Category Archives: Chemen Lavi Miyo

Idalia Bernadin 5

Idalia’s main concern over the last several weeks has been the health of her youngest son. He suffers from shortness of breath, a condition all the more debilitating because they live on the face of a steep slope. She had been especially frustrated by her feeling that her case manager Titon wasn’t taking her problem seriously.

There were, in fact, problems of communication between her and Titon. Planning a visit to the hospital in Mirebalais is complicated. The hospital is over-busy, and though our close partnership with Partners in Health means that we can get our members care, it does not mean that getting them the care is easy. The hospital’s staff have to insist that we do things in very particular ways to get our people through lines that others might not be able to get through, so case managers and our staff nurse give members detailed instructions as to when they must appear and where, and Idalia seemed to always ignore them.

She doesn’t seem to be able to grasp the importance of exact instructions. Doctors want her boy to undergo a series of tests, both blood work and an x-ray. Getting it all done involves waiting in the right lines in the right order at the right time. Nurse Ezianie gives Idalia specific instructions, and Idalia says that she understands, but then she doesn’t follow through. She ends up doing something else. If Ezianie asks her to repeat the instructions, she can’t do it.

We will have to work with her on this, or find another solution. One of her older boys lives in downtown Mirebalais, not far from the hospital, and our first thought is to recruit him to accompany his mother and brother. The younger boy was eventually hospitalized the first time she brought him, and she was told to bring him back after he was released, but she’s not sure when she will do so. Titon will need to work closely with her to make sure she can see the path to the care her son needs all the way through. For the time being, it is at least good to see that she realizes that Titon and Ezianie are on her side.

In the meantime, Idalia is making progress in other areas. Her home is almost complete. It needs mainly some finishing work, and she thinks that she has the materials that she’ll need to get it done. She’s waiting for the builder to become available, but in Gwo Labou builders are also farmers, and at a time when there is a lot of work to do in the fields, it is difficult to get one to spend a day doing anything else.

And though her pig died just as several of the pigs that belonged to CLM members in her area, and though she like others has had trouble collecting the money that’s owed her for its meat, her situation with her goats is starting to improve. She purchased a third goat out of savings, and it appears to be pregnant.

Juslène Vixama 5

Juslène is still struggling. Her pig died, as did one of her goats. And she hasn’t been able to collect the money she’s owed by those who bought the meat. She and her partner planted corn, and they’re waiting for the harvest. They have access to other land that they could have planted with beans, but couldn’t afford the investment.

The two of them and their toddler still depend heavily on her sister-in-law, her partner’s sister, for much of what they eat. They’ve been living in the older woman’s home for some time now, ever since their own house was destroyed by a storm. Their new house is nearby, and it is almost finished, but they don’t have the nails they need to put the palm wood planks that the walls will consist of into place. The only nails that CLM provides are the ones used to attach the tin roofing to the frame.

Juslène had saved some money to buy the nails with, but it disappeared. She says it was stolen, and she probably believes that it was, but we have our doubts. We know from experience that she has trouble keeping track of things. It is part of whatever her developmental issue is, and it is affecting her ability to progress in various ways.

One of her two goats died, and the other is failing to flourish, and we think it is mainly due to her lack of care for them. Normally members keep their goats tied up, but they move them around during the day, making sure they can find food and are out of the sun. But Juslène’s case manager, Titon, discovered that Juslène hardly moves her surviving goat at all. He had always complimented her for making sure that the goat was in her yard whenever he came by. We ask all our members to do this so that their case manager can have look each week. But when Titon went by once on an off day, he found the goat right where it always is when he comes by. A little tough questioning – and a short conversation with the sister-in-law—revealed that Juslène had just been leaving it in one spot, so it wasn’t getting enough to eat. She knows, in some sense, that she needs to move it around, but she just doesn’t think of it. Titon decided to enlist the sister-in-law’s support to help Juslène focus on what she needs to do, and the woman seems willing.

But Juslène’s problems enter other areas of her work as well. I watch a case manager hand her a 250-gourd bill to pay for the nails, and when he asked her what the bill’s denomination was, she couldn’t tell him. She just hid her face in her hands. As Haitians say, Juslène “pa konn lajan.” She doesn’t know money. We regularly find such women among those who join the program, and we have to work with each on strategies that help them adapt.

And here is where Juslène showed us an encouraging sign. After hiding her face in embarrassment at her inability to identify the bill, she ran up to a neighbor, who is also a CLM member. She showed her the bill, and asked her its value. Then she pulled down the neckline of the other woman’s jersey, and stuffed the bill into her bra.

It was a striking scene. There were a couple dozen of us there: two case managers, a bunch of CLM members and their husbands, and I. The case managers were vaccinating the gathered members’ goats, and we all had to giggle. But what we all saw is that Juslène has found a friend whom she trusts to guide her and, in a sense, to protect her from herself. She asked the case manager to explain to the other woman what the money was for, and seemed relieved to get the problem out of her own hands.

Louisimène Destivil 5

Louisimène is pretty frustrated with her progress to date. She now has three goats, rather than the two we started her with, but her pig died, and she hasn’t yet been able to collect anything from the people who bought the carcass.

