Category Archives: Chemen Lavi Miyo

Rosemitha Petit Blanc – At Graduation

Rosemitha thought that the certificate she received was the most important thing about the graduation ceremony. It showed that “we did good work, so we finished the program well.”

But she pivoted almost immediately from talk about her certificate to talk about her frustrations. “I would have made more progress if my livestock had done better.” Her goats’ first two litters died. The two she now has just had another litter of two kids each, and though one of the four kids died, the others seem healthy, so she can be cautiously hopeful. She and her husband also have a pig that gave birth to six piglets. And if they survive they will provide a windfall.

As she talked about the livestock, and about other aspects of her experience in the program, she was frequently interrupted by her husband. He would jump in, then I would ask her to continue. But his interruptions would change her focus, adding to the confusion that my questions sometimes initially provoke. He’d insist that she didn’t know anything about their livestock, that he was the one who took care of the animals.

People call him Patekwe, which means “did not believe.” Things were a lot easier for the couple before Patekwe’s mother died. Her illness and then funeral were a major expense, setting them back on the path forward they had started to trace. It cost them their entire first littler of piglets, money that could have enabled them to achieve their first objective already. They might have been able to afford a small cow. And the older woman played an important role in the household. She was a reliable babysitter for the children and a good friend to both her daughter-in-law and her son. Patekwe complains, “Now one of us always has to be here with the baby. If Rosemitha leaves, I have to stay home.”

The couple’s plans moving forward are a little unclear. Two of their three children no longer live with them. Both Rosemitha and Patekwe brought children into the relationship, one each, but his daughter now lives with a cousin in Lakolin, near the hospital where his mother died. The cousin encouraged him to leave the girl with her while the older woman was sick, arguing that she’d have better access to an education. Patekwe visits regularly, and he’s happy with his daughter’s new situation. Rosemitha’s boy has moved in with her father, who lives nearby. Rosemitha is glad to have someone living with the older man, but her decision was also affected by her sense that her boy had grown less welcome with Patekwa than he had been when he was a younger brother and a playmate for his girl.

Rosemitha says she wants to return to small commerce, and she knows she can sell a goat to get the money to do so, but neither she nor her husband think it’s time to do that yet. And she and Patekwe will have to decide who will look after the child if she starts going to the market regularly. His mother’s boyfriend would spend time with them at first after his mother died, but he’s moved on to another woman. They aren’t seeing him much anymore.

In addition, what Rosemitha has told me in the past, but will not say in front of Patekwe, is that it is hard for her to sustain a business around him. When he is focused on farming their land – he inherited the plot above their home from his mother, and has been renting another for a long time – he doesn’t have time to earn cash by working for other farmers. So, he turns to any cash she might have to manage his expenses. When he isn’t busy, he likes to hang out in the market in Kaledan, down the road from where they live, and that involves having money in his pocket for gambling and snacks.

Idalia Bernadin – at Graduation

Idalia liked everything about the graduation, and she thinks it is an important part of the program. She explains that “it is something everyone can enjoy. As long as you march straight, you’ll graduate.”

She graduated with six goats, including two young kids, but she already used one to make an investment. Her husband was preparing their land for planting, and they needed the money to buy seeds. The goat sold for 3000 gourds, or about $48, and she was able to buy seven large cans of beans.

Her boar is starting to grow. She bought a small one when she collected the money that was owed her for the meat from a goat that died. It wasn’t much, so she had to buy the smallest, least expensive pig she could find. Now she’s eyeing the right moment to sell it and replace it with a sow that can give her offspring.

Her family’s medical issues persist, however. Unfortunately, our team was not very successful at helping her learn how she should follow up. One of her sons was diagnosed with a hernia, but he missed the follow-upappointment at the Mibalè hospital. Idalia says that he was waiting for a phone call, but the boy lives in Mibalè, near the hospital, and he knew the date.

Her youngest son’s situation is more complicated, but also not good. He has a condition that leads him to produce too many red blood cells. His blood ends up getting too little oxygen, so he’s short of breath all the time. The only treatment is regular removal of some of his blood, and we helped Idalia get him started down that road. It appeared to help. But Idalia and her husband are convinced that “they took too much blood,” so she isn’t bringing him back for further procedures. And the boy is very short of breath again.

And things are only going to get more difficult. Idalia and her husband are committed to leaving Gwo Labou, where they’ve been living since just before our team met them. They want to return to Jinpaye, but Jinpaye is even farther into the mountains, with more difficult access to care, than even Gwo Labou. Even if Idalia was inclined to get her boy the treatment he needs for his blood condition, she wouldn’t be able to find it anywhere near where she plans to go.

