough that they were able to give some of it to their church, and it is where the church building now stands.

But things changed. According to Yvrose, Jean Gaby’s supervisor at the farm tried to seduce her. When she rejected his advances, he fired her husband. The family’s steady source of income stopped short. Yvrose’s business fell apart, too. Two difficult pregnancies that ended with c-sections left her unable to lift loads. But her business buying and selling produce depended on her physical strength. Without it, she couldn’t continue.

When she joined CLM, she wanted to raise goats.”I always saw people walking around with their goats, and I wished that I had some too.” Traditionally, a member would receive two or three goats and then a second substantial asset, but Yvrose looked at things differently. “I wanted bigger goats right from the start.” So, she got two large females. She took balance of her asset transfer in a couple of chickens.

She managed her goats with care, and by the time she graduated she had four of them, not just two. Her collection of chickens grew as well, and she had also purchased a cow to add to her holdings. But though she had dreamed of owning goats, and was happy to have realized that dream, raising livestock was not a real focus of her experience in the program.

One focus of that experience was her path towards building a new home. When Figaro explained to Yvrose that she would have to have a dry, secure home to graduate, she said she wouldn’t be able to do it. Both Yvrose and Figaro remember his response well. With a smile he said something like, “What do you want me to do, kick you out of the program because you can’t build a house?” He told her to get started, that getting started was the important thing, and that if she and her husband made a plan and started work they would surely finish.

Truer words have never been spoken. Not only did Yvrose and Jean Gaby build themselves a new home, but what they built far exceeded the homes built by almost any member we’ve ever worked with. Members typically build two small rooms with a good tin roof and walls of either palm wood or rocks and clay, depending on the character of the soil around where they live. Despite her doubts, Yvrose and her husband built a three-room home with cinder blocks.

Part of their success depended on how hard Jean Gaby was willing to work to contribute to the project. The cinder blocks were produced right at the construction site. That required cement, which they had to buy, but also sand to mix with the cement. And rather than spending money to buy the sand they’d need, Jean Gaby collected it himself, lugging it bucket-by-bucket from a nearby riverbed. That reduced the cost by a lot.

But even so, they spent much more than a CLM family normally would to build or repair their home. By Yvrose’s calculation, they borrowed 45,000 gourds with a series of loans from her savings and loan association — about $350 — to buy the other materials they would need. That’s more than CLM invested in the home and much more than program members typically spend.

All that money needed to be repaid, however, and taking care of goats and chickens wouldn’t help her. So Yvrose took out another loan from her association to start her business again.

It was a struggle. She still cannot lift heavy loads. But by buying from the merchants that pass her house on the way to the market and then waiting for the wholesalers’ trucks from Pòtoprens that pass in front of her home from its other side, she was able to minimize the physical part of the job.

Her business model became harder to sustain, however, as the route between Pòtoprens and Laskawobas became less reliable. Gang roadblocks on the road to Mibalè that drivers had to pass through meant that trucks could not always get buyers from the capital to the market, much less past the market to the area where Yvrose lives. She could sell to local buyers by bringing her merchandise to the downtown market herself, but apart from the extra effort involved, it was also less profitable. “You don’t really know what you’ll sell the load for, so you don’t know whether you’ll make money, and then you still have to pay the cost of the transportation.”

Fortunately, another opportunity came along. The CLM team was recruiting a small number of members to participate in a training on “transformation.” That’s the word agronomists here use to categorize the processes that turn produce into other products: making peanut butter, roasting peanuts, making wine or jam from fruit. The possibilities are almost endless.

The CLM team decided to focus on a few products that could be made with inexpensive, easy-to-find ingredients and only minimal equipment. Participants learned how to make, package, and sell papita, or plantain chips, karapinya, a kind of praline, and kòk rape, a treat made of shredded coconut. Yvrose invested 15,000 gourds initially, and she soon had increased her investment to 25,000.

Her products sold well, but she soon ran into a new problem. “If I was making product, I couldn’t go sell it. And if I was selling it, I couldn’t make product.” So she made two big decisions. “There was a woman living nearby making kokiyòl.” These are a little like plain donuts that are halfway to being cookies. “I asked her if she wanted to get together to make one bigger business. We talked and talked, and we decided to work together.”

Then the two women hired seven employees. Three sell their products, two assist the two women in their production, and the other two prepare the produce — like coconut or peanuts — for processing. They pay each a small, monthly salary.

The other woman’s know-how has enabled the pair to add a range of products to the business, and the group is doing well. Yvrose took out a loan for 50,000 gourds, so she now has an investment of over 75,000, about $575. And her dream is to make the business continue to grow. “I want the business to get really big. I would like it to be big enough so I can hire everyone in the neighborhood who needs a job.”

Louimène

On Thursdays, the Labasti market takes over a small section of National Route #3 about five miles south of downtown Mibalè. Merchants of all sorts spill into both sides of the street. Some of them are hawking loads of produce, bigger or smaller, in sacks or baskets or simply piles. There’s clothing, both old and used, hardware arranged in racks or on carts, cosmetics, laundry products, and groceries.

Vendors stroll up and down the road with bundles of brooms or pyramids of home-made chairs loaded on their heads or with homemade racks of belts or sunglasses. Pill-sellers weave through the crowd, their buckets piled high with medications. Bread and snacks of various sorts, both packaged and fresh-fried, are sold as well. Soft drinks and hard liquor. Cooks offer full meals: beans with rice or cornmeal and sauces thick with meat and vegetables. There’s a place to sell livestock at the market’s northern end. 

In other words, one can find most of the things that the ordinary days of life require.

Parked vehicles line both sides of the road, adding to the traffic: large livestock trucks from Pòtoprens sent from slaughterhouses in the capital, beat-up pick-up trucks of the sort that carry people and merchandise throughout Haiti, and clumps of motorcycle taxis waiting for fares. Route #3, the route through central Haiti, is now the main – really the only – road out of Pòtoprens northward. The passage of buses and trucks is constant during daylight hours, though only during daylight hours ever since gangs took control of the entrance to the metropolitan area just below Mòn Kabrit. Passage through the market can involve a lot of horns and a lot of yelling.

About fifty or hundred yards south of the market along the road from the main market space, a footpath branches off to the east. It’s a couple of feet wide, made of hard-packed soil. But it’s uneven. Heavy tropical rains wash irregular contours out of it. The thick roots that enter the path from both sides hold the dirt in places, but only in places, which only serves to make the path less even. Dark mud collects in spots whenever it rains. 

The path passes three or four small metal-roofed houses on each side before it comes to farmland. The area around Labasti is fertile, and as this path cuts downward towards a narrow, muddy stream, it passes along a couple of patches of corn, pigeon peas, and manioc. Further in, larger spaces are planted with plantain and sugarcane, the crop that has come to dominate in the area. The stream is easy to ford, and the path climbs the opposite bank, continuing upward past a few more homes before a large field of cane opens up on the left.  

On the right, a few feet above the road, is a shack falling apart in the middle of an abandoned-looking yard. Behind it and slightly above it is Louimène’s small home. 

***

Louimene graduated from CLM in December 2014. Her experience in the program was unusual. She was part of it for just nine months, rather than the usual eighteen, and she received an investment from Fonkoze much less than what her fellow members received. But, even so, she speaks of CLM as an important source of her success.

She joined the program later than the other members of the group she eventually graduated with because, right after she was selected, she left Labasti, where she and her partner Lucner had been living. She went off to care for her sick mother in Bouli, an area in the mountains of northwestern Boukankare, the commune north and west of Mibalè. By the time she returned to Labasti, the program had started, and her place in it had been taken by another member.

