Category Archives: Chemen Lavi Miyo

Modeline Pierre 2

Modeline has moved. She and her partner were living in an abandoned house they borrowed from a kind neighbor who had moved to a larger town, but her partner left for the Dominican Republic, so she and their baby moved back in with her mother and stepfather, who live uphill from the house they were in.

But Modeline isn’t upset about his departure. It is part of a plan that they made together. “We made the decision together. We have a lot of stuff to do. He left to earn the money we’ll need. He’ll be back in December.”

Their most important project is their home. They have both spent their lives as stepchildren. And though their stepfathers have treated them well, they started life together with nothing to build on. They don’t have any land of their own. Modeline’s brother-in-law has given them a small plot of land to build their home on, but they have no trees they could harvest to provide the limber they’ll need. They’ll have to buy all of it, and the money Modeline will get from CLM won’t be enough.

Modeline was careful about her return, though. She’s welcome in her mother’s home, but it isn’t easy. She left her water filter in the abandoned house she’s been staying in. She goes down every day to treat water and carry it back to her mother’s in gallons. “If I bring the filter, the kids will play with it, and it will break.”

While her partner’s away, she’s getting by. She has a small business. It has just 225 gourds in it – that’s less than $3.50 – but by rolling it over constantly, she can sometimes may as much as 150 gourds, or $2.25, in a week. And she’s a student of her own work. “I sell sugar and bread. I can’t make money of the sugar, but I can make money selling the bread. And they won’t come to buy bread if they can’t get sugar, too.”

She’s already saved enough on her own to buy a chicken. It’s the second one she purchased since joining the program. She bought the first by selling a small can of cement that was left over when her latrine was built.

But what is more striking than the purchase of two chickens is her excitement about the purchases. I was done interviewing her when she called me back to say that she had one more thing to tell me. And she explained what she had done. It was an encouraging sign of her developing pride.

Louisimène Destivil 2

Louisimène is happy to be in the program. “Nou pa menm jan ankò paske yo ban nou bagay n ap jere,” she explains. “We’re not like the way we were because they’ve given us things to manage.” She’s especially pleased that her daughter is back in school.

Her latrine’s been built, and her husband plans to enclose it with walls so they can start using it within a couple of days. He’s also started collecting the posts they’ll need to build the structure of their new house. She’s concerned about the house’s walls, though. They’ll have to buy the palm wood planks that they need, and Louisimène doesn’t yet see where they’ll find the money.

She’s been taking care of her two goats, but she was discouraged when one of them died while it was giving birth. “I liked the look of the two of them so much that I would sit in their hut just to look at them.” She says that she was devastated because she is the one who really knows what she lost.

But she knew just what to do when it died. She reported the death the neighbor who serves on the CLM Village Assistance Committee. The committee had just been formed a couple of weeks earlier, but Louisimène remembered that they were the ones who had agreed to help when trouble comes when the case manager isn’t around. He told her that he would talk with her case manager with her.

She looks forward to having a new house, and her husband has started collecting the support posts they’ll need, but like many of her fellow members, she doesn’t yet know how she’ll acquire the materials to build its

Rosemitha Petit-Blanc 2

Rosemitha missed the first day of the workshop. She sent her husband in her place. She was off in Savanèt, at the weekly market. She didn’t want to miss a day selling her merchandise.

She started a small commerce when she joined CLM, and it’s a lot of work but it’s going well. She buys plantains on Wednesdays from women bringing them to the market in Kolonbyè. She lives right next to the main road, so she catches them as they pass by her house. On Saturdays, she brings the week’s purchase to the market in Mibalè for sale. While in Mibalè, she uses the money she’s earned from plantain sales to buy okra to sell in Savanèt. The CLM program started her with 1500 gourds of merchandise, and she’s already increased her investment to 2000 gourds, even though she also uses profits to help feed her family.

But the business is risky. She depends on the trucks that pass by her house on market days to get her plantains to market. If she can’t flag down a truck with space for her plantains, her merchandise could go bad before she can get it to market.

So she’s working to increase her capital until she can change her business model. She wants to sell rice and oil, basic groceries. “Oil doesn’t go bad,” she explains.

She’s happy about the way things are going. She and her husband are working together. He still works in fields, but now she contributes to the household income, too. She doesn’t like her husband’s bad temper. “He gets angry a lot.” He yells at both her and his mother, who lives with the couple. But she lives with it because he’s not violent and he’s a good stepfather to the child she had before they got together. “He treats all our children the same.”

Idalia Bernadin 2

Idalia says that she feels good about being in the pwogram. “M santi m nòmal.” But when she talks in detail about how things are going, she seems mostly frustrated.

