Working with Juslène is going to be challenging. She is cheerful and seems willing to work, but she also seems to have some kind of developmental disability. The people around her say she is egare, which means something like scatter-brained. Her memory seems to be very poor. She can’t say, for example, how many months old her infant boy is. And she seems to lack basic knowledge. She could not, for another example, identify by name a couple of colors I pointed out to her. She is still marking receipts with a thumbprint even as her fellow members begin to sign their names. Though she and her case manager work dutifully in her copybook every time he visits, she cannot yet reproduce even the J her name starts with.

She’s moving forward with construction of a new home. In her case, there was no question of repair. She has been living in a corner of her sister-in-law’s house ever since her own was destroyed in a storm. So she and her husband have to build a new one. And since they have no land to build it on they rented a plot a couple of hundred yards from the sister-in-law’s place. They’ve had the frame built, and will put the roof on soon.

But Juslène has forgotten how much of her money they paid, and she’s forgotten how many years they’ve leased the plot for. When I try gently to provoked her memory, her sister-in-law chimes in rudely from across the yard with the rental price — 2500 gourds, or about $37 — and she adds a few choice words about Juslène.

Juslène has had trouble with her livestock as well. Her pig died of Teschen disease. She will be able to recuperate some of the loss. She sold the meat. But when a butcher buys an animal that has died, she generally does so with credit. The woman who bought Juslène’s pig says that she’ll pay in March.

One of Juslène’s goats had two kids, but they both died almost right away. According to Juslène, they never had the strength to stand. The other goat is pregnant, and though we teach CLM members to keep careful track of their livestock’s pregnancies, Juslène can’t say when the goat got pregnant or how long the pregnancy will be.

When I ask Juslène what she is planning to do to keep herself fed once her stipend runs out in just two weeks, she still doesn’t know. But she responds cheerfully, “M pa konnen. M ap rete.” Or, “I don’t know. I’ll do without.”

In a sense, it is not surprising that we find women like Juslène among those we work with. For someone like her, it might be difficult not to be extremely poor. Titon, her case manager, has his work cut out for him. The most reliable way to improve the family’s situation might be to work more with her husband than with her. And that’s probably part of what Titon will do. He’s dealt with similar cases already. But he’ll need to do it without dismissing Juslène or locking her out of the picture. Only a commitment from him to integrate her into everything he does with the family offers any hope of help her personally make whatever progress she can make.

Louisimène has a nickname. If you want most of her neighbors to tell you whether they’ve seen her, you have to ask for Mizè. They’re not sure who Louisimène is. “Mizè” means misery. She explains that her mother gave her the name because it was an especially difficult pregnancy. Her husband’s nickname is harder to understand. They call him “Apretan,” which means after time, and not even Louisimène really knows why.

Like several of the women in Kolonbyè, Louisimène decided that her home could not be repaired. The lumber was rotten. It wouldn’t have been about to support a tin roof. But the little hillside clearing her home was built on doesn’t have room for another house, and since much of the hillside is solid rock it would be hard to enlarge the clearing. So she and her husband tore down their home, and began to set up their new one on the spot where their old one stood.

It meant building a little shack for them to live in while they work on the new house, and Louisimène is happy with the care her husband took with what they hope will be a temporary dwelling. It’s only one room but he took the time to set up a frame that is solid and straight and carefully made tight buddies of dried palm leaves that he tied together vertically as walls. He collected and prepared good strips of palm-tree seedpods, or tach, to use as roofing material. Louisimène works hard to keep the shack clean as long as they have to live in it, and she took the trouble to hang curtains. She wants it to feels like a home.

She’s concerned about finishing the new house, though. She will need to buy more nails — CLM provides nails for the roof and the frame, but not for the walls — and she plans to do that with money from her weekly stipend, even though it is about to run out. But she still needs to buy some lumber, too, and she’s not sure when she’ll be able to do so. “We don’t have the money to buy palm trees,” she says.

