Yolène is a 27-year-old woman with four kids. She and her family live on the top of a little hill in Fon Desanm.

Her mother died when she was very young. The older women had a baby die before childbirth, and she wasn’t able to get the help she needed to overcome the complications. Yolène hardly remembers her. Yolène was taken in and raised by her older sister. The sister took good care of her, and she helped her with her nieces and nephews. But she did not send her to school.

Eileen eventually moved to Port au Prince to look for work as a maid, but got pregnant. She returned to Fon Desanm to have her child, and soon moved in with her current partner, who went through getting a birth certificate for her first child, though it has no father’s name on it.

Like several of her neighbors who joined the program when she did, she chose goats and small commerce as her two activities. And she has already received her three goats. But she has changed her mind about commerce, and her reason is telling. She’s worried that becoming a businessperson could lead her into arguments with customers who want to buy on credit and then don’t pay. And she says that she’s afraid of arguments.

So she’s asked her case manager, Martinère, to buy a pig for her instead. He’s happy to let her make the decision, but it is complicated. The pigs that the CLM program buys for new members cost more than the amount that it would spend to buy her merchandise for her business. Members who choose goats and a pig get only two goats, so the staff will have enough money to buy a promising pig. But Yolène already has three goats, so the pig she’ll get will be very small. But she is afraid enough of going into business that she’d rather have the pig even so. She eventually passed one of her goats along to a member who hadn’t received hers yet. So now Yolène will be eligible for a proper pig.

She optimistic about the program. “Lavi w pral chanje kanmenm. Ou pa gen anyen. W ap genyen.” “Your life will change in any case. You have nothing [now], but will come to have things of your own.”

Rosana Mitil is a 42-year-old woman who lives with her husband, their eight children, and their oldest daughter’s baby in Fon Desanm, a mountainous area that rises on the north side of the road to Savanèt. She and her daughter both received recommendations to join the program from the case managers who did the initial selection in Fon Desanm. But the daughter was disqualified because she is entirely dependent on her parents. Rosana and her husband do everything for the family.

Rosana has spent virtually her whole life in Fon Desanm. She was born and raised there. Her parents brought her up her on their own land with her sister and five brothers. They farmed and raised livestock. Though the children didn’t go to school, they ate well. It wasn’t until she moved out to live with her husband, until she was an adult herself, that she began to have problems. “Tè a pa bay ankò,” she explains. “The land doesn’t yield [what it used to yield].”

Rosana chose goats and small commerce, and she and her husband have started taking good care of the goats. There are a number of CLM families in the small corner of Fon Desanm where they live, and competition among them seems to have driven them to construct especially good huts for their goats. Rosana’s is no exception: solidly built with well-chosen support posts made of rough-hewn lumber, walls of woven sticks, and a roof of palm-seed pods.

They have always supported their household by farming, and in good years they’ve been able to buy livestock – usually goats. But they use their goats to invest in farming, too, selling one each time they need money to plant, and it’s been some time since they sold their last one. For this year’s spring harvest, they had to buy the beans – five coffee cans full – on credit, which was payable in beans with 100% interest at harvest. But they made a bad guess, planting their beans too early, and harvested less than they planted. They’ll have to repay the debt when they can.

Rosana is anxious to start her business, but she knows it will take some thought. The easiest thing would be to sell groceries in the market and out of her home, but she’s afraid that, with all the mouths she has to feed, her merchandise would just disappear. The temptation to reach into it to prepare her meals would be too strong.

So she wants to start a business in beans. If she buys them at the market in Savanèt and carries them to Lascahobas she can make ten gourds – about 15 cents – per mamit, or coffee-can full. She will initially have enough capital to buy about five mamit, so the whole trip, including the hours of hiking with a sack of beans on her head, should net her about 75 cents. The two markets’ schedules mean that she can only make the trip once each week, so she will use her sales in Lascahobas to buy sugar there that she can then sell at a profit by carrying it across the mountain back to Kolonbyè. She thinks that even such small profits can help her get ahead because she won’t think of the money as hers. “Li p ap pou mwen,” or “It won’t be mine,” she says. She’ll just leave it in the business to grow.

Even though she hopes to move forward, she hasn’t been able to imagine what that will look like yet. She has no specific ambition. “Se lè m gen nan men m, m ap wè sa m ap fè.” “When I have something in my hands, I’ll see what to do with it.”

Rosemitha lives in a small house right along the road that leads through Kolonbyè to Savanette. She had been living in Port au Prince, supporting herself by selling kleren, the locally brewed rum, and cigarettes, but she returned to Kolonbyè to live with and care for her aging grandfather.