Rural Haitians typically sell dead or dying animals to local butchers unless the cause of death is something known or thought to make the meat harmful to consume. Or the cut the animal up themselves and sell portions to their neighbors. But these sales are made on credit. Whether the animal is purchased as a whole by a butcher or in pieces by individual consumers, the transaction usually includes a payment date, which can be months away. CLM members can have a difficult time collecting these debts. Their lack of status in their communities make them easy to fail to pay, especially since their neighbors are often jealous of the benefits they receive, especially of their livestock. Case managers or members of the village assistance committee often help them by arranging for fellow CLM members to buy the meat in small lots and then sharing responsibility for collections, but though these arrangements help ensure that a member gets paid eventually, they make it harder for the CLM member herself to feel empowered to collect what’s owed her. Louisimène feels that she herself can’t collect, that her case manager will have to do this for her.

But her real source of frustration comes from the failure of one of her harvests. Farming is the activity she really believes in. “Tout sa pou fè w miyò se yon gode pwa w plante.” That means, “It’s the cup of beans you plant that can make your life better.”

She had taken 1000 gourds – or, about $16 – of her savings to start a small commerce, but it wasn’t working. She couldn’t keep from selling on credit, and couldn’t get people to pay what they owed. “When I saw that people were just carrying off the money in my business, I decided to use it to buy beans instead.” But she planted them too late. Farmers in her area who planted in March got all the rain they needed, and are seeing a strong harvest, but she planted more than a month later, and her beans are a total loss. “Life’s treating us badly. I look at what I planted and it’s all lost.

The curious thing about this is that it is not really all lost. I know from a case manager that she also planted beans in March in one of her fields and that, like her neighbors, she looks to have a strong harvest from that field. But Louisimène is so focused on her failure that she doesn’t even think about her success. That’s something for her case manager to talk with her about.

The one part of her life that she’s happy about these days is her home. She’s finished repairing it, and feels great about that. “I still want to add a door between that two rooms, but the doors to the outside are up. We don’t get wet in the rain anymore.”

Laumène François 5

Laumène has been a CLM member for about ten months now, and she is happy with the turn her life has taken, “M fè sa m vle. Menmsi m pa anfòm nèt, m pa jan m te ye.” That means, “I do what I want. Even if I’m not doing great in every way, I’m not the way I was.”

Her livestock is multiplying. She purchased a goat to go with the two she already had, and added turkeys and ducks as well.

Her home repair was completed some time ago, and she’s pleased with it. Her home is now shaped like a U, with two large rooms along the base and smaller ones, each with a separate entrance, forming the two legs. She feels as though the larger two rooms along the back wall give her the space she needs. She’s lent one of the smaller from rooms to her brother. He’s working on his own home, and she likes being able to offer him space in hers. Especially since the front room is entirely separate from her living space. He isn’t in her way.

She uses the other room to store her small commerce in. She keeps the only key herself. She sells a funny mix of products: bread, rum, laundry detergent, and cooking oil. But it follows its own logic. The rum, for example, she lugs to anywhere there is a gathering of men. It sells well at cockfights, Vodoun ceremonies, and wakes. Bread sells out of home, and moves quickly. She can sell a load in a couple of days, even more quickly if she’s willing to walk around with it. Laundry detergent and oil are staples that sell reliably, if less quickly than the bread.

She started the commerce with money she says she borrowed from her case manager, Martinière. But that’s not quite what happened.

Normally we open savings accounts for all CLM members. But we find that we are working in areas where the costs to our members of any transaction they’d have to make render the accounts impractical. Just getting to the bank could cost more that a withdrawal she’s like to make. So, we have been experimenting with several alternatives, and Laumène is involved in two of them. She’s part of a village savings and loan association, and she has savings in a group account managed by her case manager.

Her savings and loan association meets every week, and its members buy shares at every meeting. The shares are used as loan capital. Group members can take out loans, which they repay with interest. Once a year, the association empties the pot and each member collects a pay-out based on how many shares she’s purchased. Martinière noticed that Laumène wasn’t buying shares, so they talked about her weak cash flow. They agreed that she would start her small commerce, something they had been discussing for several months.

So Martinière gave her money from her savings in the group account. But they also agreed that she should look at it as a loan. She has other things she wants to use her savings for down the road, but this seemed important in the short term.

Rose Marthe and Chrismène, Five Years After Graduation

Rose Marthe lives in Wòch Djep, a small neighborhood hidden along the western tip of the slope that descends down the northern side from Mannwa. When we met her at the end of 2010, she was nine months pregnant and hungry. I sat on the ground in front of her home as we spoke. She sat on a bucket. She had no chairs. My strongest memory of the interview is of her struggling to balance her large, pregnant stomach in front of her as she shifted uncomfortably on the bucket’s open end.

I was there to determine whether she was poor enough to qualify for our program, and it was an easy call. She had nothing: no livestock, no small commerce. She and her partner had access to land that they could have been farming, but they didn’t have the resources they would have needed to farm it. The family lived in a small, one-room shack made of sticks and straw, with a roof of palm that could not protect them from tropical rains. Her children often went hungry. She described to me how she would collect leaves to boil in the evening just so that her children would not need to go to bed with nothing whatsoever in their stomachs. Often, she couldn’t afford even the salt to boil the leaves with. And they were often sick, so that she’d have to take one or the other across Mannwa to the closest clinic, to get them medical care.