And she’s concerned about her daughter as well. Though she managed to send her to school this year, the girl is now missing days for the second time in the last few months. Her shoes are torn, so she has nothing to wear on her feet, and can’t go barefoot. The first time the girl tore her shoes, Louisimène bought a new pair. The kind she bought are called “boyo,” and they’re made of cheap plastic. A pair costs about 100 gourds, or less than $1.50. But money is tight with her new house still unfinished, and she hasn’t decided to by another new pair yet.

Despite it all she’s happy about the progress she’s making. “I used to get wet when it rained, and soon I’ll be able to stay dry. And now I have goats and a pig to take care of.”

Miramène is moving forward quickly. Each of her goats has given her a litter. One gave her two, and the other only one. So she now has five. Her pig is pregnant and growing. She keeps good track of all of her animals, and is quick to talk to her case manager any time she thinks one is sick. She’s especially excited about her new house. She was the first CLM member in her area to have finished the work.

Her baby’s father came home from the Dominican Republic for a week during the holiday season, and she was proud to show him the progress she had made. He “pote kichoy,” which means that he brought money for his family back with him. So the couple was able to buy all the lumber they needed while he was around. And once all the construction materials are ready, the sort of small houses that our members construct go up quickly. He returned to his job in the D.R. after the week with Miramène and their child, but she says that he plans to return around Easter. He’s promised to bring her enough money to buy a goat.

She has been building up savings in the account that her case manager keeps for her, but she doesn’t know how much the account holds. Her case manager gives her the total every week. She just doesn’t keep it in mind. But when I saw the two of them together, her case manager gave her the new total for the week and listed all the deposits he thought she had made. Then she corrected him. He had forgotten one, and quickly added it. So her memory is good enough.

She doesn’t show much interest yet in starting a small commerce. She doesn’t want to wander very far while she has an infant to deal with. Other women might work something out with her siblings or parents, who are her closest neighbors, but she doesn’t seem to want to do so. So if she decide to sell anything, it will be something very small, like cookies or candy that she can sell out of her home. That won’t feed her, but she still shares in the food her mother and older sister make.

Laumène has been making progress since she joined the CLM program. “Things are starting to work for me, except that some of my livestock died.” Work on her new house is moving forward, but it’s slow. “I had eleven good sheets of tin that were covering half of my old house, and I thought I should add them to what CLM gave me. That would give me a bigger house.” But the bigger house means that she will have to spend more than other women do to complete the project, and with her livestock not yet ready to provide income, finding the extra money she needs is slow.

One of her goats had its first pair of kids, and she feels good about that, but one of the kids died. “I’d be more discouraged if I had lost the mother.” The other is pregnant, and should have its first litter soon. Her sow had six piglets, but rolled over and smothered four of them when they were first born. Laumène is determined to keep close watch over the last two. She knows if she can protect them until the are ready for sale, she’ll have a good way to move her life forward.

She manages her stipend carefully. In addition to the portion she saves with her case manager, she always tries to set aside something at home. She managed to save enough to by a pair of ducks, and she made a little basin in her mountainside yard so that they’d have some water to play around in.

Her case manager Martinière has been trying to convince her to start a small commerce. She has plenty of savings that she could use to begin. Her weekly stipends will stop in just a few weeks, and Martinière wants her to have a plan for feeding her kids once that happens, even if the beginning she can make is small. He explains with a proverb, “Boukane tann bouyi.” That means “Roast while you’re waiting to boil,” and it refers to the way that Haitian children will put something — sweet potatoes or corn, for example — to roast quickly in the fire while they’re waiting for a meal to cook in the pot above it. Laumène may not be ready to get into a bigger business, but Martinière wants her to get something going while she works for something big.

He doesn’t insist, though, because she explains her reason. “If my husband sees that I have my own activity he’ll stop contributing to the household entirely. He has another wife.” She says that once her husband puts a woman in a house, he leaves the rest of the household expenses to her.

