Chrismène flourished from the moment she joined us. Martinière watched her with affectionate pride as her livestock grew and multiplied because of the excellent care she took of them. She invested cash that she saved from her stipend into her farming, and was rewarded with strong harvests. And she worked hard and with discipline to take advantage of the materials the program made available for her to repair her home and build a latrine.

But one thing surprised us.

Single women usually have a very hard time with home repair unless they have a father, brother or older son around to help them. There is a lot we insist that members do toward building their own homes, things more easily done with a partner’s help. Chrismène is a small woman, and her children are still too young to be much help. When the program started, she didn’t yet own a pack animal. She would need someone to help her do the heavier lifting. Her older sister came and stayed with her for a few days to help her lug the dirt and rocks she would need to build up the walls of her house. But getting the cement for her latrine and the tin roofing from Kafou Jòj up the slope to Mannwa, and then back down the other side to her home in the very back of Lalyann would be no joke. And with Elgué in the Dominican Republic, we weren’t sure how she’d manage.

For more information about To Fool the Rain, the first book about Fonkoze’s CLM program, click here.

Jean Manie’s life after she graduated was nothing like what it had previously been. She was not the same woman we met when we first visited Moussa’s home. She herself decided to be one of the speakers at her graduation ceremony. In front of an audience of several hundred, she proclaimed that she was no longer a slave.
And the difference was more than just a change in attitude. She had built a modicum of wealth and a new way of life. She had friends, and in Claude she had something like family. But the difference was even more visible in Patrick. At Moussa’s, he had been silent, scared, always looking at the ground. Once he and his mother were in their own home, he became a happy, healthy boy. He would charge up to me any time I appeared, and try to put my motorcycle helmet on his head. With the helmet on, he would run around with his arms outstretched, growling to imitate the sound of the motor. He was happiest of all any time I’d lift him up so he could sit on the motorcycle itself. At the end of the program, he was about eight, and was finally able to finish first grade. His mother dreams that he’ll be able to go much farther than that. And maybe he will.

More information about To Fool the Rain is available here.

Last week I saw Josamène Loréliant for the first time in several years. I took a picture of her sitting with her son, Dieupuissant. She is featured in To Fool the Rain, our book about the CLM program. Her story is a powerful one. She learned not only how to support her family, but also how to insist on her own value, insist that she the respect that she — that indeed everyone — deserves.

In the following excerpt from the chapter that describes her experience, we see Josamène reject the derogatory nickname — Ti Rizib — that had been hers all her life:

All through the [naming] game, [Josamène] insisted on the use of her full, real name, Josamène Loreliant, even in the middle of a community of women who had known her only by her nickname for all the decades she had lived among them. When one of the case managers who was present mistakenly referred to her as Ti Rizib later in the meeting, she sniped audibly, “You too?” He apologized immediately. Lwidòn still calls her Ti Rizib, and when I asked Josamène whether that bothers her, she joked, “I ignore him.”
When I go by to visit them these days, it takes some time before she will talk with me. Uniquely among hundreds of women I’ve worked with, when Josamène sees me she disappears into her house. It is no longer because she wants to hide, the way she did the first time I came looking for her. She goes inside to wash her face and put on a clean dress and sandals. She doesn’t want me to see her any old way. This is especially striking because of how slovenly I tend to be. But appearance is now important to this woman, who is no longer Ti Rizib.

Here’s a link to further information about the book:
http://www.stevenwerlin.com.

When Calmise first saw CLM staff circulating around her neighborhood asking questions, she didn’t think anything of it. Even when they came to speak to her about her disability, she assumed nothing would come of it. “I’m used to it. People would come by, take my picture, and then they’d tell us that they’ll come back with help. We’d never see them again.”

She’s a lively young woman, but she was born with badly deformed feet. Her insteps are straight. She has no ability to bend her ankles. So the soles of her feet are nearly parallel to her calves. She can’t stand on them. She gets around nimbly by walking on her knees. It means that she can’t get far very easily.

Calmise was living with her mother and stepfather when CLM’s selection team passed through Pouli, but the older couple was breaking up. As the mother prepared to moved back to Belladère, where she was from, she pondered what Calmise should do. “She told me to stay in Pouli because she didn’t want me to miss out on the program.” So Calmise moved in with her older sister and their mother moved away.