It was too bad. She, Lucner, and their two boys could hardly have needed CLM any more than they did. They were living in an ajoupa, a straw tent-like structure, in the corner of a field that did not belong to them. It belonged to a farmer who would hire Lucner to help in his fields. Lucner earned 50 gourds on the days that the farmer gave him work. That was about $1 at the time, and it was the couple’s only income. It had to feed two adults and two small kids.

***

Their life hadn’t always been that way. When they met, Lucner was a successful small-time merchant in Pòtoprens. Louimène was a maid in a home near his business. Lucner fell for her, and he lights up when he tells the story. He liked her as soon as he saw her, and he decided to get to know her better. 

Louimène’s father died when she was 14. Her mother could not afford to take care of Louimène, so she sent her to live with a family in Pòtoprens. Louimène left the family within a year. She went off looking for a job because she did not like the way the family treated her. “I was hungry all the time. They had a business selling boiled cassava root as a snack. They would feed me the leftover roots that hadn’t been sold.” 

She found a job as a maid, which she soon left for what she thought would be a better one. One day, when she was not yet 16, she was sent to his business to buy some rice. Lucner volunteered to deliver the rice himself, leaving the business and his wallet in Louimène’s hands. That wallet functioned as his cash register, and it held all the money from the business, over 7,000 gourds. “I wanted to see whether she was honest.” When he returned from the errand, he found that all the money was still there.

He gave her 500 gourds as a thank-you gesture, and she used that money to buy cookies and crackers, which she began to sell. Soon she had turned those 500 gourds into more than 1,000, even while she continued to work as a maid. “I liked her right away, but when I saw how smart she was I decided to try to make her mine.”

Then one of his brothers became sick, and Lucner returned with Louimène to his home community in the hills east of Labasti, to help care of the man. They spent almost everything they had nursing Lucner’s brother back to health, but then they had to leave the cluster of homes where Lucner’s family lived because Louimène and Lucner’s sister could not get along. 

They moved into a room of a house that belonged to a wealthier neighbor, but it wasn’t long before the neighbor wanted them out. “He told us to open the door and the windows to let the mosquitos out.” It was as though they were attracting bugs.

So, the couple threw up the ajoupa, a one-room, tent-like structure that Haitian farmers build out of straw. They got permission to put theirs in a corner of Lucner’s employer’s field. Usually, an ajoupa serves as a temporary shelter for farmers while they work in fields too far from their home to go back and forth every day. But for struggling families like Louimène’s, an ajoupa can become a long-term home. 

The ajoupa was the only home that she and Lucner had, and it stood on a plot of land that wasn’t theirs. They had no livestock or other assets of their own, and they depended on the 50 gourds Lucner earned on the days when he could earn it. The CLM staff members who saw them during the selection process gave them the highest possible score for food insecurity, “food-insecure with hunger.” They were going hungry much of the time.

***

But shortly after Louimène returned to Labasti from caring for her mother, a CLM member in a neighboring community decided to move to Pòtoprens, abandoning the program. Hilaire, the case manager who was working in Louimène’s neighborhood, strongly advocated for bringing her in it to replace the woman who left, even though about half of the program’s eighteen months had already passed.

The CLM team was able to recuperate the roofing tin from the woman who had left, pulling it off the framework it had already been nailed to. The staff also retrieved one of her two goats, a small pig, and 1,000 of the 7,200 gourds of cash stipends she had received. All this was given to Louimène, but nothing else. It didn’t give her much to work with. 

Haitians say that someone can have to “bat dlo pou fè bè.” That means to churn water to make butter. It’s a way to talk of making something out of nothing. And Louimène and Lucner started churning water for all they were worth. 

Lucner kept working hard in in their neighbor’s fields, even as he took primary responsibility for the livestock that Louimène received from the program. Louimène invested the 1,000 gourds she was given into a small commerce. She would buy spaghetti and canned milk, put it on her head in Labasti, and walk the five miles into Mibalè, calling out her wares and making sales all along the way. Normally, she’d sell out by the time she got to town. She’d buy merchandise there for the next day and carry it home. If she was busy — doing laundry or attending a CLM training — Lucner would do the job instead. The business began to grow, and Louimène started investing some of its sales into additional products. On Thursdays, she would find a busy corner of the market to sit in, put her basket of merchandise on the ground in front of her, and sell what she could.

She and Lucner talked to the landowner about the ajoupa they were living in. They needed his permission to improve it. Often even farmers who are open to allowing a poor squatter put up an ajoupa on their land will object if the squatter adds a tin roof. It makes the structure seem more permanent. And Louimène and Lucner wanted to add not just a solid roof, but a cement latrine. They were eventually able to get permission to do so, in part because of their case manager’s help in the negotiations.

***

When Louimène graduated in December 2014, she and her family were eating two hot meals a day. Louimène reported a clear plan for increasing her regular income – she would sell one of her pigs and use the proceeds to add to her business – and she proudly explained that this plan meant Fonkoze would not need to worry about her anymore.

By then, she had sold her original goat and its young. She had acquired a second smaller pig but had sold the first one. She used the proceeds from the sales of the goats and the first of the pigs to buy a cow, which she wanted because she had a plan for that too. “We needed land, and if you buy a small cow you can hold onto to it. While it grows, you wait for someone to sell a piece of land, and when the chance comes along, you can sell the cow and buy the land.”

And that’s exactly the way that things turned out. After graduation, the man who owned the plot they lived on began to resent the family’s presence. “When he saw our cow, he said that he had given us land to put a house on, but not to graze animals.” He started to hire another man to work in his fields and to pressure Louimène and Lucner to leave. Since they had no place they could go, they put up with his humiliations as best they could. 

Eventually, however, they found another landowner with a sudden need for cash. They were able to buy enough of a plot to put their little house on for 12,750 gourds. They sold the cow they had recently bought to get their hands on the money they needed. They disassembled their house and reassembled it on their own land, removing the roofing from the home that they had built and reattaching it. They even spent the extra money and effort necessary to install a simple latrine, having learned of its importance.

One of Lucner’s brothers bought the neighboring plot for a similar amount. But when Lucner made the purchase for himself and Louimèner, he was careful to put Louimène’s name on the receipt, rather than his own. “If anything happens to me, I wouldn’t want Louimène to have problems with my family.”

***

That is when things started to get more difficult for the couple. Lucner got sick. He was unable to work for a couple of months. Medical expenses and life without the income he earned forced the couple to sell off their second pig and, eventually, the small commerce that Louimène had managed to create. By the time Lucner was working again, the couple was back almost to square one. They had their own house, and it was covered with a good tin roof, but they had no assets and no small commerce. 

They found themselves driven to make a difficult decision: Their children would move in with Louimène’s mother, in Bouli. Louimène would seek work as a maid in downtown Mibalè until she could save enough money to return to business. 

She did so for a year, earning 2,000 gourds per month. “You put up with how they treat you, because you know you won’t be doing the work forever.” She sent much of what she earned to Bouli, to help her mother care for the kids, and she spent most of the rest of her earnings keeping herself and Lucner fed. 

Once Lucner’s health returned, he could contribute as well, and they could start to dream of bringing their children home. Louimène wanted to bring them back as soon as she had saved enough to go back into business. Looking back, she says, “When they are with me, I can take better care of them.” 

