Marijo lives with her three children in Ranp Solda, near the main highway that cuts north-south through Central Haiti, just north of Kanj. She’s been a widow for several years, though her partner had stopped helping her support their children even before he passed away. “I’ve been both their mother and their father for a long time.”
She and her sister had both been mentioned among the community’s poorer residents at the public meeting that launches the CLM selection process, but when the team set out to interview potential members, they couldn’t find them. They living in Pòtoprens. She had left her two younger children in the care of her oldest child, a teenage boy, to work as a maid. It was the only way she could figure out to pay their rent, keep the kids fed, and send them to school. Her sister was working as a maid as well.
A CLM case managers talked to the kids about their lives and about their mothers, and he thought both women might qualify for the program. He got the kids to give him their phone numbers, and called them. Once he had convinced himself that they would qualify, he encouraged them to come home to Tomond to attend a meeting. “He asked me whether I’d rather live at home or in Pòtoprens, where I was working, and I said I wished I could see how my children sleep every night and how they wake up every morning.”
Marijo’s sister decided to stay in Pòtoprens. Marijo explains that the sister had a boyfriend at the time and wanted to stay near him. The man has, however, left her, so Marijo’s sister now has neither him nor the CLM program.
After attending the initial six-day training, Marijo chose goats and small trading as her two enterprises. And her goats have done well. “They gave me three, but they’ve had kids. I would have seven, but one of the kids died. So there are six. Most of them are still small, but I count them anyway.” Her kids help her take care of them. “They move them around a couple of times a day to make sure they are near food and out of the sun.”
Her real success has come through her commerce, though. The CLM team gave her 2000 gourds — about $21.50 — which she used to buy four sacks of charcoal from various local farmers. Charcoal trucks drive by Ranp Solda every day on their way to Pòtoprens, and Marijo sold all four for 2400 gourds to a wholesaler on a passing truck. She could earn higher profit by selling the sack individually, to consumers, but she likes being able to get rid of them quickly. She’s been rolling over her investment ever since. She now buys 15 sacks, and has establish a relationship with a particular wholesaler who buys everything she has every two weeks. “I keep almost all the money in the business, except what I take out to pay into my savings group every week.”
She’s not planning to grow her charcoal business much larger than it is right now, though. She’d rather use additional profit to establish a second business. Her plan is to sell basic groceries out of her home. “That way, my kids won’t have to go to other people to buy what we need. I’ll just keep track of what we take out of the business and replace it.”
When I tell her that I can see she has a head for business, she smiles. She never thought of herself as someone who could go into business. “When they do trainings, they talk with you. Even if you never had thoughts about business, business thoughts come to you.”
She still doesn’t depend on business to feed her children, however. Instead, she found a job doing laundry for a family in Kanj. She washes once day a week and then irons the clothes on a separate day. The family pays her 1500 gourds per month, or about $16.25.
Her real focus now is on completing her new home. Paying her 4000-gourd rent every year has been one of her biggest challenges up to now. But she found a neighbor willing to rent her a small plot of land sou pri dacha. That means that the rent she’ll pay will work as installments towards eventual purchase, so she and her kids will have her own home. She doesn’t yet know how much the purchase will cost. The land’s owner said that she should just build her house and that they’d talk about the purchase price in the future. She hopes to be able to use her livestock to complete the purchase.
She decided to build very small house, just one room, because she wants to be sure she’ll be able to finish the job. The CLM teams provides some building materials, and stipends for the builders, but members have to acquire a lot of the stuff they need themselves. Marijo is almost finished. She just needs to have the front door made.
Like all the CLM members who live in Lawa, Jeanna has now been a part of the program for seven months. She feels as though she has already made a lot of progress, but when she speaks about what she has accomplished so far, she focuses on her new home.
“Our latrine is finished. We walled it in and installed a door. We’re gathering the wooden support posts we’ll need for the house. We’ll find them, alright. The planks to make a door will be harder.”
That’s because the door will be made of hardwood. Even if she and her partner, Nelso, have a tree they can cut down, they’ll need to pay a pair of workers to cut it into planks. If they don’t have an appropriate tree, they’ll have to find planks the can buy at a price they can afford.
She received two goats from the program, and one is pregnant. She also received a sheep, and though it appeared to be pregnant too, it turned out not to be. She’ll have to wait until it’s in heat again, then cross it with a local ram. She’s happy with the animals, though. “They’re all healthy.”
She tried to start a small business selling rice. “I bought a sack of rice, but some of it ended up feeding my children and some went to customers who bought on credit and never paid.”
She wants to start over again when she has enough money. She is waiting to harvest her pigeon peas. She expects to bring in 2500 to 3000 gourds of peas. That’s about $33, and she would like to use the money to start a new business. This time she has a different plan. She wants to buy a few sacks of something from local farmers. Charcoal, maybe. She’ll sell it retail, in small piles, in the market in Gwomòn.
She sounds as though she knows what she wants to do with money, but it isn’t quite true. She wears a cheap, metallic ring, with a large, fake diamond. The ring comes up when she tells me that she owes someone 3500 gourds, and I ask her to explain. Apparently, she recently bought the ring for 7500 gourds, but was only able to pay 4000. The person who sold it to her let her owe the rest. In a way, she knows very well that she shouldn’t have spent that money, but she doesn’t think she had a choice. “I was sick over it. Bondye te kenbe m pou li.”
This is a little hard to translate. It means that God held her for the ring, something like that God intended it for her but more. Almost as though God made it impossible for her to get away from the ring.
In the meantime, she and Nelso are keeping their family fed with whatever they can find in their own gardens. Nelso tries to contribute in other ways, too. Jeanna says that he makes potions, magical remedies based mainly on rum and herbs. “But it’s been a long time since anyone bought anything from him,” she adds.
They are also trying to figure how to send the children to school this year. Six of Jeanna’s seven children could go this year, at least in principle. The baby is still nursing. The three-year-old is probably too young to walk all the way from Lawa to the nearest school, but the other five should go. Jeanna, however, doesn’t think she’ll be able to send more than four. The five-year-old will have to wait.
All this leads to a serious question. Jeanna is only 28. Nelso is a little older, but he’s still young as well. And the couple already has seven children. They’d have eight, but they lost one. As young as she is, it is easy to imagine Jeanna having a bunch more.
She would like to use family planning, and Nelso agrees that they shouldn’t have more kids, but she’s tried the two options she knows how to access, and neither works for her. Both the pill and shots that last three months make her sick. The Partners in Health hospital we work with in Mibalè distributes ten-year IUDs as well, and with a little coordination between our nurse in Gwomòn and our nurse in Mibalè, we should be able to help Jeanna get an IUD if she decides she wants to try one. But the first step is education, so the nurse intends to see Jeanna to explain the option.
Clotude feels lucky. The cactus sap that had gotten into her eye last time I went to see her could have done lasting damage, but thanks to advice from our nurse, she was able to rinse it out thoroughly before any harm was done.