She joined the CLM program at the beginning of 2011. She had been able to attend neither the initial six-day training that the program offers all new members nor the launching ceremony. She had just given birth, and couldn’t move around much. She certainly couldn’t make the long hikes between Wòch Djep and Kafou Jòj, where the training and the ceremony would be held. Her husband went in her place to both.

But as she recovered from childbirth, she began to work hard to change her life. She used most of her food stipend to feed her children, but she always saved some of it to invest in farming. Between her new-found ability to feed the kids and the access to safe water that her CLM water filter helped her ensure, Rose Marthe was able to improve her children’s health, which freed her in turn to work harder to improve their livelihood.

Her husband Sepavre was willing to work for her and their children, but he hadn’t previously had resources to work with. He helped her repair their home and install their latrine. They had no pack animal, so carrying the cement and other construction materials up the Mannwa ridge and then back down again would have been difficult – maybe impossible – without him.

And they took excellent care of their livestock. Though they were unable to succeed with raising pigs, their goats flourished. The steep slopes that crisscross through the valley north of Mannwa have ample pasturage. As long as you can keep your goats out of your neighbors’ fields, they are likely to do well.

By the time she graduated from the CLM program in the summer of 2012, her life was entirely different than it had been. She raised goats and turkeys. She even owned a small cow. Her children were healthy. She fed them two-three meals every day, and she was able to begin sending them to school.

I went to Mannwa to see Rose Marthe this week, almost five years since her graduation. The path to her home is a long, straight, angular descent that runs slowly down the northern slope of Mannwa towards the westernmost edge of the ridge, and I was most of the way down when I ran into another former CLM member who was weeding around a neighbor’s bean field. We sat down to chat, and as we did, we saw a figure approaching quickly in the distance. Rose Marthe had seen my white face from the bean field she was working in with Sepavre, and had figured it could only be me, so she started running to meet me across the steep, pathless gardens that lined most of the slope. She joined Chrismène and me where we had been chatting, and the three of us walked the rest of the way down the path to Rose Marthe’s home.

Rose Marthe has experienced some ups and downs since graduating from CLM, especially in the last two years. She and Sepavre still depend primarily on their farming, and recent crops have been poor. Most critical has been the failure of their millet. Millet is the staple for farmers across the mountains of the Central Plateau, and in other areas of Haiti as well, and all across the region the last two harvests were destroyed by a parasitic infestation. The plants grow tall and healthy-looking, but as the crown of grain emerges from the top, it turns black, covered with a tar-like film. The plants produce nothing safe to eat. Even the stalk, which would normally be useful as livestock fodder, is unsafe. In addition, their main cash crop, beans, were hurt, though not destroyed, by Hurricane Matthew.

So, once again she’s struggling to feed her children. She has to buy most of the food they eat, mainly kabesik, a low-grade Dominican rice she can get at the market down in Chanbo. She has had to sell off some goats, and she and Sepavre have returned to charcoal production as a source of cash. Even so, there are days when she sends them into the local mango trees for their meal. Fortunately, the mango crop is strong this year and it’s coming in at a good time.

But when you ask her how the troubles she’s facing right now compare with the problems she faced before she joined CLM, she just laughs. “We never had hope. Now we have hope.”

And she explains. “I have my cow, and it will have its first calf in the fall.” That’s been a long road for her. Her first cow was a small bull, which she eventually was able to trade for a heifer. She kept that first heifer, and watched it grow, but it never produced a calf. She sold it and bought another, but the second didn’t reproduce either. She now is on her third. She also still keeps goats. Her biggest goat is one of the females she received from CLM in 2011. “It’s pregnant with its thirteenth litter.” Once it has weened its young, she’ll sell it to a butcher. It’s large enough to bring in enough to buy two young females. She’ll add them to the two young females she already has and to whatever the large female’s current litter is.

Though hunger and unexpected funeral expenses have forced some sell-offs, and though she had to use a goat to invest in her farming this year as well, she reduces her expenses to a minimum rather than letting herself slip back to zero. “The children have to eat every day, but if we adults need to miss a day now and again that is better than selling everything we have.”

Most importantly, her beans look really good this year. They should be ready to harvest in July. She thinks of herself as traversing a difficult moment, not as living a difficult life. She’s unhappy that the children lost a year of school when the school they had been attending closed suddenly, but she is committed to sending them to another one in September.

Her life will probably remain a struggle. She finds it difficult to progress as well as she feels she could, and she says that the main barrier is her husband.

It is not as though he is nothing but a problem. She has been counting on Sepavre since before she joined the CLM program. When she first met him, she had just lost her oldest child and was ready to give birth to another, whose father had abandoned her. Sepavre paid for her child’s funeral, and then helped her raise her own child. They then had children together and established their household in Wòch Djep, near where he had access to land they could farm. He’s stuck by her in sickness and in health, and was especially important when she contracted cholera.

She has, however, never been his only wife. He already had another, wealthier partner even when they first met. Though he works hard for Rose Marthe and their children, she feels he works even harder for his other household.

In some ways, she could understand that in the beginning. His other partner had resources to invest in farming, and she did not. Working in the other woman’s fields was a better investment of his time.

But that hasn’t been so for a long time, and not only is she unhappy that Sepavre doesn’t value her as she thinks he should, she accuses him of using her resources to support his other wife and her family. She even says he sold a mule she had purchased when he needed money to invest in the other woman’s fields. And a mule is a both big investment, worth as much as four or five goats, and a big difference-maker, because it enables someone to bring much more merchandise to market than she can carry by herself.