One of her two goats already died. “It started yelling all the time, and then it stopped eating. Then it just fell over and died.” The other one is now pregnant, so she has something to work with, but when the goat dies, she says, “It really hurt.”

She’s worried about building her home, too. “They are giving us the tin, but we don’t know where we’re going to get the lumber.” She explains that she isn’t from the area where she now lives. She and her husband have no land there to harvest the posts that she’ll need from. They don’t have any palm trees of their own, either. “We might be able to find what we need in Jinpaye, but it’s a long way, and we’d have to get it here.”

Money is still hard. They haven’t been able to plant this year because they have yet saved up anything they can invest in farming. And her husband’s been sick, unable to move around. Worse still, her teenage boy, her youngest son, is sick too. Doctors who came to offer a mobile clinic told her she should take him to the hospital for a more thorough exam and treatment, but she hasn’t been able to get him there yet. She’ll have to arrange a trip with her case manager.

Miramène Georges 2

Miramène missed the first day of the workshop in Koray Grann. She stayed home with her sick child. The baby was feverish and uncomfortable. Miramène knew she had to come on the second day, though, so she left her mother in charge and hiked down from Gwo Labou to Koray Grann.

She feels good about how the program is working for her so far. Her goats are healthy. She works hard to keep them that way, making sure they’re tied up where they can get food but don’t have to stand in the direct sun. Her father helps her, but she is mainly on her own since her husband is in the Dominican Republic.

She still lives in her parents’ lakou, the yard with their house and also houses for her sister and brother. Her sister-in-law is also a CLM member, but her mother and sister are somewhat wealthier, so they didn’t qualify.

She and her sister-in-law decided to make one shared latrine for the whole lakou, and it has already been installed none of the households has had one until now. It will be ready to use in a couple of days. Right now it has no walls. But Miramène’s father has promised to add the walls in the next days, and the entire family will benefit.

Her new focus is on the new home she plans to build. CLM requires members and their families to contribute a lot towards the home, and Miramène is clear about her own contribution. Her father has been collecting the posts she will need for the house’s structure, and she’s already begun buying the palm trees she’ll need to build its walls. She told her husband about her place in the program, and he has been sending money to buy the lumber. He’ll come visit in December. “He’s really happy about the program, and agrees with everything I tell him we need.”

Laumène François 2

Laumène wasn’t feeling well on the first day of the three-day workshop. She’s been having headaches and hot flashes. But she came anyway, and she seems happy to be there.

She’s certainly happy to be in the program. “I’m happy about the way I’m managing [what I have]. They’ve given me things so I can hope.”

She talks about the water filter she’s received, about her new goats, and about the cash stipend she’s getting every week. “M ap vi alèz.” “I live comfortably.” Her goats, she says, are her path to a better life, and having her own water filter means she’s no longer crouching down to drink any water she comes across.

Her children are happy about the program, too. She says that they’re the reason that she can come to meetings whenever we invite her to one. “They see what I’m doing.”

She knows that the CLM team will only have 18 months with her, but she doesn’t seem worried. “They’ll leave me with principles that I can stick with.” Her goats will provide young, and she’ll have a new home so that she won’t be living “under a tree.”

Her plan is to stick with her livestock. She is afraid to invest in small commerce. “It’s too easy for the money to fritter away. The kids would yell for this or that, and it would eat up the money.”

Juslène Vixama 2

Juslène still seems lost.

She sits cheerfully in the classroom as a case manager opens the workshop. She and her fellow CLM members from the area around Koray Grann will spend three days together, going over the way they manage their new assets – almost all livestock – and how they have set out on the other aspects of the program, like home repair. She looks around as members talk or shout or sing. She never seems to focus for long on anything in particular. Others learn quickly to applaud in rhythm to offer encouragement. It’s a CLM custom: clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap, clap. But Juslène can’t pick up the beat.

She’s been in the program for three months, but can’t remember that. She can’t say when she started. But she sits smiling as we chat, looking left, right, always away but always cheerful. She’s happy in the program. “They gave me goats. They’re going to give me a house.”

But we talk about the house. The program provides roofing material and money to pay builders, but members have to provide the structural lumber and the material for walls. Around Gwa Labou, where Juslène lives, they use palm wood planks. It’s a lot to manage. She answers me quickly when I ask her whether she’ll be able to organize her part of the work. “I can.” But when I ask her how she will get the work done, she says she doesn’t know. Her husband will find the support posts, but she’ll need to buy the planks, and she has no idea where the money will come from.

But it is important to her. She’s been living in his sister’s house ever since her own was destroyed by a storm. She doesn’t like it. Her sister-in-law treats her well, but she says, “M pa renmen rèt kay moun.” That looks easy to translate. It looks like it means, “I don’t like living in someone [else’s] home.” But the Creole is stronger than that because “ret kay moun” carries a sense of homelessness, a sense of the status of restavek, the Haitian children who live as domestic servants.

