Category Archives: Chemen Lavi Miyo

Christella

Our team first met Christella Fleurissaint in May 2013, when we were going through our selection process for a new group of families. She was living at the time with Rosemond, her second daughter’s father. She had her first daughter with her as well. “My oldest girl’s father has never done anything for her. I have to be her mother and her dad.”

The four of them shared a rented room. Rosemond would do odd jobs. Christella would buy vegetables with money she’d borrow from neighbors and friends, then sell her merchandise and return the capital right away. They owned neither land nor livestock. They had no way to send the girls to school.

But shortly after Christella joined our program, her relationship with Rosemend disintegrated. He was living mainly in Port au Prince, and he stopped coming to see her. Her annual rent was due. It was only about 1000 gourds – about $25 at the time – but she didn’t have the money. And her vegetable business collapsed because she lost the money in the market one day and wasn’t able to pay back the neighbor who lent it to her.

When she joined the program, she chose goats and a pig as her activities. She wanted to get back into the vegetable business as well, but she and her case manager Christian figured that she’d be able to do that with savings from her weekly stipend when she was ready. She wouldn’t need much to get started.

She started dating Michelet, and they quickly moved in together. Michelet had been a hard-working builder, but successive motorcycle accidents had damaged he knee beyond repair. He gets around nimbly with a crutch, but can no longer carry the heavy loads that anyone working with rocks, cement, and cinder blocks needs to manage. So he learned to change and repair flat tires. The highway from Port au Prince to Mirebalais and beyond passes through Labasti, and improvements to the road have come with increased traffic. His services were in steady, if not heavy, demand.

He helped Christella pay the rent she owed and added money from his earnings to grow her business. He also took on shared responsibility for the household. They eventually had a child together, but he showed himself to be devoted to her other daughters as well. “Anytime someone asks him, he says he has three kids.” Christella explains. “You should see how my oldest girl clings to him.”

Thanks to their good care, Christella’s livestock thrived. Her pig grew quickly, and her goats had kids. Soon her older daughters were in school.

But both she and Michelet were frustrated by how limited his contributions to the household were. “Michelet might make two hundred gourds on a good day, but he didn’t have his own equipment, so he’d have to give half to the owner of the tools.”

So they made a big decision. They sold all their livestock and used the money to buy a small, gas-powered air compressor. It cost 14,000 gourds. Michelet’s earnings would double right away. “Christian liked the idea, but he told us to be sure to buy some livestock as quickly as we could. He didn’t want us too reliant on just a few things.” They used some of Michelet’s new income to buy a young sow, and used some to re-start Christella’s vegetable business. She had given it up while nursing their baby. Michelet smiles as he remembers. “The other CLM members in our neighborhood all made fun of Christella when she sold her livestock. They thought she’d never graduate. But now we’re doing better than any of them.”

Christella graduated from CLM in December, and immediately joined Fonkoze’s credit program. She likes credit because it gives her more money to invest. The business takes a lot of work. She’s on the road all the time, buying at various local markets and then selling in Port au Prince. “I don’t have a regular place to buy or a regular product. Sometimes it’s okra, sometimes it’s sweet potatoes. Sometimes I buy corn. Whatever I think I can sell.” When she graduated from CLM, she had only 1750 gourds to buy merchandise with, but her first loan was for 3000 gourds, and as soon as she paid that back she got a second one for 4000. She’ll finish repaying her second loan in December and take out a new, larger one right away. “I’ll need the money to buy merchandise to sell for the New Year’s holiday.”

Christella has made enough profit that she was able to buy a second pig. Meanwhile, Michelet keeps working hard. He took his compressor to Saut d’Eau for the parish festival there, which is one of the largest in Haiti, and made enough money to pay a three-year lease on the land their CLM house sits on. Christella says, “There’s nothing lazy about Michelet at all. He’s always working hard.”

And they have a clear goal for the coming years. They own no land, and so can’t really build the home they’d like to live in. “You can’t put a nice house on rented land,” Michelet explains. But thanks to their lease they mow have three years to save up to buy a little plot. “We’ve promised ourselves that we’re not going to rent land any more.”

VSLA

One of the persistent questions we face is what CLM members should be doing after they graduate from the program. They receive eighteen months of close accompaniment from our team, and when they graduate we judge them to be capable of continuing to support themselves. But almost all are still very poor. We believe they will be better able to continue their progress if they are within a supportive structure.

At our program’s inception, we made a simple assumption about the next step. As part of Fonkoze, an institution that has long made microcredit the core of its poverty-alleviation efforts, it was easy for us to think it terms of our own microcredit programs. Even before Fonkoze had established CLM, we offered regular solidarity-group loans to thousands of borrowers and a six-month program of credit and additional support for those who would need extra help to succeed. It seemed natural to try to graduate CLM members into the Fonkoze’s credit programs when they were done with us.

But the results have been mixed.