She felt she owed him her care. He was the one who raised her. Her parents had never been a couple. Her father’s father took her in when she was very young. He was a well-to-do farmer and took good care of her.

His wife, however, didn’t like her, so she eventually accepted the chance to move to Port au Prince with her mother’s sister. Though her aunt didn’t send her to school, she took good care of her otherwise, grateful perhaps to have Rosemitha to help her with her own kids.

She grew up in her aunt’s home. As a young teenager, she had two children with men who crossed her path, but the men took their children and abandoned her. She started to make her way by getting work as a maid in other families’ homes, but she left that work when she received news that her grandfather, whose wife had passed away, was alone in his home and in poor health.

When the old man died, she decided to stay in Kolonbyè. At first, she just continued to live in the house he left behind. She had nothing of her own, but would live on whatever neighbors were willing to give her. She made her way by begging, or did minor chores in exchange for food. She was still living in the old man’s house when her current partner found her. He immediately liked her and also saw her as someone who could help him raise his two kids. She now lives with her partner, their infant boy, his two young children, and his mother in a house that belongs to the older woman.

They seem to have a strong relationship. Her husband speaks enthusiastically about Rosemitha as a stepmother. “She does everything for them. She’s a mother to them in every way except that she didn’t give birth to them.” But there is a lack of respect in the relationship, too. When Rosemitha is confused by one of my questions, her husband and mother-in-law gang up on her: “How can you say that? If you aren’t sure, say you don’t know!.”

But things are hard. His children are old enough for school, but they aren’t able to send them. They can’t even feed the children every day. For now, they depend entirely on what he can bring in as a day laborer, working in their neighbors’ fields. The usual rate, when work is available, is 50 gourds, or less than 80 cents. And that 80 cents has to feed three adults and three kids.

Rosemitha chose goats and small commerce because she feels that she’s succeeded at small commerce before. Her husband is already working hard to help her with the goats, making sure that they have everything they need, and seeking advice when he sees something in one of them that concerns him. She isn’t ready to start just yet, though. She’d like her boy to be a little older before she starts leaving him with her mother-in-law.

Monise lives in Kaprens, a broad area stretching above and to the west of Fon Desanm. She’s 25 and has three children, with a fourth on the way. She lives in a small house with her mother and some sisters. They live in the same yard that Monise grew up in. She’s tried making it in Port au Prince, working as a maid, but she says that the people who hire women like her don’t pay.

Her mother has always had the principal responsibility for the whole family, farming her land. She also used to manage a small commerce, borrowing the capital she needed from local loan sharks. But as she’s aged, the work and the running around that commerce requires have become too much for her. She now just farms. And her decision has come at a price: Ever since she stopped running her small business, the family has known hunger more and more frequently.

Monise chose goats and small commerce, and has had experience of both. She said that she used to keep goats that her mother would give her occasionally out of her own goats’ young, but they’ve passed over the years when she’s had to spend money to take care of her kids. Until recently, she managed a small commerce, buying produce locally and taking it for sale in Port au Prince, but the business was based on a local leader’s willingness to lend her the money. She had no capital of her own. When the leader decided to stop give her loans, her business just stopped.

She spent some time in school when she was young, and can sign her name without difficulty. But when her case manager, Martinière, asked her to read the weekly lesson so that he could evaluate how much she knows and how he can help her, she initially claimed to be unable. But Martinière can be bossy when he wants to be, and he pushed. And it eventually emerged that she recognizes the letters and can stumble through a simple text. She appears, however, reluctant to struggle.

At this stage, members are working on getting the materials they need in place for their latrines. The program provides cement, rebar, pvc, and pays the builder, but members have to dig the pit and provide the sand, water, and gravel. Monise is far behind other members in the area collecting the sand and gravel she’ll need. It’s a short hike straight downhill to the riverbed where she can find it, but lugging it back up is challenging, especially for a pregnant woman. Monise has siblings she could mobilize, however, and Martinière is convinced that she’s just not yet committed enough to the work. He turns to her mother as they discuss the issue. The older woman seems very much in charge of the household. And she promises to get behind the effort. They agree on a deadline for the work, and Martinière writes their decision into Monise’s notebook.

Altagrace lives with her partner, their four kids, and her mother in a small house in Kaprens. She’s just 23 years old, and her oldest child is ten. She was a schoolgirl when she first got pregnant, and had to leave second grade. She’s still together with the father of that first child. She grew up in Kaprens in her parents’ home. They were farmers, and they struggled, but there was usually enough food for all.