The family had originally fled from Jinpaye when they got into a conflict with neighbors about the rightful owner of some plantains. When we met them, they were living in a small space within a cousin’s home. The cousin himself eventually gave them the very small plot of land they built their house on.

But they feel as though they have no future in Gwo Labou. The cousin who gave them land to build on clearly wants them gone now that the program is over. Last year, he let them plant a very small garden around their house. This year, he planted his own crops to within ten feet of their front door. And with no land to farm, life is simply too expensive. Idalia’s husband has taken to traveling back and forth to Jinpaye to farm their land there, but that means he has to spend days at a time away from his family.

They don’t yet have the money they’ll need for the move. Their old house needs extensive repairs. But between their livestock and the crops they are planting in Jinpaye, they expect to be ready by the beginning of next year.

Louisimène Destivil – At Graduation

Louisimène was happy about the way graduation went. “They gave us jerseys, they welcomed us warmly, and we sang very well.”

She came down with a fever right after graduation, and she was still feeling sick a week later, but she was cheerful as she spoke of the day and of the completion of her CLM experience. “Everything they gave us is really ours. They are leaving, but they didn’t take back anything that they gave us.” It was as though she had doubted whether what she received was really hers even until the last moments.

She looks back at her experience with a strong sense of how much her life has changed. “I never had any kind of business activity of my own. I lived in misery. I was drenched by rain. I lived badly. I don’t live badly anymore.”

Even growing up, her life had been hard. She never knew her father. He died before she was born. Her mother remarried, but she was in the couple’s way. Her uncle decided to take her, and he’s the one who raised her. “He didn’t have much. He couldn’t send me to school. But I was rarely hungry.”

She’s been struggling to take good care of the livestock she acquired since she joined CLM. One of her goats had a kid, but her pig died. “I need to save enough money to replace it.” She bought a pair of turkeys, but someone stole one of them. The one she still has is nesting, though, so she may have more soon.

But Louisimène’s most important activity is farming. She and her husband work together. They lost their last crop of beans when the rains came at the wrong moment for them, but they have a small field of plantains that is producing well. It gives them something to eat, but also something to sell.

Having something to sell is important because Louisimène doesn’t want to get into small commerce, and she and her husband need cash sometimes, especially since their girl is finally in school. Keeping her in school has been a struggle. She missed some time when her school fees were overdue. But Louisimène is up to date with the payments now, and she’ll be able to send her girl back to school as soon as the Easter vacation is over.

In the meantime, Louisimène is planning her next planting. She and her husband are getting their field ready for a new crop of black beans, which they will plant in the coming days for harvest in June. She’s pinning her hopes to the upcoming crop. “The bean money will be enough for me to buy the pig I want as long as I don’t waste it.”

Miramène Georges – At Graduation

Miramène’s journey through CLM was somewhat unusual. She left Gwo Labou, where she lives and where she was part of the program, for three months. We don’t often have members who have such large gaps in their experience.

She was sick with persistent diarrhea. Her family took her to the government health clinic in Savanèt, where she was told that she had cholera. She was sent to the cholera treatment center there. She never went, however, because she was convinced that cholera wasn’t her problem. Instead, she went to the home of a medsen fèy, a practitioner of traditional herbal medicines. She stayed with him for weeks until the diarrhea was gone, drinking herbal preparations, then she left for Port au Prince, where she stayed with a cousin while she regained her strength.

While she was away, her case manager Ricot worked with her mother. The older woman took care of Miramène’s livestock. Miramène lives in a lakou with three houses in addition to hers: her parents’ and those of two sisters. One of the two sisters also qualified for the CLM program, so it was easy for Ricot and the other case manager to stay on top of the situation.

When Miramène was finally strong enough to come home, her assets were all in place. Though her goats didn’t increase, her pig had three piglets. She was also able to buy ducks and turkeys. She even added a cow to what she owned.

The cow is especially interesting because it has nothing directly to do with the CLM program. The father of her little girl, who lives in the Dominican Republic, bought it for her during one of his visits.

And his support for Miramène is probably worth dwelling on. It turns out that he was willing and able to do a lot for Miramène and their girl. She was, for example, the first CLM member in her neighborhood to finish work on her house. The man heard about the opportunity, and he came to Haiti long enough to help her through the process. And then he gave her an expensive cow.

This makes you wonder why Miramène was a CLM member in the first place. With a strong family structure in place where she lives and substantial support from her girl’s father, she might have been okay without the program.

