Nine months after the graduation in Bay Tourib, which is still the largest single graduation we have ever celebrated, a lot has changed in the mountains that overlook Tomonn. When I rode up for a visit in the summer, in the middle of the rainy season, the road had deteriorated badly enough that I gave up before I got to the town. For that trip, I went with my godson, Velicène. He’s a medical school student and was going to spend a week assisting the doctor there. We left my motorcycle by the side of the road in Jidipe, and hiked the last hour or so in the rain. But in the early fall, the Haitian government put heavy equipment to work in preparation for the parish festival in November, and the assorted tractors and graders did a lot of good.

For now, at least until next year’s rains wash the new, improved road out, the ride from downtown to Tomonn to Bay Tourib is easy. Motorcycle taxis go up and down the road for only 150 gourds, or less than $4. The old price was 500. And at 500 gourds, one had to get off the motorcycle to walk in a couple of places that were too difficult for even a professional driver to take with a passenger. Just as importantly, trucks without four-wheel drive can now get to the town, and one has started coming up to Bay Tourib regularly to buy the fruit that grows abundantly there and to transport it for sale to Port au Prince.

Previously, fruit would rot on the ground. People would have more than they could consume, but they would have a hard time getting it to market. That should no longer be a problem. If the truck focuses on produce, rather than charcoal, it will be an unmixed good for the region. But I had heard about the road. It was not really what I was curious about. I was much more interested in discovering how CLM graduates were doing. I had heard disturbing rumors of livestock lost to disease and to hungry dogs, so I was concerned.

Mirana lives with her husband in Senflè, uphill from the residence at the Partners in Health hospital. I remember her very well from my first visit to her in the spring of 2011. She had just lost one of her older sons, the one who had been her principal source of support ever since Canot, her husband, had grown sick and incapable of hard work. The younger man had earned enough money to buy her a small house, had helped her keep their family fed, and had even paid to send his little sister to school – the first of Mirana’s children to see the inside of a classroom.

That son had gone of to Port au Prince, promising to find work and to earn a real income so that he’d be able to support her well, but the first news Mirana had heard of him was that he was dead. She had sold off what little she owned just to pay for his funeral.

The household was going hungry most of the time. She had planted a couple of cups of beans that had been lent to her by the local peasants association, but she, Canot, and their daughter were surviving mostly on handouts.

What was most memorable about that interview was when she expressed her greatest sadness. She said, “We get by with what we have, but I’m sorry for my girl. She’ll finish primary school this year, but there’s no way I can send her any farther.”

While Mirana was part of CLM, her case manager helped her figure out how to send her daughter to school in Tomonn. The young woman would live with a relative. Mirana would send food and money down as often as she could. That way, the girl would seem less like a beggar, and more like a regular part of the household.

And the first person I saw in the yard when I passed by on Christmas day was that girl. She’s still in school, but had come home for vacation. Mirana has not continued to accumulate much in the way of assets, but she has been able to keep herself, her husband, and their daughter decently fed, and the girl in school. The girl will take the national 9th grade examination this coming summer.

I asked Mirana about the rumor that some CLM graduates had been losing goats to packs of hungry dogs. She answered that she had lost one herself. But she still has one mature female. It’s now pregnant, and its most recent kid is a female on the verge of sexual maturity. So she should soon have a couple more. Both were tied in her yard, right in front of the house. She now brings food to them there instead of tying them where they can find food. It’s the best way she has to protect them from the dogs.

She had also been raising a pig, but had become concerned when several of her neighbors’ pigs had died. So she sold hers. Bay Tourib’s farmers were harvesting their beans just then, so she invested the money she earned from sale of the pig in dried beans. She’s holding on to them. By waiting until planting season to sell them, she will be able to turn them over at a significant profit. “I’ll be able to buy a pig again with money from the beans.”

Mirana’s older daughter, Orana, lives in Fonpyèjak, with her husband Bob and five small children. Bob works hard as a farmer, and is able to keep the family fed while Orana earns cash with a business selling plastic sandals at the markets in Abriko, Regalis, and Koray.

Before CLM, they struggled in three ways. First, Orana had to carry her merchandise on her head because she had no pack animal. That severely limited her ability to earn. She was further limited by frequent pregnancies. On the other, Bob was unable to farm consistently because he had to leave home to look for work every time they faced a significant expense.

CLM helped them build up assets until they were able to buy a mule. That made it possible for their business to grow. They worked together so well that even when most of their capital was stolen during a purchasing trip to Port au Prince, they were able to get themselves going once again by selling off some of their produce.

Orana and Bob have not added new livestock since Orana graduated, but they added something important to their yard, something that reflects their growing prosperity.

A kolonbi is a grain depot built on long stilts to protect the harvest from rats. As I walked up to the front of Orana’s new home, the one she built while a member of CLM, I noticed that the straw house they had been living in before joining the program had been demolished. When I had been talking with Orana for a few minutes, she asked me proudly whether I had seen her new //kolonbi//. I hadn’t noticed it. It was hidden behind the new house. They used the lumber from the straw house, but then bought used tin roofing material to cover it. Orana was excited about it. Because Bob no longer had to take time off to earn cash, they had enough of a harvest to require storage. And her nice, new kolonbi provided a good space to store it in.

The family seems to be doing really well. The children are healthy and in school, and Orana uses family-planning services offered by Partners in Health. And Orana reports that her business is steady.

When Gladys heard I was in Bay Tourib, she came to the residence to see me. She was anxious to tell me how well she was doing.