Things improved for the couple and their children after they moved back to Labasti together. Though they still had no farmland of their own, they were able to rent a plot. Lucner farmed that plot and worked a second plot as a sharecropper, so they did not depend on day wages exclusively. 

Louimène continued to earn money through small commerce. When she first went back into business, she followed the same plan that had worked for her previously. She filled a basket with a couple of products, put it on her head, and hiked five miles into town, selling as she went. But she managed her money carefully, and she soon had too many products to carry around on her head. She decided to start selling out of her home instead.

She sold a range of basic groceries, and she was the family’s principal earner, bringing in enough to feed the family and make weekly contributions to her savings club, or “sòl,” Every week, members of the sòl make a set contribution, and one of them receives the whole pot. Whenever it was Louimène’s turn to receive the pot, she would invest most of it right into her business. Her business would thus grow and shrink cyclically as the date of her receipt of the pot was nearer or farther away. At times, it was nothing more than garlic and bouillon cubes. At other times, she could sell rice, oil, and other staples as well. Its value could vary from as little as 1,500 or 2,000 gourds to as much as 10,000.

But though their income grew only slowly after Louimène graduated, the family’s live changed in important ways. Despite their struggles, they bought a small pig. It was their first investment in new livestock in a couple of years.

And Louimène is quick to talk about another, more important change. She and Lucner married in December 2019. “We got married, and we started going to church.” They couldn’t attend services during the coronavirus crisis, but they prayed with their fellow congregants. Louimène visited neighbors’ homes with other church members every morning. 

Between her business and Lucner’s farm income, they also created a different sort of home. They tore down the walls of their shack, which had been made of thin sticks, woven together and covered with mud. They replaced them with walls of palm wood planks in the back and on the two sides, which they painted a creamy orange. They built a new front wall of stones. It was much more solid and attractive than the house it replaced. They also enclosed what had been a covered entry in the front, so the inside of the house was about a third larger than it had been.

Her business was working well, but Lucner’s farming was not. A persistent drought killed a couple of crops. Eventually, he came to doubt whether it was worth replanting. And, so, the couple had to face another difficult decision. Louimène had a brother who was living across the border, in the Dominican Republic. He works for an avocado producer, loading sacks onto trucks, and he told the couple that he could get Lucner a job working with him. 

There were just two problems. First, Lucner would need to find 6,000 gourds to pay for the trip across the border. Second, he would have to live away from Louimène and the kids.

Lucner knew he would accept the second problem, as unhappy as it made him. He didn’t think he had a choice, because it was the only way he could think of to earn money to help Louimène take care of their kids. He could not bear not contributing. 

The first problem seemed like more of a barrier. He didn’t have the money, and he didn’t know where he’d get it. He felt stuck.

Until Louimène let him know that she had enough money saved up, and that she would give it to him. Lucner went to join his brother-in-law in 2022, and he started to regularly send Louimène as much of his earnings as he could. He visits her and the kids occasionally, and he spent a month with her this past year recovering after an accident, but for the most part the couple must now live apart. 

***

And as Louimène herself continued to work hard, her business continued to grow. She kept adding new products. In addition to what she bought in Mibalè, she started selling things she could find at the Labasti market as well. She could buy basic groceries, like rice, beans, sugar, and oil in Labasti. She can buy a moderately large quantity, like a sack or a five-gallon jug, and break it down into the small quantities that her neighbors want. She began buying cooking charcoal, too, 500 gourds’ worth at a time – now less than half of a large sack – and dividing it into 50-gourd bags.

Her business took a big step forward through a friendship she developed with another member of her church. He sells snacks out of his home. Louimène would sometimes send her kids to him for them to buy a treat. One day, he saw how well her business was doing and he approached her with a proposition: he makes bi-monthly buying trips to Elias Piña, the large bi-national market on the border, across from Beladè. He was willing to buy for her as well. He’d even front her the money. It was an easy way for him to increase his sales because he charges her more than he pays. He is basically a retailer with Louimène as his one wholesale customer. And their arrangement enables Louimène to buy more merchandise less expensively than she otherwise could so that her business can grow.

Before each of his trips to Elias Piña, Louimène pays him what she owes him, and they talk about what merchandise she needs. His advances can be as much as 13,000 t0 14,000 gourds, which is a little more than $100. He’ll look for what she asks him for, but he will sometimes see something new that he thinks she’ll be able to sell. This new system keeps her business from cycling the way it would when she depended on her sòl. And Louimène has since found another person willing to buy for her in the DR. The second buyer brings her logs of Dominican salami.

Growing her business is important. All four of her kids are now school age, and although she sent her older girl to live with her mother back in Bouli — the older woman asked Louimène for that because she would now be alone without her — Louimène is financially responsible for all four kids. Lucner’s income is still limited. He is back in the D.R., loading avocados onto trucks with his brother-in-law, but he is still slowed by the accident that brought him back to Labasti for a time. 

A couple of years ago, Louimène learned about VSLAs. Former CLM members in her area had been recruited into VSLAs established by the CLM team. We cannot reconstruct why Louimène was not a part of one from the start, but she was eventually encouraged to join one by a friend she has among her fellow graduates. When she joined it, the share price was 100 gourds. When her first cycle as a member ended, the group decided to raise the price to 200 gourds. Since members can buy up to five shares per meeting, Louimène can buy up to 1,000 gourds’ worth each week, which is what she tries to do. She takes out loans from this association occasionally as well.

But folks in the area saw how well VSLAs can work for former CLM members, and the associations began to proliferate. The director of a nearby school established one with a share price of 500 gourds. He and his fellow members decided to make the cycle two years long, reather than the usual 52 weeks. Louimène joined that one as well. Taking out loans in this second association is complicated, but Louimène is happy to use her CLM-founded VSLA for credit and to use this other just for saving. The two-year cycle will end in February 2025, and Louimène already has a plan. She wants to buy a motorcycle that she can rent to a taxi-driver and use to do the buying for her business less expensively.

But she has a new project before her that will involve a lot of expense. The couple’s church has offered to help them replace their current home with a more solid one of rocks and cinder blocks. But the church will expect her and Lucner to contribute a lot towards the one room that they will help them build, and Louimène’s vision is beyond the single room. “My kids are getting bigger. I want them to have their own room now.” When the pastor called her, and told her that the church was ready, she went right into action. She gave the church 20,000 gourds she had been saving, and called Lucner in the D.R.

Even before he could return to Labasti, the church delivered sand, rocks, cement, and rebar. It was all hands on deck, as she and the three children who are with her started carry the materials, one small load at a time, from the drop off point — the nearest to her home a motorcycle can reach — to her own spot of land. Even her little girl was carrying rocks, one at a time, or small bowls of sand. 

The other members of her church, motivated by the effort they saw from her and the kids, joined in. “I was so embarrassed. I had nothing to offer them. I sent for a couple of sacks of ice water and cleaned all the crackers out of my business and passed them around.”

By the time Lucner got there, they had cleared a spot in the yard behind their current home to build the new one. They had also traced and laid down a foundation for its two large, square rooms. Louimène sent word to her mother in Bouli that she was feeling exhausted, and the older women hiked down from her home and moved in with Louimène for a week, taking over the housekeeping duties. Work on the home should be finished before the end of November. Then Lucner will return to his job in the D.R.

