Louimène’s path into the CLM program was an unusual one. She agreed to join the program in May 2013, when we were selecting 360 families in southern Mirebalais.

At the time, she and her husband Lucner were eminently qualified. They were living with their two young boys in a small ajoupa, a tent-like structure made out of straw. The land their ajoupa stood on didn’t belong to them. A farmer whom Lucner did work for let him put it up in a corner of one of his fields. Louimène and Lucner had no productive assets and no land of their own to farm. The depended entirely on the fifty gourds Lucner could earn on days he could find work as a field hand. At the time, that was just about $1.

It wasn’t at all the way they had started their life together. The two met in Port au Prince. Lucner was a trader, selling soap or rice or women’s underwear. As he put it, “Anything I thought I could sell.” Louimène was working as a maid in a home next to where Lucner’s sister lived. Lucner liked Louimène as soon as he saw her, but he decided to get to know her better. One day, Louimène was sent to Lucner’s business to buy some rice. Lucner volunteered to deliver the rice himself, leaving the business and his wallet with Louimène for the monent. The wallet had all the money from the business in it, over 7000 gourds. “I wanted to see whether she was honest.” When he returned to his business, 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 that 500 gourds into more than 1000, even while she was working as a maid. “I liked her right away, but when I saw how smart she was I decided to try to make her mine.”

They’ve been together ever since, first in Port au Prince, then back in Mirebalais, when he decided to return to care for a sick brother. That brother’s illness was life-changing because it ate up all the capital the couple had. Lucner could only look for work as a field hand. And they were able at first to live in his family’s yard, that didn’t last long. Louimène and Lucner’s sister could not get along.

So the couple really needed something like CLM. But when the program started, Louimène was unavailable. She had returned to her own home, in Bouli, a remote corner of Boucan Carré, to take care of her sick mother. Initially, Lucner went to the six-day enterprise training workshop in Louimène’s place, but when it appeared that Louimène would not be able to participate in the program herself, the CLM team selected another woman to replace her. Weeks later, when Louimène returned to Mirebalais, she found that her place in the program had been taken.

Fortunately, the couple got a second chance. A woman who was selected with Louimène decided to abandon CLM and move to Port au Prince. The CLM team was able to recover the pig and one of the goats that we had given her. We took back the roofing material we had given her as well, climbing onto the roof to pull the nails one-by-one. Finally, we took back 1000 gourds she had saved out of the cash stipend CLM members received during their first six months in the program.

So Louimène received far less support than members of the CLM program normally do. She got one goat, rather than two, and one flat transfer of 1000 gourds rather than six months of weekly 300-gourds payments. In addition, she received just nine months of weekly coaching, rather than eighteen.

But Louimène and Lucner made good use of what they were given. Lucner kept working hard in in their neighbors’ fields, even as he took primary responsibility for their livestock. Louimène invested the 1000 gourds in a small commerce. She would buy spaghetti and canned milk, put it on her head in Labasti, and walk the five miles into Mirebalais, making sales on the way. Normally, she’d sell out by the time she got to town, and she’d buy merchandise there for the next day. Her business began to grow as she invested some of the proceeds into additional products. On Thursdays, she would find a busy corner of the Labasti market place, and her sales would be strong.

Meanwhile, she and Lucner talked to the landowner about letting them improve the structure they were living in. Often 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. But they were eventually able to get permission to do so, in part because of their case manager’s help in the negotiations.

In December 2014, Louimène graduated from the program after having spent only nine months in it. By that time, 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 to buy a cow, which she wanted because she had a plan. “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 landowner began to resent the family’s presence on his land. He started pressuring them to leave. Since they had no place they could go, the couple put up with his humiliations as best they could. But eventually 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 even spent the extra money and effort to install a simple latrine, having learned of its importance while in the program. One of Lucner’s brothers bought a neighboring plot for a similar amount. It was Lucner who made the purchase, but he was careful to put Louimène’s name on the receipt, rather than his own. “If anything happened to me, I wouldn’t want Louimène to have problems with my family.”

That is when things started to get more difficult. Lucner got sick. He was unable to work for a couple of months. The couple sold off their second pig and, eventually, their small commerce. 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. Eventually they made a difficult decision: Their children would move in with Louimène’s mother, who lives in Bouli. Louimène would seek work as a maid in downtown Mirebalais until she could save enough money to return to business.