But we couldn’t have known that. At the time she joined CLM, she had been without the man’s support for some time. As she explains it, he was living with his wife in the Dominican Republic, and the wife was pregnant. He focused all of his support on his pregnant wife. So, we took Miramène into the program. At the time, the case managers who selected her probably felt that they had no choice.

Miramène’s plans now that she graduated are straightforward. She’ll take care of her livestock and farm the land that’s available to her. She’s already got everything she needs to plant black beans for a spring harvest. She’s not interested in small commerce. “People buy on credit, then they get mad at you when you ask for your money.”

Juslène Vixama – At Graduation

Even after 18 months, it is still hard to talk with Juslène. She’s friendly, even cheerful, and she’s happy to chat. She seems excited to see me whenever I come by.

But she just doesn’t have much to say. I ask her about graduation, and she says it was “bèl,” which can mean pretty or good, but when I ask her what she liked about it she says she doesn’t know. That’s just one example. A cheerful “m pa konnen,” or “I don’t know” is her answer to most questions, at least her initial answer. She can’t say what about the graduation she enjoyed except to say, “because I graduated,” nor can she say what about it is important to her. As her boy fumbles around in my bag, I ask her how old he is now, but she doesn’t know that either. She can remember only which local children were born before him and after him, and with that information a neighbor concludes that he’s probably four.

She plans on going to the final meeting of her Village Savings and Loan Association later on the day of my visit. It is an important meeting because she’ll receive the savings she accumulated through the year along with the interest it earned when association members repaid their loans, but she doesn’t know how much she’ll receive. She won’t even hazard a guess.

She does, however, know what she plans to do with the money. It’s planting season in Kolonbyè. She’ll buy black beans, which is an important cash crop in the area. The farming she does with her partner is crucial to the family’s well-being since her livestock never really flourished within the program and she never started a small commerce. Though she lists the goats and the pig she was given as the program’s most important elements, she didn’t succeed with either. We gave her two goats, and she graduated with two goats. We gave her a pig, and she graduated with a pig. All she was able to accumulate was some poultry: a turkey and two ducks. Most of the couple’s wealth is in their farming.

And their lives have changed. When she joined the program, she was living in the corner of a room in her sister-in-law’s house. Now she has a little house all her own. A plank nailed across two short posts that were driven into the earth next to her home’s front door serves as a bench, and she loves to sit there and chat with passers-by. It leaves me wondering what she says to them.

More important, however, is the transformation of her boy. When she first joined the program, he was badly malnourished. He was thin and mostly lifeless in her arms. The CLM nurse referred him to the local government health center for evaluation, and provided a transportation stipend to ensure that Juslène could get him there for regular appointments. Her was treated with fortified peanut butter, the standard treatment in Haiti, and now seems like a different boy. He’s curious, getting into everything. He maintains a constant banter. His development seems a little bit behind. Very little of what he says is clear to anyone but his mother, who talks with him constantly as her case manager taught her to do.

Breaking the Bank

Fonkoze’s Chemen Lavi Miyò, or Pathway to a Better Life, program is more than ten years old. And it’s been almost eight years since three of my Haitian colleagues and I spent a month in Bangladesh, learning the program from its creators at BRAC. That BRAC team would still recognize its work in all that we do, but the program has changed over the years as we’ve tinkered with it whenever we come upon what looks to be a way to make it stronger.

Over the last couple of years, the most important change has been the introduction of Village Savings and Loan Associations. (See: www.vsla.net.) CLM members attend weekly meetings, where they can buy from one to five shares of the association. The money they buy their shares with becomes capital that members of the association can borrow. They repay the loans with interest, so the capital grows. At the end of a year-long cycle, the association breaks the bank, distributing the capital among members in accordance with the number of shares they have purchased.

This morning I attended the final meeting of the year of a VSLA in Fon Desanm, a mountain community that lies a short hike upward from the main road that leads to Savanèt. The meeting took place in a small church., really just rough timber support posts covered by a tin roof and enclosed by walls of straw. There were a handful of narrow, wooden benches fixed into the packed dirt floor along the walls of the church and a table in the front that held the various things the meeting required.

About 35 CLM members had been buying shares for 50 gourds – about 80 cents – and together had purchased 160,150 gourds, or almost $2,600, worth over the course of the year. They were very excited about the payout. The return on their investment came in several forms. Members paid 2% interest per month on their loans and penalties for late payments. An additional fund, comprised of small weekly donations to be used to help any member who confronts an emergency, like a death in the family, was folded into the total. Taking it all together, the members accumulated more than 200,000 gourds that they need to separate among them. That’s about 25% more than the value of the shares they purchased.