***

The CLM team tends to point to the training and the coaching that the program includes its most important elements. Plenty of members over the years have agreed, explaining in conversations or in the testimonial speeches they make at graduation that the program taught them to manage what they have and imagine what they could have. Louimène is different. She says that she had a vision when she joined the program, but the animals and the cash that she received as a member gave her what she needed to work with. Hilaire, her former case manager, confirms what she says. And she explains, “Even if you are living in misery, you have to struggle to imagine a plan. If you think something through in your head, it will come about eventually one way or anoth

Enel

Enel Jacob

Fonkoze’s team started looking for new CLM members in Ramye in late 2020. At first, Edeline and her husband Enel were not slated to be part of the program. The couple was living with their two little boys, a toddler and an infant, in Edeline’s parents’ home. At the community meeting that produced the first list of possible program members in the area, they were not even mentioned. Their neighbors counted them as part of her parents’ household. They did not think of them as a separate family. 

When Fonkoze’s work in the area got going, however, the team met Edeline and recognized her need. Fortunately, the Haitian Timoun Foundation, which was financing the CLM program in Ramye, made a late decision to support 150, rather than 100, families. That meant there was support for 50 extra families, and Edeline and Enel could join the program with that additional 50.

***

Ramye is a small, isolated community just northeast of central Laskawobas, between the downtown area and the Artibonite River. The river is dammed downstream in Pelig to generate electricity, and the dam creates a network of small, irregular tentacles of muddy water, which grow and shrink with the season as rain adds to, and irrigation and drought take away from, the river’s flow. Ramye lies among these tentacles, with water on multiple sides. More sides when the water is higher, and fewer when it dries. At times it is an island, at times just a penisula.

The dirt road that leads towards Ramye is manageable during dry season, but it turns muddy when it rains and therefore slick. It becomes a challenging ride on a motorcycle. Steep in places and rocky everywhere, rainwater has cut irregular traces through the rocks. The road passes between little houses and small fields of corn, pigeon peas, and plantains. Merchants selling small items — like snacks, groceries, or laundry soap — sit alongside the path every few hundred yards, their wares displayed in a basket in front of them or on a small table.

Then the road comes to an end. 

During the dry season, it’s just a short walk from the end of the road, across some more fields, to the footpath that winds up through Ramye. In the rainy season, however, these fields flood, and a canoe ferry carries residents and visitors of Ramye across. The driver stands in the back of the canoe with a long pole that he uses to push it across the flood water. Passengers sit on a couple of rough boards nailed across the boat as benches. 

***

When they joined CLM, Edeline and Enel had been really struggling. The main source of their income was a series of construction jobs that Enel would take in Pòtoprens. His brother-in-law is a builder who was happy to take Enel onto his team as a laborer, lugging concrete or blocks to the masons doing the skilled work. Enel would have to leave his wife and their boys for weeks at a time, but he was resigned to it. “Things are hard. If you can get a job, you take it.”

Early in 2020, just before they joined the program, Edeline got sick. Their second son was an infant, and Enel was really concerned. “I did everything I could.” Enel took Edeline to two different Partners in Health hospitals, and she eventually recovered. But the couple spent most of their money getting her the care she needed, even though the care itself was almost free of charge. 

When they joined CLM, her health was much improved, but the improvement did not last. Edeline grew sicker and sicker until she passed away in February 2021. 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, the family had moved into their own small house, built with the program’s assistance, on the land that Edeline’s mother gave them. Enel took care of the livestock they received. His close attention to their goats kept them flourishing, even as other goats in the neighborhood suffered from a shortage of food during the dry season. Their pig got sick and died, however, 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 then forced Enel to take on debt.

After her death, Enel continued to struggle. The best way he could think to earn income would have been to go to Pòtoprens and work for his brother-in-law, but he didn’t feel comfortable leaving the boys or, for that matter, his goats. For a short time, he and the boys depended on irregular charity from his friends. 

But then his sister called him. Through her, his brother-in-law was offering him two weeks of work. He didn’t see how he could refuse. He could drop his younger boy off with his mother, who lives down the river from Ramye, near Bagas. The older boy was already in school, so he asked a sister-in-law, who lives next door, to look after him. A local teenager had been sleeping in his home with him and the boys since Edeline died, and that boy would look after the goats.

A life mostly away for his boys was not what Enel wanted, though. He knew they needed him. And he had an idea of a way to start a business that would allow him to live at home. He would 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 had enough capital. He is also good with livestock, so he could buy sick, low-value goats, and care for them until they recovered their value, and then sell them.

But just getting started, even with chickens, would take some capital, and after the funeral expenses, Enel just didn’t have it. Going to work for his brother-in-law was a way to make enough to begin, at least in a small way. He was also saving money in the savings and loan association that Edeline joined when she entered the program, but he was afraid to take out a loan. “If something happens to money you borrow, it’s a problem.” And the association wasn’t going to pay out his savings until the end of the cycle. 

His desire to start and build a business fit into a larger plan. He was not comfortable living on land that belongs to his deceased wife’s parents, but his in-laws were unwilling to even talk about selling it to him. They wanted to him to think of it as his. They told him that they owed it to their daughter’s kids. But even before Edeline had passed away, he had told them that he wanted to work towards buying the land. He thought of buying a plot of land to live on as a man’s responsibility. And he was not yet even 30. Though his wife had died only recently, he knew that he wouldn’t want to live his life alone. He didn’t think a woman would be willing to move into a house built on his first wife’s family’s land. He wanted to discuss a purchase, but his in-laws just wouldn’t talk about it.

And there was more. He couldn’t see himself wanting to live in Ramye forever. He doesn’t like how remote it is. He dreams of moving with his 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 was hoping to establish, and it would also mean better schools for his boys.

So, he decided to take up his brother-in-law’s offer of work, but by the time he got to Pòtoprens, the work had been completed. There was no job left for him. He had made the trip for nothing, and when he got back to Ramye, he found his livestock in a bad state. The young guy he had asked to look after his animals had not taken care of them the way he said he would, and Enel didn’t really blame him. Living under Enel’s roof, the kid expected Enel would do more to keep him fed, but Enel just wasn’t able to. He was much more focused on looking for odd jobs than on helping Enel. 

Fortunately for Enel, because of the CLM program, there was at the time a fair amount of construction going on in the neighborhood. And though he couldn’t get a job as a homebuilder, he could get hired to turn palm trees into the planks that local residents use to wall-in their homes. The job typically paid 1750 gourds for a tree. Enel didn’t get a lot of those jobs, but he got some. “I would save 250 gourds each week in my savings association, and if I had been paid for a tree, I’d take 500 to the meeting instead of just 250 and leave 250 in the VSLA’s box.”
That way, he would be ready even if he wasn’t able to save anything the next week. But as local CLM-funded construction neared completion, those jobs dried up, and so Enel made his next plan.

Settling back into life in Ramye, he began to do well, but not spectacularly well, with his livestock. Fonkoze had given Edeline and him two goats, and he turned them into five. One of the two he received had a pair of kids, and he bought an additional adult female himself. The other of the two he initially received returned to health once Enel took it back under his own control after his return from Pòtoprens. 

Purchasing the extra goat took smarts. Enel had received cement from the program to build up a small protective barrier around the base of his home’s walls, but it was too little to do the job. Rather than waste it with a useless half-measure or let it harden in the sack while he saved up to buy the rest of what he’d need, he sold it and used the proceeds to buy the goat.

The useless trip into Pòtoprens had convinced Enel that he was better off creating an activity near his home. It wasn’t a simple matter, but he started finding more things to do because he wasn’t particular. One moment he was fishing in the waters around Ramye, selling his catch to merchants from downtown. Another moment, he was collecting driftwood to make charcoal.  He would rent himself as a laborer to builders. When he could find nothing else, he would simply sell a day of farm work to neighbors.