Rose Marthe’s story is a reminder that we need to help women address all the various problems in their lives. If we cannot help them clarify their relation with men, for example, they will always remain vulnerable. Rose Marthe’s situation with Sepavre could be much worse. We often deal with cases that are much worse. But it could be much better as well.

That brings me back to Chrismène. When the CLM team met her in 2010, she was also together with a man who had another partner. She had grown up as an unpaid servant in the man’s parents’ home. By the time she was thirteen, she was pregnant, and though she lost her first child, she had another when she was 14. By 2010, she was in her early twenties and the couple had four children. Elga also had five with Omène, his principal partner.

Chrismène flourished financially more than any other of the program members with had in the Mannwa area. She took good care of her livestock, and they multiplied. By the time she graduated, she had not only a cow but also a horse, in addition to a handful of goats. Her farming went well, and she used it not only to help her as she bought larger livestock, but to establish a business buying and selling beans. She’d walk her horse to the hard-to-access market in Regalis, and bring loads of beans down to the Chanbo, where they would reliably sell for more.

Like Rose Marthe, she depended on her partner. Elga lugged the materials for her home and latrine construction to the yard on his land where she lived, which was even farther from our delivery point than Rose Marthe’s. He helped her take care of her livestock, worked in her fields, and helped send their children to school.

But five years after graduation, Chrismène had reached her late twenties, and she had had enough. When I saw her in Mannwa recently, the first thing she told me was that she had left Elga. It cannot have been an easy decision. She had been with him since she was a little girl. But she took her two younger children and left the two older ones with him. She gave him a cow and three goats to help him take care of the children. He and Omène now have seven without Chrismène’ two. She kept three goats and a mule, and moved with her two younger children into another man’s house. She says that he’s good with her kids, and they now have a baby together. Like Rose Marthe, she’s struggling for the moment because of the loss of the millet harvests, but, also like Rose Marthe, she too has her hope and a clear plan.

Gwo Labou 4

Laumène has been sick. She hasn’t been able to work around the house. She was having a hard time even just getting out of bed. She felt rotten, but she wasn’t going to do anything about it. “I was waiting for it to pass.”

Her case manager, Martinière, was having nothing of it. “When he got up here to see me, he was really angry. When he calmed down, he called his office on the phone to get them to send a truck to pick me up, then he came back to my house and helped me organize myself.” Laumène credits Martinière with setting things in motion for her. “He was right. My life was important to him.”

Laumène ended up having to spend four days in Mirebalais, between an initial doctor’s visit, lab tests, and second consultation based on results. Thanks to Martinière’s arrangements she felt well cared-for for all four days. “They took care of me at the office, and found a good place for me to spend the nights. All of that took effort.”

The experience left her feeling good about the CLM program and the team she works with, but her own recent efforts have her feeling good as well. Her home repair is complete. She has a little u-shaped house with two small rooms across the base and a separate, even-smaller room on each side. The smaller rooms are only accessible from the outside. They’re not connected to the larger ones. She set one aside as a storeroom. “I’ll keep the key to this room myself. When I start my small commerce, I’ll need a place to keep things secure.”

And for now, her brother has borrowed the other. He’s repairing his own house. “I like having an extra room. If family comes to visit, I can give them a separate room. If our sheets are dirty, they don’t have too see. And I like having larger rooms, too. I’m still not feeling well, so I didn’t feel like clearing my sleeping mat off the floor. But in this house the kids can just walk around it.”

Though she’s been dealing with some set backs around her livestock – she lost a goat and her pig – she’s working hard to overcome them. She bought another goat and a couple of very young turkeys, too.

Miramène is also struggling. She’s been in her new house, but she hasn’t been able to make the other progress she’d like to make. Her goats are starting to multiply, and her pig is growing, but she had hoped to buy a turkey, too, and hasn’t been able to just yet.

Her girl’s father had sent her the money to do so, but since the end of her weekly stipend she’s had a hard time just dealing with daily expenses, so she talked to the man, and they agreed that she would use the turkey money to buy food and some other necessities. He’s promised to bring money for a turkey when he comes back from the Dominican Republic for an Easter visit.

But she knows she needs some way to start earning money regularly, and she has a plan. “I want to start a small commerce. I’ll sell sugar and roasted coffee. My mother sells bread, and her customers are always asking for sugar and coffee, too.” She’s talk it over with her case manager, and he thinks it’s a good idea. They agreed that she’d withdraw 1000 gourds – a little less than $15 – from the account she keeps with him to get started.

That’s when she ran into a problem, however. They made their plan last time he visited, and he even recorded the transaction. Then he forgot to hand over the money before he went to the next house. The whole thing seems to have slipped his mind.

That’s okay in a sense. He remembers now, and will correct his error. It has just set her back a couple of weeks.

But the larger issue is that she let him walk out of her yard without saying anything. She wasn’t comfortable enough to say, “Hey, you forgot to give me the money.” His status as an authority figure, even one whom she’s fond of and trusts, got in her way.

The two will have to works towards building her confidence. She won’t succeed in the long term until she is comfortable asserting herself.

Louisimène was out in the field, working in asosye, to help someone plant beans. So the next house was Juslène’s, and she and her case manager have a lot of work to do.