Like Jeanna, she’s focused right now on improving her home. She finished her latrine, and has begun collecting the rocks and the clay she’ll need when they are ready to build the walls of her new house. Her children have been a big help, but she’s also been grateful to other neighbors who’ve shown that they are willing to give her a hand. Cutting out a flat spot in her hillside plot of land to build the house is heavy work. It would have been very difficult for her and her girls. She doesn’t know what she would have done without neighbors, but so far they’ve come through when she needed them. It’s keeping her busy, but she doesn’t mind. “[CLM] didn’t give me building materials so that I could store them at home. I need to do my part, too.”
She thinks her two goats are pregnant. But her sheep has her a little confused. “It’s the first time I’ve had a sheep.” She explained that the sheep started breaking its cord and wandering off whenever it could. It was a neighbor who told her that that was a sign that the ewe was in heat. So, she rushed to take it to a ram, and she’s been watching it ever since. “Its udder has started to drop,” she says, so she thinks it’s pregnant.
She had planned to start a small business as well, but she decided to use the money to buy some of the lumber she needs to build her new house. She now plans to get her business started after she’s finished with her home. She’s not yet sure, however, where she’ll get the start-up capital.
Holding off on starting her business means that, since her weekly stipend ended after 24 weeks, she’s short on cash these days. But she points out that this is a good time of year to be income-free. She has stuff in her garden that she can feed her girls. “We might not have a lot, but I can make sure they get something to eat every day.”
Itana just had to take her little boy to the doctor. He had a bad fever, but he’s feeling much better.
Like the other two women, she’s excited to have a new latrine, even though she has work to do to finish walling off the last side of it. She’s also trying, like Clotude, to have a spot in her yard cut flat so her house can be built, but it’s slow going. She seems to be getting less help than Clotude is.
And one would think she’d get more. Clotude has been a widow for a long time, whereas the father of Itana’s children is still around. He could be helping her. But not only is he unwell, he isn’t around very much. He has two partners, not just Itana. He has four children with a woman who lives in another part of Moulen. According to Itana, he spends most of his time with others, rather than helping her.
Even so, she’s pushing forward. She arranged with a neighbor to buy 5000 gourds’ worth of the lumber she’d need, and the neighbor agreed to take a 2500-gourd deposit. Itana could owe the rest. But when her boy got sick, neighbors advised her to take him to a local healer first, and she spent most of the money buying the home remedies that the healer offered her. She’s hoping that her partner will be able to replace the money so she can buy the lumber. He sometimes gets work in one of the local sugarcane mills. But Itana knows she’ll need to be patient. She says the work at the mills pays very little.
She’s excited that her goats are pregnant, but like both other women, she’s a little unsure about her ewe. She’s never raised sheep, and so she isn’t familiar with the key signs.
Evna lives in Sèka, a small community within Tomond, just northeast of the intersection on the national road that leads to Kas. She and her partner struggle to support their two children. He takes jobs as a day-laborer in other people’s gardens and works a field for the family as a sharecropper, paying half of his harvest to the land’s owner. Evna herself does laundry for a family that pays her 750 gourds per months. That’s less than $10. “When you have nothing, you have to do what they offer you,” she explains.
When she joined the program, she chose two goats and a pig as her two enterprises, but when she realized how expensive it would be to raise the pig, she asked her case manager Josiane to buy her a third goat instead.
In the program’s earlier years, Josiane would not have had the flexibility to make that change. Its rules used to require that members take two different types of assets. It seemed like a good way to protect them against total loss. If one of their economic activities failed, they would still have another. But though successful management of multiple types of assets remains one of the criteria for graduating from the program, members no longer have to take more than one type of asset at the start.
In fact, Evna hasn’t been able to make much out of her three goats so far. One was pregnant when she first received it, but miscarried. This is not unusual because transporting goats from the markets where we buy them to our members’ homes can be a rough experience for them. Two of them are now pregnant, but Evna plans to sell the other. At her CLM training, she learned that there is no point in raising a nanny-goat that doesn’t produce young. So her three goats are still just three goats.
But she has been making progress in another way. During her first months in the program, she was part of a sòl, a form of savings club common in Haiti, with some of her fellow CLM members. Each week, they would contribute a portion of the stipend they received for the program’s first 24 weeks, and one of them would take the whole pot. Josiane managed the process, and used it to work with the members on the habit of planning. Each time a member’s turn was approaching, she and Josiane would discuss how she would use the money. When Evna’s turn came, she took the 1250 gourds — about $13.50 — and used 1050 gourds to buy a female turkey. She now has six turkeys, worth more than 6000 gourds in all.
She still does laundry. She says the extra cash helps her keep her children fed. And it also helps her buy shares at the weekly meeting of her savings and loan association. Each week, she contributes 100 – 250 gourds. She can ask the association for a loan if she needs one, but she’s not planning to right now.
She wants to wait until the year-long cycle ends. At that time, she’ll receive her year’s worth of deposits along with whatever interest the group earns on the loans they make. She’s hoping that she’ll have enough to buy a cow, even if she has to buy one nan vant, or unborn. She’ll sell some of her livestock to add to the money she gets from the association if she needs to. Like many CLM members, her interest in a cow is straightforward. “A cow can have a calf or two and eventually you can sell them to buy land.”
Loralda Vil lives near Route 5, the road that leads north out of Gwomòn towards Pòdpe. She, her partner, and her three children share a small, deteriorating house that is owned by someone who moved to Pòtoprens. “They’ve been letting us sleep here, but now I hear they’re trying to sell the house, and I don’t know what we’ll do. We don’t have the money to buy it.”
She’s also raising a younger sister. The girl left their mother’s home because the mother is a heavy drinker and couldn’t take care of her. She moved in with a stranger, becoming one of many Haitian children who live as domestic servants, but the woman eventually kicked her out because she made a costly error making change for someone while trying to help in the woman’s business. Loralda likes having her sister around. “She’s helpful, but I don’t like it when she does stuff I tell her not to do.”
Loralda and her partner struggle to send the girl to school, though Loralda’s older brother helps some. Their two older children are five and three, and should be in school, too, but Haiti’s political conflict has prevented the school Loralda registered them for from opening this year. Once school starts — probably in January — Loralda will need to figure out how to pay the fees. She doesn’t see where the money’s to come from yet.
With her third child an infant still nursing, Loralda isn’t earning any income herself, and the couple has no land to farm. The depend completely on whatever small jobs her partner can find. He doesn’t have a trade, but people sometimes hire him to move a pile of sand or some cement at a construction site. It’s hard work that’s poorly paid, and it’s hard to come by, but it is all the couple has.