I knew she had been involved in small commerce when she graduated from the program, so I was concerned to hear that she had wasn’t selling anymore. Then she explained why: Her horse had died. She can’t carry merchandise to market. It’s too far. When I asked her whether she had had problems feeding her two girls because she had let her business disappear, she explained that the harvest had been very good, so that they were doing well.

Like other graduates, she had been concerned when people started to lose goats to hungry dogs, but she had protected herself. She had sold off her remaining goats, and bought a pig instead. The pig had had six piglets, which were starting to grow. She was planning to let them grow until she could sell them and buy a mule. Then she would go back into business.

It was, generally, an encouraging visit. It is always exciting to see CLM graduates who have accumulated significant assets by the end of the program. But talking with women like Mirana, Orana, and Gladys is more encouraging still. Their wealth has ebbed and flowed since they joined CLM, but they have shown resilience because they have learned how to develop and work from a clear plan. They are still very poor. There is no mistaking that. But they are making progress, not as passengers riding a tide, but as actors charting a new course for the families they lead.

Guilène’s husband used to work loading and unloading a truck that carried imports from Elias Piña, in the Dominican Republic, into Port au Prince. The truck’s brakes gave out as it was going down a dangerous mountain road to avoid the customs station on the main road into the capital. He never made it to a hospital.

After he died, Guilène moved back to Pòsab, a small community near the market in Labasti, right on the main road that leads from Port au Prince to Mirebalais. She had neither land nor livestock of her own, and she lacked both the capital and the know-how to start a small commerce. Her husband had been the provider in their home. She had only had to manage the money he brought to her. So she moved into a shack on her stepfather’s land with Jovensonne, her son, and Guinya, a daughter who was born just after the husband died.

Guilène kept them fed at first by selling off the household goods she had accumulated as a married woman: her bed, her curtains, her sheets, her dishes, pots, and pans. When she had nothing to sell, they went hungry.

As her relationship with her mother deteriorated, life just became harder. She got on well enough with her stepfather, but the two women would argue and fight. Chimène, her mother, had problems enough of her own. She had numerous younger children she struggled to feed. They fought over everything and over nothing. Chimène wanted Guilène to respect her authority. Guilène resented the way her mother took advantage of her need to sell off her things. She had expected help. Instead she felt her mother cared about nothing but getting a good deal.

Since they were two separate households, we qualified both for CLM. And each got quickly to work.

When Fonkoze adapted BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra Poor, or TUP, program for Haiti, we were reluctant to change very much. BRAC had shown that the program could be successful in Bangladesh. We became convinced by the approach, and sought mainly to replicate it. But there were some things that had to be changed. Haiti’s mountainous terrain and the way its population is distributed each required minor adjustments in the way the program is administered.

But one standard part of Haitian culture integrated itself seamlessly into the work as TUP turned into CLM. It is what Haitians call a sòl. It’s an important financial strategy for many classes of Haitians, and it quickly became a central part of CLM.

A sòl is a savings club. A number of people get together and contribute a set amount every day, every week, or every month. Each time they contribute, one of the members collects the whole pot. If there are ten members, and they each contribute 100 gourds a week, one of the ten will get 900 gourds each week. It’s a way that Haitians, who can be under a lot of pressure to spend what they earn every, force themselves into a discipline that permits them organize a lump sum.

During the first six months of the program, CLM members receive a cash stipend of 300 gourds each week. That’s about $7. We called it the “ti tchotcho lamanjay,” which means “little food money.” It was initially designed to take the edge off a family’s hunger during the first six months, when they are just beginning to develop their new assets.

We quickly discovered, however, that our members wanted to do much more with their tchotcho than feed their kids. They would make small deposits in the savings accounts we would open for them, or they would buy small assets, like chickens.

And they also wanted to organize a sòl. Most would put aside 100 of their 300 gourds. They would collect their share more or less often, depending on the number of women who were in the sòl with them.

Our case managers quickly discovered how useful a part of the CLM process a sòl could be. One of the most important challenges that a case manager faces is to teach CLM members to plan. Most members have spent their lives struggling to find food each day. They haven’t had the leisure to think about the future.

But each time a CLM member is scheduled to received the money from her sòl, she and her case manager take some extra time to plan what she will do with the money. She might use it to pay school fees or to start a small commerce or to buy livestock or to invest in farming.

When it was Guilène’s turn, she used it to address her biggest problem. She added its 1500 gourds to 500 she had left from the sale of her bed and put the 2000 gourds down as a first payment on a five-year lease on a small plot of land. The total price was 5000 gourds, but the landowner likes Guilène, and was willing to take a partial payment. She quickly built an ajoupa, a tent-like structure that has a peaked roof that comes all the way to the ground. Its only walls are small triangles in the front and back. An ajoupa is generally made of sticks and straw, but Guilène was able to cover hers with the old roofing tin that she brought with her from her house in Belladère. That got her out of her mother’s yard, and made it possible for her to start to feel better about her life.

Her first major problem struck as she was having a neighbor dig the hole where she would place her latrine. The hole made an attractive place to play for Jovensonne and his uncle, Chimène’s second-to-youngest son Lukachòn, who’s just a couple of years older than he is. One day, when Jovensenne was in the hole, Lukachòn let a heavy iron pick they were playing with fall in. It landed on Jovensonne’s foot, and cut all the way through.

One measure of the hostility Guilène felt towards Chimène is that she accused her of indifference to the damage Lukachòn had inflicted on her boy. She was so angry that Chimène sent Lukachòn to Port au Prince to stay with another one of her older daughters. She was afraid of what Guilène might do to him.