When it came time to think about where to build her new house, her father decided to rent a plot well downhill of the place she’s been living. Her husband has begun to assemble the support posts her house will need. “My life will change when I’m in my own house, but it hasn’t changed yet,” she says. The house, which is the part of the program most important to Juslène, will depend entirely on the two men.

Rosemène Achil

Rosemène Achil lives in Bozyo, a sparsely populated agricultural area in the lower, southern side of Boukankare. Bozyo is dotted with small, grass-covered hills, with narrow dirt paths that lead between and around them. Its homes are scattered through these hills, some on hilltops and others hidden away in the little nooks the hills provide.

Rosemène’s is hidden, at least a hundred yards from her closest neighbor’s. She lives there with four of her children. She had seven, and lost two. One of the surviving five – her oldest living daughter – lives with another family. She owns no land, but has a cousin who let her put up the shack on his. He even agreed to let her construct her new CLM home on it.

She joined the CLM program in 2009, immediately after the end of the successful pilot. At the time, she was living in a broken-down shack that provided no protection from the tropical rains. Her husband was with her then, and the couple lived on what he sometimes earned for a day’s work in a neighbor’s field. Her son Isnat, who was a teenager at the time, would help too. He would recognize sometimes that his mother had nothing to feed him and his younger siblings, so he’d go find work. The adults he’d work for could be slow to pay him, though. They still thought of him as a child.

The program gave her goats and a collection of poultry, and she struggled with the poultry. “I don’t eat eggs. It’s not something I grew up with. And you can’t raise the young poultry because the animals around here eat them all.”

But Rosemène had success with the goats. She took good care of them with her boys’ help, and they had young. She used the young, along with savings from her weekly cash stipend, to make other investments, though it wasn’t easy. She always needed some of the stipend to feed her kids, and had a hard time protecting the rest of it from her spendthrift husband. He would pressure her to him money as soon as her case manager, Lissage, had finished his visit. She’d have to argue or lie to keep him from wasting it. Eventually, she arranged with Lissage for him to hold on to it, depositing it in her savings account for her. She didn’t know what else to do.

When she graduated from the program in December 2010, she still had her goats, but she also had a fertile sow and a young heifer. She says that her case manager bought them for her though she knows that he bought it with her money. Almost six years after graduation, her livestock is still flourishing. Her cow was nursing its second calf and her pig had proven a reliable source of income.

But that points to Rosemène’s continued vulnerability, because one of her husband’s children took the bull and sold it. He spoke vaguely about having just “borrowed” the animal, but has shown no sign of a plan to replace it. And she can’t speak to her husband about it, because he has disappeared. Rosemène has been unable to assert her authority over the assets she’s worked to build up, and a reduction in her livestock holdings is dangerous because they are her only source of income other than the little her boy can earn.

Part of the problem is that she cannot establish a small commerce. Activity at the local markets would normally be the obvious way for a woman like Rosemène to generate a regular income. She would depend on livestock to manage larger expenses but use commerce to manage the day-to-day. But Rosemène “pa konn lajan. ” That means that she doesn’t “know money”. Haitians say this about two kinds of people. Some have trouble distinguishing between bills of different denominations. Others can’t do the arithmetic that making change requires. In any case, she and her case manager judged that small commerce would not work for her.

So Rosemène’s progress remains fragile. Her economic situation is much improved since she joined the program, but she has very little margin. This year, for example, her children are not in school because her husband wasted the last litter of piglets she had been counting on to cover the expenses. And psychologically, she’s fragile, too: She still understands the progress she’s made as something Lissage did for her.

But there’s reason for hope nonetheless. Lissage is committed to investing the time necessary to help her get through the trouble with her husband and his family, even six years after graduation. He’s helping her start legal proceeds against the man’s son to recover price of the bull. And Isnit is increasing showing signs that he feels himself ready and able to be the partner his mother needs to ensure the future of her younger kids.

And her view of herself has changed. The same woman who had to beg her cousin for a spot to put up her shack was proud that she was the one to finance her uncle’s funeral. She sold a large sow, replaced it with a much younger one, and used the difference in price to buy funeral supplies.

Lourdine Magloire

Lourdine Magloire lives in Savann Donnen, a rural area just off the main road that leads from Mibalè to Pòtoprens. When she first got together with her partner, Derisnord, he was a widower with three children. They decided to raise the three together, and Lourdine eventually had their fourth.

They remained a medium-sized, poor family for several years. Derisnord brought in a small income with day labor, working their neighbors’ fields. With no livestock and no land holdings beyond the small plot the couple lived on, Lourdine’s best option was to work as a market woman, selling groceries at the weekly markets in Labasti, Mache Kana, and Ti Sèkèy. Labasti is close by, but the others our long hikes from Savann Donnen, so she would rent a horse to make the trips.