She has simple goals for herself as a CLM member. “I want the program to help me send my kids to school, to buy them a pair of sandals if they need one. I want it to help me get them to the doctor’s if they’re sick.” She chose goats as her first enterprise. She wants eventually to become a trader, but she thinks that, as things stand for her right now, her children would eat up any little business she started. “When the goats start to have kids, I’ll call my case manager and plan to sell one so I ca start a business with the money.”
Meloya with her youngest stepchild.
Meloya Paul lives south of Loralda’s neighborhood, off the same road. She and her partner live in a house that belongs to him. It’s a short hike east of the main road. The house looks as though it was once solid enough, but the earthquake of 2018 brought down sections of its walls. The roof above it held, but much of it is now open to the elements. They haven’t had the money to make repairs.
She and her partner first moved in together in 1990. At the time, she already had two children, and together they had two more. But all four children died. When the last one passed away, Meloya left the home. “The shock of it made me what I am. If I had children, I wouldn’t look like this.” She spent 25 years wandering around the streets of Gwomòn as a beggar. “It’s better to beg than to steal. Stealing leaves a stain on your whole family.”
After she left him, her partner had four children with another woman, but when that woman grew ill, he was at a loss. He asked Meloya to move back in to help him take care of his children’s mother, and she agreed. When the woman died, she decided to stay to take care of the four kids. “They’re my children now.”
The couple struggles to feed themselves and the kids. They depend on such unreliable, poorly-paid day labor as her partner can find. She asked the program to give her goats and a sheep, and she explained by talking accurately and in some detail of the cost of raising a pig. “You can’t raise a pig without means.”
When I told her that I could see she has a head for figures, that she “knows money” well, she smiled, but she denied it. “I don’t know money. I’m egare.”
“Egare” means dumb. And when her case manager, Pétion, heard her say it, he jumped in.
“Have you told Steven what you did with the water?”
Meloya smiled.
After the launch ceremony for the group CLM members Meloya is part of, there was an extra sack of bags of water. The sacks go for 75 gourds, or about 80 cents, and hold 50 little bags. Pétion explained that he wanted to see what Meloya was capable of, and he was pleased with the results. In less than a month, she turned that 75-gourd gift into a 300-gourd business. She no longer sells water, but buys small amounts of hot peppers and limes, and sells them in even smaller amounts. She has been making 60% profits every time she turns the capital around.
Clotude, Jeanna, Itana, and their neighbors have been part of the CLM program for about five months. A lot has happened since they joined, for them and for Haiti. But the situation in Haiti has meant that some of the things that would normally happen in CLM members’ first months in the program have been delayed.
Two difficulties have combined to make provision of some of the supports that CLM offers families difficult. On one hand, gas has been hard to come by. In Gwomòn, it’s been expensive when available at all. As the Haitian government’s debt to international fuel suppliers has increased, the suppliers have cut deliveries to Haiti. And even after fuel arrives in Haiti, distribution is complicated. Some retailers have discovered that they can make more money by selling from gas pumps to street venders, who then sell gallons – often diluted – at inflated prices. Fuel that sells at 224 gourds per gallon – currently about $2.43 – has been selling for 700-750 gourds in Gwomòn, with occasional spikes both there and elsewhere that reach yet higher.
On the other, demonstrations and other manifestations of the political conflict have been more frequent, more sustained, and more intense in the last months. Protesters block roads, sometimes violently. Small groups of frustrated Haitians will also sometimes block the road to collect a toll before allowing travelers to pass. You don’t really know, from day to day, whether one will be able to get where one plans to go.
But after arriving in Gwomòn from Mibalè on Sunday, I went to Lawa with the CLM team there on Tuesday. They went as a group because they had scheduled a meeting with CLM members and the community leaders whom the members had selected to join the Village Assistance Committee. They would establish the committee, explaining its role in detail, and then have members vote in its leadership and set the date of its first meeting.
Though we arrived an hour before the scheduled meeting time, some of the CLM members were already there. Among them was Clotude’s oldest daughter. When we asked why she was there, she told us that Clotude wouldn’t be coming. She had had an accident that very morning, so she sent her teenage daughter in her place. Clotude had been working on the fence around her small piece of land, and something got into her eye. The team wanted to make sure she was alright, and I needed to speak with her, so we left the cockfighting ring, where the meeting would be held, and hiked the additional 20 minutes to find Clotude.
Clotude’s fencing, like much of the fencing in rural Haiti, consists of candelabra cacti. These succulents are easy to grow and easy to propagate from cuttings. In relatively short order, a family can establish a barrier that is hard to penetrate, even for wayward goats.
But the plant contains a sticky, milky liquid, which is mildly toxic and slightly corrosive. In handling her fencing, Clotude got some into her eye. It’s a dangerous situation if she doesn’t rinse it quickly and thoroughly. The liquid can form a film that could interfere with her vision permanently. Her case manager called the staff nurse, Lavila, and we gave her, on Lavila’s advice, a plastic water bottle that we had with us. We showed her and a neighbor we found with her how to pierce its cap and then squeeze the bottle to produce a forceful stream of water to rinse out her eye. We will know when the case manager, Enold, returns next week whether it worked.
She and I also had some time to chat, though she didn’t want me to take a picture. (The photo above is from an earlier visit.) We spoke first about the economic activities that she has asked Fonkoze to transfer to her. She said she chose goats, sheep, and small commerce.
We generally transfer only two different activities, and Clotude had initially requested goats and a pig. But then she had second thoughts about the pig. “If you have a pig, you have to buy feed. You have to have resources. Pig feed has gotten expensive.”
So, she asked Fonkoze to buy her a sheep instead of the pig. They run about the same price. Sheep are more like goats. Both require only minimal care. “If you struggle with them,” Clotude explained, “they’ll provide offspring quickly. You just make sure each one can find something to eat, you make sure it has water, and you keep it out of the rain.” Clotude has received one of the two goats we will be providing and the sheep, and both her animals seem to be flourishing.
Clotude’s plan for small commerce depends on the savings club that her case manager set up for her and several women who live relatively close. Each week, all the women contribute, and one of them gets the whole pot. The arrangement is called a sòl, and it is extremely popular in Haiti. Each of the members of Clotude’s sòl gets 2000 gourds, which is now a little less than $23, and Clotude’s plan is to invest her payout in groceries that she can sell out of her home.
She knows that it will be a tough business. When you sell food staples from a home in the countryside, neighbors will ask to buy on credit. “Credit means I can sell more quickly, but neighbors might not pay for a week, two weeks, even three. But you think about how you used to buy with credit to save your own kids, and it’s not as though customers don’t want to pay you.”
She hasn’t been able to start her business yet, however, and the problem is that she hasn’t yet received her sòl money. The CLM team has fallen behind with its weekly stipend payments to some of the members in Gwomòn. The problem is that there were two quick changes in case manager. The original case manager resigned. It took some time to replace her, but the team did so. The second case manager was then surprised with a job offer close to her home less than a month after she started working for CLM, so she resigned, too. She’s been replaced by an experienced case manager, but it’s taking some time to catch up with all the bookkeeping. The supervisor responsible for Gwomòn expects to work things out next week.