The pay-off meeting actually took place in two sessions on consecutive days. On the first day, the association’s leadership, along with Martinière, the CLM case manager responsible for working with the Fon Desanm VSLA, counted and recounted all the shares that had been purchased. Each member has a small booklet with a star for every share she bought, and the association’s secretary keeps a notebook that lists all the share purchases by week. The two records are compared in the presence of the entire membership so that each member know what she and her fellow members have accomplished. Members repaid outstanding debts. Those who had debts they could not repay with cash repaid them giving back shares. There were five such women, and four of the five were able to clear their debt with about half of their investment or less.

Many of the women came early to the second day’s meeting, excited to find out how much money they had made and to receive the payout. There were only a few stragglers. It was a social occasion. The room was noisy, as the women chatted with one another. Martinière and the association’s leaders first counted all the cash. The total was 203,132 gourds. They subtracted a small sum that the group will need to restart the association for another one-year cycle. They’ll purchase new savings booklets and notebooks for record-keeping. They then divided what was left by the number of shares – 3,203 – to calculate the final share price, just under 63 gourds. They then called the women up, one at a time, to receive their payout, counting the cash out carefully in front of her. VSLAs need trust to function, but that trust is built on transparency.

Marie Yolène had purchased 107 shares over the course of the year. She had also taken out two loans, each for 3,000 gourds. The first helped her pay her children’s school fees, and the second she invested in farming. Paying them back was difficult, but she managed. She plans to use her payout for farming. She has agreed with a neighbor to rent a plot of farmland, and most of her money will pay that rent. But she will have enough left over to buy the seeds – beans, pigeon peas, and corn – that she’ll plant.

She liked the VSLA, and her explanation is simple. “I like it because if you need to borrow a little money, you have a place to find it.”

Rosana was very happy about the VSLA, too. She has big plans for her money. She and her husband have a house full of children, and 2017 was difficult because when it came time to plant, they didn’t have the resources to put in any crops. They had to figure out how to feed the kids for the year with whatever cash they could earn. He did day-labor when he could find it in their neighbors’ fields, and she managed a small commerce. Part of the VSLA’s value for her was that it gave her access to credit to restart her business each time she ran through her capital.

She took out loans three times, and says she never had trouble repaying them because she always used them to invest in her business, which would earn the revenue she needed for repayments as long as she could keep it afloat. “I made the money work, and as soon as I sold my merchandise, I would a payment.”

Like Marie Yolène, she likes the VSLA because it gives her a way to borrow money. “I can get a loan without leaving my community. I would have nowhere else to go. Rich people won’t lend you money.”

Not all the members of the VSLA are CLM members, or even women. The associations would be hard to build with CLM members alone. Too few are literate enough to do the record-keeping that the associations depend upon. Our solution is to bring members of the community’s village assistance committee into its VSLA as well. We organize these committees everywhere we work. They bring community leaders into the program as volunteers. Committee members bring an additional level of personal support and supervision to program members. Adding them to our VSLAs achieves two goals. On the one hand, they can provide literate staffing of critical positions. On the other, they establish an activity that CLM members and community leaders can share that is beneficial to both.

Daniel was the president of the assistance committee, and when Martinière told him about the VSLA, he decided to join it as well. “The women chose us as their leaders. We owe it to them to help out.”

He thinks that the VSLA really helped the poorer members of his community. “It really protects them by giving them a way to save and to borrow.” He saw the way some of them struggled to repay their loans, but was pleased that they somehow managed.

He also discovered that the VSLA was as useful to him as to its other members. “If you have 50 gourds lying around, you have a place to save it. You have easy access to loans. And the payout at the end of the year gives you something to hope for.”

He and one of his sons were the group’s two leading savers. They each bought 257 shares, which was about three times the average for the 38 members. And he’s anxious to get the next cycle started. “We’d start again tomorrow if we could.” He says that a lot of his neighbors are waiting to join as soon as the group is ready.

He and the group’s leaders were not the only men present at the meeting. Wisnel came in place of his wife, who still spends most of her time at home with their infant. He took over attendance at the meetings from her as her pregnancy started to make it hard for her to get around, and continued after she gave birth.

The couple’s experience in the VSLA was mixed. They took out one 3000-gourd loan, and it did not go well. Wisnel bought an avocado crop with the money, but a passing hurricane destroyed most of the crop while it was still on the tree, and the remainder rotted before it got to market when the truck he loaded it onto broke down on the long, bad road to the main highway. He and Modeline eventually had to reach into their savings and sell a goat to pay the debt.

But Wisnel is enthusiastic about the association anyway. They were about to buy 68 shares. “We worked hard, we saved, and we reaped our profit at the end of the year.” They plan to stay in the VSLA, and they’ll continue to borrow when the see a need or an opportunity. “We can’t be afraid of credit.”