This happened on a Friday morning. Guilène’s case manager, Nerlande, wouldn’t be in the neighborhood until Monday. Guilène had no money to get Jovensonne to the hospital. Though the care would be free thanks to Partners in Health, there would be transportation to pay for and food to buy if they had to stay a long time. She could have called Nerlande, but she had just joined the program, and was not yet used to thinking of her case manager as her most important partner in the struggle to improve her life. So she carried Jovensonne to a neighbor, who stanched the wound with cotton and poured in some alcohol.

By Monday, when Nerlande and I went by, the wound was badly infected. Jovensonne was stuck in bed with a high fever and a foot swollen to twice its normal size. I put him on the front of my motorcycle and rushed him to the hospital. He went through agony as nurses carefully removed each thread of cotton from the ugly wound. An x-ray showed that the pick had passed through his foot without breaking any bones. In that sense, he was lucky. The doctor who saw him gave him a course of children’s Tylenol and amoxicillin, and he was starting to heal within days.

The experience would have shaken any mother, but it was especially hard for Guilène because of her special relationship with Jovensonne. Since she became a widow, Guilène has gotten used to referring to him, though he’s not yet ten years old, as the man in her house. She is always raving about how loving and helpful he is. Not only does he refuse to complain when she can’t feed him the way she’d like to, but he begs her not to borrow money or buy food on credit because he doesn’t like to hear people speak roughly to her when she cannot pay. Haitian children are generally raised to share, but Jovensonne is especially good about doing so. Nothing falls into his hands without his mother and his little sister get something first.

A couple of weeks ago, we were glad to see that Guilène had started a small commerce. It is an important step towards assuring daily income. When she joined CLM, she had asked us to give her goats and a pig. Each member chooses two activities she would like us to help her start. Guilène takes good care of her animals, and they should eventually earn her significant profits. But they could not help her feed her children in the short term. She needed a way to earn at least a few gourds every day, and small commerce seemed the most likely way for her to do so. We wondered where Guilène had gotten the money to start her commerce because we knew that the down payment she made on her lease had more-or-less cleaned her out.

Guilène told us that after she pays 100 gourds into her sòl each week, she takes 25 of the remaining 200 gourds and gives them to Jovensonne. To an American accustomed to a culture in which even young children get an allowance, this might seem like an obvious thing to do. But of the 2400 who have graduated from CLM thus far, and the 1350 currently in the program, Guilène is the only one we know of who has done something like this.

Jovensonne spends 15 gourds on whatever treats happen to catch his eyes – always sharing with his mother, his sister, and his friends – but he puts ten gourds into his own weekly savings club. He had seen how a sòl had helped his mother, so he wanted to be part of one too. Each week, he and his friends all contribute their ten gourds, and one of them gets the whole pot, which is 400 gourds.

When it was Jovensonne’s turn to receive the pot, he gave it all to his mother and told her she could start a small commerce. She got off to a successful start based only on the money her boy gave her, selling cookies, crackers, and hard candy from a basket at the side of the main road. Eventually she was able to add her own cash when her second turn came around. That allowed her diversify the range of products she can sell. She added peanut butter sandwiches and coffee that she roasts and grinds herself. She also occasionally fries dough or sweet potatoes.

Guilene

So Jovensonne started his mother in business, and proved that, at nine years old, he is a real partner in her struggle to lift her family out of poverty.

One final note: The accompaniment CLM offers is not focused narrowly on members’ economic/financial development. We are committed to help them improve all aspects of their lives. Nerlande believed that a better life for Guilène and her children would depend, in the long term, to healing the wound separating her from her mother. So she invested a lot of extra time over the first few months talking to both women about their conflict.

And we are glad to report that her encouragement has yielded results. Guilène decided to go to her mother and make up. “We can’t both be members of this great program and not be friends,” she explained. So they are friends once more. When Guilène has to leave her business for a few minutes, her mother sends Lukachòn or his little brother Dinaldo to cover for her together with Jovensonne.

Dieumette entered CLM as what we call a “ka espesyal,” or a “special case.” That means that she did not show up on the lists that we develop with community input at the beginning of the selection process. Our first step is designed to give us a list that includes all households in a neighborhood, organized into about five different categories based on their neighbors’ sense of their relative wealth. We then interview all the households that fall in the two poorest categories as we search for families who might qualify for our program.

But we know that some of the neediest households will fail to turn up on those lists. For various reasons, members of the community do not think of them. Some of these families are simply invisible. They live in such isolation even from their closest neighbors that people can forget that they exist. But many are young single women, who live with one or more children in a house or yard that their neighbors identify as part of a larger family. Such a woman might just use a corner of someone else’s house as a place to sleep with her children, or she might live so close to parents that neighbors fail to see her independent need. Our case managers have to be on the lookout for such special cases as we work through the selection process. They include some of the families who need us most.

Dieumette lives in a small, one room house in Platon Sous, a small neighborhood about twenty minutes off the main highway that leads from Mirebalais to Port au Prince. It’s high above Mirebalais, with views that extend widely, to Montay Terib in to the west and to the mountains that cut through Boucan Carré to the north. She has two girls, with two separate fathers. Abandoned by both men, she is raising her daughters on her own. But her little house is close to those belonging to her mother and her aunts, so her neighbors did not count her when they were listing the households in the area.

But she needed help. She was struggling to feed herself and her girls with a small business, buying and selling pigeon peas, using capital that she borrowed from two different people.