It is increasingly clear that Juslène has developmental issues in her way. She doesn’t communicate well, nor has she been able to think through even a small part of a plan.

Progress on building her home has stopped, and she seems hard pressed to explain it. She’s been depending on her partner for all the work that the couple must contribute, but he seems responsible for the initiative as well. His focus is elsewhere lately, probably on getting his beans into the ground, so there hasn’t been any progress at all.

But Juslène’s inability to get focused enough to make a decision has broader implications. Her boy is sick. Poor hygiene has left him with rashes on both of his legs. He seems sick, and she’s not planning to get him to help. Though she followed her case manager’s instructions to bring him to a mobile clinic we arrange to check him for malnutrition, she doesn’t think the rashes are important enough to do something about.

Her economic progress has been limited as well. Though one of her goats had a kid, the kid soon died. More importantly, her pig, which was her largest single asset and the one with the greatest potential for return, died as well. Thanks to the intervention of a member of her Village Assistance Committee, she was able to sell it to a butcher. But butchers don’t pay cash for sick animals. They buy them on credit, and Juslène hasn’t seen the money yet.

Idalia has made some progress since we last saw her. She’s settled into the idea of remaining in Gwo Labou until she graduates from the program. Then she plans to return to her home in Jinpaye, in the mountains between Kolonbyè and Granbwa.

But she doesn’t want to stay in Gwo Labou permanently. She and her husband were able to build a house and install a latrine on a small piece of land that overlooks a rental plot they farm and another plot they work as sharecroppers. But she doesn’t like living on land that isn’t hers. What’s more, she doesn’t feel comfortable with her neighbors. “They’re the kind of people that don’t bother to ask us how we are, even though they’re my husband’s family.”

So she’s decided make her investment in her home minimal. She had her son build the house so that he could get the stipend that CLM provides to builders, but he isn’t really a skilled builder, and the work he did was poor. She, her husband, and two of her boys now live in one small room, and though it is covered with tin, the roof is much lower than CLM homes normally are. Not only that, but she and her husband decided not to buy the palm trees they would need to wall the room in sturdily. They used tach, the palm-seed pods normally used as the roofing material of the rural poor, so the house is very fragile. She and her case manager will need to talk over that decision.

She is struggling with her livestock, just as Juslène is. She lost both her pig and one of her two goats. Like Juslène – and Laumène, for that matter – she hasn’t been able to collect the money she’s owed for the lost livestock. All three had livestock sold for them by a committee member, but of the three, only Laumène seems comfortable pursuing the matter.

She took the first steps to getting her older boy to a doctor, but her youngest one is asthmatic, so he really needs to get treatment, too. Getting them care is possible. Her case manager can work together with the CLM nurse to ensure that the boy gets seen if Idalia can bring him to the hospital, but she has consistently been missing or showing up late for appointments. The hospital is so overloaded, that its staff feels it has to be strict about the way it provides care. So if Idalia can’t learn to arrive on schedule, her children may miss out on the care they need. That’s something for her case manager to work on with her.

Rosemitha is making progress, though she’s still struggling. Her three goats are now five, with one of the adult females ready to have kids.

Her small commerce nearly disappeared when a load of plantain ripened before she could get it to market, but she and her husband decided that she should try again. So she took the 600 gourds – about $8.70 – that remained, and she bought tomatoes and onions at the market in Kolonbye. She then carried that load for sake in the main market in downtown Savanèt.

Her results were poor. She returned with only 500 gourds, though she resisted her desire to snack during the day. She thinks she made a mistake, but she’s not quite sure whether she bought too dear or sold too cheap. She had calculated a profit after her purchase, but when she got to Savanèt she fold that she had to break up her merchandise into larger piles than she had anticipated. Customers expected a pile of six tomatoes for the price she had expected to sell a pile of only four.

She and her husband have decided that she should give it one more try with tomatoes and onions this coming week. If she doesn’t make money this time, she will think about another business.

Fon Desanm and Kaprens: 4

As a CLM regional director, I was responsible for three cohorts of families: 250 in Northern Boucankare, 350 in Western Tomond, and 360 in Southern Mibalè. What I didn’t notice at that time was that the three regions shared an important characteristic. All are areas where the high quantity of clay in the soil means that poor families can build their homes out of rocks and mud. If the mud is well mixed and allowed to set, it can serve as reliable mortar.

This makes a big difference to CLM members, for whom home construction or repair is one of the central parts of the package. The program expects members to contribute considerably to repair or build of their home. We provide only roofing material and cement for a floor. Structural lumber and the material for the walls are the family’s responsibility. Providing the rocks and mud for walls involves only finding them and carrying them to the construction site. Members do not normally have to buy them. Where members have to use palm wood, however, they have to buy trees and then pay to have them chopped down and cut into planks. It can add several thousand gourds to their costs.

So it should not be surprising that completing home repair and construction is one of the biggest challenges that CLM members in Kolonbyè face as they approach nine months in the program. When the six in Fon Desanm and Kaprens were asked how they are doing, they all responded as though I had asked them how their home construction is progressing. The chance for a new home, and the serious challenges they must overcome to complete one, is dominating their thinking these days.

Rosana’s made good progress with hers. Three of the walls are complete, and a fourth is partially finished. She needs some palm wood planking to finish the fourth wall, and then six planks of hardwood for the doors.