Our program, and the communities we work in, still have a lot to learn about VSLAs. To this point, we find them functioning well when case managers take a strong hand in guiding them. Martinière’s leadership was evident throughout the meeting. They have run into trouble in places whether our case managers have decided to stay farther in the background. So we don’t yet know enough about how they function once the case manager leaves, after the CLM members graduate from our program. If we discover that the associations continue to need the program’s support to function well, we’ll need to choose between figuring out a way to provide it and letting the whole promising enterprise drop.

Jeanne Brise: At Graduation

When I first met Jeanne, she had recently been selected to participate in the CLM program. I had gone to interview her, because the data we collected from the selection process made her look too wealthy to be in our program. Our spreadsheet showed that she and her husband owned a pig and two goats, and though that might not seem like a lot to someone from the States, it seemed as though it would put her, if true, in a category distinctly different from the families living in ultra-poverty whom we work to serve.

The member of our management team who had approved her for the program, Wesnel Charles, had analyzed her case with care, and he turned out to be more than right. As I wrote at the time, “. . . by the time the couple joined the program, they seemed well qualified: no assets except some money owed to them, children who are hungry and not in school, and a miserable little shack that they would not even be able to stay in much longer.” You can read the original post here.

That was almost a year and a half ago, and Thursday Jeanne graduated from the program. Though she and her husband, Chilet, are still poor, their life is nothing like it was just two years ago. They’ve made significant progress, and they have objectives in front of them and plans for obtaining those objectives that suggest that their progress could continue.

Their three older children are in school. Their parents first sent them shortly after the family joined the CLM program, and the kids are now in the midst of their second year. Jeanne had the couple’s fourth child while she was in the program. The last months of her pregnancy and her months nursing the healthy new baby forced her to shut down the small commerce she had established with her case manager’s coaching. But shortly after the birth, she went to the local Partners in Health clinic, where she received an implant that should provide contraception for the next seven years. She’d like her fourth child to be her last. “Children are expensive. School is expensive, and food is expensive too,” she explains.

She is looking to the upcoming harvest to provide the means to restart her small commerce. She’ll do so as soon as she feels that she can leave her baby for short periods. She plans to return to the business that was working for her, selling groceries in the nearby market in downtown Laskowabas. There are two principal market days there each week, but like many downtown markets, there is traffic on other days too, so she will be able to go any day but Sunday that she finds she has time.

Two of her three goats are pregnant right now. Her pig is nearly ready for sale, and she plans to use proceeds from the sale to buy another goat and to add to her savings. She eventually wants to buy a cow, so accumulating savings is important.

And her livestock is the key to the most important change in her family’s life. When we met her, the family was virtually homeless, forced to squat in a small shack on a plot of land where they were no longer welcome. With her case manager’s help, she negotiated a two-year lease on a very small plot of land, just big enough for her to put up the home that CLM helped her construct and its accompanying latrine. The rent is 3000 gourds – less than $50 – for two years, and it corresponds nicely to the price of a large, healthy goat. If she can keep her goat-rearing enterprise moving, it should be able to cover the family’s housing needs for a while. Buying a cow would then change things for the better, giving her a large asset that she’ll be able to sell if she and Chilet can find a plot of land for sale.

When she talks about the difference that CLM has made in her life, she talks first about the security that has come with her new standing in the community. “If one of my children falls sick, I can always borrow 500 gourds or so from a neighbor if I need to. They see I have the means to pay them back. If I find myself blocked in something I want to do, I can find someone to help me out.”

But her new stature has her thinking not only of herself and the progress she’s made. She also thinks of others. “I want CLM to continue. You cannot be happy if you have things and others don’t.”

Miraclide Joseph, Three Years after Graduation

I wrote a short piece about Miraclide in early 2015, just after she graduated. At the time, she was struggling to manage her small commerce. It had grown considerably since she established it with savings from her weekly cash stipend, but she was finding it hard to get her customers, who often bought on credit, to pay what they owed. For that reason, she had decided not to join the credit program offered by our sister organization, Fonkoze Financial Services. She was afraid she’d end up unable to pay back her loans if her customers’ payments were late. (See the original post here.)

Three years later, her life has really changed. Her three daughters are in school, but not at the small community school that was once all she could afford. The youngest, in her first year of kindergarten, was just a baby when Miraclide graduated from CLM. And she decided to send all three to schools down the road in Mirebalais. “The schools there are better, and education is the most important thing you do for your kids.”