We have seen many CLM graduates move into Fonkoze credit and then continue to make progress by using it to make their businesses grow. But there are problems, too. Some CLM graduates live in areas that are difficult to serve for a commercial entity that needs to be sustainable. Fonkoze’s credit programs have to break even. They are not supported by donations, the way CLM is. And some areas that CLM serves are just too expensive for credit agents and their supervisors to access. Other graduates succeed in CLM without developing small commerce as a financial activity. They live off farming or livestock instead. They don’t feel a need for credit.

So we’ve been experimenting with alternatives to Fonkoze’s credit programs, and one of the most promising is the Village Savings and Loan Association, or VSLA. It is a process that offers a group of friends and neighbors a way to establish simple financial services on their own.

VSLAs use a strongbox that has three locks. Three different VSLA members keep the keys, and a fourth person keeps the box itself. The box can be opened only at weekly meetings. Savings are made at the meetings by the purchase of shares. Each member must purchase at least one share per week, but may purchase more. Share prices are determined at the group’s first meeting. At that meeting, the group also decides on the size of a weekly contribution to the Association’s emergency fund. Members can then take out loans of up to three times their savings. They repay them with interest in two to three months.

The VSLA functions on a one-year cycle. All the loans have to be completely reimbursed by the last meeting. At that meeting, the whole pot, which includes the balance in the emergency fund, the savings, and the profits generated through interest on loans, is distributed to the members proportionally, depending on the number of shares each has purchased over the course of the year. Members who have not taken out loans profit from the interest that their fellow members have paid. Those who have borrowed money benefit from returns on their own payments.

One of our pilots is functioning in Dolibren, a rural neighborhood in southern Mirebalais, and the response of its members so far has been very positive. They day I visited they were giving their second round of loans, even as the first round of borrowers were making their first payments.

At the start of the meeting, the group’s president brought out the strong box, and the three members who hold the keys came forward to open it. The box holds two separate bags of money. One holds the emergency fund. The other holds the amount of savings that is not out in loans. It also holds a savings book for each member of the group, a calculator, a pen, an inkpad, and a seal.

Three different group members open up the locks.

The savings books are then distributed, and members are called forward, one at a time, to make their contributions to the emergency fund. This group had decided they would contribute five Haitian gourds per week, or about ten cents.

After the contributions are counted and verified, members are once again called forward, one at a time, to buy shares. This group chose to set the share price at 25 gourds, and members bought from two to five shares each. The number each purchased was recorded in the savings booklet with the seal. Someone who bought three shares received three stars in their booklet on a line designated for the particular week. Using the seal to record shares, rather than writing the number, makes it easier for even those who cannot read to verify their own booklet.

Share purchases are recorded with a small, pencil-shaped seal.

The three members who had received the first set of loans then came forward, one at a time, to make their payments. The repayments went into the savings pot, together with the proceeds from the week’s sale of shares. The elected board then counted the pot so that they’d know how much money they had available for new loans. Three new members took out loans, ranging from 1250 to 3500 gourds.

A record of Atelia’s loan and her first repayment in a separate section of her savings booklet.

Finally, the board verified totals in each of the two pots. The pots were returned to the strongbox, together with the savings books and other equipment. The whole meeting took about 90 minutes.

I spoke to Atelia, a member who has begun repaying a loan. She borrowed 1250 gourds to start a business buying sacks of charcoal in the area around her home, and selling them at the Nan Gad market, which overlooks Port au Prince. Her business, she said, is going well, and she reported no difficulty making her repayment. She purchased five shares on the day her repayment was due. “I like borrowing from the Association because all the profits stay with us.”

Atelia Hermé. She graduated from CLM last spring.

The experiment shows promise. But we will need some time to see whether the VSLAs really succeed. Right now, all three pilots are working smoothly. Too smoothly. None has yet had to manage a problem. There have been no missed repayments. None of the members have faced major issues in their lives. We won’t really be able to evaluate VLSAs as a strategy for CLM until we see how they deal with setbacks. There will be setbacks. But right now, we are excited by what we see.

Josué Terlus

Josué lives in Loncy, a small community along the rocky road through Ti Fon, the area of Lascahobas that stretches between the dam-created lake near Peligre and Mòn Michel. Several years ago, he suffered a series of strokes. Because he lacked access to rehab facilities, the partial paralysis that set in went untreated. He lost most use of all four limbs, and would spend almost all his time just sitting on a bed. Before he was selected to participate in CLM’s pilot program for persons with disabilities, he had spent more than a year without leaving the dark, windowless room.

He once lived in his own small house. It was a small shack, with palm wood walls and a roof made of tach, the large fibrous pods that palm seeds appear in. But such houses require continual maintenance. Palm wood planks rot, and tach dries and cracks. His paralysis made it impossible for him to do the work, so he had to abandon his own home and move into his nephew’s. “It was my mother’s house, but my sister inherited it, and she gave it to her son.”

When the CLM team first approached him about the program, Josué was reluctant. Hébert Artus, the program’s assistant director, explains that Josué told him that our team shouldn’t waste its time with him.