Jeanna
Jeanna also asked the program for two goats and a pig, and she too decided to take a sheep instead of the pig. She’s happy with the decision, though a little bit nervous. Neither she nor anyone in her family has ever raised sheep, so she feels as though there’s stuff she doesn’t know. She thinks that her sheep might be pregnant. She’s had neighbors tell her that it is. But she isn’t sure.
She knows her goat is pregnant. It was pregnant when she received it. But she’s almost six months into the program, and she’s only received one. She knows she is supposed to get two, and she doesn’t know when she’ll get the other one.
Distribution of assets is running behind. Protests and gas shortages have made getting transportation to make large livestock purchases difficult in the last months. In addition, protests in Pòtoprens, almost halfway across the country from Gwomòn, interfere with any of the activities in Gwomòn that depend on cash. Fonkoze’s accountants are in Pòtoprens, and if they cannot get to the office, they can’t transfer cash into the accounts that field staff can access. But the needed transfers have now been made, and the team expects to finish purchasing and distributing livestock and other assets soon.
Jeanna is excited about installing a latrine in her yard and repairing the home she shares with her husband, Nelso, and their kids. She and Nelso have been working hard to assemble the lumber they’ll need early, so the house can go up quickly. Like Clotude, she wonders when she’ll finally receive the sòl payment that she is due, though she isn’t entirely sure how she will spend it.
Itana hasn’t been feeling well. She’s been sore, she hasn’t slept well, and she’s had little appetite. Nurse Lavila, the CLM nurse in Gwomòn saw her recently and gave her some pills, which helped. But she isn’t sure what they are. Itana did said that Lavila had been coming to see her every month, and Lavila explained that Itana is on her list of members with high blood pressure. She went by to check Itana’s pressure and to give Itana her medication. She also gave her some ibuprofen. She doesn’t think Itana’s issues require anything more serious, but she’ll keep an eye on her.
Like Clotude and Jeanna, Itana asked for two goats and a sheep after initially requesting a pig. “A pig is like a child. You can’t wake up in the morning without giving it something. I don’t want a pig I’m responsible for to go hungry.” Unlike the other women, she has received all her livestock.
But she’s finding the sheep puzzling. She hasn’t raised them before, and she’s trying to make sure she mates hers if it’s in heat. “I’ve taken it to the ram two or three times already, but I’m trying to figure out whether it needs to go again. I’ll probably just go again this afternoon.”
She also is waiting to receive her sòl payment. She had planned to invest it in small commerce, but she changed her mind. “People just won’t pay you.” She’s decided instead to use the money to help buy the lumber she’ll need to build a new house. She adds that the other women have wood that they can use, but that she will have to buy all that she needs.
She wants to build one as big as she can with the 22 sheets of roofing that the CLM program will provide. When I explain that she could make things easier on herself by building a smaller house, she explains her reasoning. “If people come to see me, I want to have a place to put them.” With so many of her children living away from home, her hope as she says this is clear. She adds that once she has finished her house, she’ll look to establish a small commerce.
Until recently, the CLM team had a straightforward way of offering new members their choice of enterprises. We had a menu of two-item choices. A member could pick from among goats, pigs, poultry, small commerce, and agriculture, and each would pick two. We are much more flexible now, but in our early years, we were quite rigid. It made a complex part of our work manageable.
But there were occasional exceptions. Ti Manman was one.
“Ti manman” means “Little Mama,” and it is what most people call Simélia Duvelsaint.
When she started the program, she had nothing. “A neighbor was letting me raise his sow, and he would have had to give me a piglet, but he took it back before it gave birth, so I got nothing.”
She and her daughters were living in a straw shack. She supported them partly through small commerce. A neighbor would lend her money now and again, and she’d use it to buy used clothing, which she’d then sell at the Mache Kana market nearby. She had learned to sew as a young girl, so when she found a tailor who would sometimes let her use her sewing machine, she became capable of altering the clothes for her clients, too. Occasionally, she’d even get the chance to make a uniform or two for schoolchildren.
It was, however, unreliable work because anytime the tailor went anywhere, Simélia would find the door locked, and she’d just have to go back home. “I couldn’t say anything. The woman wasn’t charging me. She was just letting me use her machine to be nice. She saw how difficult things were for me.”
Simélia had learned to sew by investing in her own education, something she started to do as a young girl. When she saw that her parents wouldn’t send her to school, she started earning money herself, grating manioc for neighbors who were making kasav, a Haitian flat bread. She used her earning to pay someone to teach her to read and write. “I never went to school, but I got up to the fourth-grade level. Now I’m one of the readers in my church, and I’m the one who works with my granddaughter.” She then found a tailor, and paid her to teach her the trade. “It didn’t cost much back then.”
She never had her own sewing machine, but she started to succeed. She saved enough to buy a cow, which she eventually sold to buy a small piece of land from a neighbor. But she never got to use the land, because one of the seller’s siblings took it away from her. “I had no one to help me,” she explains. She was left with the cow’s calf, but someone in the neighborhood broke its leg with a rock, and it eventually died.
When she joined CLM, she chose goats and small commerce, but at one of the first days of training, the staff asked whether there was anyone who knew how to sew, “and I raised my hand.” Her case manager, Martinière, used the money he would have used to buy her goats and small commerce towards buying a sewing machine, instead. “It wasn’t quite enough,” he explained. “We had to use money she had saved from her weekly stipend, too.”
But she got the machine, and started to work. “I saved as much as I could after paying for the girls’ school, and I started to buy goats. I eventually had seven, but they got sick and died.” She’s had more success with pigs. She now has two: a full-grown sow and a younger one. She also gave her younger daughter one of the sow’s daughters to raise, and her daughter’s sow is now pregnant, almost ready to give birth.
Though her older daughter moved out in July, Simélia still has two children with her: her younger daughter and that daughter’s little girl. And until this year, the sewing machine was the key to their income. But it’s been broken for about six months. The only repairman she could find tried replacing some parts, but it didn’t do the trick. She’s waiting for him to come try something else.
In the meantime, she’s selling used clothing again. She also sells laye, a platter woven of straw used in various ways in the countryside. Finally, she sells bowls made of gourds, which are used in Vodoun ceremonies. She goes to four different markets every week. Her income varies, but she uses a sòlto steady herself. She and about ten other women contribute 500 gourds, or about $5.50, a week, and each week one woman takes the whole pot. “When it is my turn, I can use the money to buy poultry, to invest in my businesses, and to pay back any debts I have.”
Simélia continues to work hard. She invests a lot in her children’s education. But she also has a dream. She would like, once more, to buy a cow. “It’s just something I’ve always wanted.”
A photo of a photo from 2015, sitting behind her sewing machine.