For two months, now, Louimène has been working for 2000 gourds-a-month. Her employer doesn’t normally eat a home, so Louimène is on her own for her meals. Louimène goes hungry much of the time so that she can send money to her mother for her children’s upkeep while she saves up as much as she can towards the day when she can go back into business. But after two months, she’s saved 1000 gourds. And now that Lucner is healthy, they may not be far from their dream of bringing the family back together and sending the kids to school.

Claudette and Franckel

When Claudette joined the CLM program, she and her husband Franckel had very little. They were living with five children in a single room they rented near the Labasti market, which sits along the main road between Port au Prince and Mirebalais. Four of the children were theirs, and one belonged to Claudette’s brother Manny, who lived nearby. She had been living with her aunt and uncle for years.

The couple struggled to send both their oldest girl and Manny’s girl to school. To pay the tuition and other expenses Franckel would turned wood that belonged to neighbors into charcoal and take half the revenue. He also did day labor to keep the family fed, earning less than $1 a day in their neighbors’ fields. Occasionally, he’d getting a job on a team milling sugarcane for a few days. That would be a windfall. Claudette didn’t contribute to the household’s income. With the couple’s twin toddler girls and the infant boy who followed them, her hands were more than full.

They chose goats and a pig, and got to work, taking good care of their livestock. They couldn’t afford to buy land to build a home on, so they talked to Franckel’s brother. He gave them a small plot downhill from a larger one that he claimed from their half-siblings. The brother is a difficult man, a bully. That’s what enabled him to claim the land from their siblings. It didn’t really belong to the half of their family that he and Franckel were part of. But the brother presented the only way that Franckel and Claudette saw of establishing their own home, so they dealt with him as best they could. To make things worse, the man was jealous of their participation in CLM. He and his wife had been too wealthy to qualify. So Franckel and Claudette had a lot to do to manage the relationship.

Things weren’t easy, and their frustration built as their livestock failed to multiply. By six months into the program, their pig was growing, and it would soon have piglets. But the piglets all died. Even at twelve months, their two goats were still just two goats. So the couple prepared to make a difficult decision. Their baby was no longer breast feeding, so Claudette would leave their area to seek work as a maid in Port au Prince. The work would be poorly paid, but it would be regular income. Franckel would have to manage things at home with the help of their older girl and their niece.

But something got in the way. Claudette’s brother Manny became dangerously sick. He had severe constipation and accompanying stomachaches. Franckel’s brother was close to a Vodoun practitioner who made money as a healer, and he convinced the couple to let his friend take care of Manny. Claudette could only watch as Manny’s condition deteriorated.

One rainy afternoon, however, seeing Manny in agony, Claudette made a courageous decision. She took him from the healer’s compound, put him on a motorcycle taxi in the midst of a tropical downpour, and rushed him to the Partners in Health University Hospital in Mirebalais. Doctors performed emergency surgery to remove the blocked section of his intestines, and so saved his life.

The cause of his trouble was extra pulmonary TB, and Manny would need at least six months of treatment after he left the hospital, so the couple built a small shack next to their own, where they could keep Manny with them while protecting the children from possible infection. He became a full part of the household. They helped him get to his follow-up appointments, and cared for him as he recovered. As he gained strength, he began to help with housework. He had long been a hard-working farmer, but initially he could just manage the smaller chores. He was anxious, however, to do whatever he could.

Meanwhile, the couple’s livelihood was undergoing a transformation. They found a landowner who was willing to let them work a small plot as sharecroppers. They would do all the work, and keep half of any income. Franckel first cultivated it for the charcoal he could make from the wood growing on it, and then invested the money from charcoal sales into planting a crop of beans.

They also found someone willing to sell them 2000 gourds worth of sugarcane on credit. Claudette explains the opportunity: “Making money from cane is a lot of work. Some people would just as soon take the easy money and be done with it. But Franckel’s not like that. If he sees a way to make an extra 50 gourds, he’s always willing to make the effort.” They used the income from that sale to buy another load of cane. “Franckel found someone who had a cane field they had already harvested. But he thought it looked like it had a lot of cane still in it, small plants that would grow if they had a little more time. He bought the harvest for 5000 gourds, and eventually sold 15,000 gourds worth of cane.”