He eventually earned enough from these odd jobs to buy a small bull, and when the bull became a lot to handle, he sold it and bought a heifer instead. “The bull wasn’t going to reproduce, and it had begun chasing people.”

He also went back to his plan to buy and sell livestock. He finally assembled the capital that he needed to start his business by cutting down the trees on a small plot of land and turning them into charcoal. He produced five sacks, which he sold for 750 gourds each. It was enough to start buying chickens. 

Enel would hang out on the roads leading to a market, stopping folks on their way. Some people were happy to give him a deal on animals they were bringing to market in order to avoid the need to go all the way to market themselves. It would save them time and effort. His willingness to spend his day buying and selling was his superpower, and he began earning enough to take care of his kids and to contribute to his VSLA each week. He eventually borrowed 5,000 gourds from his VSLA to add to his capital.

He was always careful about his expenses. “If I have five gourds, I know I won’t waste any of it.” And, so, his capital slowly increased. Before long, he had enough to buy goats, rather than just chickens. He also joined a second VSLA. “I could see that VSLAs are good for me. They force me to save. If I tried to keep money in a box, I would always find ways to spend it. The only way to take money out of the VSLA before it’s time is to take a loan.”

One day, just after he crossed the water heading out of Ramye on his way downtown, he saw a sign. A woman just across the water was selling land. The sign listed a phone number, and he called right away. He made a date to see the land and speak with the seller. He asked the secretary of his VSLA to go with him. “I had no experience with land.” They negotiated a sale price of 220,000 gourds. Enel sold his cow — it was pregnant by then — and a large billy goat that had been produced by a nanny that the CLM program had given him. He also borrowed 25,000 gourds from his VSLA and added the capital from his business. In all, it was enough for a 150,000-gourd downpayment.

It put him well on the way to achieving his biggest goal. He had already used his savings at the end of the last cycle of his VSLA to begin to collect home construction materials. He would disassemble the home in Ramye and reconstruct it on the new plot, covering it with new roofing. 

But the purchase created problems, too. It ate up the capital in his business, so it eliminated his primary income, and he still had himself and two boys to take care of, a VSLA loan to repay, and regular contributions to his two VSLAs to make. He went back to doing odd jobs. He will be able to pay back most of the VSLA loan out of his savings when the cycle is complete. But he’ll have to add earnings from his odd jobs to finish repaying.

He continues to contribute to both VSLAs. Once he pays of his debt in the one, he can start thinking about whether to use a loan from the other to restart his business. He still owes 70,000 gourds on the purchase of land, however, and it will take a lot of work to clear that debt.

Jocelyne Right after Graduation

Jocelyne has been a widow since 2019. She lives with her six kids and her mother along a dirt road that leads into downtown Laskawobas from the east. Until recently, only her three younger children lived with her and her mother, who is showing signs of dementia.

The three older ones lived in the Pòtoprens area, with her sister. There they went to school there with her sister’s help. Jocelyne couldn’t afford to send them. But her sister lives in central Kwadeboukè, in an area controlled by one of the many gangs who dominate much of the Pòtoprens area now. Her kids felt unsafe, and she was scared to have them there, so she made them come home. Seven dependents is a lot for her to manage, but she did not feel she had a choice.

Before she joined the program, she fed her family with a small business on the road in front of her home. She made pate, a fried pastry popular as a snack food in Haiti. They are usually filled — with meat or eggs — before they are fried. But Jocelyne filled them with neither. “I couldn’t afford to buy meat or eggs. I just put a little dried herring in mine.” She took care of a pig, but it didn’t belong to her. It was, however, a reason for hope, because those who take care of livestock for others a generally paid in kind. Jocelyne had a chance at owning her own pig whenever the sow in her care might have a litter.

She asked the CLM team to buy her goats. She received two, but one died. When her case manager was ready to replace it for her, she asked whether she could have money to start a business instead. Her case manager agreed, and she started selling cold soft drinks.

That business worked well, but there was a problem. The drinks sold well whenever there was a public gathering, like a cock fight or a wake. But in her neighborhood, there were too many days with nothing going on.

So she came up with another idea. The Dominican border is not far from her home. She began buying basic groceries in Elias Piña, in the DR. A lot of goods are cheaper there than in most places in Haiti.

And she came up with a unique way to sell them. She goes door-to-door offering her wares. Her clients do not pay her right away. She makes a second visit to collect what the owe the day before she is to go back to Elias Piña. She says that her clients pay on time. “I don’t really give them a lot,” she explains. So her new business keeps the cash she needs coming in. When there is an event in the neighborhood, she can still buy soft drinks for the occasion.

But though the business helps her with a steady income stream, it is not her principal success. When she was evaluated for graduation, she had 105,000 gourds in assets. That’s over $800. The program had given her business assets worth just 18,000 gourds.

Her spectacular growth depends on livestock. With profit from her business, she bought a sow. She bought another with a loan from her savings and loan association. She now has four sows, one of which has a litter of eight piglets trailing behind it.

She serves as the president of the association, and she opened two accounts in it. That means she can save twice as much each week as most of her fellow members. “I had been in an association before, though it hadn’t really worked. I thought that with my case manager there I could use it as a good way to save.”

Her first priority with the money she saves was to make sure she can always pay for her children’s school. It gets to be a lot. That’s how she used most of her savings at the end of the association’s first 12-month cycle. But she should have enough money when the next cycle ends to buy a cow, an important goal. “My house belongs to me, but I rent the land it’s on. A cow could help me buy my own land.”

Yvrose, Right after Graduation

Yvrose graduated from the CLM program at the end of January. In December, when she was evaluated for graduation, she had accumulated 82,000 gourds of wealth, over $630. That is a lot for a woman who had reported owning nothing less than 18 months earlier.

When she joined the program, she, her husband Jean Gaby, and their three kids had been living in the kitchen of a church that had been built on her family’s land. Seeing her situation, the church’s pastor eventually threw up a shack for the family, built of old roofing tin and wooden planks that no one wanted.

Her case manager, Figaro, told her that she’d have to have a dry, secure home to graduate from the program and that the program would help her. She answered that there was no way that she and her husband would be able to do so, even with CLM’s help. She now looks back at Figaro’s response with a smile. “What do you want me to do?” she says he asked, “Kick you out of the program because you can’t build a house?”

“If you start, you’ll finish,” he added. “Just start.”

Figaro was right. Few families have succeeded more dramatically in their effort to build a new home than Yvrose and Jean Gaby did. Typical CLM members’ homes are two rooms, built of palm wood planks or rocks and dirt, but Yvrose now has a solid three-room home of cinder blocks. Jean Gaby brought down the cost somewhat by collected the sand they’d need to make the blocks for construction from the local riverbed, bucket by bucket. But the home still required a lot of expense. It involved taking out and then repaying three loans from her savings and loan association, worth a total of 45,000 gourds in all.

The results of her efforts are clear for anyone to see.

The new house on the left, the old one on the right.

But 45,000 gourds was a lot of money to borrow and repay, and Yvrose had to start generating income to repay those loans. The CLM team gave her two goats and a small package of poultry, and she succeeded to a degree with both, but neither would help her manage those construction costs or, for that matter, her family’s daily expenses.