Since it was established in 2007, the CLM program has worked exclusively in the countryside. That was consistent with Fonkoze’s original focus on rural areas, but also with the history of CLM’s parent program, the graduation program developed by BRAC, in Bangladesh. It also focused initially on the rural poor.
This focus had consequences for the program’s design. Its selection process depends on a fundamental fact about rural areas: neighbors know one another well. The enterprises CLM helps families develop have been principally the sort that work in rural areas: animal husbandry, small commerce, and farming. And those are just two of the ways the program has reflected its rural focus.
But Fonkoze knows – as BRAC knew as well – that extreme poverty exists in cities, too. So Fonkoze is now piloting an urban version of the program in Jeremi, in southwestern Haiti. After six days of training ended on Saturday, 200 new families joined the program from five poor, seaside neighborhoods.
There are some differences in how the program works. On one hand, though the selection process involved community members in its first steps, it was not a full-blown wealth ranking process. On the other, Fonkoze ending up transferring investment capital for small commerce, rather than assets. There are other differences as well, including a special array of challenges around home repair and land rights.
Lancie Vixima lives in Kamanyòl. She has eight children, but just five still live with her and the father of the youngest four. The oldest of the five has been raised by her partner as one of his own children. She’s a 14-year-old deaf girl who now has her own baby. Since the baby’s father provides no support, Lancie is responsible for her grandchild, too.
Lancie’s husband used to fish, and she sold used sneakers and schoolbags. But the husband suffered a hernia about a year ago, and had to give up his work. That put more pressure on Lancie’s commerce than it could bear. The expenses involved in getting him care, combined with his inability to contribute, ate up the capital her business depended on. It no longer exists.
To earn the little bit of income she needs to feed her kids, Lancie shells peanuts for women who sell them roasted. A typical job can involve as many as ten cans of nuts and takes her two-three days. She’s generally paid 150-200 gourds, or about $2. That’s enough money to buy 3-4 cups of rice if that is all she buys. But as big as her household is, it doesn’t go far. And the work is difficult for her because she has only one good arm. The other is very little help.
She was excited to get started in the program. “They taught us a lot about managing a commerce.” And she knows what she wants to do with the money she will earn once she starts. “If I make 500 gourds, I need to save 50. And I need to start sending my kids to school again. Four of them used to go, but I didn’t have the money to send them last year.”
Lancie is excited about some of the progress she has made in the program’s first ten months. She had been, practically speaking, homeless because she couldn’t stay in her own home. She and her children were living in borrowed space in her sister-in-law’s home.
In contrast to many of the members from Jeremi, this is NOT because she doesn’t own a home. Lancie owns a well-built home, given to her by a US-based charitable organization with operations in Jeremi, and the land it’s on was given to her as well. But the house had no roof. Not that some or most of its roofing material was in poor condition, but that its roof was gone, lost because of a series of storms. With the investment that the CLM program helped her make in roofing material, the new roof is up and she and the children are back in their home.
Her struggle to develop more income has had more mixed results so far. She initially invested 1500 gourds, which is now less than $15, in a komès epis, or spice business. She sold leeks, garlic, and onions, important seasonings in Haitian cooking, and she started off well, quickly increasing her investment to 2000 gourds. But the business soon withered away because she counted on it to buy all the food her household needs.
She wants to establish a business again. And she’s in a better position to do so now that she’s in her own home. She likes komès epis, and she’d like to return to that. She feels comfortable with it. But she’s like to add a business selling charcoal. Charcoal from wood is the principal cooking fuel in Haiti’s cities, and so it sells very reliably. She feels that an investment of 3000 gourds would get both businesses up and running.
Under some circumstances, she would be able to access the capital by borrowing it from her savings and loan association. All the program members in Jeremy are part of VSLAs.
But two things argue against that. On one hand, she hasn’t been making regular weekly contributions. “If I have 100 gourds, I am going to use it to feed my children.” And not, by implication, to add to her savings.This is a sharp contrast to the lesson she said she learned from the initial CLM training she attended. On the other, she is simply afraid to borrow money. “I have too many kids on my hands.” Lancie still speaks like someone who feels overwhelmed by the challenges she faces.
She does, however, have some money in her savings account, and she’ll need to figure with her case manager how she can use it best.
Margalitha
Margalitha Lissaint too is still struggling after 10 months in the program. She’s 28-year-old a single mother of just one baby. The child’s father abandoned them before Margalitha gave birth. A tiny woman – well under five feet tall – with a back bent by scoliosis, Margalitha just recently moved with her baby out of her mother’s home.
Even before her child was born, Margalitha was struggling to support herself. She tried businesses selling prepared meals or fritay, fried snacks, along one of the alleys that runs through her neighborhood. But she couldn’t keep it business going because she would sell on credit and then her customers wouldn’t pay. “They’d swear at me when I tried to collect.” Margalitha knows that she shouldn’t have given credit in the first place, but in a poor neighborhood like hers, refusing isn’t easy. “The people who ask you are your neighbors, and when you’re hungry too, you can’t say ‘No.’”
She’s anxious to use the resources CLM will give her to start her business again. “I won’t be able to sell on credit anymore. I have a child I’m responsible for.” She wants to go back to selling fritay, but also basic groceries. And she’d like to add a side business selling used clothes. Her mother is in the CLM program as well, and she thinks she can count on her help, especially when she needs a babysitter.
And she’ll need the help. She made it into secondary school before her mother’s inability to pay forced her to give up her studies, and she now hopes that being part of CLM will enable her to return.
“I need to support my baby, but I need to save money, too. That way, if the business shrinks I’ll have something I can invest to make it grow again.”
Margalitha did re-start her fritaybusiness shortly after joining the program. It was starting to progress, but then she ran into trouble. Her baby got sick. Between doctors’ appointments, lab work, and medication, she quickly burned through everything she had. She now counts on her mother, who is also a CLM member, to keep her and the baby fed.
She wants to get back into business, but with all the difficulties she’s faced selling fritay, she’d now wants to try something else. She’d like to take some of the money in her savings account and invest in sandals.
The two live with her mother once again, too, but that situation may be temporary. She is building her own small, one-room home on land that her family controls across a small yard from her mother’s house.
The situation is unusual, however, and may be fragile. She is building the entire home out of roofing tin. Not just the roof, but the walls as well. It is striking to see the bright, new corrugated-aluminum walls reflect the sun just as the roof does. Using the roofing that way leaves her with a much less stable structure than cinder blocks and concrete would, and it means that the home will be especially hot during the days, but it is much less expensive. And she’s afraid to make a more substantial investment because her family’s claim to the land is, apparently, in dispute. She may need her case manager’s help to figure out how to secure her right to the land.
In the meantime, she has already earned some extra money by renting a corner of the still-unfinished home to another single mother.