She started that business by borrowing 250 gourds from one friend and 500 gourds from another, a total of about $17. She would take that money to the small markets nearby in Gran Boulay or Dalon, where she’d buy a sack of pigeon peas. She’d then take it to Port au Prince, where she would sell it in smaller measures. Her profits were steady, even after her transportation costs were calculated.

Then one day, she bought herself a “bwat sekrè,” or a “secret box.” That’s something like a piggy bank: a box with a small hole that allows someone to insert money, but not to take it out. Dieumette explains: “Every time I came home from the market, I would put a little something in my secret box. I needed money to feed my girls, but I knew that if we ate everything, we’d never get ahead.”

As spring turned to summer, the price of pigeon peas got so high that she couldn’t afford to buy a sack full any more, not with the very little money she had borrowed. And then her friends said they needed their money back.

So she cracked open her secret box and found that she had saved up 450 gourds, a little more than $10. It wouldn’t be enough to buy beans, so Dieumette thought about what else she could buy. “I bought a case of soap and four buckets of salt, and I started selling them in the market.” She kept turning them over and adding little bits of profit to a new secret box. And before too long she had 900 gourds, which was enough to buy a very small piglet, one barely weaned. But she is taking good care of it. It’s already worth twice what she bought it for, and it’s still growing fast.

Her business took a hit this month, as she has had to draw on it to send her little girls to school, but she already bought a second piglet with money from the savings club she’s in with her fellow CLM members, so she’s making good progress. And Dieumette already has a clear plan, too. When her pigs are big enough, she’ll sell them off to buy a cow. “I really want a cow, because once it starts giving you calves it can really help you.”

So, though she was regularly hungry when she started the program, she was all set to begin succeeding almost as soon as she joined. She had the financial discipline that she developed by using her secret boxes and the good sense to shift her investment when faced with a situation that called for a new plan. One of the ways we articulate the criteria for joining CLM is that we should not take families who could succeed with credit. Looking back, it looks as though Dieumette might have been able to.

But I don’t regret her selection, because I think that to assume that she could have succeeded with credit would have been a poor bet. She started with neither a husband to back her up nor assets like livestock that would have been sufficient to insure her against bumps in the road. And she wasn’t able at the time to feed her girls well. For someone like her, failure at a credit program was too easy to imagine.

Extremely poor families often live in isolation. They lead lives that may be parallel to those their wealthier neighbors lead, never touching the points of intersection that give a community the unity that defines it.

Many of them cannot send their children to school, and often those who can do not feel entitled to go to a parents’ meeting. They have no regular place at the local market because any little produce that they bring with them is too insignificant to require a fixed point of sale. They carry it around on their heads, or go straight to a wealthier retailer who will buy their load cheap. They don’t belong to community organizations. They would not feel comfortable at meetings. And no one would think to invite them to a celebration.

It’s not as though they are feared or avoided like lepers. It’s just that no one ever thinks of them.

So one of our principle social goals for CLM members is to help them become members of their communities. That is one of the reasons for establishing village assistance committees. Our members get used to attending meetings with friendly community leaders and even to speak up. The committee members’ work brings them to our members’ homes as visitors, a habit that sticks when the CLM members show the committee members that the visits are welcome. The relationships they will establish with these leaders as they start to develop their own economic means can protect them from returning to their former isolation, even as the livestock they accumulate can protect them from returning to extreme poverty when their livelihoods run into inevitable rough times.

So when a community has its own tools for managing problems and conflicts, we think it is to our members’ advantage for us to guide them towards those tools. That’s not to say that we never intervene strongly ourselves. Sometimes we do. (See: DeleGasyon.) But if we don’t have to manage things ourselves, we’d rather not. So when the case manager who serves the town of Trianon, which sits along the national highway in southern Mirebalais, explained the situation that had developed between two of the families he works with, I referred him to Judge Patrick, the justice of the peace.

The two families are neighbors. Dénius is the son of a woman named Osiane who was selected for the program. He became responsible for himself and his 14-year-old younger brother when Osiane died, probably of persistent malnutrition. Their father had died two years previously. Genel is his cousin, the husband of another woman we selected for the program. Dénius’s father and Genel’s mother were brother and sister. The mother is still alive.

Genel is about five years older than Dénius, a married man of 25. He’s also bigger and stronger than Dénius. Dénius may be 20, but he looks much younger. More important, Genel is tougher than Dénius, who is very sweet but probably lacking in what would be useful grit.

Not that he doesn’t try to stick up for himself: When Genel went into the land his father left him and lopped a fruit-laden branch off a mango tree to make charcoal, he complained, enough apparently to annoy Genel. Genel finally explained that he had been asked to make the charcoal by his mother, so that Dénius should complain to the mother instead. Dénius complained again when Genel cut down a tree on another plot of land that Dénius believed that his father had left him – Genel thought it had been left to the whole family by their grandfather – and made enough noise to make Genel angry and threatening.

Dénius then complained to Michel, their common case manager, who decided to sit down with them both. In the course of the conversation, Genel became angry again. He finally said, in front of Michel, that if he came across Dénius when the moment was right he would cut him to pieces. That was when Michel came to me.

Fortunately, Trianon had just been assigned a courthouse and a justice of the peace. Fortunately again, the justice of the peace is Judge Patrick, who had previously been assigned to a court in Tit Montay, where he became very familiar with CLM. So we were assured of a sympathetic hearing.