Her plan is to wait until he helps her finish her house — he’s providing much of the lumber — and then she’ll start her business. She wants to sell groceries out of her home and rum. She’s especially confident about the rum. “You listen for noises at night, and whenever you hear a celebration, you put your gallon of rum in your bag and go sell. You won’t ever come home without money in your pocket.”

Modeline was excited about her New Year’s holiday. Her baby’s father came back from working in the Dominican Republic. She returned to the abandoned house they had been sharing until she moved back in with her mother’s house while he was away, and got a lot of encouragement from him when he saw her changed situation. “He was really happy. He saw the roofing tin they gave me, and he jumped into the work. He started to prepare the support posts” for their new house. And what’s more, she said that he’s now planning to stay around. “His mother gave him a little bit of land for him to farm.”

She has made no real progress at writing her name. She works at it seriously but seems dyslexic, though our team doesn’t really have the expertise diagnose her issue. Normally, we just write members’ names clearly for them to copy it in a notebook, and with practice they improve. Some can learn the whole name in one go. Others need to start with a few letters or with only one. But Modeline can’t copy something she looks at. Her case manager, Ricot, will start tracing her name lightly for her with a pencil to see whether she can learn by following the letters her draws for her.

She’s enjoying taking care of her goats and her pig, even though she has to find money to buy the feed that the pig requires. She has only one way to buy the feed right now, and that’s by using money from her weekly stipend. That would be putting pressure on her ability to feed the family, except that she still takes care of younger siblings every day, so her mother still sends her some of the food she prepares.

The relationship with her mother has gotten tense, however. “The case managers tell me to respect my mother, but I yelled at her the other day.”

The issue is her birth certificate. Modeline doesn’t have one, and Modeline blames her mom. Her mother says it was lost in a fire, and Modeline complains that she doesn’t want to help her get a replacement. Modeline’s watched the way the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture has been working to get livestock registered in rural areas, and the ear tags on her own goats, and it only frustrates her. “They say that even animals should have papers, and my mother won’t help me get mine.” What makes it worse is that her daughter will be ready for school next year, but won’t be able to go with a birth certificate and Modeline thinks that she can’t get one for her child without one of her own. Ricot will have to work with her to help her both to get the two birth certificates and to mend fences with her mother.

As I talk with Modeline, I find her cheerful and energetic. But she lacks clarity as well. When I ask her what she would like to do with the money that she’s begun saving, she says that she’d like to buy a mature nanny goat to add to the two that we gave her. It is a good and modest plan. But when I ask her how much she’s saved so far, she has no idea. It is recorded on a sheet that her case manager leaves in her keeping, but she can’t read the sheet and hasn’t kept track of what her case manager tells her. This is a pretty serious issue, because unless she learns to keep careful track of her own things, she’ll have a hard time managing her life.

She has a bigger hope for the future. She wants to move to downtown Lascahobas, where she thinks she’ll find better schools for her little girl. But it is just a hope right now, not yet a plan. She doesn’t know how to do it. “Her father will have to see what he can do,” is all she can suggest.

“Jan bagay yo te ye, yo komanse chanje. Mwen gen twalèt. Mwen chanje bèt.” Solène is anxious to talk with me as soon as I appear. “Things aren’t the way they were. I have a latrine. I have livestock I take care of.” She lives on a little hill, just 15-20 feet about the land that surrounds it. The hill has enough room for her own house, but not much else.

The house her mother-in-law gave her, which she was living in when she joined the program, is gone now. She had it torn down. She needed the better pieces of lumber she could scavenge from it and the space it was on for her new home. Right now, she lives with her husband and children in a temporary shack they threw together of straws walls and a roof made of palm seedpods.

Work on the house is moving along. “They told us from the beginning that they’d help us build a new home, so we started getting ready.” She continues by citing a Haitian proverb discussed at her training. “Se avan dòmi nan jè w, w ranje kabann nan.” That means, “You make your bed before you get sleepy.”