So she also borrowed money from her savings and loan association for commerce. She took a loan of 15,000 gourds — about $115 — and started buying plantains and other produce from farmers and others bringing them to market. Her home is right along an important dirt road that leads to downtown Laskawobas from farming areas to the east and south. She would just wait for sellers to pass by. Many were happy for the chance to sell to her. They carry their merchandise to market themselves, balancing it on the head, and are happy if they can get rid of their load early.

She would sell the produce to wholesalers, who would bring it for sale to Pòtoprens. “I try to avoid having to bring it to Laskawobas myself, too, so I won’t have to pay a motorcycle.” She waits for buyers coming up the road just as she waits for sellers coming down it. She makes her money by being in a good spot and by negotiating prices skillfully.

But the unrest in Haiti has made it almost impossible for buyers to reach her from Pòtoprens. She had to give up that business.

Fortunately, she had another option prepared. The CLM team tested a new kind of training workshop for her group, and Yvrose was excited to participate. She learned to make different snack foods out of plantains, peanuts, and coconut and to package them for sale. It is a way to make higher-mark-up items out of commonly available ingredients, and it can be more profitable than mere trading is. By then, Yvrose had built her business capital up to 30,000 gourds, and she put all that money into her new snack business. The business is now growing. Her products are popular. More and more people hear about it. They come to her home to buy.

And Yvrose has a plan for her next steps. She wants to add another room to her house to give her children more space, and she wants to build up her assets though investments in livestock so they she and Jean Gaby can buy more land.

Yvrose and Jean Gaby

Woodia after Graduation

Woodia graduated from the CLM program late last year. We have written of her before. When she joined the program, she and her three children were living with her parents. She depended on them for almost everything. Her only income was money she made by selling a few snacks from a small table next to her mother’s shop. Her mother encouraged her to sell for herself even as she sat in the shop, selling for her mom.

Woodia asked for goats, but hasn’t really succeeded with them. She also asked for small commerce, and with it her success has been remarkable. She started with just 15,000 gourds’ worth of merchandise, about $115. But she took what she learned from her mother, and made the business grow. It is now worth over 125,000 gourds. She sells at the Savanèt market. She was selling from a small booth within the market, but she outgrew it. She now lays out her merchandise on a neighboring field, with other larger merchants.

Successful program members have always used the program to build dry, secure homes as well, but Woodia had to do something different. “Building on the land I had would have been too expensive.” The only plot she had available was what her parents could give her, and it was sleepy sloped. She would have had to pay a team to cut a flat space into it to build on, and she didn’t think it made any sense.

So she rented an apartment in downtown Savanèt instead. It costs 25,000 gourds for a year. It was expensive, but she thought it was important. “Now I am close to the market. I don’t have to walk back and forth to my mother’s house anymore.”

She has been saving 2,000 gourds each week in her savings club. The club’s rules allow members to buy just five shares each week, and the share purchase price is 200 gourds. So, to increase her ability to save, Woodia opened a second account. She buys five shares each week for each account.

When the cycle comes to a close, she knows exactly what she wants to do. She plans to buy a piece of land she can build a home on. She does not want to keep paying rent forever.

When asked how her mother, who first taught her business, feels about her success, Woodia smiles. “She’s really proud. And I am too. She knows that if she needs anything — food to make dinner or money to buy merchandise for her business — she can just send me word. I can take care of it.”

Vernette after Graduation

Vernette and her husband Rodrigue live with their two small children just east of downtown Savanèt on the dirt road that winds all the way to the Dominican border. Before their family joined the CLM program, they really struggled. Rodrigue got work when he could as a mason’s assistant, mixing cement with a shovel or lugging blocks or buckets of cement for skilled builders. Vernette would occasionally do laundry for neighbors.

Vernette asked the program to give her goats and small commerce, but she’s been able to do very little with them. The very small plot of land they live on gives them very little space for goats to graze. She received two and she chose to buy a third, but they haven’t reproduced. She started buying poultry, but her luck with that has been even worse. Most of what she’s acquired simply died.

But she had no trouble qualifying for graduation, because she built up a small grocery business that she runs out of her home, and it is succeeding well.

To say that she runs it out of her home is misleading, however. In fact, she and Rodrigue built a a separate one-room shack next to the two-room house she built as a member of the program for her business. And the construction of the two buildings is an interesting story.

When she joined CLM she was living in a home, but not a shelter. The walls of her then-home were falling apart. Its roof was in ruins. It could not keep her and the family even minimally dry. She could not establish a business, because she had no way to secure her merchandise. Or anything else. She would complain to Rodrigue, but he had no interest in helping her build a new home. “He would always say that many women had it worse than I did.”

Faced with the chance to receive the program’s support, she decided she had to act. She started pulling out the rotted wood planks from their home’s walls, making their situation worse. She wanted to bring Rodrigue to recognize and grow ashamed of their circumstances. She started talking to neighbors, friends, and anyone who would listen about Rodrigue’s unwillingness to do anything.

It worked. As Vernette says, “He was embarrassed. So when he saw the 22 sheets of roofing that the program gave me, he got to work, collecting the lumber we needed. Before long, the family had a dry, secure home. Rodrigue realized he had done the right thing on the first rainy night. “He was so happy that we were dry.”

With a secure home, she was able to start to grow her business. But there was a problem. With just two small rooms for her family and her merchandise, there was not enough space. She and her case manager talked about it, and they talked with Rodrigue. By this point, his attitude had changed. He was ready to help however he could. And he used income from his labor to buy what they needed — roofing material, lumber, and cement — to build a second small structure in their yard. That second building is now her shop.

And Vernette has bigger plans. She cannot sell her goats right now, because they are not in good shape. But Rodrigue has agreed to help her nurse them back to health. He takes them with him into the fields when he does his farming. She hopes that when her savings club ends its next one-year cycle, she be able to take her payout along with whatever she can get from selling the goats to buy a cow. Owning a cow will put her and Rodrigue on their way to achieving their larger goal. They want to buy more land.

Roselène Genéus — Seven Years After Graduation

Roselène isn’t from Mibalè. She from Kenskof, an agricultural region in the mountains above Pòtoprens. She met her husband in Pòtoprens, and they came back to Mibalè to move in with his parents.

It was a difficult time for Roselène. She didn’t get along with her mother-in-law. The couple wanted to move, but they had no place to go. They had no land. Eventually a kind neighbor, seeing the problem, gave Roselène and her husband permission to build a small shack in a corner of her yard.

That is where they were living when the CLM team found her. By then they had a young girl, and Roselène was pregnant with their second child. “CLM never would have found me if they hadn’t gone to every house. Programs had been to the area before, but they just ask local leaders for names. And leaders lead them to their own friends and family.”

The couple really needed help. They were getting by on what Roselène’s husband could earn as a sharecropper, planting his crops in fields that didn’t belong to them and turning over half of the harvest to landowners. There was no way to get ahead.

Soon after they entered the program they once again were at risk of homelessness. The woman who offered them a place for their shack didn’t mind having them around, but her family didn’t agree. They threatened legal action to have them removed. Roselène was nursing their second daughter, so the couple needed to find a solution quickly. Their case manager helped them talk with a neighbor, who was sensitive to their situation. She was willing to offer them an inexpensive five-year lease — just 5,000 gourds — on a small plot of land. It was hidden in the maze of footpaths that run through Bwa Fonten, but they would not have to worry about being chased away. What’s more, the owner was willing to consider the rent as a downpayment towards eventual purchase.