She’s a single mother, but she’s lucky. The father of the two younger children helps her out. But she still is spending a lot. Just the transportation – a contract with a motorcycle taxi driver whom she trusts – is expensive. She pays 3000 gourds, or almost $50, per month for him to take the three girls to school, and then pick them up and bring them home every day. Then there are school fees, uniforms. The money their father gives – a little more than $8.25 per week for both his girls – allows her to make sure they go with a little snack in their school bags.

She still has two goats, but she sent them to her mother’s house for her family to look after them. She worries that as closely as she lives to the main road, they would always be at risk of theft. And she admits that she was never very focused on raising livestock, even when she was part of the program. Though even now, she’s planning to buy a small pig as soon as she can.

For her, getting ahead always meant starting a small commerce. When she joined the program, she was living on the 75 gourds that her girls’ father would occasionally send. She chose to receive goats and a pig when she joined the program, and she managed to increase their value a lot over 18 months, but her business was the heart of her plan for the future. By the 12-month mark, her it was worth 2000 gourds, and just five months later, when she was evaluated for graduation, it was worth 5000, which was more than $100 at the time.

She would try selling one thing after another. “I started with milk, sugar, and soft drinks, then moved to cosmetics. Whenever something didn’t work, I tried something else.” More recently, she’s sold groceries. She put her commerce aside recently when a nearby mission started some construction work. She can earn 250 gourds, or about $4 per day, hauling the water that the builders need to mix the cement, so she’s doing that for now. She’ll start selling again soon, however. She’d like to take out a loan to re-start her business on a bigger scale, but she lost her government ID a few years ago when someone picked her pocket, and worries that she wouldn’t be able to get a loan without one.

But her biggest problem when she joined the program, and the area of her greatest progress as well, has to do with her home. When she joined the program, she was living in a rented room. She had reached the point at which she could no longer pay for it, and her landlord wanted her out. She didn’t know where she might go.

Shortly after she joined the program, she was able to find a plot of land nearby to rent. Her case manager helped her get a signed, five-year lease. The lease is critical. As we have learned from our interviews with graduates over the years, their progress is unreliable if their access to the land they live on is not assured.

Miraclide built a simple, two-room home for herself and her girls. Its walls were woven out of sticks that the builders covered with mud, but it had a good roof of new tin, so she and the kids were dry and comfortable. As her business grew after graduation, she invested more in the house, replacing the walls of sticks with more solid ones of cinder blocks and cement.

But she still wasn’t satisfied. She spoke to her landlord about his willingness to let her stay on the land long-term. Her lease is up in 2018. He told her that he wasn’t planning to sell the land and that she could continue to rent. He promised that if he does decide to sell, he’ll offer the land to her first. It’s a good plot, with two large mango trees, that provide her a saleable harvest every year. With her place secure, she started building a new, larger house. She isn’t finished yet, but the walls are almost complete, and soon she be able to add the roof.

As hard as she’s worked to get the house near to completion, she gives a lot of the credit to CLM. But she doesn’t talk about the livestock she received or the cash stipend that helped her get her business started. “Before CLM, I didn’t know how to manage what I had. That’s what I learned. I don’t know what other people say, but CLM did a lot for me.”

Final Verification: Exploring the Gray Areas

Our team is once again selecting a group of families who are living in ultra-poverty so that we can bring them through the program. The selection procedure is long and complex. It can take three months to identify a new group.

The paperwork we use has evolved quite a bit in the ten years that we’ve been implementing the program, but the final step and the criteria it depends upon have changed very little. We call it “final verification.” A member of the CLM management team visits families whom our case managers have recommended for the program, and he verifies that they qualify. We take individuals with disabilities in the program if we think they are poor enough to need us and believe we can help them, but I want to set those cases aside for a moment to consider the more usual cases: women living in ultra-poverty who have at least one dependent.

One could define “living in ultra-poverty” in various ways. One could try to estimate a family’s income or its level of consumption. Accurate analyses of either might be a good way to determine whether a family is poor enough to need our help.

But we do neither. Instead we depend on a number of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Are there school-age children in the household whom the family cannot send to school? Does the family lack the livestock, farmland, merchandise, or other productive assets that could enable it to establish a reasonable livelihood? Most importantly: does the family regularly go a day or more without a hot meal?

The criteria might seem pretty clear, even though applying them can involve challenges. The women we speak to can be reluctant, for a lot of reasons, to tell us the truth. You have to establish a comfortable conversational setting with a rural Haitian woman who has never met you. In my case, as the team’s one foreigner, she may never have met anyone like me. And you have to work through any falsehood she might present.