Altagrace is intensely shy. She doesn’t want to answer any of the questions Martinière asks her, constantly repeating that she’s forgotten or that she doesn’t know. But Martinière persists. Altagrace finally answers, “M pa gen tèt,” or “I don’t have a head.” It’s a standard Haitian way to say that one’s memory is poor. But Martinière won’t have any of it. He tells Altagrace to shake the thing that God put on top of her shoulders, and Altagrace obediently nods her head a little to each side. Martinière says, “They call that thing a head. Don’t tell me you don’t have one.” Altagrace gives him a big smile.

She says that the reason the team invited her to join the program is that they saw her problems: “I don’t have a house. I don’t have any livestock to keep.” The couple lives mainly on what the man can earn as a day laborer, working for 50 gourds, or about 80 cents per day when he can find the work. Altagrace sometimes goes out for a day of work too.

She chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises, and her ambitions are still vague. “They’ll put me on the path forward. The animals will have young, and I’ll be able to send my children to school. When they’re sick, I’ll be able take them to the hospital.”

She has already suffered her first setback. She had used savings from her weekly stipend to start buying plantains by the bunch so she could carry them to market for sale. She wanted to get a business started quickly because she wants to send her oldest girl to school. “I don;t want her to grow up like I fid,” she explains.

She was selling 1800 gourds — about $27.50 — worth of plantains to a single customer. She was pleased because she was thus selling out in one sale. The women gave her two 1000-gourds bills, and she gave back 200 gourds in change. But before she even left the market, she learned that the bills were counterfeit and the buyer who gave them to her was gone.

Modeline seems like a very young woman, but she doesn’t know her age. She was born in Kwafè, an important market community northeast of Savanèt, along the main road from Mibalè to the Dominican border. Her mother was driven away from Kwafè because of a conflict with her father and his family. Though her siblings eventually returned to their father, Modeline decided to stay with her mother and stepfather in Kaprens.

Her memories of her earliest years in Kwafè are fond ones. She says that she,her parents, and her siblings lived well. But then her father’s family burned their house down and her mother and siblings were left homeless. She speaks with gratitude of her stepfather. “He took us all in off the street. We were sick. But he’s always fought to put food in our mouths.”

When she had her child, she and her partner moved into a neighbor’s unused house. The neighbor let them live there for free until he decided to sell the house and the land it was on, and the couple had to look for another place to live. They found another neighbor, who had a small house lower down the hill. It is in very bad disrepair. It lacks doors, and the walls of the front porch are starting to fall, but it gives them a place to stay.

They live on food that she asks wealthier neighbors to give her and on whatever her partner can earn working in nearby fields. And she babysits for her mother, who now has young children, and the older women will send them to Modeline’s house with ingredients for meals she can prepare.

Most of the new program members from Kaprens have already received their goats, but Modeline is still waiting for hers. She’s frustrated and says that other women make fun of her because she doesn’t have them yet. Her hopes are bound up with the goats. “You keep a close eye on your goats and you manage them well, and they are the ticket to your future.”

Working with Juslène may prove to be challenging. She seems to have some sort of learning disability. She’s a young woman with two children. Only one lives with her and her partner, who is an older man.

She grew up in her mother’s home. Her mother had five children, but lost three. Her mother farmed and raised livestock. She also had a small commerce, buying rum, tobacco, and basic groceries at the markets down the mountain and selling them out of her home. Justine says that, as a child, she never knew hunger.

When she became pregnant, she left her mother’s home and moved in with her current partner, her children’s father. It was with him that she first experience life with hunger.

He built a small shack on a plot of his farmland, but they no longer live in that home. They had to leave it when it was destroyed by a storm. They moved into a small room in his sister’s home in Gran Labou. Juslène is always there, and he is with her most of the time. He has, however, been married since before they got together, and he still spends some of his time with his wife and their kids.

Juslène doesn’t know her colors. Each time Titon, her case manager, asks her the color of something he points to, Juslène says that the object is green. She can’t copy the first letter of her name. As Titon tries to work with her, you sense that her attention is constantly wandering. She repeatedly tells him that she doesn’t remember what they talked about during his previous visit. She won’t even admit to being able to repeat things he tells her during this one. She looks at him when he asks her to do so, but her eyes gradually drift away as he speaks.

Louisimène lives with a daughter in a small shack in Gwo Labou. She has two other children, who live with their fathers. Three of her children are dead.