Building a new home is costing a lot of money, however. She can’t use the livestock that she received from CLM. Neither her goats nor her pig have produced anything that she can sell yet. So she depends mostly on careful management of her weekly cash stipend and the 50 gourds her husband can earn most days by working in neighbors’ fields. That’s less than a dollar. They have a third source of income, their plantains. They can harvest some to feed the children and some to sell so that they can buy the things they need.

That garden points to their continued fragility. It was planted on rented land, and Solène can already see that she and her husband won’t be able to take the plot for another year. The money they are investing in their home leaves them with nothing to pay the rent with.

But Solène remains optimistic, and she points to the program’s role in her optimism. “I’m on my way. I never had money or a plan for how to spend it. The program pushes you to move yourself forward.”

Altagrace was happy with the way she passed her New Year’s holiday. “As long as we’re healthy, it’s always a good holiday.” And she likes the way her life is moving forward. “Now I have some of the things I’ve lacked in the past.”

Her goats are doing well. Though one miscarried its first pregnancy, the other is about to give birth. And even the one that miscarried seems to be pregnant again. Her boar is beginning to put on weight.

Keeping the latter is a challenge. She and her husband can find some of what it eats by scouring the area around their home. Leavings from the meals they prepare – like plantain peels – and various leaves and seeds that grow around them provide some of the pig’s diet. But it’s not enough. Altagrace has to buy feed as well, and it costs her about $2 a week, which is probably about half of what she spends on food for her family. It’s a big expense that puts pressure on her and her husband to keep cash coming into the household continually.

Her husband contributes with farm labor. She would be able to use her small commerce, but her first attempt at building one failed when she accepted 2,000 gourds – or about $30 – in counterfeit bills. So all she contributes now comes from her weekly stipend, which is less than a month from running out. “We split our expenses,” she explains, “between rice for the family and feed for the pigs.”

She says that she’d like to start another business, and she’s thought about businesses she could try. She thinks she has one basic choice to make. She can start buying produce in the mountains and transport it to market. That’s what her first business was. Or she can buy basic groceries – rice, oil, sugar, and the like – and sell them out of their home.

Each implies challenges. “If I try to buy and sell produce, I will have a lot of expenses because I don’t have an animal to carry them. It’s expensive to get them to market. If I sell things out of my home, I’ll need to have some extra capital because people can be slow to pay and if you don’t have money to buy merchandise with, the business will fail.”

But Altagrace says that she’s ready to get started, and she has enough money to do so in the savings account she keeps with her case manager. But right now, the case manager is reluctant to approve a withdrawal for her. Until CLM members graduate, withdrawal from savings requires a case manager’s authorization. Hers is Martinère, and he is concerned because her first business disappeared and when he approved another 1000-gourd withdrawal to get her moving again, she wasn’t able to show what she did with the money.

It may have gone towards building materials. In a sense, that would be ok. Altagrace and her husband are working on their home, and there are materials they’ll need to buy. But she should have told Martinière clearly if that was her plan. He had thought some of it might go towards sending their children, or some of them, to school, but Altagrace appears to be resigned to waiting until next year.

Martinière is worried that her husband is pressuring her to get access to the money she’s saved. He’s observed the way the two interact, and he’s concerned that Altagrace doesn’t know how to make decisions for herself. He plans to delay approval of the withdrawal – which he will almost certainly give eventually – until he has more confidence that Altagrace is speaking her own, and not her husband’s wishes.

In the meantime, Altagrace may be caught in the middle between two strong men. But at least she says she’s gotten comfortable talking with Martinière. “He’s working with me, thinking about what’s best for me. I can’t be afraid of talking things over with him.”

When I last visited Monise, she had just given birth. Her baby was just days old. She hadn’t yet left the house.

A lot has happened since then.