But Hébert was able to convince him to give the program a chance, and Josué is glad he’s part of it. “My boys help me take care of the goats and the pig, and the 200 gourds that I get every two weeks helps. Sometimes I need it to buy salt. Sometimes, it means I can buy a candle so that I’m not completely in the dark.”

And our team has already noticed real change. Hébert explains, “I would see Josué regularly during the two-month selection process, and he was always hostile, a little bit angry to see me. But since the first six-day training, things are different. We go by his house, and find him sitting outside, rather than in his dark little room. And he shows you he’s glad to get a visit, throwing out his hand to meet yours with all the warmth his paralysis allows.”

Josué still has problems. Though the team has linked him to the Partners in Health rehab clinic, getting there will always be a struggle and his years without rehab make it hard to foresee how much mobility he’ll be able to regain. In addition, his nephew has started to hint that he’d like him to move back into his own house, and it will take time for the program to help him make the repairs his house needs to be at all habitable.

But his new attitude is the clearest sign that his hope has returned.

Jaklin and Bob

Jaklin lives with her husband Bob and their children in Fonpyèjak, a farming area that rises out of Bay Tourib towards the high plateau that overlooks both it and Boukankare to the south. When she and her family joined the CLM program in the summer of 2011, they had very little.

They had access to some of the farmland above and around Fonpyèjak, even to a small plot that surrounds the house they were living in. That house belonged to one of Bob’s brothers, but he let them use it. They couldn’t do much with the land, though. The pressure to put food on the table every day kept them from investing time and money in activities that would take months to bring anything in. When Bob was around, he would work for wages in their neighbors’ fields.

Now and again he would leave for the Dominican Republic. Then Jaklin would have to shift for herself and their growing family. Each time Bob returned, he would try to come with some extra money. Jaklin would use it to buy plastic sandals in Tomond, which she’d sell in the rural markets around Bay Tourib. Business was generally good, and each time she would restart her business it would work for a while. But eventually it would collapse, usually because of pregnancy. She and Bob weren’t using family planning. She’d be unable to sell for a few months, and would feed her children with the money in the business until it disappeared or until Bob returned. They were hungry much of the time.

Jaklin was accustomed to the way that she and her family lived. She had always lived in terrible poverty. When she joined the program, her mother Mirana joined as well. And if anything, Mirana was even poorer than her daughter, though she only had her youngest child still depending in her. She had been together with a man, Jaklin’s stepfather, for years, since shortly after that death of Jaklin’s dad, and for most of those years he had been disabled by poor health. Unlike Jaklin, who had a willing partner in Bob, Mirana was on her own.

Their lives started to change as soon as they entered the program. For its first six months, they received a stipend of about $1 per day. Though it was very little, and though they would struggle to save a small portion of it to invest, it was enough to ensure they’d have something, however minimal, to feed the children every day. This freed Bob to stay at home and farm for himself. His mother had a couple of plots that he could work rent-free.

During their weekly conversation with their case manager, they learned about family planning. Haitians in the countryside have a saying, “Children are a poor person’s one asset.” But Jaklin and Bob began to see the realities connecting their poverty to Jaklin’s frequent pregnancies and to the expenses that were increasing as their family grew. They decided use the planning available free of charge at the Partners in Health clinic near their home.

Bob’s increased presence at home made it easier for them to make additional progress. CLM set Jaklin up with merchandise to restart her sandal business, and the business took off. Bob would purchase loads of sandals for her in Tomond or even in Port au Prince, and she would sell them in Regalis, Zabriko, and Koray. She’d sell them out of her home on days without a market. The more she was able to manage their expenses with her profits, the freer Bob became to focus on farming, and for the first time in years they brought in an impressive crop of beans, the main cash crop in the hills around Bay Tourib. When he and Jaklin brought their harvest to market, they made enough money that they were able to afford to buy a mule. Having a pack animal, in turn, helped them increase their business because it meant they were no longer limited to selling what they could carry on their head.

Jaklin and Bob continued to prosper. They replaced the leaf-covered house they had been living in with a larger house covered with a tin roof. The new house was the first one that belonged to them. They graduated from CLM in March 2013, easily meeting all the graduation criteria despite suffering setbacks in the program’s final months. Their bean crop was devastated by consecutive hurricanes in the fall of 2012, and at the end of that year their sandal business was nearly destroyed because Bob lost most of their capital when he was robbed while in Port au Prince to do the buying.

After graduation, they kept moving forward. Between Bob’s farming and Jaklin’s small commerce, their income continues to grow. They built a grain-storage hut behind their new house. With their growing harvests, they really felt the need for one. Eventually, they were able to buy the plot of land the house was on, along with the small garden around it. And now they plan to buy some additional plots to farm.

Midway through 2014, Jaklin became pregnant with their sixth child. She had missed the date she was scheduled to receive the contraceptive she was usuing every three months. It was a difficult pregnancy, but she and Bob knew how to get help. When the doctor at the Partners in Health clinic saw she was in trouble, she sent her by truck to the hospital in Ench. There she delivered a healthy boy, and had her tubes tied. “Children are expensive, and six is enough.”