But even as they were beginning to find a path towards financial success, their lives grew more difficult socially. Franckel’s brother was angry that they had turned their back on his friend, the healer. And his jealousy only intensified as he watched his brother’s lot improve. So he decided to run Franckel and Claudette off the land he had provided for them.

Fortunately, it was at about this time that their first bean harvest came in, and it was a good one. They sold it off and made good use of the profits. They bought a horse, and made a down payment on a small plot of land that they could build a house on. They threw up a three-room shack. They wanted Manny to have his own room. It wasn’t much, but it put a tin roof over their heads and it was theirs. They had to sell off their goats to get the house built, however, so they were left with farming as their only economic activity. And with Manny and five children on their hands, things were very tight.

When Claudette graduated from the program, the couple had their horse and a couple of chickens, but all their other money was in the fields. And Claudette was pregnant with what would be their last child. As Franckel explained at the time, “We know that our family is already large, but we want one more, and we are sure that we can support all our kids.”

Their success with sugarcane is what changed their lives. Claudette and Franckel began to buy all the cane they could, and would rent local mills to turn it into molasses. They’d then sell the molasses to rum distilleries. With each new purchase, they had more to invest. Soon, they were farming sugarcane, too, paying five-year leases on plots of land. Eventually, they had over three hectares under cultivation and a sugar mill of their own.

And as they rolled over the capital that they invested in sugarcane, they invested in the quality of their lives as well. They poured concrete over the packed dirt floor of their home, and repaired and painted the planking that made up its walls. They re-did its small porch with cinderblocks and cement. They bought the plot in front of the house to plant a garden. Their three younger children joined the two older girls in school.

Many CLM graduates are successful, but Claudette and Franckel know that few have been as successful as they have. “Some graduates are willing just to keep the things they have,” Claudette explains, “but we always are trying new opportunities.”

Each has an explanation for their success, and their explanations converge. Each credits the other. Franckel says that Claudette has two qualities that really help them. “She works hard with whatever we have, and she never complains when we have nothing.” Ever since she weaned their youngest child, he’s made sure that she always has some capital to manage a small commerce. She buys loads of whatever produce is in season, and sells it in local markets. “Since she manages the house with her business, I can focus on bigger things.” For Claudette, it’s Franckel’s willingness to work hard wherever he sees an opportunity. “He doesn’t worry about doing things the easy way. When you are in a difficult situation, if you see a path out of it, you have to be willing to take it.” For both of them, it starts with their willingness to discuss all their decisions and make them together.

And they seem well on their way to continued success. With money from the sale of their sugar mill and 100,000 gourds they borrowed from a local credit union, they made a down payment on another hectare of land. This one they will own. Their next cane harvest should enable them to complete the purchase. Here, there is a small disagreement between them. Franckel wants to build a new, larger home on the new plot. Claudette would rather stay where she is and use the new land for farming. “We’ll have to discuss it,” she says.

And Claudette is making progress in another sense. This year, she found an afternoon school program for adults at her church and she entered the first grade. “I go to meetings and there are folks old enough to be my parents who can read and write, and I can’t. It’s embarrassing.” She had never been to school before.

It’s been four years since Orana graduated from the CLM program. She was part of a group of 350 women we worked with in Bay Tourib, an area of western Thomonde. She and her husband Sonn were able to transform their lives during the program’s 18 months and the couple of years that followed.

Previous to joining CLM, the family depended on what Sonn could earning working in the Dominican Republic. He would return to Bay Tourib whenever he had money he could bring with him. Orana would have to stretch out what he brought her to make it last. Now and again she would start a small commerce with some if the money, rather than just spending it on food, but frequent pregnancies got in the way. The couple had no livestock, and though they had access to land that belonged to Sonn’s family, they couldn’t afford to plant it. They frequently went hungry.

But the livestock Orana received as a CLM member encouraged Sonn to stick around. It gave him work to do. And the couple was able to use savings from their food stipend to begin investing in their fields. They took some of the proceeds from their harvest, and invested it in Orana’s small commerce. She sold plastic sandals at the local markets. Their lives took off.