Roselène spoke with the other members of her savings club. Each week, every CLM member in her group would contribute money from their weekly stipend, and one of them would take the entire pot. It wasn’t Roselène’s turn to collect the pot, but her fellow members were willing to let her jump ahead in line. So, she paid the lease and started dreaming of her future purchase. “The land was steep and covered with thorns and cactus. My husband got together a group of friends, and they tore out the thorns and cut out a spot on the top for us to build on.”

She chose goats and small commerce as her two assets. She initially struggled with the goats. One died, and she was worried about the other two. So, she talked with her case manager, and she sold them both, purchasing a mature female with the proceeds from the sale. That female gave her three consecutive litters of twins, and between that nanny, her kids, and her kids’ kids, Roselène soon had ten goats. She and her husband added a small pig, which they cared for until it was large enough to sell for the price of a small cow. “It was a sow, but we just fattened it up. We didn’t have the space for piglets. I scoured the neighborhood to find stuff to feed it. The day we sold it, my husband and I got up at three in the morning. We left the girls in bed. And we pushed and pulled it to the market in Labasti.” It sold for 14,000 gourds, and they bought the cow for 12,500.

She used the money CLM gave her for small commerce to start a business out of her home, selling onions, dried herring, leeks, herbs, tomatoes — the ingredients for sauce. She walked around to all her neighbors to make sure they knew what she was selling. She used some of the income from that business to manage household expenses, but also managed to save money in her Fonkoze account. Between this small business, and her success with livestock, the family easily qualified for graduation.

When she graduated, she wanted to grow her business, so she began to take out loans from SFF, Fonkoze’s sister organization. Those loans made two changes possible. First, she changed her business. She began to buy up produce in the markets near her home — sacks of fruit or vegetables — and sell them in the large market in Kwadeboukè, Pòtoprens’s sprawling northern suburb. Second, she and her husband were able to use income from her business to rent plots of farmland for cash. They would no longer need to give up half of their harvest.

In 2019, the CLM team returned to Roselène’s neighborhood. In the years after Roselène’s graduation, the team had added an important new element to the program. It starting helping all program participants organize their own small savings and loan associations. Members of these associationsmake contributions at weekly meetings, and can take out loans from the funds accumulated. They repay the loans with interest, so the association’s funds grow. At the end of a one-year cycle, each member receives everything she has contributed along with her share of the interest. They then start a new cycle.

Roselène used her business to make her maximum weekly contribution, and her funds started to grow. By now, the couple had four children, so their expenses were increasing. Just the taxis to take all four to school and back cost almost $20 a week. And there’s tuition, uniforms, and books. And the family had to eat. So it wasn’t always easy to save, but Roselène was committed.

The couple used a 40,000-gourd loan from their association to buy a second piece of land. It was offered to Roselène by an older neighbor whose husband passed away. “It is close to the main road, so when we decide to build a new house, it will be easier to deliver the construction materials.” By now, Roselène’s business was flourishing, and she was quickly able to repay the loan from sales of produce, some from their harvest and some from her purchases. In 2021, the couple sold their cow and their goats, and used the proceeds to pay off the balance of the land they had leased back when they were in CLM, about 90,000 gourds.

Roselène’s vision for the future is optimistic, but also focused. “For myself, I don’t need any more progress, but I need to keep moving forward for my children. I want to leave them something.” She herself never went to school. She can sign her name because her case manager taught her how. But she wants her children to be able to go much farther.

Clermicile — Eight Years After Graduating

The years Clermicile spent growing up were complicated. When her father passed away, she moved from the area around Labasti, in southern Mibalè, where she had been living, to Doko, on the top of the hill that separates the Central Plateau from the area around Pòtoprens.

Her mother really struggled. Clermicile was her only daughter, and she was able to pay for Clermicile to attend only one year of school. Not once, but twice, she sent Clermicile to live as domestic help in wealthier families because she couldn’t take care of her. But Clermicile felt she was being mistreated, so she ran away, returning to her mother’s home.

But the mother still had difficulty taking care of her daughter, and was alarmed as she notice boys beginning to flirt with her. A neighbor suggested she encourage Clermicile to return to Pòtoprens and find paying work as a housemaid to get her away from the boys, and the mother agreed. Clerimicile moved in with the neighbor’s daughter in Kwadeboukè and spent her days working at a job they found for her. She went through several such jobs this way. Women liked employing her. “They called me ‘Seliwòz‘ because they said I was always cheerful.”

“Se li woz” is hard to translate. “Woz” means pink, but the phrase means something like “she’s the pretty one.”

Clermicile continued to work in Pòtoprens until she became pregnant. Then she returned to Mibalè and her mother, but she met her current partner, Jolicoeur, almost immediately. They moved in together when she was still pregnant with that first child, a boy named Lovensky.

Clermicile was never able to earn a steady living. Lovensky was a very unhealthy child, requiring lots of care in his early years. He was born with a fused rectum and required emergency surgery as a new born before he could defecate. She had trouble sustaining all the medical follow-up he needed, and he spent the first seven years of his life with a colostomy bag. Lovensky was admitted to the hospital frequently, and Clermicile would stay with him. But it not only prevented her from earning a living, but led to lots of expense. The medical care itself was nearly free of charge thanks to Partners in Health, but Clermicile had to eat while she stayed at the hospital with her boy, and the costs of purchasing meals every day from vendors in the street in front of the hospital added up.

Lovensky was six when Clermicile joined CLM in 2013. One of the first things the team did with her is assist her through the steps of follow-up that Lovensky needed. It took some maneuvering, but she was able to arrange surgery for Lovensky at Partners in Health’s University Hospital in Mibalè, which had just opened. Jolicoeur had to earn most of what the small family needed in their day-to-day lives. He would work for the drivers of the pick-up trucks used for public transportation between Mibalè and Kwadeboukè, the northernmost suburb of Pòtoprens. He’d earn tips for collecting passengers’ fees when he could find a driver willing to take him on.

By then the couple had another boy, an infant. Clermicile chose goats and a pig as the enterprises she would receive from Fonkoze. With an infant in her arms, it was too difficult to start a small commerce.

She was able to keep her pig healthy. That was before the epidemic of Teschen disease that has made pig-rearing in Haiti even riskier than it already was. But her real success came with her goats. “I had a lot of luck with them.” The program gave her two, and by the time she graduated, she had eight.

When asked how she uses her goats, she explains that she has always used them mainly as savings. She sells one or two or more when she needs to manage an expense, whether it is school fees or costs connected to sickness in the family or just to cover regular household expenses when the couple is struggling. Once she sold four of them to pay a lawyer to help get Jolicoeur out of legal trouble. The number of goats she keeps at any time varies, but each time it has gotten down to zero, she’s been able to get started again by purchasing new ones out of what they can save from Jolicoeur’s earnings by selling a bunch of plantains or two from her garden.

When she graduated from the program, Clermicile decided that she wanted to start a small business. She had always managed one on-and-off, whenever Lovensky’s health permitted it. Friends would lend her 500 gourds or so, and she’d buy something she could sell at Labasti, the large weekly market just a short walk from her home. In the last weeks of her time in CLM, the CLM team introduced her and her fellow members to staff from SFF, the Fonkoze Foundation’s sister organization in Haiti, which is the country’s largest microfinance institution. So, just after graduation she took out her first loan. She has taken a series of loans since 2014, and the value of the loans has increased. The first was for just 3,000 gourds. The most recent was for 45,000.