But the criteria themselves can be hard to apply. A woman might have productive assets, but be dealing with significant hunger if, for example, she has more children than she can manage. The children could be in school if you visit the household early in the year, but the family may not have paid their tuition, and the parents might therefore simply be waiting for the school’s principal to send the children home. Or she might have a children whose father sends them to school even though the household is hungry because the mother has no means of her own and the father provides no other help.

One of our clearer criteria is that a family should have no outside support. If children or siblings from Port au Prince or abroad are supporting a woman, then we probably shouldn’t. But the more complicated question is whether we should accept a mother into the program if she is still living at home as her parents’ dependent. We don’t generally believe we should be in the business of taking over the role that a parent plays in a child’s life. Certainly not if the parent is handling the role capably, and maybe not even if the role presents a woman’s parents with significant challenges.

A day last week spent visiting potential CLM members presented four such cases, and each case involved a set of circumstances that gave me pause for thought.

The first whom I met was Maniose. She lives in a shack on a hill overlooking the river that separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic. A thickly planted, chaotic garden of plantain, manioc, and weeds planted along the slope leading up to the shack hides it from the footpath that winds around the small hill’s base. The house is guarded by two well-fed-looking dogs, which is unusual for the homes we visit. Not that there are dogs, but that the dogs appear well-fed.

Maniose lives in the shack with her mother, her own two children, and one of her brother’s children. The brother lives and works in the Dominican Republic, and sends his mother money to support her and his child. Maniose, on the other hand, cannot her send her school-age older child to school.

She does not face severe hunger. Her mother combines what her son sends her with what she can harvest from her own garden to take care of them. Maniose has two adult sisters, who live in their own homes nearby, and they are willing and able to offer their mother, their younger sister, and the children an occasional plate of food as well.

But she has no hope of her own income at all. She has no idea what she might eventually do to support her two children, whose fathers have already abandoned them. She owns neither livestock, nor farmland, and she has no idea of a small commerce she might be able to manage. What’s worse: her mother has no land either. The shack they inhabit and the garden that surrounds it are on land that belongs to her son-in-law, the husband of one of Maniose’s older sisters.

With two children with different fathers, both out of the picture, no resources or plans of her own, and a home situation that could deteriorate quickly if her sister and brother-in-law cease to get along, Maniose’s situation is fragile, so I approve her for our program.

The decision to approve Liline was easier. Like Maniose, she is a dependent. She and her three children live in her parents’ home. The parents are farmers, and between children and grandchildren they have eleven kids to look after. Some of those kids are adults, but all depend largely on them. And Liline worries that her father is aging and, so, that the burden is falling more and more on her mother alone. As we chat in her yard, we talk about her teenage and 20-something brothers, who sit on the other side of the home. They look eminently capable of pitching in, but Liline complains that they’d rather leave things in their parents’ hands.

Like Manoise, Liline has neither resources or a plan of her own. And she is already 26, with three children from three different fathers who do not help her or their kids. If we don’t intervene, her search for a man to help her establish a livelihood may lead her into ever-deepening poverty. I give her my OK.

Roselande, too, lives in a large household. She and her two young children live with her parents and seven other kids. They depend entirely on her parents. Her father is a farmer, and her mother is a “machann lòbèy” in the nearby market in Kas. That’s a little hard to translate.

The first word is easy enough. It means “merchant.” Roselande’s mother is a businesswoman. She goes to the market two to three times a week. A “lòbèy” is a commotion or a scene. But Roselande’s mother isn’t selling disorder. She’s selling food. In the rural Central Plateau, a marchann lòbèy is a woman who sells prepared meals right in the market. Many of them – Roselande’s mother among them – buy everything they need on credit from grocery sellers early in the day. They pay what they owe at the end of the day, and take their profit home.

I could not evaluate how much the mother was bringing home each week. I wasn’t able to speak with her. But I knew something else. Roselande’s older child is already being treated for severe malnutrition at a nearby clinic. The child receives a weekly supply of super-fortified peanut butter. So whatever the mother brings in isn’t enough.

Roselande is just 19, so I could leave her for her parents to help, but her lack of any idea how she might help her children and the malnutrition that one is suffering convince me. I give her my approval.

Natacha’s situation is similar in some ways. She and her baby live with eight other kids in her parents’ home. Unlike the other women, she is an earner in the home. She helps her father in their charcoal business. They find neighbors willing to have a tree turned into charcoal, and the father cuts down the tree and processes the wood into charcoal. Natacha then sorts it and bags it. The tree’s owner gets half of all they produce. They then bring their share to market for sale. They could sell it quickly by the sack to wholesale merchants, but can make much more by taking the time to sit in the market and sell it in small quantities directly to consumers. Natacha shares in that work. The business is much too small for a household as large as theirs, and the family often goes hungry as a result, so Natacha would seem to be a good candidate for the program.