Meloude
Meloude St. Vil and her husband Nicola live with their six children, ages five to 13, in a neighborhood called Dèyè Distriyèl. Her husband does whatever odd jobs he can find, often scavenging scraps of iron that he can sell to recyclers. Meloude sometimes finds someone willing to give her their laundry to do. Neither has any regular income.
Until Hurricane Matthew passed through Jeremi in 2016, the family lived in a small house with a solid roof, but the hurricane’s category-five winds blew the house down. She and her husband collected what they could of the roofing material and used it to put up a new set of make-shift walls. That lasted until an unexpected windstorm blew the house apart Friday night.
She and Nicola support their kids with his little jobs and her occasional laundry, but it’s gotten much harder. “More people are doing those things now.”
She’s started to work out her plan to establish a more regular income. She wants to get up early in the morning and sell prepared breakfasts. She figures that she can use the business to feed her children before they go to school. She’ll finish selling early in the day, and then move to the market. She’ll sell basic groceries there.
She thinks that, combined, the two business can help her out. She needs to feed her children, but knows that it’s also important to save. “I have to put 50 gourds somewhere now and again so I’ll have something if the house needs repairs or if one of the kids gets sick.”
Meloude’s new home on the waterfront.
Ten months into the program, Meloude and Nicola are glad to be working to rebuild their home once again. Because she is part of the CLM program, she has more resources to invest than she’s ever had before. Though the house is still a temporary structure, made mostly of roofing tin, the couple has begun assembling the blocks they will need to replace the walls. They have purchased most of the blocks they’ll need, but they will need more money to buy the cement.
Meloude feels her life has changed since she joined the CLM program, and not only because she can hope to repair her home. “M pat konn manyen lajan chak mwa.” That means that her hands didn’t touch money every month. It is hard to believe that she means it absolutely literally, but it is, nonetheless, a powerful way to talk about the difference in her life. She has money to manage, to make decisions about. She no longer must live hand-directly-to-mouth.
She used to sell prepared meals, buying the ingredients in the morning on credit and then paying the merchants that same day. But if her food didn’t sell well, or if too many of her clients paid with credit themselves, she could find herself unable to pay what she owed. She’d have to face the merchants, and ask for their patience. And in the meantime, her own business would be blocked until she could clear the debt.
The capital that the CLM program made available to her made it possible to re-establish the business with her own money. Because she’s not borrowing any more, she can keep things going through the inevitable dips that her business will go through. As long as she manages what she has, she can sell any day that she doesn’t have something else she needs to do.
But most of the money CLM provided the family has gone into her husband’s business, which is now flourishing. He buys scrap metal of all sorts and sells it to recyclers in Pòtoprens. It took some time to build up his capital from what Meloude initially gave him, but he can now buy 15,000 – 20,000 gourds worth each time he ships.
Meloude with her new baby. She says it will be the couple’s last.Sonya
Sonya Etienne is succeeding quickly. She lives with her husband Gary and their two children, ages four and nine, in Nan Site.
The family previously depended entirely on Sonya’s business selling charcoal for cooking. Gary is willing to work hard, but he has no skills. He used to depend on finding masons willing to take him as an assistant, carrying mortar, rocks, cement, or water, whatever they would pay him to do. But the work was irregular. He could go days at a time without finding anything. He eventually got sick, and was unable to work at all. He’s recovered, though, and now makes cinder blocks with a shovel and a mold. The work is much more regular. Some of the progress the couple has made comes from his improved health.
Sonya has a lot of experience with her charcoal business. She buys a sack or two and divide it into bags that give someone what they might need for just a day or two. Sales are reliably profitable even if there are occasional small losses. “Sometimes you open a sack and most of the charcoal has been ground down into pieces that are too small. Then you lose money on that sack.”
Paying for her husband’s healthcare while feeding the household without his help proved to be too much for her business, and it disappeared. She was excited to get started again using the capital that the CLM program made available.
She was also happy with the lessons about small commerce that her CLM training provided. She learned some things about avoiding counterfeit money that she believes will be valuable. But there was more, as well. “They said you should sell what you know, and I know charcoal.” A charcoal business is important to her because it means that she always has some to cook her own food.
She wanted to add a side business selling cookies and crackers to schoolkids and another selling cellphone minutes. But other opportunities came her way. Once she had re-established her charcoal business, she started buying gasoline in five-gallon jugs and selling it by soft-drink bottles, half-gallons, and gallons to motorcycle drivers. They are willing to pay a premium to avoid having to go all the way across town to get into line at a gas station.
She also started a business selling ice, but she didn’t start it herself. Her ten-year-old son Widmaël did. Someone gave him 100 gourds, which is less than a dollar, and he bought a small block of ice, which he carried around until he sold it in small chunks. Sonya explains, “He never spent any of the money he made. He just kept buying more and more ice.” So she bought a thermos chest and started buying in larger quantities. She would sell to people who came to her looking for ice, but Widmaël would still make most of the sales by taking a small amount at a time and walking around with it. When school starts, he’ll go in the morning. “Ice sells better in the afternoon sun anyway,” Sonya explains. She still plans to sell cookies and crackers, but is waiting for school to reopen to get started.
Sonya and Widmaël
Looking back after ten months, Sonya thinks more about the Haitian proverbs they have discussed in her CLM trainings than about any particular skills she’s learned.
“Hang up your bag somewhere you can reach it.”
“If they pour water for you, you should be ready to scrub your own body.”
This second proverb was especially meaningful because, she says, “there is a level of effort I would not be putting into to things” if I weren’t in the program.
She believes in saving, and has been using a local savings structure for years. Someone with means collects savings every day: one Haitian dollar, which is five gourds, on the first day of the month, two on the second, three on the third, etc., all the way to the 30thor 31st. At the end of the month, you receive 450 Haitian dollars, or 2250 gourds minus a 50-gourd fee. If you miss payments, you get back what you have deposited, minus the same fee.
Savings are especially important because her home is a rental. She and her husband have been paying 10,000 gourds per year. That’s almost $110. It is much more money than they can earn in a single shot. Their lease is up in September, and the landlord has already warned them that the rent will increase to 12,500 for the coming year.
And Sonya was excited to report that she is on the way to solving her rental problem. She and her husband Gary were able to make a downpayment towards the purchase of a small piece of land not far from the neighborhood where they now live. It will eventually cost 90,000 gourds, but they are well on their way. There is already a shack on the land, and they will need to replace it, but they decided to focus on installing a latrine first. Once the latrine is in, they feel they can move. Replacing the shack can wait.
Marie Milise
Marie Milise Mistaire lives in Lapwent. She’s had nine children with six different men, but she lost one of the kids. She’s been alone with her kids since the last man died. Six of the children live with her. Her oldest girl has been living with her uncle out in the countryside ever since the younger woman’s stepmother, whom she had been living with, put her out of the house. Her second daughter moved out to be with a boyfriend, but she now wants to moved back in with her mother, pregnant. The boyfriend refuses to help her.