Jaklin and Bob have an entirely new life. They have a comfortable house to live in, the money they need to keep their children fed and in school, and a plan for further progress. And the best part of it is the way they now can and do face its challenges together.

Ytelet Maxi

with her daughter, Marc-Berlie

Ytelet is from Zaboka, a village hidden among the steep valleys of eastern Tit Montay, Boukankare’s most remote rural section. The road to Zaboka is a long, difficult hike. Neither cars nor motorcycles can get there. But the CLM team can.

Before Ytelet joined the program in December 2010, she really struggled. She was trying to take care of her own child and of her younger brother, Dieulonet. But she had very few resources to manage with. “There were times when you’d look up, you’d look down – you’d look all around – just to find a little change you could use to buy the kids something to eat.” She and the children would go days at a time without eating a meal. Persistent hunger left her and Dieulonet so weak that a minor fever nearly killed both of them in the program’s first months. Only the determination of her case manager, Martinière, to carry her to a hospital that was hours away saved her life. As she said at her graduation ceremony in the summer of 2012, “Without Martinière, I wouldn’t even be here. And nobody would know that I matter just like everyone.”

Ytelet flourished in her time with the program, but not in the way that one might expect. She chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises, and neither developed very quickly. After a year, her two goats were still two goats. And her pig made less progress than that. A first one died, and she struggled to collect enough money to buy a second, smaller one.

But she and Martinière looked at another area where he saw she could improve her life. Even before she joined the program, she would farm to try to feed herself and the kids. She had no land, but she would plant beans – the most important cash crop in the mountains of Central Haiti – as a sharecropper. “I might harvest a bushel or two, but I’d have to give half to the landowner.” What’s worse, without cash, she’d have to buy the seeds on credit, and the standard interest rate on seed loans in the Central Plateau is a flat 100%. “I couldn’t get ahead.”

Martinière realized that Ytelet could do much better with her farming if she had cash to invest. So they came up with a plan. Ytelet would work hard to save money from the weekly stipend she’d receive for the first six months of her time in the program. She eventually saved up about $30.

She used that money to help herself in two steps. First, she bought up beans at harvest time, when the prices were low. She sold some at a profit right away by carrying them down to Boukankare where the prices are higher. But her new CLM home gave her a dry place to stock beans, too, and she put away as much as she could and waited for the planting season, when prices would shoot up. She also set some aside to plant in her own fields. Second, she set aside some of her profits from her first sales and rented land for cash. That way, her harvest would be entirely her own.

The strategy worked. The last harvest before she joined CLM, Ytelet had planted four mamit of borrowed beans. A mamit is a heaping coffee can, and is a standard measure of dry goods in the Haitian countryside. Her harvest was not great, but it was good, about thirty mamit. However, fifteen mamit went to the landowner and eight to the man who lent her the beans. Six months into her membership in CLM, she planted 12 mamit of beans that she purchased with cash up front on a plot she rented for 1000 gourds. She put away 40 mamit of beans at harvest, even after using some of her harvest to pay the neighbors who had helped her to work the plot.

After graduation, Ytelet continued to make progress by sticking to her plan. Her $30 grew to over $125 that she rolls over twice each year in her bean business. “At harvest, people need money and the market is full of beans, so the prices are low. I just hold on to them until the prices go up again.” With two harvests each year, she is earning well. She has even added to her livestock with new purchases.

In October 2014, she made a major decision. Unhappy with the quality of education her kids would be able to find in Zaboka, she decided to rent a room down the hill in Difayi, when she’d find much better schools. It would cost almost $100 for the school year, but it would be worth it. “I just want my kids to get a good education.”

When she looks back on her time in CLM, she smiles. “Life is easy now. I don’t worry about money anymore.” Her easy life might not look easy to everyone. She hikes the five hours from Difayi to Zaboka and back every two weeks to check on things, and she has to work her fields, keep an eye on her livestock, and take care of what are now three kids. But compared to the life she once led, it is easy. And she couldn’t be happier about her progress.

A now very-healthy Dieulonet

Luckson François

Luckson lives along the main road that leads from Mirebalais, in central Haiti, through Lascahobas and on to the Dominican border. He’s in his early thirties, and lives with his father and a young niece. Back when he was in his teens, his life seemed to hold great promise. He had learned to drive, and found a job in Port au Prince that allowed him to support himself and his sister, even as he put himself through high school.

His life took a terrible turn in 2001 when he was returning after work to the home in Port au Prince that he and his sister shared. He was mugged, shot once in the back. He lost the use of his legs and has been in a wheelchair ever since.

At first, his sister took care of him, shuttling him to the medical appointments that aimed to restore some measure of him health. But her sudden death forced him to return to his parents’ home. Then his mother died and his father’s condition deteriorated. He supported the household for awhile with a job as a school teacher, but persistent back pain that may be connected to the bullet that was never removed from his body made it difficult for him to sit for long hours every day, and eventually he had to give up the work.