But she is only sixteen, and seems nothing like an adult. In our conversation, she seems to have no interest in setting out on her own. Instead, she tells me that she wishes she was still in school. She was a sixth-grader when she became pregnant, and wanted to start seventh grade this year, but neighbors convinced her father that he’d be wasting his money by sending her.

I give her case some thought, but I decide to reject her for CLM. She’s still a child. She has a child already, it is true, but she doesn’t even want to be an adult just yet.

Wilny is one of the case managers who recommended her for the program, and we are together for the day because he is my guide. So I ask him why they didn’t recommend Natacha’s mother for the program, rather than Natacha. I haven’t met her, but her family seems poor enough for CLM.

This is where things get complicated.

Natacha’s mother is a market woman with a small loan from our sister organization, Fonkoze Financial Services. Her having received that loan reflects their evaluation that she is capable of more than an incoming member of CLM is capable of. Someone who qualifies for an FFS loan cannot, by definition, qualify for CLM. And the very fact that she has the loan shows that she is beyond most CLM members in at least one important respect. The kind pf loan that she receives requires that she be part of a group of five women who receive their loans together. She has enough of a standing within her community that she was able to find four other women willing to take out a loan with her. She is not, in other words, as socially isolated as many CLM members are.

But we know that the family is going hungry, and we know something else as well. She has already had to borrow money from a neighbor to keep up with her repayments. That, too, reflects social capital most CLM members lack, but it may also mean that credit just isn’t working for her.

Our team will not need to complete the selection of families for this group of CLM members until January, so I suggest to Wilny that he hold onto to the file and give it some time. Natacha will not be able to join the CLM program. My decision in that respect is final. Even our director, Gauthier, will not overrule a member of his team. But if the case managers and their supervisor decide that Natacha’s mother’s effort through credit is failing, they can consider helping her get out of the credit program to join CLM instead.

This will be complicated. We cannot make our program appear to be an alternative to taking out a loan. Who wouldn’t rather get stuff they don’t have to pay back? But just as our CLM team makes mistakes in our selection process, our colleagues in the credit program can make poor evaluations, too. If Natacha’s mother is bound to fail in Fonkoze’s credit program, we need to find a way to support her. Fonkoze’s job is to leave no family behind.

Rosemitha Petit Blanc 7

Rosemitha and her husband have been unhappy ever since his mother passed away. They both feel her loss keenly. They loved having her around. To Rosemitha, she was a second mother, having accompanied her through her pregnancy while her husband was away working as a field hand in the Dominican Republic.

And their loss is more than emotional. The older woman was an important member of their household. A trusted babysitter, beloved by her grandchildren, she made it easy for Rosemitha and her husband to go off and engage in their various activities, and her willingness to share domestic chores lightened the couple’s burden of work around the house.

Her sickness and subsequent death was also expensive. The CLM program made a standard contribution of 5000 gourds to offset funeral expenses, but the couple still owes the coffin maker 7500 gourds – about $120. The coffin cost 10,000. They gave the coffin maker half of the CLM money, and used the other half to pay off the various expenses they incurred entertaining their neighbors during the wake.

Their goats have been slow to multiply. Two have had litters, but the kids did not survive. Once again, two are pregnant, but they’ve learned not to count too surely on the results. But normally, they would have their pig’s litter of piglets available to them to pay down their debt and invest in new opportunities. They’ve had good luck with their sow. But the expenses associated with the older woman’s illness cost them the opportunity to use the piglets to make progress. They had to sell the whole litter before it was even born just to manage the expenses that helped the older woman pass through her last weeks of life. So, they’re waiting for their sow to ween the piglets so that they can breed it again.

Rosemitha would like to get back into small commerce. She had felt good about her success at it, and the daily income really helped the family. It enabled her husband to focus on farming without having to worry about bringing in something every day. With the Fall bean harvest approaching, there will be opportunities for those with the cash to buy beans directly from farmers and the energy to get them to market.

Rosemitha still has savings from her cash stipend that she could use as her investment, but she’s not sure about the energy. “Ever since my mother-in-law passed away, I feel weak.” In the past, she has carried most of her merchandise on her head to the places where she can find trucks to get it to markets, but right now she doesn’t feel as though she has the strength to do so.

She doesn’t worry about her home’s immediate needs anymore. She and her husband have food enough right now from their own fields. But they will have a lot to do to get themselves back onto the path forward, and right now the steps they need to take seem to feel as though they are too great.