But as far as she’s come, that leaves her with a lot to accomplish still. Palm wood isn’t sold by the plank, so she’ll need to buy another tree, even though she doesn’t need all of it. She can save money because her husband has the tools and the skills to prepare the planks himself, but she still expects to have to come up with another 3,000 gourds to finish their new home. That’s more than $40.

And her commitment to getting it done has already made her life harder. She had been sharing responsibility with her husband for earning the money they need to feed themselves and their children. He does day labor in their neighbor’ fields, and she had her small commerce, selling bread, sugar, and coffee out of her home. But she drained the capital out of her business buying palm trees for the house, so the family has had to eat on the 50 gourds – less than $1 – that her husband can earn for a day’s work. And there are eight children.

Keeping their children fed is especially hard this year. They are farmers, but they lost both of their most important staple crops. Their millet was destroyed for the second consecutive year by disease, and their pigeon peas were eliminated by Hurricane Matthew. They didn’t have enough cash to plant anything this year for next year’s harvest, so they’ll need to increase their other forms of income just to get by.

Rosana took a first step towards building up her income by taking out a loan from her Village Savings and Loan Association. These are organizations that we are now establishing everywhere we work. Members buy from one to five shares at weekly meetings. Share prices are determined when the group meets together the first time. They can take out loans for as much as three times what they have contributed, and they repay them with interest. At the end of a year, the whole pot is divided, each person receiving a portion determined by the number of shares she purchased over the course of the year.

Rosana took out a loan for 2,500 gourds, and she invested it in beans. She would buy them each week in Savanèt, and then sell them in Kolonbyè. She’d be able to buy about 30 mamit, or cans full, and make about ten gourds per can. But here, too, a thousand gourds of her capital ended up going into buying palm trees, which left only 1,500 in her business. That wasn’t enough to make her trips to Savanèt worth her while. So for now she will go back to selling bread, sugar, and coffee. She’s still trying to figure out how she’ll repay her VSLA loan.

Marie Yolène hasn’t gotten nearly as much done towards building her new home as Rosana has. She needs three more palm trees and the lumber for her doors, and she isn’t yet clear how she’s going to take the last steps.

One of her goats had a kid, but the kid didn’t survive. The other is pregnant. Her bigger hope rests right now on her pig, which should have piglets in April. Like Rosana, she and her husband lost their millet and pigeon peas last year. Since she has no small commerce at all, they are entirely dependent on the 50 gourds her husband can earn as a day laborer.

Like Rosana, Marie Yolène would like to borrow money from their VSLA, but Marie Yolène feels she needs to do it just to buy what she’ll need to finish her house. And if she borrows money for something other than commerce she could have trouble repaying the loan, as other VSLA members are discovering.

Monise has made some progress on her home, but she still has a long way to go. She started out with an advantage because she was able to take some of the palm wood planking that she needed from an extra room in the home she was already living in, and her older boy’s father sent her enough money to buy another palm tree. But she still needs two or three trees. And the man was killed in an accident in Port au Prince. He was changing a truck’s tire, with the truck up on a jack, when it was hit by another truck and fell on him.

She seems to have begun taking a more clear-eyed look at her situation, though. Until recently, she had been counting on her infant’s father to return from the Dominican Republic and help her with the expenses of setting up her new house, but a couple of promised visits failed to materialize, and she now recognizes that she has no idea when or even if he’ll come back. “Now I’m both mother and father to my kids,” she says.

One of her goats had a healthy kid, and the other is pregnant. She’s taking good care of her boar, and it’s growing. She hopes to use it eventually to buy a cow. “Cow’s are more valuable. And if you have a female, it will give you calves.”

She gave up her small commerce for now. She felt that she’d be better off using the money to plant a crop of beans in April. If her harvest is good, it could really help her progress.

Altagrace is close to finishing her home because she decided to take a short cut. After sitting down with her husband and her mother, who owns the house they all live in now, she decided to repair that house rather than building a new one. “I wanted to stay with my mother. I’m all she has. And my husband agreed to the plan.”

Part of the house is already covered with tin roofing. There are just a few rusted sheets that need to be replaced. After that, she’ll need about ten sheets of the sheets we gave her to cover the rest of the house, which is still covered with tach, the roofing material that poor rural Haitians get from palm trees. When she’s finished, she may even have tin left over that she can sell to neighbors.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this plan is that it seems to have been hers, motivated less by the cost savings than by her desire to continue living with her mother. In our early meetings with Altagrace, her husband would sometimes dominate the conversation. He seemed very much in charge and not very respectful. When, for example, she told us that she had her first child as a 13-year-old sixth grader, he injected with a smile that she was in too much of a hurry though he, too, had been a student at the time. And we think that, at least at first, he was making most of the decisions about the weekly stipend she received. So we’re happy to see signs that she might be establishing a role as a decision maker.

The two still need to work together, because since Altagrace does not have a small commerce, they depend on day labor to keep the household fed. “I’d like to earn the money myself, but things are hard.” They work in fields in two different ways. Most of the time they simply vann jounen or “selling a day.” That means one of them, usually her husband, works in someone’s field for 50 gourds and a meal. He can bring home the cash and, perhaps, some of the food as well. But sometimes they work asosye, or “in association.” One or both of them will work in a large field as part of a team that’s hired as a team. Here they are paid for a job – whether weeding or planting the whole field, for example – and the team divides the fee. For the time being, their relationship seems to be working, though we hope we’ll continue to see signs that Altagrace is able to assert herself.