Luckson is a tall man, and his wheelchair was too small for his long legs. It also lacked a footrest that could hold his feet in place. So he was unable to move around on his own. He would need to hold his feet with his hands while someone else pushed the chair.

He and entire household could do nothing but live on community charity. He had friends and neighbors who would occasionally give him something – food or a little cash – but he couldn’t count on any of them. “Haitians say, ‘A goat with many masters will die in the sun,’ he explained. They all mean well, but any of them might think that one of the others would do something for me. Sometimes our household went for days with nothing at all.”

He joined CLM’s pilot program for persons with disabilities in March. When the CLM team first came around asking him questions, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. “The first time they came, the guy just said that he was doing a census.” Then he got two more visits, and started to wonder what it was all about. “I didn’t learn about the program until they invited us to the first meeting. That’s when I began to feel glad because it seemed as though someone was finally going to help me.”

Though the program has not yet officially launched, he has already seen some benefits. When CLM staff saw how his ill-fitting chair was hampering him, they helped him contact the office of the Secretary of State for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities. A trip to Port au Prince in the CLM truck was all it took for him to receive a new hand-operated cart. The cart’s wooden body holds his feet comfortably inside, while he works peddles with his hands. His experience as a driver seemed to come back to him as his quickly learned to maneuver in the cart. On the day he brought the cart home, he was able to get from the street to his house by himself for the first time since his accident 15 years ago.

But when he talks about what he thinks of the program so far, that’s not what he mentions. “My life is totally different since I joined the program. The whole staff treats me like their friend. They took down my phone number, and call me now and again just to say, ‘Hi.’ I feel as though I’m part of something. It’s really a family. And it made me see that I have reason to hope for a better life. I’m not hopeless anymore.”

Luckson already has a plan for how he will move ahead. He wants to learn to repair cellphones. He’ll be able to sell cellphone minutes and repair phones right from his chair. Right now, people where he lives in Flande to go to Mirebalais or Lascahobas if they have trouble with their phones. It will be challenging. He’ll need tools and some training. But the CLM team is committed to trying to help him make it happen. Thanks to the Digicel Foundation’s contacts within Digicel itself, we are not far from making it happen.

After not Graduating

Not every family graduates from CLM.

The record since the program took off in 2007 is striking. 144 of the 150 families who participated in the initial pilot graduated, and the team has maintained that 96% graduation rate ever since. 3395 families have succeeded thus far.

The criteria are straightforward, nothing fancy. A family must be eating at least one hot meal every day. They must have two sources of income and $185 worth of productive assets. They can have no untreated cases of malnutrition and must be living in a house with a good tin roof. We want the woman of the family to have a plan for the future and the confidence to know that she can succeed.

But that leaves about 4%, or about 140 families, who haven’t graduated. That’s really a lot.

They fail to graduate for lots of reasons. For some, the case manager has failed to establish the trusting relationship that our program’s work depends on. We had a member named Marie who went behind her case manager’s back and sold all the goats that we gave her. He continued to try to work with her, but her dishonesty continued. And that was when he was able to see her. Much of the time, she ducked his weekly visits.

We don’t know as much as we should about the women like Marie, about what they do after their cohort graduates. We have anecdotes that suggest that many continue to make progress. Marie herself finished building her house after we had moved on, and she continued to build up her charcoal business as well. But we don’t have the resources to ensure follow-up.

But Mimose is doing ok.

She and her husband Wozèn live in Mazonbi, a remote area at the end of a rocky, twisting road that follows a secondary ridge northwest from Gran Boulay, a village on the mountain that separates the Central Plateau from the plain that contains the suburbs north of Port-au-Prince. When they joined our program in June 2013, they had three small children. She had once had a small commerce, but had lost the money one day when she was at market. Then she became pregnant with her last child, and couldn’t really move around. The boy was born right before she entered the program. Wozèn took on the whole responsibility for supporting the household by farming their small plot, and doing day labor in their neighbors’ fields.

The issues that interfered with her graduation were nothing like those we saw with Marie. We evaluate women after twelve months to see how much progress they have made towards the program’s goals, and at the twelve-month mark Mimose was ready to graduate. She and Wozèn had worked hard to build a well-constructed two-room house, using money she saved from her weekly stipend to making it larger than most of the houses that CLM members build. She was once again managing a small commerce, and though she had had trouble with her goats, she had enough assets overall to meet our graduation criteria.

But then she ran into problems. She and Wozèn chose not to use contraceptives, and she became pregnant once more. The pregnancy made it impossible for her to get her small commerce to market – each of the local markets she sells at is a considerable hike from her home at the lower end of Mazonbi – and the money that she had in it frittered away as she and Wozèn worked to cover household expenses.