I had Michel help Dénius file a complaint based on the threat to his life. This would require the court to send Genel a manda envitasyon, something like a formal demand that he present himself in court for a hearing, but much less serious than a warrant for his arrest would be.

Judge Patrick’s sympathetic understanding was important, because our goals for the hearing were complex. Both Dénius and Genel are part of CLM. We needed to do what we could to help Dénius feel save and to clarify the land ownership issues that invited the conflict. We also wanted Genel to see that it was, for us, simply a matter of using a fair process to clear things up, and that we continue to see him as part of our CLM family – every bit as much a part of it as his more vulnerable younger cousin is.

Judge Patrick was wonderful, talking and listening respectfully to both men. He got Genel to admit that he had been hotheaded and to agree that he must manage any conflicts with Dénius in some other way.

He also identified the source of the problem as their different understandings of the way the land was left to them, and we were lucky enough to have a satisfactory way to define things. Their aunt, their parents’ older sister, came to the hearing. She is a childless older woman who has more-or-less moved in with Dénius and his brother, Amison. She keeps quiet and manages her affairs separately from them, though they share what they have with her and she shares with them. They speak to her with gentleness and respect, and she seems fond of them.

Judge Patrick asked her what she knew about the land in question. Did it come to Dénius as an inheritance from his father or did her father leave it in common to them all? There were no papers of any kind to establish the old man’s intentions, but the land is between a small garden that belongs to her sister and another that belongs to her. What, if anything, did she know?

The aunt had a simple answer: She remembered that her brother once told her that their father had given him that piece of land. He had never cleared it for planting because he wanted to leave it as a source of lumber in case he and his children needed it to build a home.

Her declaration satisfied Judge Patrick, and it satisfied Genel as well. He said he was sorry, that he hadn’t understood things that way, and that he’d stay off the land from now on.

Dénius now asked the judge to make Genel promise to leave him alone. Genel started to get angry when he heard this, so that’s when we felt we had to intervene. Genel had already said three times that he’d avoid problems with Dénius, but Dénius was still scared.

I was sitting next to Genel, and as he started to speak I held his hand and asked him to let me respond. I said that Genel had already promised in front of the judge that he would not bully Dénius. To continue to ask for guarantees was to doubt his honesty. And no one had shown any reason to do that. I’ve gotten very close to Dénius, so when I said this, he relented.

Then it was time for Judge Patrick’s final maneuver. He wrote an agreement of reconciliation into the courtroom’s official record. There were a number of points in the agreement, but the central one was that Genel and Dénius would agree to act as brothers. Dénius would look to Genel as and older brother for protection and advice, Genel would protect and advise him. Judge Patrick made them sign the agreement and then hug. All in front of a crowded little courtroom. It was not the warmest of embraces, but I think it did what Judge Patrick wanted it to do.

On the way out, I pulled Genel aside for a chat. On one hand, I wanted him to understand that we would hold him to his agreements. On the other hand, I wanted to communicate my friendship towards him. For various reasons, I have grown very close to Dénius. I haven’t with Genel. But I wanted Genel to see that our team is committed to helping them both. We talked mostly about his very beautiful little girl and about one of the goats that the program had given his wife, which seemed a little sick. I also asked him to contact me if there was any more trouble between him and Dénius, and he said that he would.

Using the legal system in Trianon gave us a way to protect a scared young man from another who is stronger and tougher than he. But it also made their conflict, and its resolution, a part of the formal comings and goings of the community that surrounds them both. Making it a public matter served to bring both young men farther into the public realm as well.

One of the formidable challenges at the center of our extreme poverty program is ensuring we select the right families. We have a process that always involves three steps: community input, initial screening, and final verification. But sometimes there’s also a fourth step. Fonkoze’s Social Impact Management Unit – which is our research and evaluation team – takes 25% of the families that the CLM staff selects for the program and re-evaluates them. They then follow the families through the program so that we have a way to independently confirm the work that our case managers do.

Earlier in the month, we got an initial report on the 360 new members we are currently working with. The data it included about the first 64 members whom they will follow confirmed a lot about our selection. But there was one problem: One member, Elsie Fénélon, appeared to be completely unqualified for the program. Social Impact’s survey found that she owed three goats, a horse, and a cow before she even joined the program. While that would hardly qualify Elsie as wealthy, it would disqualify her for CLM, especially since we knew she was managing a small commerce and had been able to send her kids to school last year.

I asked her case manager to follow the report up. He’s an especially smart and experienced man named Christian, and I’ve learned to value his judgment greatly. I wanted him to find out about the livestock and to let me know his overall opinion of the household.

This is what he reported: There were in fact three goats, a mother and her two bucks. They had not yet been weaned. She had been given the mother by Mercy Corps, an NGO that had been working in the Mirebalais area at the time. She also had purchased a horse, really just a colt. A younger brother had offered her one for 2000 gourds because he wanted to help her out. She didn’t have that much, but she had 1500 in a savings club that she was in with other market women. So she paid that money down, and her brother agreed to wait for the rest. The cow belongs to her husband. Right around the time she was selected for the program, he finished a job for a neighbor who planned to pay him by selling a young bull. When the neighbor couldn’t get the price he was seeking in the local market, the husband agreed to take the bull in lieu of payment. Unfortunately, however, Elsie is not the husband’s only partner, and he does not contribute dependably to the household.

So she has more in assets than a CLM member typically would at the start, a lot more. And with her existing small commerce, she might seem like an excellent example of an extremely poor woman who could be served by our Ti Kredi program, rather than by CLM. Her business – she sells powered laundry detergent by the cup full – is 100% dependent on credit. She has none of her own money invested in it all at. She buys a sack of detergent at a time with no money down, and has to sell it off to pay for it before she can get another.