Solène’s home is almost finished. It lacks only doors and windows, and the hardwood planks she’ll need to make and install them is ready. She’s just waiting for the carpenter to finish his job. She may have felt more rushed than other members of this group. “I was living in the shed we made for my goats, and we’d get soaked every time it rained.”

But getting her new home to the point that she could move in took everything she had and more. She used the money she had in a small commerce to buy some of the palm trees she needed, and then borrowed money from her VSLA to buy the rest. But now she and her husband depend on his day labor both to feed the household and to repay the loan.

It’s just not enough. The first installment of her loan was about 800 gourds, and she was short almost 300, even though she cut down on household expenses so much that she felt she had to stop sending her children to school. She can’t afford anything for them to eat first thing in the day.

Her livestock is beginning to develop, but it will be some time before she can count on it for any returns. So for now things will just stay difficult.

Modeline is excited about the progress that she has been making. Ever since her child’s father moved back to her from the Dominican Republic, his collaboration has helped her move ahead.

He came for a holiday visit with some of the money that they needed to buy lumber, and they now lack only a palm tree and some hardwood planks. And ever since he returned he’s taken over much of the work of caring for her livestock.

She’s also excited just to have him around. In the past, he’s come to Haiti only for short visits, but now he seems ready to stay for a while. “He’ll always go back and forth, but now he’ll stay more because we have something for him to work with.” Because he’s decided to stay in Haiti more, his mother is letting him farm some of her land, too, which only gives him more reason to stay around.

Having him in Haiti has had an unplanned consequence. Modeline thinks she’s pregnant,

Right now, the two are focused on organizing the funds they need to make sure he can farm the land. Most of it comes from saving a few pennies out of the 50 gourds he earns in the field every day.

So there isn’t much leftover that they could invest in the rest of the lumber they need. He will probably cross the border in May, when he’s done planting, to try to earn some quick cash.

Clermène Bruno

Clermène Bruno, or Ti Klemèn, lives in an isolated home along a minor road that cuts through Briza. The road breaks off of the main road that leads downtown Tomond to Bay Tourib and then it winds through fields of corn and sugar cane on its way to nowhere in particular. Her closest neighbors are within shouting distance, but not by much.

She says that before she joined the CLM program life wasn’t good for her. “Whenever it rained I’d run around like a crazy person, collecting clothes and children. I’d put them all on the bed and then cover them with plastic. After the rain, we’d scoop the water out of the house with our dishes. Now if it rains during the night I don’t even know it until I get up.”

She’s proud of her new home. “CLM helped out, but we’re the ones who did it.” Her husband did all the building himself, without hiring extra help. “That way, we got the money that CLM pays builders.” And she and her husband put the money to good use. They bought extra roofing material and lumber to make a bigger house than CLM members can normally afford. And that’s important because all eight of the couple’s children live there.

Her husband used to support the family by working as a day laborer in their neighbors’ fields. Sometimes he would get a few days’ work milling and then boiling down sugarcane in a local mill. He was part of a team that would make molasses to sell to rum distillers or rapadou, and unrefined brown sugar popular in the rural Central Plateau. But he couldn’t contribute a lot because he has another wife who also has children with him. Ti Klemèn used to manage a small commerce, using loans from Fonkoze to make it work. But between her frequent pregnancies and the continually-increasing number of mouths she had to feed, she never could keep enough money in her business to make it work. So she gave up, repaying her last loan and then dropping out. “If someone had explained things to me, I never would have had so many kids, but now I can’t send them back.”

She’s been in the CLM program for 13 months, and has watched most of her livestock grow. Her boar is almost big enough to sell. She plans to give it just a couple of more months, and then she’ll sell it to buy a cow. A cow is useful as a durable, high-value investment that can open the door to what she really wants. “If you have a cow, and someone offers you a plot of land, you can sell the cow to buy it.”

Her two goats have turned into five. One had two kids, and she bought a fifth goat with savings from her stipend. “The other goat hasn’t produced anything. I’m going to take care of it until I can sell it for a good price and buy another.”

She’s especially excited about something extra that the program was able to provide her. Through a new partnership with an organization called Watts of Love, the CLM team was able to get solar lamps for all 200 families in the Tomond cohort. Ti Klemèn likes the lamp because she says she doesn’t have to sleep in the dark anymore. She also finds it useful as she cares for her goats. She explains that if she hears them make noise out in her yard at night, she can go out and see what the matter is. But most importantly, the lamp gives her a way to help her younger children with their homework. “I’m not done with my own work until the end of the day, but now we just turn on the light and look at their lessons.”

She knows she only has five more months in the program, and she’s set herself some goals. She wants to buy her cow and change her goat, and she also wants to buy a turkey. But she’s not focused just on livestock. She wants to prepare herself to rejoin Fonkoze’s credit programs so she can get back into small commerce. She knows that it will be the best way to make sure her income remains steady.

Idalia Bernadin 3

Things are not progressing smoothly for Idalia. She’s lost some livestock, and she’s not settled into a constructive relationship with her case manager.