There were bumps in the road. Sonn was the one who travelled to Port au Prince to buy Orana’s merchandise, and on one of his trips all their money was stolen. They had to start over again. But by the end of the program, Orana had a small but steady business. They couple had been able to buy a mule, so that she didn’t have to carry her merchandise to market on her head. More importantly, after she graduated they had been able to purchase the land they lived on and some additional farmland as well. They even started leasing additional plots to plant even more. Neither Orana nor Sonn was ever afraid of hard work, and they finally had resources to work with.

But the last two years have been hard. The couple feels as though they’ve taken a step backward. It started with Orana’s last pregnancy, her sixth. It was difficult. Though her boy was born healthy, she required expensive hospitalization in its last days, and the couple had to sell off her commerce to pay.

Then they suffered some poor harvests. Like most farmers in central Haiti, they would normally depend on millet, but the last two years’ millet crops were total losses. Some kind of parasitic invasion destroyed the millet in much of Haiti. Their pigeon peas were lost this year because of heavy rains that fell at the wrong time, and like most farmers who planted their beans late last winter, their current crop looks unpromising. “The folks who got their beans planted early are seeing a good harvest. But our land is hot. We have to wait longer. And it doesn’t look like we’ll get very much.”

Orana’s quick to point out that the kind of problems she and Sonn have now are nothing like the ones they used to have. She doesn’t have trouble keeping her children healthy and fed. “We have plantains and corn. We planted some malanga that should be ready in a few months, and we have pumpkins growing all around us.” They have another mule — they sold their first because it wasn’t strong enough — and they still keep goats. “I can pay for school for the kids, and as long as you have a few animals you must be doing ok.”

But Orana does have one problem, an unusual but a serious one. It concerns Daben, her fourth child. “He won’t go to school. And it’s not as if I couldn’t pay to send him. He doesn’t want to go.” Orana explains that Daben’s problem is teasing. He was born with both male and female sexual organs. I call him “he” because he identifies unambiguously as a male. The school is full of the kids he grew up around, and they torment him because he’s different. Orana isn’t sure what to do. “He’s a healthy boy. He’s never sick. There’s nothing wrong with him. But because of the way he is, he won’t go to school. And these days you’re not supposed to bring up your kids to be ignorant.” This last note has an especially strong ring to it coming from Orana because she never got to spend a day in school herself. “I think about it all the time. Even his younger brother’s in school.”

It’s gotten bad enough that Orana has thought about giving Daben up for adoption. “I wonder whether it would be different if he was living where no one knew him.” For now, she just wants medical advice to help her understand what options there might be.

Orana Louis lives in Bay Tourib with her husband Sòn and their six kids. Few of her neighbors know her by that name. They have called her Jaklin ever since she moved to the area from Mannwa with her mother Mirana. Her father had passed away, and her mother came to Bay Tourib to move in with another man. Jaklin and Mirana both graduated from the CLM program in March 2013, and Jaklin’s time in our program was especially transformative.

When we first met her and her husband, they were struggling to get by with farming. They had no assets to speak of except the land that belonged to Sòn’s family, but they didn’t have the resources to invest in seeds. They depended completely on seeds they would borrow from a local peasant organization. They didn’t have a home of their own. They were living in a small house that belonged to one of Sòn ‘s brothers.

Their main source of local income was agricultural day labor. Jaklin and Sòn would do work when they could find it in their neighbor’s fields. Sòn often went to the Dominican Republic for months at a time, and when he returned to Haiti, he’d try to come with some extra money. Jaklin would use it to buy plastic sandals in Tomond, which she’d sell in the rural markets around Bay Tourib. Each time she would restart her business it would work for a while, but eventually collapse. Often the problem was pregnancy. She couldn’t run her business because she was busy nursing a child. And whenever Sòn was away, she’d have to dip into her capital to manage her household. The family was hungry most of the time.

Things began to change when she joined the CLM program. She chose small commerce as one of her two enterprises, and so received an infusion of capital into her business as a transfer that she didn’t need to repay. She also received coaching, which helped her keep better track of her business.

She decided to expand the same business she had been trying to establish for years. She continued to buy sandals at the market in Tomond, the nearest town, and lug them for sale to the remoter markets in Koray, Regalis, and Zabriko. With her older children now big enough to watch the younger ones sometimes, and Sòn around all the time to give her a hand, her business started to take off. The couple saved money from her regular cash stipend to invest in their own farming, and they had a couple of good harvests. These harvests, in turn, enabled them to invest more in the sandal business and, more importantly, to buy a horse and then a mule to carry merchandise.