She grew up in the same extreme poverty that has marked her adult life. Her parents lived in Gran Platon, a mountain community. Her father was never part of her life, and her mother was seriously handicapped, so she was raised by an uncle who treated her well even if he could not send her to school. When she first fell in love, her young partner sent his parents to her uncle to ask for her hand and they set out on their life together. He worked his father’s land, but they were never able to get ahead. They couldn’t earn enough even to buy just a few animals to raise as a source of informal savings.

The situation was especially complicated because her partner always had other women. Eventually, he decided to move to Port au Prince with one of them, abandoning Louisimène and their daughter in Gwo Labou.

Louisimène has tried to send the girl to school, and the girl made it to second grade last year, but she’ll have to repeat the grade because she stopped going when she tore her sneakers and Louisimène couldn’t afford to replace them. The girl’s father doesn’t help. The girl explains, “He never buys anything for me. I could ask her for five gourds (less than eight cents) and won’t give it to me.”

Though their house is in disrepair and the yard that surrounds it is small, Louisimène is careful about its appearance. She sweeps all around it meticulously each day. “Even if you’re poor, when people go by your house, they’ll look at you.”

Louisimène is motivated to try to learn to write her name. She quickly bought the cheap copybook and pencil that Ricot, her case manager, told her to acquire so that he can give her writing lessons. But her progress is slow. The pencil is still awkward in her hand. She struggles even to copy the L’s that Ricot assigns her as homework.

The week’s lesson is about malnutrition, and it starts out oddly. Both Ricot and Louismène seem frustrated that Louismène remembers so little of the previous week’s lesson, and Louisimène’s response is to start by repeating everything Ricot says this week, line by line. He can pause to take a breath without her echoing what he’s just said. It takes some convincing, but he eventually gets her to relax and just listen.

She has a hope for the program, but she initially frames it in very general terms. “Jan nou te ye, nou p ap konsa ankò.” That means that she and her daughter will no longer live the way they’ve been living. When she’s asked to explain, she focuses on her home. “Even if you’re only living under a tree, you have a home,” she says, but her current house is on family land. The land isn’t hers. And she worries that she could die and her daughter could have trouble enforcing her claim to it. So she wants to buy herself a plot.

Miramène is just 21 years old. She, her mother, and a sister-in-law live with their children in a small hillside house made of palm wood, in Gwo Labou, a mountain community in Kolonbye. The sister-in-law is also a CLM member.

She says that there are families that have the means to live, but hers never has. “Gen mount ki genyen. Nou men, nou pat janm genyen.” Her mother had six children, and supported them by farming. But with access to only very little of her own farmland, she had to struggle by renting plots or working them as a sharecropper. But hunger, Miramène says, wasn’t a serious problem when she was growing up. “The land used to yield more.” The family was even able to buy livestock. Her mother still raises some animals, even though things have gotten harder.

Miramène has one child, a girl who was born in January, just after the girl’s father left to look for work across the nearby border, in the Dominican Republic. He returned for a visit in April, and Miramène says that he was glad to meet their child.

As a girl, she had the chance to go to school. She made it to the second grade, but she explains that she got sick, anemic, and so had to give it up.

CLM took her into the program, she says, because she lacks. “M pa genyen.” That means that she doesn’t have. It’s not that she lacks this or that particular thing, but that she just doesn’t have possessions. Though she can occasionally earn a little bit of money when her mother gives her something out of the garden that she can carry to market and sell, she explains that she has nothing of her own she can lay her hands on to sell it if she needs cash.

She’s been seeing her case manager for almost a month, but she’s still uncomfortable talking with him. Ricot sits close to her, and speaks encouragingly, but she shifts constantly in her chair, always turning so she can look away. The day’s subject is malnutrition, and Miramène whispers that she doesn’t know what it is. But she follows Ricot’s explanation closely, repeating the key points when he asks her to.

It’s her turn to receive the sòl. That’s the pot from the savings club that Ricot has organized for her and the other women he works with in her neighborhood. The women contribute 200 gourds of their 350-gourd stipend each week, and one of them gets it all. On the one hand, it can serve as a way to help women learn to plan. Their case managers will talk with them about the different ways they could use the money and what their priorities are.

On the other, it can help them organize the money they’ll need to complete their home repair. The CLM program helps them. We provide some of the materials and stipends for the builders, but the families themselves have a lot they are responsible for, and some need cash to make the work happen. Without the money they can save through the sòl, they’d have a hard time getting it done.

But Miramène has no idea what she wants to do with the money. Ricot asks her several times in several different ways, but she doesn’t know how to respond. So they agree that he will deposit it as savings.