Our team occasionally refers to “original” CLM members. These are the ones who are the worst off, the ones who have nothing at all when we find them: No children in school, no assets of any kind, and no economic activity beyond day labor and begging. We find a lot of families like that, and Elsie was not one of them. We knew that her business was working for her – it had enabled her to pay into the 100-gourd-per-week savings club that made it possible for her to buy the horse – and, even if we discounted the cow as an asset she couldn’t depend on, the goats would give her something to fall back on if her commerce took a bad turn.

But not all of our members are “original.” Some are slightly better off, even though they are still extremely poor. Christian still wanted to keep Elsie in the program. He felt that she was really struggling to feed her family, and that her lack of decent housing in a neighborhood where housing is relatively expensive would put her at great risk.

I needed to take his view seriously, very seriously. I can’t pretend to judge more astutely than he. But I also know that he tends toward including marginal cases. It is a predictable consequence of seeing as many miserably poor people as we do: You want to help them all, and the weight of their poverty tends to play with your sense of who it is who is poor enough. Deciding, even correctly, to exclude a hungry household from the program because it is not quite poor enough becomes harder and harder as you go along.

So I went to talk to her myself. I wanted to figure out if I could why we had missed the assets when we first interviewed her. Had she simply lied? And needed to decide, more importantly, whether she belongs in CLM.

I went by to see her early in the morning, hoping to catch her before she went out. By the time I got to Labasti, where she lives, she was already out in the street, trying to sell the last couple of scoops of detergent so she’d be able to pay for it and get a new sack the next day. But she hadn’t gone far, and when word got to her that I was there, she came running home. It took her a few minutes to catch her breath before we could start to chat.

I already knew that her small commerce was on the edge. I had seen her the previous day in the small market in Trianon, trying to sell the same last bit of detergent she was walking with. The Trianon market is failing. Very little is sold there. But a few desperate merchants sit around, hoping that something will happen. If her sales were thriving, she wouldn’t have wasted a day there. So things weren’t going well. The day I saw her she was on her way to Terre Rouge, a long uphill hike from her home. She thought she’d be able to sell out her product if she went to the various fried-foods merchants who set up there for passing traffic. They don’t have time to do much shopping, so are often glad when the things they need come to them. It would be a long day, with low potential for return, so she must really feel the need for a few gourds of additional sales.

We talked about her goats. She told me that she had received one as a gift from Mercy Corps, but that she had offered it to her brother when she could not figure out how to pay her kids’ tuition bill when the school year was coming to an end. The brother offered her the 2000 gourds she needed, but then said he’d rather she kept the mother goat. He would take the goat’s first two young, instead. When the goat had a litter of two, he turned the kids over to Elsie’s oldest boy to take care of. He has now just sent for them from Port au Prince. It is also true that she has a horse, though it is not all hers and it’s much too small still to bring her anything but the extra work of taking care of it.

But as I talked to her, and looked at both her and her young children, I just thought “CLM.” Their house is a wreck, and the boys were scavenging something to eat in their grandmother’s corn. The ears are dry, ready for harvest, but the boys grill the whole kernels and then count on their good teeth to snack on them. Anything like a real meal would have to wait until the afternoon, probably late because the trip to Terre Rouge and back would take Elsie all day.

I could be wrong. Maybe Elsie would be a good bet even with Ti Kredi. I know that I’m subject to the same pressures that I see acting on case managers like Christian. But Elsie’s household is struggling by any measure, I know that CLM can help, and I’m not certain that Ti Kredi is really an option.

So I decided to make what was certainly the easy decision, the one to keep her in the program. I’m pretty certain that she will succeed. A lot of the entrepreneurship we seek to teach seems already there.

Monday morning, I spoke with Denius. He’s a boy about 19 or 20, though he looks several years younger. He’s his mother’s oldest child, one of her four surviving boys. His father, who was also father to Amisson, the next younger boy, died a few years ago. The mother, Osiane, died just as the CLM program was starting. Her death was probably related to malnutrition. The last time we saw her, she was weak and a little disoriented. And she had a scarf tied around her stomach as poor Haitian sometimes do when they are suffering hunger pangs. We just didn’t get to her soon enough.

Relatives decided to take the two younger boys, but to leave Denius and Amisson, who’s 14, to fend for themselves. They’ve been managing. Not very well, but they’re learning.

During the first few weeks we were discouraged to see how little Denius was willing or able to do for the household. CLM depends largely on members’ deciding to work hard with the advice and the assets that we offer them, but Denius seemed to be mostly sitting around.

When I started to press him, he admitted that physical exertion made him dizzy. The shock of losing his mother was combining with continued hunger to make him weak. I couldn’t do much about his sadness – the cure for that seems to a combination of time and Amisson, who is unswervingly playful – but I could help with the hunger. An American intern had just finished six months with us, and she left a large quantity of powdered protein drink (chocolate flavor) behind. We brought most of it to Denius and Amisson, and added a care package of some more conventional food that had been left over after six days of the new members’ enterprise training. Denius has been saying that he feels much better, and we see new energy in the work that he’s started to take on.

But he was a little panicked when I saw him Monday morning. Sunday night, the relatives who had taken the youngest boy, Bernardo, changed their mind. Bernardo is two, and had been getting sicker and sicker since his mother’s death. I suppose they didn’t feel as though they could take responsibility any more. So they brought him back to Denius and Amisson, along with a sack of his dirty clothes, and walked away.