She and Wozèn had been struggling from the start to make something of their investment in goats. A jealous neighbor had killed three of them, and though they pursued restitution with their case manager’s help, the most they could get to replace their losses were two small goats that the man’s aunt gave them so that he could avoid prison. They reluctantly accepted the aunt’s offer because she had been a very good neighbor to them for a long time. They thought they owed her their cooperation. Shortly before the 17-month evaluation, which would determine whether Mimose could graduate, the two replacement goats died.

So the only productive assets that they had were a couple of chickens from a flock that the couple had been keeping to provide Mimose with the extra protein she needed during the last stages of her pregnancy, and a field they had planted with beans. It was less than our graduation criteria demand. The last thing we were able to do for her before we left Mazonbi and its environs was to arrange for another CLM member to give Mimose two more goats so that she and Wozèn could get started once more.

But it didn’t take long for them to begin to build their household back up again. Mimose gave birth to a healthy baby, and decided that her fourth child would be her last. The couple made the effort to get her to the hospital in Mirebalais for the childbirth, and she had the doctors their tie her tubes. “Four children is enough,” she explained. Wozèn added, “Children are expensive. They have to eat, and they have to go to school.”

While she was in the last months of pregnancy, Wozèn took good care of their new goats, and they grew quickly. But he and Mimose were constantly concerned about goat thieves. The area around Mazonbi is spotted with little hills and valleys. Wherever they might choose to tie their goats to graze, the goats would be hidden most of the time. And there are numerous little paths that lead to Croix-des-Bouquets and Titayen, easy routes to market for someone who decides to lead away a neighbor’s goats. So they sold them and looked for another way to invest the funds.

Then a neighbor asked them about farming a field that they could not afford to plant, and they agreed to rent it to him for two years. They took the rental money, added the money from the sale of the goats, and bought a cow. They paid a lot for the cow – about $260 – but they thought it was a good investment. “It’s a big cow,” Mimose explains.

And now Mimose is ready to get back into her commerce. In the coming weeks, she plans to apply for a loan from Fonkoze, once again joining the women who were in CLM with her. She’ll send Wozèn to purchase rice and beans and other basics for her in Croix-de-Bouquets, and then she’ll bring them for sale in the local markets in Labasti, Dalon, and Ti Sekèy.

We’re optimistic about Mimose. She and Wozèn work hard and together, and they learned enough during 18 months with their case manager to have an excellent chance to succeed over the long term.

Not Ready for Credit

Programs like Chemen Lavi Miyò are called “graduation” programs. Participants spend eighteen months with us. Then they graduate. We hold a celebration, and we hand out certificates. Then the women move on to bigger things.

We are part of Fonkoze, a large microfinance institution, and while finding customers for our banking operation is not our goal, we do encourage graduating members to join Fonkoze’s credit programs if we think they could benefit. And we believe those programs can help many of our graduates continue their struggle to lift their families out of poverty.

So while we were planning the graduation of 347 families in December, we worked hard with our partners in the banking side of Fonkoze to arrange for loans. Case managers recommended approximately half of all graduates for credit, and most of them received their loans right away.

Case managers don’t decide by themselves whether a woman should join the credit program. Their recommendation emerges from conversations they hold with each CLM member in the months just before graduation. CLM members need to understand what it takes to succeed with credit, and they need to want to take the risk that comes with a loan. They also need to be clear about the difference between credit programs and CLM. The fact that Fonkoze provides both can lead to unrealistic expectations when they leave CLM to join credit. Finally, the case manager needs to be convinced that a prospective graduate will be able to manage a small business that can absorb the extra capital that the loan provides. Unless it can borrowed money will be more of a useless burden than a helpful tool.

Miraclide is a recent graduate from Niva, a large swath of farmland just south of Mirebalais. She made enormous progress during her 18 months with us, but did not decide to take on a loan when she graduated. It’s instructive to see why.

She lives with four children along the paved highway that runs from Port au Prince, through Mirebalais, and then on to the north. When she joined the CLM program, she had little that she could call her own. She had been forced to sell the one goat that she owned in order to rent the room they slept in. As her year-long lease was expiring, she wondered what she’d do. The father of one of her kids would send her about $1.50 a day, but it was all she had to feed all of them. She was pregnant at the time.

Shortly after she joined the program, she found a spot nearby that another neighbor was willing to rent to her for five years. Her case manager helped her figure out how to assemble the money she’d need to make her payments. So with the program’s support she built a small house and a simple pit latrine on the land. She started to care for the livestock we gave her – two goats and a pig – and they multiplied, despite the epidemic of Teschen Disease that was sweeping through the region, killing many of the pigs.

She also started a small commerce, and it began to take off. At first, she sold cosmetics: soaps and shampoos, perfumes and lotions. She would place them with a series of saleswomen who already had stands that they sold from along the highway. They would make a small commission on the sale. She might give a woman $10 or $20 worth of merchandise, with payment scheduled a week or two later, after it was sold. Her merchandise moved well, because she didn’t have much competition. Local merchants who were selling cosmetics were mostly selling hers.

But there was a problem. The women who were making the sales wouldn’t always pay her on time. Each delayed payment would affect the amount of new merchandise she could purchase, so her business began to shrink.