Between the added capital and the pack animals, Jaklin was able to expand her business dramatically. She was soon sending Sòn to buy her merchandise in Port au Prince, where the variety was greater and the prices were lower. And their growing business made further investments possible: farmland, a grain storage depot, and better schools for their kids. They built a house of their own on the family land they had been living on, and they bought a large garden from Sòn’s mother.

And their progress continued despite setbacks. When Sòn lost most of the capital in the sandal business during one of his trips to Port au Prince, they shook off the loss and kept moving forward.

In 2015, Jaklin became pregnant again. And this last pregnancy was especially difficult. Her labor went poorly, and she had to be rushed down to the Partners in Health hospital in Hinche. The doctors’ care there was free of charge, but the hospital is badly undersupplied with medications and other supplies, so Jaklin and Sòn had to spend the capital in the sandal business to pay for what she needed. She eventually required a C-section. She gave birth to a healthy boy, and asked the attending doctors to make sure that Rivalda was her last child.

When she got back to Bay Tourib, she was stuck nursing another baby, but the baby was healthy and she gradually regained her own health as well. Her sandal business, however, had been reduced to nothing. When she was ready to start getting around again, she had no merchandise and too little capital to buy any.

So she and Sòn made a new plan. Instead of the larger investment that the sandal business needed, she decided to go to the rural markets every week and buy up all the beans she could afford. Each week, she would take a load down to Tomond. She wouldn’t make a lot, but the income would be reliable. The standard rural unit of measure in Haiti is a large coffee can, a “mamit”, and Jaklin would be sure to make 15 to 20 gourds for each mamit she’d sell. “The sandals take more money,” she explains. “But once we harvest our beans in the fall, we’ll have the money to buy sandals again.”

So she and Sòn have a plan and the confidence to know they can manage. They are not at all a wealthy pair, but they are smart and resilient, so their future is bright.

Jacklin with her five younger kids

Cenecia grew up in an extremely poor family in Dubuisson, an area of northeastern Saut d’Eau. Her parents had ten children, but though the family often had to go without, her mother and father kept the family together. “Back in those days, people didn’t send their children away. There weren’t so many orphanages.”

When she first joined the CLM program in 2010, she was living alone in a straw shack with her four youngest children. Her three older kids were living with their father – who is not the younger children’s father – in Port au Prince. She and her kids were struggling. “Things were really bad. We were barely getting by. I’d make some charcoal now and then or go to work for a neighbor.” The father of her younger children was in the Dominican Republic. He had gone looking for work, but he hadn’t been able to send anything back to Cinecia. The children attended school on and off, but Cenecia never knew whether or when she’d be able to pay their tuition. There were days when she didn’t even know what she would give them to eat. She owned no livestock, not even a chicken.

She joined the CLM program, and she got to work. She chose goats and poultry as her enterprises. Her case manager gave her two young female goats and a variety of birds: hens, a rooster, and a couple of turkeys, too. And though most of her poultry died, her goats had offspring.

But her real progress came through small commerce. “I saved up some of the money from my weekly stipend, and my case manager Josiane taught me how I could use it to start a business.” She sold groceries – staples like rice, oil, and the like – from her own home and at the local markets. The commerce worked well, and as she moved through the program, her profits increased steadily.

And she needed the profits, because she had a lot she wanted to accomplish. The shack she was living in had a roof made of tach, the thick, fibrous seedpods that grow on palm trees. It offered no protection from the rain. And the walls were much too shaky to repair. She wouldn’t be able to cover it with a tin roof. She’d have to build something new. That meant finding the support posts and cross beams. CLM doesn’t provide the lumber that home repair requires. And she’d have to do it by herself, without a husband’s help.

When her husband returned from the Dominican Republic, he was surprised to find Cenecia and the children living in a new house with a good tin roof. The CLM program had offered Cenecia fourteen sheets of tin, but that wasn’t enough for the house that she wanted. She used profits from her business to buy 16 additional sheets so that her house could have two rooms. Now she’s glad she went to the extra expense. “My girl sleeps in one room, and my boys in the other. They’re getting older so I don’t want them sleeping in the same room.”