Denius didn’t know what to do. It is hard enough for him to have to raise Amisson without their parents’ help. But Amisson clearly understands their situation, as much at least as he could be expected to, and he had made himself much more manageable than anyone could expect. Bernardo, especially a sick Bernardo, would be a different story. At the same time, Denius was clear: “I can’t just throw him away.” He was stuck, and he’d have to figure out a way to be father to the little boy.

When Denius and I first spoke on the phone, he was most worried about a high fever. “I put Bernardo to sleep in the middle of the bed, between Amisson and me, but every time I rubbed against him, it felt like fire against my skin.” I told him to start bathing Bernardo in cool water to see whether he could bring the temperature down while I was on my way.

By the time I arrived, the temperature was down, but Bernardo was lifeless. He was sitting in the middle of the bed – he would cry if Denius tried to make him lie down – but he could barely keep his eyes open. More striking was the terrible rash that covered his head. Blistering sores and cracked scabs were all over his scalp. Every once in a while Bernardo would make an effort to scratch the scabs, but mostly he just sat there.

So I had Denius wrap him up and get onto the back of my motorcycle, and we rushed to the PIH hospital. We had to wait for most of the morning. I asked Denius whether he had eaten anything, and he hadn’t. So I went out and got him a large plate of boiled plantain and meat sauce. The women who surrounded him, the only man in the line waiting with a child to see the pediatrician, seemed to enjoy watching him feed Bernardo as he ate.

They eventually saw a doctor, who gave them a seven-day course of liquid erythromycin and two large tubes of ointment for the rash. On the way home, we stopped by Mirebalais’s one grocery store, and bought some powdered milk and some instant oatmeal.

After I dropped them off in Trianon, I continued up the hill to Yawo, which is on the road leading west along the ridge from Fon Cheval. I wanted to see Elourdes. She’s a new CLM member whom I’ve written about before. (See: DifferentShapes.) I had visited her on Thursday and found her struggling with a painful burn on her right calf. She had taken a spill when riding on the back of a motorcycle. The muffler had landed on her leg. We had a tube of good ointment for burns in our office, so I brought it to her. Monday, I wanted to find out whether it was helping.

Her yard is generally a loud, busy place. She has nine children. One is a girl in her mid-teens with a child of her own. But Elourdes was sitting on her front porch, with four of five of the young children sitting listlessly around her. She, her husband, and I had a good talk. The ointment was apparently helping a lot, but they were more interested in the goats we had given her on Saturday. The husband wanted to know whether he was allowed to mark the goats, and we talked about the advantages of doing so.

He and Elourdes remained cheerful throughout our chat, as did their oldest boy, a youth in his late teens. The younger kids, whom I knew to be inclined to play, were distinctly cheerless.

The reason was obvious. It was late afternoon, and they had not yet had anything to eat. Elourdes has been in the program for a couple of months, but she has nothing like a steady income stream. She, her husband, and the oldest boy were able to joke about how one has to live with hunger when there is no food in the house, but the little kids were miserable. I pulled the son aside on my way back to my motorcycle, gave him some money, and asked him to go buy something they could feed his brothers and sisters. He thanked me, and I rode off.

On my way back down the hill towards Mirebalais, I stopped in Pòsab. I wanted to see Guilène, whom I wrote about in the piece that mentions Elourdes. I had particularly wanted to see her boy, Jovensonne. I had taken him to the hospital the week before, and I wanted to see whether his foot was healing.

The moment I saw him limping over to greet me, I knew he was doing well. The week before, he had been unable to walk because his foot had been pierced by a sharp tool in an accident that occurred while he was playing with his uncle, who is a small boy not much older than he is.

Jovensonne had a plate of rice in his hands, which was another good sign. He tried to get me to eat some of it, but when I wouldn’t he finished about two-thirds, then gave the rest to a hungry-looking child from a neighboring house.

He then went back to his play. He had taken a coconut leaf and stripped off the foliage, leaving only the woody, saddle-shaped stem. He had then tied a stick across the narrow end. He was sitting on the wide end, holding the cross-piece, and sliding around the yard on this improvised motorcycle, pretending to honk the horn just as he had when he sat in front of me on my motorcycle as I drove him home from the hospital the previous week. I could hardly have felt more encouraged. “He has a good body,” his mother explained. That’s a Haitian way of saying that someone tends to heal quickly.

As I think about these stories, I think about the fundamental challenge I face when I write about CLM. It is easy to talk about how worried I was about Denius and the difficulties he would face as de facto father to his two-year-old brother. It’s easy to focus on the sick feeling in my gut as I watch Elourdes’ young children, listless from hunger, and how I feel a little better when I’ve left some cash in their brother’s hands. It’s easy to talk about the fun I have playing with eight-year-old Jovensonne, who tells his widowed mother that he wants me to be his dad. But I think it’s important to remember that I am not the story, neither my frustrations nor my joys. Everything important about CLM centers on the extremely poor families we work with, the problems they overcome, and our case managers, whose creativity and devotion enable those families to transform their lives. The story of CLM is their story, and my situation as a close observer is a privilege that I hope I know how to appreciate.

A final note: Things may work out for Denius. When Bernardo’s father got word that his boy had been abandoned by the relatives who had said that they would raise him, he came and took him himself. I don’t know what his situation is financially, but he must be in a better position to raise a toddler than Denius is.