Fortunately, she and her case manager were quick to identify the problem. Leaving her merchandise to be sold on consignment meant giving up too much control, because she couldn’t know when she’d be paid. She decided to sell off her cosmetics business and try earning money another way.

By then, she had given birth to her second child, and because she had her baby on her hands, she couldn’t choose anything that involved a lot of time out of the house. That’s why she decided to sell basic food products – like rice, oil, bullion cubes, sugar, flour, and tomato paste – out of her home. Neighbors would come to her when they weren’t able to make it to the market in Labasti or Mirebalais, or when they just needed a few ingredients to make a simple meal.

Once again, her sales started out strong. But her difficulty collecting the money she was owed persisted. Women who sell out of their homes face enormous pressure to sell on credit. Their closest neighbors come by, asking for a cup of rice or a measure of cooking oil. Something they need to feed their children. They promise to pay the next morning or the next week. It’s difficult to say “No.” She’s your neighbor. You’re around her every day. And her children, the children your own children play with, may be hungry.

It’s also difficult to collect these debts. You can go a customer’s home, and make a lot of noise, but Miraclide was unwilling to make ugly scenes. And even an ugly scene might not help. The woman might simply not have the money when she said she would have it.

So Miraclide’s business continues to stumble along. She earns enough to keep herself and her children fed, but her income shrinks and then grows again as the amount of money she has in her clients’ hands increases and diminishes. When the school year is over, she’ll be able to use her older girl as a babysitter, and then move her business to the market. That will help. People who come to the market expect to pay cash. But it will only help for a couple of months. When her girl goes back to school in the fall, she’ll be stuck again. As long as she has to stay with her baby, she won’t be free to invest herself fully in the business she needs to make herself and her girls prosper.

If you ask her how she feels about the progress she’s made, she gets excited. “I had nothing. I was living in someone else’s home. I remember what my life was like, and I’m determined to manage my livestock so I can continue to move forward down the road.”

And she hopes to be able to join Fonkoze’s credit program some day, but right now a loan seems like a bad idea. She doesn’t feel confident that she’d consistently be able to make her payments. It would always depend too much on the women who owe her money. And she doesn’t want to have to sell off livestock – the only insurance that she has –to pay off a debt.

So she’ll wait. She’s young and her little girls are young, too. She’s learned that she can run a business, and she’s confident that she’s be able to flourish as soon as she’s free to really get to work.

Rose Marie Takes Her First Loan

Walking through Derasin, to the home that Rose Marie and her husband Emmanuel shared before they joined the CLM program, you would not have imagined that the couple living there would need the help that CLM offers. The yard surrounding their home was always richly planted, covered with healthy-looking patches of beans and corn. Large, old mango trees provided comfortable shade. You would have assumed that anyone living in such an area would at least have plenty to eat.

But nothing about those fields or trees belonged to Rose Marie or Emmanuel. As Rose Marie struggled with her third pregnancy, the family would get by on whatever Emmanuel could bring in through irregular day labor. They frequently faced days without solid meals, getting by on abandoned mangos or boiled leaves.

Then the family joined CLM, and things began to change. Emmanuel continued to seek day labor, whether in his neighbors’ fields or in the sand pits that line the main highway along the ridge separating Port au Prince from the Central Plateau. Rose Marie stayed home, looking after their two children and taking care of the livestock they received from CLM. She would use their weekly stipend to ensure that her children were eating well, but she’d also use part of it to buy poultry. She began keeping chickens, ducks, and turkeys, and they all prospered.

As her due date approached, however, life became more difficult. She is a tall, strong woman. But she was becoming enormous. Her previous pregnancies had been nothing like this. Her feet and ankles began to swell so much that it became hard to move around at all. And Derasin is far enough off the main road that she would need to walk just to get to where a truck could pick her up to take her to the hospital. Preeclampsia is a serious threat to the women of rural Haiti, and her case manager, Georges Zetrenne, kept a close eye on her situation. CLM’s driver Wilfaut made four trips to the hospital with her before she finally gave birth to twins.

Having the twins to take care of changed her life. She was limited to what she could do around the house. Emmanuel would have to work even harder to bring in whatever income he could. Between the pressure he was under to earn their daily bread, and Rose Marie’s inability to leave the twins, the couple was forced to make a difficult decision. Their two older children had finally started going to school, but neither parent was able to walk them to the one they were attending. They had to keep them at home and hope to start over the following year.

Shortly before Rose Marie graduated, the couple hit a bump in the road. They lost a large pig and a cow to disease in quick succession. They suspected jealous neighbors. They had harvested good crops on farmland they rented, and their livestock was starting to take off. The deaths of such large animals were sudden and mysterious. But rather than cry over their losses, they decided to move out of the house they had built on Rose Marie’s land. So they packed up what they owned and moved to a small place on land that Emmanuel’s family owns in Fond Cheval, near the sand mine that was becoming their most important source of steady income.