When she was ready to graduate, Cenecia felt as though she was facing a problem. She wanted to add to her business by joining Fonkoze’s credit program, but she was afraid to do so with the business she had. “People were always buying on credit, and they wouldn’t want to pay.” In rural Haiti, sales made in the marketplace are usually made with cash, but the neighbors who come to buy groceries at someone’s home often expect to be able to buy on credit. If Cenecia couldn’t count on collecting what neighbors owed her, it would always be hard to repay her loans. Right before graduation, Josiane had organized a meeting, and she asked whether any of the graduating CLM members owed money to other members of the program. She wanted to settle the debts before she left. The experience marked Cenecia. “When I told her about the women who owed me, they got mad. Even to this day, there’s one who won’t speak to me.”

Cenecia would be joining Fonkoze’s Ti Kredi program, a special credit program featuring very small loans and extra support from specially trained credit agents. She would start with only 1000 gourds, which was worth about $25 at the time and only about a third as much as Fonkoze’s standard first loan. But she didn’t want to risk it with a business in which customers might not pay. So she gave up her grocery business, and moved into the charcoal business instead. At first, she would buy the charcoal by the sack, and then split it into smaller portions that customers would buy for household use. Sometimes she would buy tree branches, and her husband would turn them into charcoal. Instead of selling out of her home, she sold at local markets, where all sales were for cash.

The business took off. She took larger and larger loans as her business grew. Soon she was buying and selling charcoal by the sack. She’d sell several sacks at a time in a single trip to Port au Prince. And she started selling lumber, too. She’d buy trees that she’d have cut into planks for furniture makers or home construction, or she’d buy planks that had already been cut.

As her income grew, her life changed. The two-room house she built while part of the CLM program began to feel too small. So she and her husband added a second building, with three rooms, next door to it. It has the family’s kitchen, a storage room, and a bedroom for the two of them. The children can be noisy. She also rented a room in Port au Prince so she could send her three older boys to trade school there. One’s studying ceramic tiling, another is learning plumbing. Her children were eating better, and there was no problem paying for school any more.

Her last loan was for 50,000 gourds, worth about $1000. She used it to make the first payment on a plot of land that had been planted with sugarcane, the second cane field that she’s purchased with Fonkoze credit. The land will eventually cost 105,000 gourds. She managed the first three repayments on her loan with money from her commerce and other of her own and her husband’s earnings. She’ll make the last two payments with sales of syrup milled from the land’s cane. But she plans to take a much smaller loan when she’s repaid this one. “I don’t yet have a plan for 50,000 gourds. I’ll take 25,000 instead.”

But she also has an ambition that goes beyond taking care of her family. She wants to start speaking to new CLM members when they first enter the program. “When I tell them where I was and where I am now, that will help them have hope for themselves.”

It has been more than three years since the women of Mannwa graduated from our program. They were part of the first group of families we selected when we scaled up in the fall of 2010. We began working with them at the beginning of 2011.

Mannwa presented challenges from the start. Even during the selection process, we had difficulties. About half of the ultra poor families we found there, families who needed the program, refused to join. We made a series of trips to the neighborhood, meeting with prospective members individually and with other community members in group meetings, but we couldn’t convince them.

And just getting to Mannwa to hold all those extra meetings and make all those extra home visits was not a simple matter. Mannwa is on the top of a mountain, and there are no roads that lead up to it. Even the ones that approach the bottom are challenging, especially during the rainy season, when they turn into muddy, rut-filled messes.

It took me almost three hours to hike up Mannwa’s steep face from the closest approach I could make with my motorcycle. When I finally reached the summit. There’s a small plateau that spreads out across the ridge as it widens at the top. I hiked across the fields of corn and pigeon peas that cover most of it until I arrived at Edrès’s home. He’s a tall, middle-aged farmer with a broad face and a wide smile. During the summer vacation, when his kids are home from school in Mirebalais, his yard is populated by children of all sizes – boys and girls, young women and men. You see them singly and in twos and threes, going back and forth doing their chores or playing their games. And they all resemble Edrès almost to comical degree.

He’s a local leader and a community agent for Partners in Health. He provides vaccinations, chlorine tablets for drinking water, and other simple health services, including referrals to the hospital at Rat Leta, in central Boukankare. He was also the president of a committee we created to support our work in and around the neighborhood, and he turned out to be its only active member. But he really was active, supporting us in all sorts of instances. He helped CLM members address cases of domestic violence and manage their health problems, he resolved community conflicts, and kept an eye on things when we weren’t there. At times, he just gave us advice, important because it came from someone who knew the community and its history much better than we ever would.