She began to think that the program was something serious when she started to receive her weekly visits. Her case manager would come on Wednesdays, and sometimes other members of the staff would come as well. She chose pigs and small commerce as her two activities, but she says she never had much luck with livestock. Her pig died, though she was able to sell it and add the money to her savings. She bought two goats while she was in the program, and her older brother keeps one of them for her, but she ended up selling the other and putting the money aside. The savings from those sales, together with other savings from her weekly stipend and her small commerce, enabled her to buy a young bull for 10,000 gourds, which she gave to a neighbor to keep for her. They’ve agreed to keep it while it grows until the can sell it for about 17,500, which will be enough for them to buy a female that will be ready to breed.

Her real income now comes from her commerce. She has a very small one that she manages on and off, selling cookies and crackers and other small packaged snacks to neighbors. It works when she is at her sister’s house, but when she travels, as she regularly does, to the house she built next to her mother’s, in Belladère, it doesn’t work. That house has too many little hands looking for a snack. Her family ends up eating into her profits.

Instead, she invests in kasav, traditional Haitian flat bread made of finely grated manioc. It is the same business that her mother is in, so she can give her mother money to buy manioc when she buys for herself. Calmise then prepares her own kasav for sale.

They key to her progress has been how she’s learned to save. She received four-weeks of training on why and how to saved that was adapted by a program developed by Texas Christian University professor Dawn Elliott. The program, called “More than Budgets,” emphasizes the importance of establishing the habit of savings through setting savings goals and creating social pressures that favor savings. Calmise received a small box, but for 18 months her case manager kept the key. She would make a deposit into her box during each weekly visit. Every six months, Calmise could earn a small cash prize if she saved consistently, and those prizes contributed a lot towards the purchase of her bull.

Calmise feels differently about herself now that she has been through the program, and others see her differently. “It used to be that my family wouldn’t even take me to the hospital if I was sick. Now they’ll take me even if I don’t have the money to pay for it at the time. Thy value me. I have value in everyone’s eyes.”

And she has advice for those who might join the program in the future. “Don’t think of it as a small thing. Look at it as a big deal. take care of every little thing you’re given, because they can grow into big things eventually.”

When Yves first became aware that CLM staff members were circulating in his neighborhood, asking questions, he didn’t know what to make of it. “No one had ever come to me to ask me questions before.” No one had ever come by to ask him about his life.

“M te mal viv,” he now says. “I lived badly.” He adds, “I spent my time just thinking about life.” Yves often was hungry. “I am blind, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew that I was missing something. I knew there were lots of things others could have that I couldn’t afford.”

Yves has been blind for years. Untreated glaucoma took away his vision when he was a boy. For a farmer in Pouli, the rural neighborhood just outside of downtown Lascahobas where he lives, it seemed like a real limitation. He would support himself as best he could by harvesting crops on his family’s land, but without the resources to invest in his farming, he barely managed.

In the spring of 2015, he joined CLMD, Fonkoze’s graduation program for extremely poor persons with disabilities. Though he was poor enough to have qualified for the standard CLM program, Fonkoze offers that program only to women who have dependent children. As a single, childless man, he couldn’t have benefited. The CLMD program, however, focuses only on poverty and disabilities, so a blind young man with no reliable source of support fit right in.

He chose goats and a pig – he likes raising livestock – and he got to work. He was careful with his cash stipend, and invested savings from it into his farming. He had never been afraid to work hard.

His livestock and his farming prospered. His two goats were soon seven goats, and with every harvest his wealth increased. He started renting additional plots of land so that he could farm even more. It keeps him busy, but he doesn’t mind the extra work. He sold five of the goats to buy a cow, and though his pig never reproduced he took care of it until he was able to sell it to buy a horse. “I wanted a mare, because after its first colt, you can start crossing it with a donkey to get mules, and they sell for a lot of money.”

But Yves hasn’t just gotten wealthier. He’s changed, even in his own eyes. He explains that when you start having visitors, it changes everything. The CMD program provided weekly visits from a case manager and less regular visits from other members of the staff. Yves had never had visitors before. “Tèt mwen te pi ba. M pat gen lavni. M gen yon bèl tèt kounye a.” That’s like saying, “I was feeling down. I had no future. Now I walk with my head held high.”

And others see him differently, too. “When you have no hope, people don’t value you. But when they can ask you for something and you have money you can lend, that shows real value.”

Even a year ago, Yves thought he would spend his life alone. Because he is blind, he thought he could never have a family. But now he thinks of the young women in his neighborhood, and he knows they think of him. “I’m not ready to make a commitment, but I will be.”