Then Lourdine became pregnant again, and the couple awaited what they expected would be their fifth child. Except that Lourdine had triplets.

The event made their already-difficult life even harder. Lourdine spent months unable to leave her home to manage her business. All the capital she had in it quickly wasted away. The entire household was left to live off Derisnord’s agricultural earnings. Field labor typically pays 50 gourds per day. That may have been worth a little more than $1 at the time, though it’s now worth less than eighty cents. The international definition of “extreme poverty” is now $1.90 per day, and that’s per household member. Derisnord was earning about a dollar when he could find the work, and that was for the whole family.

Lourdine joined the CLM program in 2013. The triplets were just about a year old. She knew she wouldn’t be able to restart her business. She was too busy nursing. So she chose livestock – two female goats and a young sow – as her assets.

Savann Donnen is a good place to raise livestock. There are areas to let goats graze, and food to scavenge for pigs. You don’t have to buy everything you feed them. Thanks to Lourdine’s hard work, the livestock prospered. Her goats had kids, and her pig had piglets. She was able to use proceeds from sales of the young to manage some of her household’s needs. The kids began to eat well, and she sent the third and fourth ones to school.

As she developed her new businesses, she learned to count on the weekly visits she’d receive from her case manager, Guerrier. “He really pushes you because he doesn’t want you to slip back to the way you were.”

the time she graduated in December 2014, she had more than achieved her first big goals. Her children were healthy, the older ones were in school, and she had purchased a cow by selling off some of her animals’ young. And two years after that, her progress continues. The triplets are now in school as well, and she’s just purchased her second cow.

She still has challenges. Though she has valuable livestock holdings and plenty of food for herself and her children to eat, she can be short on cash. The day I saw her, she was running around trying to borrow the 100 gourds she needed to take a taxi to the hospital in Mibalè. She was due to renew her family planning. She knows that she needs to get back into small commerce to build a modest, regular cash flow, but the cost of getting all the children into school this year has left her without the funds she’d need to invest in a small business.

She’s thought about Fonkoze credit program, but the loans are group loans and doesn’t like the idea of borrowing with other women. “I’d think about it if the loan was individual.” For now, she plans to start buying cases of frozen chicken parts in the next couple of months, when she can sell off some more livestock to fund that first purchase.

She also has a larger vision. She thinks she can be a leader, and wants to get into local politics. “Right now, I’m just studying the lay of the land.” But she advocates strongly for CLM’s return to her neighborhood. She claims that there is a corner of it we missed. We’ll have to study what she says.

Idalia Bernadin

Idalia seems as though she might be about 40, but like most of the women from this new group, she doesn’t know her age. When she’s asked why she thinks she was invited to join the program, she says that it was because of her problems. But she knows that everyone has problems, so when pressed, she explains: “Tout moun konn mouye, men gen ki mouye plis.” “Everyone is wet sometimes, but some are wetter than others.”

She grew up in Beken, and community in the larger, western section of Savanette. Her mother had six girls and five boys, but lost five of the children. Neither she nor any of her siblings went to school, but they never knew hunger. Her parents farmed as sharecroppers, but they worked their own land too. They also kept livestock. “My parents worked really hard.”

She lives now in Gwo Labou with her husband and the youngest two of her four children. They met at church when they were young, and her husband sent his parents to her parents’ home to formally ask for her hand. They struggled, but they got by. “Le w malaria, ou pa jam san pwoblèm,” she explains. They farmed their land, growing plantain that she’d bring to market for sale. She also maintained small business selling rum in Jinpaye, where they lived. “When you’re poor, you’re never without problems.” Now and again, they’d be able to keep a goat.

They moved to Gwo Labou recently. They were driven away from Jinpaye, the remoter mountain community where they had been living. Her husband was accused of stealing a bunch of plantains out of a neighbor’s garden.

She claims that her husband was innocent, that there was no proof, only suspicions. She went to complain to the local KASEK, the elected official responsible in some measure for law and order in the countryside, and he told her that wives don’t speak on their husbands’ behalf. So they fled, fearing for the man’s life.

And that’s not her only problem. Her oldest son is in prison in Port au Prince. They are staying in a cousin’s home for now. Their case manager, Titon, will have to help them figure out a more permanent solution.

Idalia is happy to chat and able to explain the various lessons that Titon has already gone over with her. She remembers the points that they’ve gone over well. She can talk about the care of her goats and about Vitamin A.

She doesn’t have a clear plan for the future, but she has hopes. She wants to add to the livestock we’ve given her. She’s not sure what she’ll buy, but explains that “everything has its own price.” What you buy depends on what you have to spend.