More recently, he had been the agent for the Haitian government’s extreme poverty program. This had given him an excellent way to continue to follow our graduates’ progress. He had just decided to give up that job. The constant hiking was getting to be too much. But his oldest son had passed through an open recruitment process and was ready to begin training to take over the job.

He and I talked first about Manie and Sorène, a mother and her grown daughter who moved into new houses right next to each other on the edge of the plateau. He felt good about Sorène. Joining the program had been hard for her. She eventually had to leave the father of her children because he refused to let her participate, even though he couldn’t keep their children fed. “She doesn’t waste anything,” Edrès explained. She had sold her cow because it wasn’t growing as she wanted it to, but she used most of the proceeds to buy goats and to invest in her farming. Most encouragingly, she had talked over the decision with Edrès, still recognizing him as someone who can give worthwhile advice. Her little daughters were flourishing. “She’d be doing even better, but she has trouble finding grazing land for the goats. She has to keep them out of other people’s farmland, but the grazing isn’t easy on her part of the hill.”

Manie was different. She had entered the program almost as poor as someone could be, living temporarily in a house she had been forced to sell to pay for her husband’s funeral. The new owner wanted her to leave. She didn’t have even a chicken she could have sold to start raising money to find a new place to live.

But she had only one teenage boy still living with her, and Edrès reported that they are managing. They had moved into a small house that our support had helped her build, and though she hadn’t done very well with her livestock, her children were taking good care of her. When I saw Jacquesonne, her youngest, later in the day as he was returning from the fields, he confirmed everything that Edrès told me. He had used his own farm earnings to buy his mother a pig to care for. They would share the profits. And his older brother was helping her out as well.

Then Edrès turned to the women from the other side of the ridge. “The women from Lalyann are all 10s. They’ve got cows and horses and mules, and are really moving ahead.”

He dragged out what I had thought would be a short talk into a long one because his wife and their kids wanted to make coffee for me before I headed on my way. But eventually I took off along the ridge that separates central Boukankare from its northeastern corner. I wanted to catch up with the women from Lalyann myself. For fifteen minutes I had broad views in both directions, but then I followed the narrow trail that descends on a long, straight diagonal into Wòch Djèp, the neighborhood where Rose Marthe lives.

I was most of the way down the path when I heard quick footsteps behind me. I turned and saw Rose Marthe herself, running to catch up, wearing a homemade dress of red and blue. She had been working in a field higher up the hill when she saw me in the distance, and didn’t want to risk missing me when I got to her home. She was out of breath from running, but we were close to her house so we decided to walk the rest of the way.

Rose Marthe and her youngest boys

She told me about the challenges she had faced over the months since I had seen her. She had lost a child, still a baby. The boy had caught a high fever with diarrhea, and she wasn’t able to get him to the hospital in time. It is a four-hour hike. The funeral had been a big expense, but she had managed. She’d had to sell off some livestock, “But I didn’t sell the cow,” she said. She hadn’t been able to buy one until two years after she had graduated, and she wasn’t going to waste it. She sold some of her goats instead. “I still have four mother goats and a kid,” she added.

Her other challenges have involved her husband. Sepavre is a farmer, and he works hard. But he’s also unreliable. He occasionally sells off some of her assets to pay for things he wants. He never sells off enough to really send Rose Marthe backward, but he keeps her from making as much progress as she could. He had recently fallen from a mango tree when I saw her. He hadn’t been hurt badly, but he was still recovering. She had to care for him, and she had to do the work of both of them as well.

Nevertheless, Rose Marthe was plowing ahead. Her younger children were ready to return to school, and she had helped her oldest daughter and her sister prepare to move in with men whom they had chosen to try to make their lives with. She was sorry that her girl had decided to start a family, rather than to continue with school, but she was resigned to the fact, and was glad to have been able to help her get started.

We left her house together. She was heading back up to her field, and I wanted to follow the trail as it turned back farther down into Lalyann. I had other women to visit.

Magalie was next on my list. I saw most of her children. They are all still small. But she herself was off farming farther down the valley. Nevertheless, the kids told me that everyone was healthy, their mother’s livestock was in good shape, and that they were ready to return to school.