Marie also has a nine-year-old with severe disabilities who lives with a sort of foster family. The family lives near a school for handicapped children, and they took a liking to the boy. Marie pays for the school, but they take care of the boy for her.
She used to make a pretty good living selling fish. She would buy a big thermos-chest full from local fishermen and take it for sale to the market. On some days, she would see that the market was too flooded with fish. Then she would separate her merchandise into small loads and carry them on her head through the residential areas of town. It might take three or four trips to sell a full day’s load, but she would usually sell out. If she had any she couldn’t sell, she would dry it out and sell it later. She was successful. “I could put aside 500 gourds of the profit every day, even after I took out what I needed for my family.”
But taking care of her late husband before he died ate up all her capital. She was forced to turn to friends for charity.
She was excited to be part of the program, and knew she wanted to go back into the fish business. “I will do what I know.” And she was confident she would succeed. “You don’t buy something to sell it at a loss.” She was thinking from the start of building up savings. “When the CLM team sees my savings account, they’ll know I worked hard. I think I can come in first place for savings.”
She re-started her fish business with 2500 gourds of the capital that the CLM program made available, and has built it up to 4000 gourds. She makes 500 to 1000 gourds of profit in a day. She tries first to sell her entire load to a restaurant, but if she cannot, she walks it through the street selling individuals as much or as little as they want. “Even if it’s just 25 gourds, you cannot tell them you won’t make a sale.” If she sells out quickly, she can make a second trip.
When she joined the program, she was thinking of all the things her house needed, things she felt the lack of, like a bed, chairs. “When they first came to my house, they had to sit on my water jugs. I want to buy chairs so I can offer them a place to sit. I had a big pile of dirty laundry because I didn’t have the money to buy soap. If they see that my life doesn’t change, they’ll think that their investment was wasted.”
And her life has changed. “I didn’t have cups we could drink water from. I didn’t have a basin to do laundry.” She proudly shows off some of the household items her business has enabled her to buy.
But as she talks about her progress, she smiles and makes a pun. “Fòk ou jere. Jeremi gen ‘jere’ ladann.” “Jere” means “to manage.” She says that “You have to be able to manage. Jeremy has managing as part of it.”
Fonkoze piloted the CLM in three regions: Lower Lagonav, Boukankare, and Twoudinò. At the time, they were rated as the three poorest parts of the country. In each area, the team worked with fifty families.
Twoudinò is in Haiti’s northeast, a region that has seen important changes since the CLM graduation. The main road between Okap, Haiti’s most important northern city, and Wanament, on the Dominican border, is now smoothly paved. Its completion has facilitated trading in the region because both Okap and Dajabon, the Dominican city across from Wanament, are important market towns. In Karakòl, just north of Twoudinò, post-earthquake relief funds helped establish a park of assembly factories that now employs almost 15,000 people. Excess electricity generated at the park makes the region the only one in Haiti with reliable power all the time.
Elissiène lives in Kayès, not far from the park. Her home is a multi-room cement house in the back of her yard. Her two youngest children still live with her, and the three older ones are off on their own. She’s a widow and has been one since before she joined CLM. Cement homes belonging to two of her grown children – “off on their own” doesn’t mean distant – sit in front of and on either side of her house, the three together forming a semi-circle.
She started the program with goats and poultry as her activities, and she managed both well. Eventually she was able to sell off her other livestock to buy a cow. But she didn’t feel as though she could take care an animal that big by herself, so she turned it over to a neighbor. He would receive every other calf it produced as his payment for caring for it. Neither he nor Elissiène benefitted from the arrangement, however, because the cow was stolen.
While she was part of the program, she also developed a small commerce. She used savings from her weekly stipend to get started. Eventually, she was selling bread, sugar, local rum, cigarettes, and other high turn-over items. The commerce prospered and she maintained it for years. “If you are a woman and you’re in business, as long as you know what you’re doing you’ll make some money.”
But she sold out her business a couple of years ago and threw all the capital into improving her house. She felt as though she had no choice. Two of her children got jobs in local factories, and they needed their mother as a full-time babysitter. Now that the kids are getting a little older, she’d like to go back into business. “I can leave them for short periods, now.” All she would really need to do is go off to buy her merchandise. She would sell, as she always did, right out of her home. Going back to earning an income, even a small one, is important to her. Her youngest child missed out on the national 9th-grade graduation exam last year because Elissiène owed money to her school.
Anne Marie, or “Mad’Kòk”
If you go to Jakzil and ask for Anne Marie’s home, they’ll try to take you to one of the three nearby women named Marie. But you won’t find Anne Marie. She’s married to a man they call “Kòk,” and no one knows her by anything except “Mad’ Kòk”, or Mrs. Kòk. “If you ask for Mad Kòk, anyone around her will bring you straight to my home.”
Jakzil is a village of closely-spaced shacks on the plain near Haiti’s northern coast. The Atlantic Ocean is just a few steps away. Anne Marie, like Elissiène, received goats and chickens when she first joined the CLM program, and she managed them with great success. By the time she graduated, she was ready to buy her second cow. In the years that followed, she sold the four calves they produced and invested the money in the house she lives in now. It has all been her work, because though she is known exclusively by her husband’s name, she cannot count on him to contribute to the household.
Jakzil was arid to start with, and in recent years drought has very much reduced her access to grazing for her cows. She watched the two big ones losing weight and getting sick. She eventually sold them at a loss to a local butcher.
But she did so with a plan. While in CLM program, she had built a small commerce selling salt. As a retailor, she saw the potential benefits of a larger business. So, she took the money from the sale of her cows and bought a salt basin. The coast around Jakzil is one of the areas that produces the coarse salt that is principally consumed in Haiti. Anne Marie lets sea water into her basin and then closes it off, letting the water evaporate. Once a month or so, she can harvest. A single harvest can bring in 10,000-15,000 gourds. She doesn’t have time to manage the basin herself, though. A neighbor does it for her, and they split the income.
She doesn’t, however, depend entirely on that income. She spends much of her time hunting tchatcha, a kind of small, saltwater crab used in Haitian cooking, and other small crustaceans she can find along the shore. She sells these to merchants, who bring them to market. She also gets a regular monthly salary from a local school with a school lunch program. She supplies them with the firewood they need in their kitchen. She collects it locally.
She’s focused now on her youngest child, a teenage daughter who still lives with her. Her most important goal is to keep sending the girl to school. “She’s my youngest. She’s the one I have to raise the highest.”
Rosette
Rosette also lives in Jakzil. She had nine children, and eight of them survive. Her four youngest are still in school. Two will be in their last year of high school this year, and two will be in 10thgrade. She has had to raise them alone.
She too chose goats and poultry as her two CLM-activities. They flourished while she was part of the program, but didn’t last long afterwards. “There was so much draught. The livestock couldn’t survive.”