She had someone tear down one of her home’s two rooms so she could use the lumber to start building her new home. She’s now off to a good start, with the frame already up. But the way she has managed is not what she had expected.

When I saw her last, she was excited because her baby’s father had said he would come spend the holidays at home. He was in the Dominican Republic, trying to make a living. January 1st is Independence Day in Haiti, the most important holiday of the year. Her partner, she said, wanted to spend the holiday with her, all the more so since it would offer him a chance to meet his new child. She was counting on him to bring money she could use to build them a new house. The house she’s in now belongs to her mother.

But he never came. Eventually he called and let her know he would visit in February instead. So she was left unsure where she’d get the resources she’d need to buy the materials for her new home. One of her goats had given birth to its first kid, but the kid wasn’t even weaned, so it was too early to sell it. Her boar was beginning to put on weight, but selling it before it has the chance to really grow seemed like a waste.

She ended up getting what she needed the same way she’s gotten most of what she’s needed for most of her life. From her mom. The older woman’s sow had recently had piglets, and they were just old enough to sell. So she sold two of them and bought the rest of the lumber Monise needed for her frame. Once she had the lumber ready, getting the frame up was quick work. She says she’s grateful for her mother’s help. “Gwo vant lan pat t ap kite m regle anyen si se pat pou manman m.”

That means that her pregnancy wouldn’t have let her do anything without her mother’s help. But she’s already planning to get herself back to work, and though the baby is just a couple of months old, she’s already supplementing her breastfeeding with porridge that she and her sisters prepare. “I can’t give my baby only breast milk. What will I do when I start going out to manage my business?”

Her plan is to take the money that she expects the baby’s father to bring her and use it to buy produce that she can take to sell in Port au Prince. She’s been in the business before. She used to do it with money she’d borrow from a nearby loan shark. When the loan shark stopped lending to her, she was stuck. She couldn’t think of anything else she could do.

She’s been able to save a lot in the months since she’s entered her program by putting away most of what she gets as a weekly stipend. Her mother, who’s a farmer, covers most of her expenses. Her total savings, 5100 gourds – about $75 – is as much as she thinks she would need to get started, but she doesn’t want to ask her case manager for authorization to use it. She will need that authorization for any savings withdrawals she makes until she graduates from the program in another year.

She’s already happy with the changes she’s starting to see in her life. “I didn’t have goats. They gave me two, and now I have three. I didn’t have a regular income, now I get my stipend every week. I was able to use it to buy a school uniform so my oldest boy can go to school.”

Monise isn’t yet making clear plans for the livestock she now owns any more than she has a plan for her savings. Right now, she’s focused on the arrival of her man. She thinks he’ll be happy to see her when he arrives because he’ll be pleased that they have a new house.

Marie Yolène is, like the others who are part of the Kolonbyè cohort, about six months into her experience of the program. When I ask her whether she feels as though her life has begun to change she hides her face in her lap in embarrassment. Though she had welcomed cheerfully into her yard, this question somehow puts her off her guard.

But she eventually started recounting changes that she’s experienced so far. Her oldest boy is in school this year, and she’s started to learn how to write her name, too. She does so by copying in a notebook from an example her case manager gives her. She hasn’t begun working on Yolène yet, but she writes “Marie” clearly. Though she’s left-handed and is more comfortable writing it backwards from right to left, starting with the E.

Her new home’s frame is up, but she’s not sure yet how she and her husband will afford the palm trees they’ll need to build up its walls. Her goats and pig are pregnant. Only one of the goats is close to giving birth, but she’s started imagining what she’ll be able to do if she can raise their young. “Ou ka achte yon bèf oubyen yon ti kal tè si w jwenn yon. E w ka jere depans lekòl.”

That means, “You can buy a cow or a little piece of land if you can find one. And you can manage school expenses.” And it shows that she doesn’t really have a plan yet, just a series of hopes.