Magalie’s children with some neighbors

I reached Omène’s house next. She wasn’t there, but her husband, Elga, was. He was hanging around the house because a machete wound he had recently received in his forearm limited what he could do. The arm had healed to all appearances, but he couldn’t yet work hard with his hand.

Elga was glad to see me. Omène and his other wife Chrismène were both working in a field higher up the slope. A neighbor had assembled a team to clear and plant a large plot of her land. Omène and Chrismène have livestock and gardens of their own, but they are happy to earn a few extra gourds with a hard day’s work.

Elga and I chatted about the first time we met, in January 2011. I had gone out on rounds, covering for Martinière, Omène’s case manager. Martinière had asked me to follow through with Elga for him. At the time, Elga ans Omène were living in Elga’s parents’ yard, and Omène was having lots of problems with her in-laws. Elga would travel a lot, chasing farm labor wherever he could find it, and whenever he was away his parents would treat Omène as a child, laying down the law for her, even threatening her. Omène was tired of it. She had complained to Martinière. He was happy to try to intervene, but he wanted to hear from Elga first. The problem would be very different depending on who Elga was inclined to side with.

Elga was on Omène’s side, 100%. He was embarrassed that he had put her in such an awful position, and was anxious to free her from it. Even four years later, he shook his head, remembering how his parents had behaved. I let Martinière know, and the two of them helped Omène get out from under his parents’ rule. “Things are fine now,” he explained, “ever since we moved down the hill into our own house. We can go back and forth, seeing each other when we need to, but everyone has their own place.”

Then we talked about each of his wives. Polygamy is not unusual in rural Haiti, but Elga, Omène, and Chrismène represent something like a best-case scenario. Elga is devoted to both, and has shown no interest that we’ve ever heard about in any other women. The two women accept each other and are on sisterly terms. The ten children are as one family.

This is a difficult moment for them all because Elga’s contribution to the two households is limited, but he’s making sure their livestock is in good shape. They’ve both increased their holdings a lot since graduation. And he exercises the hand as much as he can, trying to speed its recovery so he can get back into the fields. They’ll soon be peanuts to harvest in the east, near the Dominican border, and Elga is anxious for the work. “I owe it to Omène. We sold her calf to rent and extra field this year, but we lost the crop so the calf was wasted. She could have bought a horse instead.”

By now I was rested, and I was still anxious to see the two women. Elga filled my bag with avocados. He wanted to send a gift to Martinière. I was worried about carrying the extra load up the steep path to Mannwa, but I saw him sling the bag over his own shoulder. He said that I would never find the women unless he showed me where they were, and we set off. Omène’s oldest daughter, Natacha, sent us off with a final word: “Martinière deserves a spanking. He never comes to see us anymore.”

Natacha

We were about halfway up the path when we turned off the main path. We walked across a field of pigeon peas, through a garden of plantain trees, and suddenly saw a team of a dozen workers clearing and planting a field. The two women were there, and they broke off from working and came running. Elga stepped back. He knew it was their time to talk with me, and we sat for a few minutes. We couldn’t talk very long because it was midafternoon already, and I wanted to be sure to get most of the way back to Mirebalais before the rain.

The women didn’t want to talk about very much except Martinière. They had seen him at the market in central Boukankare a few weeks earlier, and had been really happy about that, but they couldn’t imagine when he might visit them at home again. They know he has other work. They explained why they decided to take a few days of work in a neighbor’s field, too. School would be opening soon, and a little extra cash for books and other supplies would only help. Otherwise, they’d have to sell livestock.

Christine and Omène

As we said our goodbyes, they said the same thing that Natacha, Rose Marthe, and Magalie’s kids had said: “Kounye a, nou p ap janm wè w ankò?” “Is this the last time we’ll ever see you?” I tried to assure them. They know how hard it is to get to Mannwa. But I’ll always try to visit when I can. They hadn’t expected me that day, and another day will come when I’ll just show up.

The Elga picked up my bag – he decided he owed it to me to at least get Martinière’s avocados to the top of the hill – and we turned straight up the path. When we got to the top of the ridge, he handed me the bag and said, “It’s still a long way, but at least it’s downhill.” Then he headed home. And so did I.