So, Rosette found another way to get by. Her neighborhood is part of the area served by the electricity generated at the Karakòl factory park. Her home has electricity all the time. She acquired a freezer. She buys five-gallon jugs of treated drinking water and fills small plastic bottles. She freezes them and sells them as ice. A jug of water costs 25 gourds, and she can sell the ice for more than twice as much.
She remembers the program fondly. She especially enjoyed the group trainings. “You have to learn to be comfortable around people. You have to change, and we changed.”
Bwa Joli stretches along one of the ridges that divide Tomond from Boukankare, which lies to its south and west. It is a hard-to-reach neighborhood of small farms, mainly patches of corn and beans. The one road into the area is the steep climb up Mòn Dega. Recent work by heavy road equipment smoothed out some of the worst spots on the slope, but the work stopped in Plenn Dipò, so the last hill from there to Bwa Joli remains challenging.
Gran Chemen is a broad footpath well onto the Tomond side of the ridge. That’s where Manoucheca Louis lives with her partner and their three kids. Before the family joined the CLM program, they survived by farming, making charcoal, and selling the avocados that grow on her in-laws’ land once-a-year. “If you don’t have a horse, you have to carry your merchandise on your head, which means you can’t make much. You’re stuck selling a day’s worth of labor or making charcoal. We had reached a difficult moment.”
Manoucheca
Manoucheca has been a CLM member for seven months. She chose goats and poultry as her two enterprises, and while the goats haven’t yet had kids, they are healthy. “I put them with a buck and thought they were pregnant, but they weren’t. I mated them again last week. So, we’ll see.”
The poultry has gotten off to a quicker start. As part of the package, she received two turkeys, and one already has three chicks. Turkeys are valuable, but they are hard to keep. They tend to wander off, and they are easy to steal. “The chicks were disappearing for days at a time, to I finally had to tie the mother to keep it in my yard.” In addition, a sharp rise in the price of local chickens has increased the value of her holdings. She plans to wait to sell off some of the chickens, though. “I’ll use the money to buy another goat, because a goat can turn into a cow. For the price of three adult females, you can by a young calf.”
But she isn’t ready to sell any livestock yet, and she’s reluctant to sell any for food. So, her husband is still responsible for the family’s income. And she needs that income, both to feed her kids and to save every week in her Village Savings and Loan Association. “If he gives me 500 gourds to go to the market, I make sure that I set aside 50 gourds or so.”
She’s getting ready to use the access to credit that her savings provide. She plans to borrow 3000 gourds this week to buy beans at the market in Opyèg. She’ll be able to sell them for a higher price by carrying them downhill to markets in more populous areas. She can buy on Wednesday, and sell on Friday in Domond. Then she’ll buy again on Saturday, and sell on Monday in Difayi. She doesn’t have an animal she can load, so she’s limited to the seven coffee-cans worth she can carry on her head, but it is a good, if a difficult way, to establish a regular income.
It is a hard time for her to begin, however. She is in the early stages of a new pregnancy. But Manoucheca is confident. “When I had my other kids, I was able to work almost until they were born.”
Marie
Marie Exantile also lives in Gran Chemen, though her home is a long way off the main path. She lives as a widow with five children and three grandchildren. Her husband has been dead for seven years.
Her oldest daughter, Zette, is also a CLM member, and she will move out of her mother’s house as soon as her own is ready. But Zette will take only her youngest child. The other two children will stay with their grandmother because the man Zette is moving in with is not their father.
Before joining the program, Marie and her children survived by farming. She would sell a day of field labor whenever she could. “Life wasn’t good. I didn’t have the strength to send my kids to school. I couldn’t keep them fed.”
She chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises. One of her goats already had a kid, and the other is growing quickly. She almost lost the kid because its mother wasn’t producing milk. But she tried a folk remedy she had heard of, and it worked, so the kid is healthy now.
Her pig was pregnant, but it wasn’t really mature enough to bring the pregnancy to full term, and miscarried the litter. It recovered well, however, and Marie still has high hopes.
Like Manoucheca, Marie thinks it is important to save money in her association, but she has to find the money on her own. She occasionally sells a bunch of plantain or whatever she can find in her garden to both buy what she and her children need and to set aside some savings. Unlike Manoucheca, she’s reluctant to take out credit. She’s been suffering from cramps in her legs for almost a year, so she has trouble getting around, and it is hard for someone where she lives to start a business without doing a lot of walking. And without a business to invest in, she is afraid that she wouldn’t be able to repay what she borrowed. So, she thinks she’ll wait until the savings and loan association pays out her savings at the end of the year and see how she’ll invest the money. “I’ll have to see how much there is.”
For the moment, not a lot has changed about her life. For six months, she received a weekly stipend, but she has no new source of income. She isn’t willing to sell any of her livestock, whether to invest in other ways or to feed her kids. “I remember once I sold two goats to plant a garden of beans, and the beans failed. My neighbors laughed. They said I was in too much of a hurry to get rich.” For now, she’ll save the livestock so she can use it if she’s faced with an emergency.
Joveline St. Fleur lives in Anana, a small community along the road that cuts through Tyera Mouskadi from Tomond to Kas. She lives with her mother, five siblings, and her older sister’s child. Her mother’s oldest died before Joveline was born, and Joveline’s oldest sister now lives with her partner in a separate house.
Her mother’s name is Rosette Bruno, and she has been a member of the CLM program since last year. Rosette will graduate, if she passes next week’s evaluation, at the end of August.
Joveline says that CLM has really helped her mother and the family. “They gave her money and helped her start a small business, so she could begin to send some of the kids to school again.” Rosette chose goats and small commerce, and her three goats are now five, even though the first litter died right after birth. Two of the young females are pregnant now. Rosette started a small business selling basic groceries out of her home, and it took off. She used it to manage household expenses and also to buy weekly shares in her savings and loan association.
The program helps the communities it works in establish associations, and members can buy from one to five shares each week. At the end of a year, members collect all that they’ve saving along with the interest they’ve earned. Increasingly, it is the most important of the various forms of savings that the program encourages.
Members can also take out loans. Rosette used one to buy the materials she needed to complete construction of the family’s new home. She had a hard time repaying it, but her association was able to deduct her balance from the end-of-year pay-out. The remainder of her pay-out enabled her to by a large pig for 4500 gourds.
Unfortunately, someone stole the pig. That’s a big loss for Rosette, but Joveline says she’s looking to her goats to help her get moving again.
Joveline just spent three days at CLM’s summer camp in Kas. She liked it because she learned things that she’s always wanted to know. “We learned to make different stuff, like liquid cleaner and kokiyòl.” The latter is a sweet fried dough, sold in little rounds. Joveline would like to help her mom by starting a kokiyòl business now that she knows how to make them. She thinks she’ll need about 2500 gourds to get started, but she isn’t sure. She also isn’t sure where she’ll get the money, but she’s hoping that her mother will lend her a goat that she can sell for the capital she needs.