Like other poor families in Kolonbyè, she and her husband have really had to struggle because of the failure of their most recent harvests. They got nothing from either their pigeon peas or their millet, and the two would normally be their most important crops. Her husband is keeping the family more-or-less fed by working in neighbors’ fields. It’s called “vann jounen,” or “selling a day,” and it usually brings in just 50 gourds, which is now worth only about 75 cents. She supplements what he can bring in with money from her weekly stipend. She avoids spending everything that the two bring in, but the stipend will run out in February, and she’s not sure what she will do then.

Like many of the women from Kolonbyè, Rosana’s focus right now is on her home. We talk about “home repair” in CLM, but the reality is that most families need to build a new home from scratch. Either they do not have a home that belongs to them, or what they have is too flimsy to support the tin roofing material that we provide.

Also like many of the women from Kolonbyè – and those from the other areas we have worked as well – Rosana is finding the building process challenging. We provide some of the material. We’ve given Rosana roofing and nails, and we’ll pay the builders she uses. But that leaves a lot for Rosana and her husband to do. They need structural lumber for the support posts, the doors, and the beams their builder will attach the roofing tin to. And they also need whatever material they’ll use to enclose the house with walls. In Fon Desanm, that means palm wood planks.

She and her husband have jumped into the work, however, and they are making good progress. They built a small extension onto the rough shed they had set up for the goats we gave them, and moved their whole large family into it. Then they tore down their house to take the usable lumber, and started to buy the additional lumber they need. They acquired all the necessary support posts so that their builder was able to set up their new frame.

She has made some progress in other areas, too. Three of her older children are in school now, but the younger ones are not, even though at least two of them are old enough to go. Her three goats are doing well. All are pregnant and should produce kids soon. She hopes eventually to use their young to buy a cow. In some ways, a horse might be more useful because she could carry merchandise to and from the local markets. And the horse itself would be much cheaper than a cow. She doesn’t want to buy a horse, however, unless she has money to invest in merchandise, too. A cow, on the other hand, is a good investment all by itself.

She continues to manage her small commerce carefully, but much of the money she had in it went to buy and prepare palm trees. The CLM program started her off with 1500 gourds – which is about $22.50 – but she has only 700 gourds left. On Saturdays, she buys bread and sugar in the market, and sells it during the week from her home. Most of her customers buy on credit, and she goes around collecting on Fridays so she can buy again on Saturday. It is a challenging business model for a woman with a large group of small, hungry children, but she’s taught them to leave it alone. “They take the bread and sugar that I give them, and I give them what I can afford.”

Because she has very little money in the business, and turns it over only once a week, she can’t be making much money. And she’s not sure what direction she wants it to take. She thinks she’d need a lot more money to succeed at the kind of larger business that she could do in local markets, rather than out of her home. That’s because until you have your own pack animal, transportation costs are relatively high. They make it hard to make a profit.

But she knows that she has to be careful about increasing the business that she runs out of her home. She knows that she won’t sell more bread and sugar just because she buys more, so she’ll have to add other products, like rice. And the business’s dependence on selling on credit means it’s fragile, but it’s not something she can avoid. She says that little home grocery businesses like hers have to give credit to customers. They are your close neighbors. Many are family. And they are most likely to come to you when they just don’t know what to feed their kids. She has saved money from her weekly stipends that she could use to invest, but she’ll need to get her case manager to agree to any plan she comes up with. And Titon doesn’t want to release any more of it until her house is finished. She’s already burned through 800 of her first 1500 gourds and another 2000 gourds that she said she would use for additional commerce.

She’s going through a difficult time right now. Normally she’d have pigeon peas and millet at this time of the year, but she has neither right now. Rains that fell at the wrong moment hurt the pigeon peas, and for the second year in a row the millet crop was wiped out by disease all across Central Haiti. So she has very little coming in from the fields. But she’s nevertheless excited about the difference CLM is making. “I had no hope that I’d get help from anywhere, but God sent CLM to me.”