The day after graduation, Rose Marie took out her first Fonkoze loan. She had been in a credit program offered by one of Fonkoze’s competitors in the past, before joining CLM, but it hadn’t worked out. She would borrow enough money to buy a pig and some poultry. The pig would mature over the term of the loan, and she’d sell it to repay the loan and its interest. The poultry would remain as her profit. Because she generally had good luck with poultry, and her family was small, it seemed like a good arrangement.

But Teschen Disease is a serious threat to pigs in the Central Plateau, and Rose Marie’s luck ran out. She lost a pig to the disease, and had to sell off other assets just to pay back what she owed.

Facing the chance upon her graduation from CLM to join Fonkoze’s credit program, Rose Marie made a different sort of plan. Fond Cheval is a bigger and livelier place than Derasin, and she and Emmanuel decided to use their move as an opportunity. They began selling cellphone minutes, and the business took off. They decided to use credit to accelerate the sales. The loan is important, because cellphone minute sales can only work if you have enough cash in the business to be able to provide change all the time. Having the correct change ready is one of the most important competitive advantages that a salesperson can offer to clients in the Haitian countryside. Without it, she and Emmanuel would have had to choose between losing customers to other venders or selling on credit. Thanks to their loan, they can now sell as much as 2500 gourds worth in a day. That’s translates into 200 gourds of profit. They had no trouble making the first of their three repayments. And they did not need to shrink their business to do so, even though they have also been using some of their earnings to help feed their kids.

And they are nowhere near ready to stop. They’re already planning what they will do with their next loan. “We want to increase the loan just a little. But we won’t put more money in the business we have,” Rose Marie explained. “We’ll add another, new business.” The twins are still small enough that one or the other of them has to stay at home all the time, so Emmanuel will stay with the twins and sell phone minutes from home on market days, while Rose Marie buys sacks of produce that she can then divide into retail quantities and sell in front of their home.

Rose Marie and Emmanuel have struggled since they joined CLM, but they have made real progress, too. They are ready to send their older children back to school in their new home community, and are committed to helping all their children to a better life.

Emilienne and Kendy

Emilienne joined the CLM program almost a year and a half ago, and is preparing to graduate in December. She is originally from Zilia, a very rural area tucked in close to downtown Mirebalais, but she spent much of her life in Port au Prince, raising her children together with her husband in Cité Soleil, one of the city’s most notorious slums. “There were so many people there, I could always sell something. I’d just set up my business outside my front door.”

But crime in Cité Soleil was rising. And then disaster struck. While Emilienne was pregnant with her last child, her husband died. So despite her ability to earn a living in Port au Prince, she decided to move back to Mirebalais. Her oldest children were already off on their own, and she found family members willing to take two of her younger children in. So she moved into a small room in a cousin’s house in downtown Mirebalais. She was pregnant, but alone, supporting herself making and selling tablèt, a handmade praline-like candy.

One night, she woke up alone in her room, and knew that her time had come. She had her baby without waking up anyone. “I had my boy, washed him off myself, and cut his umbilical cord. Then I got up, went out, closed the door behind me, and started to make my candy. The next morning, my cousin heard a baby crying in my room, and asked me whether I had had my child.”

By the time she joined CLM, she had moved back out to Zilia, with her young boy, Kendy. She was living in a straw shack, on a cousin’s land. She supported the two of them by buying a couple of twelve packs of crackers on credit every day, and selling them at the Mirebalais – Port au Prince bus station. She’d pay for the crackers at the end of the day.

She chose goats and small commerce, and got to work. She started working to develop her small commerce while Kendy helped by watching her goats. And they began to flourish. Her goats grew and eventually had kids. But Zilia is a difficult neighborhood. Though it is sparsely populated and even a little remote, it is also very close to downtown Mirebalais. And so it’s more subject to crime than more distant areas. She and Kendy lost two goats to theft. Little Kendy was so heartbroken that she was too busy comforting him to worry about the losses.

At the same time, her business started to grow. She continued to sell crackers — with her own money, now — but added other snacks, even cold drinks.

The commerce has been growing. She and Kendy set up the business each morning, before he goes to school.

But it isn’t always smooth sailing. Just last week, a young man passed by and tried to steal 50 gourds by reaching his hand into her basket. Fortunately, Kendy saw him. “Kendy ran after the man and grabbed him. The man tried to deny that he had taken the money, but Kendy saw where he put it. He grabbed the guy and wouldn’t let go. Kendy made so much noise, that people came up. By-standers tried to hit Kendy to drive him off, but he wouldn’t give up. Eventually, the man gave the money back, but I was so mad. Who know’s what could have happened to Kendy? And for just 50 gourds.”

Emilienne is excited about the progress she’s made. “I have a new house, I have livestock, and I have my business. I’m taking good care of Kendy.” Her dream is a simple one. “Kendy’s everything to me now. I just want to give him the chance to live a good life.”

Apprenticeship in Education

Essays on Life in Haiti by Steven Werlin