She was feeling chastised as we started to talk. He case manager’s supervisor had called her out in front of other CLM members because she has been out and about, missing more than one of her case manager’s visits. Members know when the case manager is scheduled to see them, and they make a commitment to be at home. “I know I was wrong to be away without telling him, but the way the other women smiled. . .. It was like they thought I did something really bad, like selling my animals.”

We gave her two goats and a pig, but she hasn’t been able to make much of them. One of the goats died early in her experience. She remained optimistic when her other goat had a litter of two kids, even though she never thought the nanny looked particularly robust. It hasn’t grown and looks sickly. She was not surprised when one of the kids died.

Now she’s not sure what to do. Her neighbors say that she should try to nurse the nanny goat back to health enough so that she can sell it and use the money to buy another. She at leave needs to keep it as long as the kid is nursing. She’s struggling to keep the kid healthy, too, but it hasn’t been growing they way it should be either. It has sores around its mouth that may be interfering with its nursing and eating, and she’s been treating them the way her neighbors suggest, but she’s had no results so far.

The situation with her pig is, if anything, even worse. She received it on a Monday in February, months behind schedule because a shortage of pigs in the local markets combined with an increase in pig diseases in the region to make pigs hard to acquire. By the very next day it was showing the symptoms of Teschen Disease, a viral infection that is fatal in about 85% of cases. So she had the pig slaughtered on Thursday. The whole proceeding at least suggests a willingness to act, to take responsibility. Many CLM members struggle to emerge from an initial passivity, but Idalia is ready to act. She should receive money from the butcher eventually, but rural butchers buy sick animals with credit, not cash. It could be weeks or even months before she’s paid.

Work on her home is proceeding slowly as well. At first, she didn’t want to build it at all. She’s living right now in Gwo Labou, but she doesn’t think of Gwo Labou as home. Home is Jinpaye, a community on the other side of the mountain, in Kòniyon commune. She fled Jinpaye because her husband got in trouble with neighbors, but she wants to go back. She and her husband have land they can farm there. “I can go into my own field and harvest things to eat. If I want land to farm here [in Kolonbyè] I’ll have to buy it or rent it.”

Eventually, she accepted advice from case managers who told her that she should construct at least a small home in Gwo Labou to live in, even if it’s just for the time being. They reasoned, she says, that the program would not be able to help her in Jinpaye. So she’s decided to invest effort in getting a room built. She may eventually sell it or break it down so she can move, but it will give her a secure and dry space to live in for at least a time.

So she’s fallen behind many of her fellow members, but that’s not what’s bothering her these days. Her teenage boy has been sick. She took him to a mobile clinic that we organized, but couldn’t get help. There is only so much doctors can do without the diagnostic equipment that mobile clinics lack. Then she took him to the University Hospital in Mibalè, but he wasn’t even seen. Here again she showed willingness without know-how. The hospital is big and complicated, and she didn’t know how to navigate its various lines. The CLM team has a nurse who works effectively as a patient advocate, ensuring that members and their families get care, but Idalia didn’t think of contacting the nurse. Her case manager would have helped her do so, but he wasn’t aware how worried she was.

And that’s the heart of her problem. She feels as though her case manager takes her boy’s sickness too lightly. And his inability to communicate his care for the boy has pushed her to try to rely on her own devices. It’s also made her other communication with her case manager poor. She hasn’t told him about her struggles to keep her goat’s kid alive, and it’s a shame because between his own knowledge and the knowledge he could mobilize from the CLM team he could greatly improve her chances of success.

Idalia has a long way to go in the program, and her case manager has time to win her trust and help her turn things around. But the sooner he invests the time and attention it will take to reach out to her, the better her progress is likely to be.

Rosemitha Petit-blanc 3

Rosemitha feels as though she has made progress. “I was really in a bind. I never had the money even to buy a little oil to cook my rice with. Now I buy what I need to go with our rice.” They had a solid rice harvest on land that she and her husband work as sharecroppers. It won’t provide any income, because she thinks she’s better off storing it for food than selling it. “I’d only have to use the money to buy us food.” But it should keep the family fed for awhile.

Her goats are doing well. Two of the three we gave her had young already, and although one of the three kids died, the other two seem healthy. The third mature goat is pregnant and should have its litter soon.

Not everything has been smooth, though. She started her small commerce with 1500 gourds — or about $23 — worth of plantains. Her business plan was to buy plantains in the hills around her home and then transport them for sale to Mibalè. And the plan started to work. But then on two occasions she had trouble arranging transportation for her merchandise. The plantain ripened before she could get them to market, so she could only sell them as individual bananas locally. Her 1500 gourds had increased to 2000 when she was selling plantains by the bunch, but the loss she took reduced her capital to about 750.

Instead of using that money to keep buying plantains, she and her husband made a decision. They decided to invest it in black beans to plant on land that belongs to her mother-in-law. She still wants to have a small commerce, however, so when they harvest the beans, she plans to use income from the sale to buy kerosene and oil. She might not make as much as she would with plantains, but it will be less risky because neither product can spoil.

She and her husband finished repairing their house, but they’ve had problems there, too. One of the palm trees that they bought for the walls was too fresh. The planks that were made from it shrank as they dried after they were nailed in place, leaving wide gaps between them. There’s really no solution except to buy another palm tree and let it season before they cut it into planks. And until they harvest their own beans, they won’t have much income beyond the 50 gourds her husband makes every day that he works in their neighbors’ fields.