She has experimented with a range of businesses. Often she will buy livestock at various markets in Sodo or Mibalè and resell it, either at the same market, counting on strong negotiation skills, or by bringing it to Labasti, where butchers come from Pòtoprens and prices for livestock can be high. Sometimes she buys groceries and sells them either in Labasti or in Nan Gad, a large market near the entrance to Kwadeboukè. She buys beans in Laskawobas, where farmers bring them in for sale from the mountains, and sells them in Labasti and Nan Gad, where they cost a lot more.

Two yeas ago, the CLM team had the chance to offer families who had been part of the program before 2017 a new level of support. In 2016 and 2017, the team began helping members organize their own local savings and loan associations, and these associations had proven a success. Members make weekly contributions over the course of a year, and the association uses the money to make interest-bearing loans to members. At the end of a one-year cycle, members receive all their savings along with their share of whatever interest the association has earned. Clermicile and the women she graduated with had passed through the program before the team had learned to use the associations, so Fonkoze decided to organize associations for 800 CLM graduates in the region.

Clermicile was elected president of hers, though her presidency didn’t last. At the first meeting, it became clear that the elected secretary could not read well enough to do the job, so she and Clermicile switched places. Clermicile is, it turns out, perfectly able to read Creole well.

This is surprising, not just because Clermicile attended just one year of school. When she first joined CLM, her case manager taught her how to sign her name. We are always careful to say that the CLM program does not include literacy. We help women learn to write their names, but that’s about it. Neither we nor the women we work with have time for much more in the 18 months that the program lasts.

But when Clermicile could write her name, her case manager started giving her other words to write. A range of words. And before long, Clermicile was able to read and write at a basic level. Little bits of practice in the ensuing years only made her more capable. Now she manages all the reading and writing associated with her post in the association without difficulty. The association recently completed its second cycle, and its members are happy with it. Over 20 other neighbors have asked to join, enough so Clermicile is planning to open a second association for them, so that her original one will remain manageable.

Clermicile likes her association both for the way it encourages her to save money and for the credit it makes available. She prefers to take out loans for just a month, borrowing only what she can invest, roll over, and pay back in one lump sum. Interest in her association is 2% per month, so paying back the entire sum quickly minimizes the interest she pays. She has gotten so comfortable with the rhythm of these loans and their repayment, that she plans to leave her more expensive SFF credit program when she finishes repaying her current loan.

Meanwhile, she and Jolicoeur have been building up assets. Clermicile has eight goats and Lovensky and his younger brother each have one too, gifts from Jolicoeur. The couple has purchased some land, as well.

Clermicile has made a lot of progress since she first joined the program. Some of it has been financial. She and Jolicoeur are not wealthy by any means, but they are managing. And she’s become a leader in her community, too. She is the secretary and undisputed leader of her savings association, but she’s done more. She now serves on a regional committee committed to fighting gender-based violence. There, too, she is the committee’s secretary.

Just After Graduation

Manise lives in Laflòt, not far from the main road through Dezam, just a short walk from the border with Lachapèl, farther to the east. She hasn’t always lived there. She moved a couple of times while she was growing up.

She spent her earliest years in Palma, a market town on the upper end of the island of Lagonav. Her mother was from Dezam, but her father was from the island. The two met at the market in the small port city of Arkaye. When her father passed away, Manise’s mother struggled to care for her. She gave the girl to the father’s cousin, who lived in the nearby city of Ansagale, because she could not keep Manise fed. Manise grew up in the cousin’s home.

Manise’s mother then returned to Dezam, but when she became sick and required someone’s care, Manise moved to Dezam to be with her. She already had a child by then, and had to leave the child with the father, on Lagonav. But she didn’t feel that she had a choice. Back in Dezam, she soon had another child. But she also met her eventual partner. “He saw me and he liked me. And I like the way he treats my boy as his own child.”

The couple got by, but things were hard. Manise worked as a second-grade teacher, making 3,000 gourds per month, which is now less than $30. When, that is, the school was able to pay her at all. Her partner did odd jobs. Anything he could find. Despite the couple’s efforts, the small family frequently went hungry. Manise could not afford to send her young boy to school.

Manise chose goats and small commerce as the activities the CLM program would transfer to her, but after she received her two goats she and her case manager Odiel realized there was a problem. Manise was nursing a baby, so she and Odiel decided it was no time for her to be managing a business that would force her out of her home. They took money that they had set aside to purchase merchandise to buy a third goat instead.

The third goat didn’t end up getting Manise anywhere. Neighbors jealous of her participation in CLM killed it. But her other goats prospered. She would have had eight by graduation if she hadn’t already sold two to manage expenses. Four of her six remaining animals are pregnant. Before graduation, she had added two turkeys, which she bought out of savings in her VSLA, and a large pig. She had also started a very small commerce, selling snacks like crackers and candy out of her home, something she could do while managing the couple’s infant. At graduation, our evaluators assessed her productive assets at over $700, more than three times what she needed to graduate. Shortly after graduation, her pig succumbed to fever, but she purchased a small replacement almost immediately.

Manise has progressed in another way as well. She followed advice she received at agroforestry trainings that the CLM held in Dezam. She has been planting trees in the same fields in which she grows her usual crops: coconuts, mango, papaya, lime, and cherry. But also trees that bear no fruit of any value, but which leave her leafy, compostable that she can use to build up her garden’s ground soil. Though her neighborhood has been dry recently, her trees are starting to grow.

Despite her progress, Manise still struggles. Her baby has been developing slowly. It is early still, but he seems to be falling behind. He’s 18 months old, and he cannot yet support the weight of his head with his neck. We plan to help her access the services the boy might need in the next weeks. If we don’t, she is likely to burn through the wealth she has accumulated doing what she can for the boy.

Suzette lives in Lanbè, a neighborhood in eastern Dezam. Before she joined the program, she and her children were living with her mother. The arrangement led to conflict. Rather than live with constant arguments, Suzette chose to move out. She and her partner, Davilmar, could afford very little. Just a rented room that was soaked through with every rain, but it gave her some distance from her family.

She had no source of income herself when she joined the program. Davilmar was responsible for everything. He talked to a cousin of his who sold lottery numbers. Such people earn a small percentage on every ticket they sell. People are not inclined to do it if they can find something else. It is very little money. But Davimar needed money, and his cousin could see that. So they agreed that Davilmar would take over. “He works hard, and will do whatever he can,” Suzette says. Davilmar’s income meant that they had at least something to eat most of the time. They could not afford, however, to send the kids to school.

When she was invited to join CLM, Suzette figured that she and Davilmar had to talk. “When you are with someone, you shouldn’t make big decisions by yourself.” The couple was afraid to join the program. “People in the neighborhood were making up all kinds of lies about it. They said it was the devil’s work. We talked and talked, but we finally decided that we didn’t really have a choice. We needed the help.”

Suzette asked the CLM team to give her goats to get her started, and she received three. She cared for them, and the three turned into seven, but she sold a small male to buy school uniforms for her kids. She’s added other livestock. She owns turkeys and chickens, and a large and growing pig.

She started saving money in her VSLA. She and Davilmar really pressure themselves to save 250 gourds every week. Suzette used a 7,500-gourd loan from the VSLA to start a business. She would buy beans in the local market, and bring them for sale to other markets just down the road. When bean prices rose too high, she switched from beans to eggs. She now buys six cases of eggs each week at one market and sells them at two others. She can make enough to keep her family fed and continue saving. “I want to make my business bigger. I didn’t want to sell a goat to pay for school, but I had no choice. You can’t not send your kids. Next year, I want my business to be able to pay.”