Denius is upset because the man apparently took the boy gracelessly. “He didn’t say anything nice to me about the way we took Bernardo to see a doctor and get the medicine he needs,” he complained. But he is also very relieved. He had started to worry that his hopes of returning to school this fall, after missing the last two years since his father’s death, would fall apart if he had a toddler on his hands.

Here, in any case, is a photo of Denius and Bernardo, taken during the day they spent as father and son:

Bernardo

Bebe Geffrard

Bebe Geffrard is from Viyèt, an extremely poor agricultural region in northern Boukankare, a county in central Haiti. When she and her family were selected for the CLM program, they were extremely poor by any standard. She was living with their eight children and eight grandchildren in a decaying hut. She provided for the family as best as she could by farming, but couldn’t keep up with all the mouths she had to feed. She had too little land of her own to work. She farmed additional land as a sharecropper, but the one-third to one-half of every harvest that she had to give to the landowner made it impossible to get ahead. Her grandchildren were not in school, and the whole family suffered from persistent hunger.

Because Bebe’s family was so large, she received a cow. She took great care of it, and it gave birth to a healthy calf. She took excellent care of the calf too, and by the time it was weaned and ready for sale, the mother had given birth again. Bebe plans on keeping this second one, a female, so she will eventually have a second calf-bearer. But she sold the first to buy the land that she’d previously worked as sharecropper. Now the whole harvest is hers. There’s more food to go around, and there’s milk as well, so the children are healthier than they’ve ever been.

She received two goats with her cow, because CLM members always start the program with two new assets. As they’ve produced young, she’s kept some, but has sold the males and some females as well. Her first sale enabled her to buy a horse, which is a big help with her farming, and now the horse is pregnant too. She also now has four mother goats, even though she has used further sales to invest in her farming, buying seed, fertilizer, and tools as she needs them.

She doesn’t do much in the way of small commerce. She doesn’t have time during the farming season. She does, however, sell from her harvest, and she uses income from her crop of pigeon peas each November to start commerce that she learned to manage from her case manager, a former Tikredi agent named Alancia Belony. She maintains the commerce until farming season returns in the spring.

Bebe’s life is different now. Her family eats well, the younger children are in school, and they live in a well-built house with a good tin roof. She made it larger than a typical CLM house by having her boys build it and using the money they would have received to buy extra roofing and nails. The older boys still live in the older hut, except when it’s raining. “They like to have a place of their own,” Bebe explains.

Bebe graduated from CLM in July 2012, and she and her family keep moving forward. Her third calf is on the way, and she already knows that she’ll use it to buy more land. She has her eye on a small plot down the hill from her home, along a small stream. The flowing water will allow her to irrigate, so she’ll be able to farm beans, her main cash crop much more reliably.

Bebe’s increased wealth is encouraging. But it’s not the best part of her story. What’s most encouraging about Bebe is the way she’s transformed herself into a strategic, forward-looking thinker. With CLM’s help, she’s both learned to plan shrewdly and acquired the assets she needs to make plans that can work. That transformation gives her good reason to hope for a brighter future for herself and her kids.

We are just starting work with the 361 new families that our team selected in southern Mibalè. I thought that a good way to introduce this new cycle would be to introduce a few of the families who have joined the program. I thought that would help show the various kinds of families we deal with.

Elourdes Joseph lives with her husband, nine children, and a granddaughter in a small house in Yawo, in the mountains the separate the Central Plateau from the plain that envelops Port au Prince.

No one has to tell her how difficult life is when you have that many children. She’s tried family planning, but she never felt comfortable with it. “It made me short of breath. I couldn’t walk up even the little hill next to my house. And it gave me back pain, too.” So she had one child after another, and could only shake her head when her oldest daughter, who is still a teenager, became pregnant and added another child to the household right as Elourdes was pregnant with her youngest son.

She and her husband have always struggled, and by enterprising management of minimal resources they have managed to stay afloat even as their family has grown. Nowhere is their enterprise clearer than in the story of their home.

For the first few years after her marriage, Elourdes lived with her husband in a series of make-shift arrangements: first in the homes of various friends and relatives, then in a tent on her father-in-law’s land. But very early on, her husband bought a tree for 20 gourds. Just a few years of growth and inflation enabled her to sell the tree for charcoal for 900 gourds. They needed 600 of those gourds for household expenses, but Elourdes invested the rest. “I didn’t want all the profit to melt away.”

So she bought a very small pig for 300 gourds, and cared for it until she could sell it for 2500. Then she sold it, and bought roofing material. By then, a local organization was cutting a new road in her neighborhood with a NGO-funded cash-for-work program. Her husband was able to earn enough money to cover the other expenses that building required.

But all that enterprise is not enough to support a family of twelve. Her husband suffers chronic back pain, so he can’t work very much, and they have little land and no livestock to build a livelihood with.

Like many new members, Elourdes is optimistic about the program but a little unclear. She says she wants to “move forward,” with the program’s help, but she not yet sure what that might mean.

One of the criteria for a family’s membership is that it includes a woman who is capable of working and who has at least one child dependent on her. Generally, that means a mother and her children or her child. Sometimes, we come across grandmothers raising their children’s children, or godmothers who have responsibility for a godchild. But in almost all cases, we are dealing with mothers, even if the children on their hands are not their own.

AFH’s cohort of CLM families has three exceptions, however. They are groups of siblings whose parents have passed away. Julienne Dorcé and her younger brother and sister live in Yawo, in a house that belongs to a childless aunt. The aunt moved out when she realized that her sister’s children need the house more than she does.

Julienne’s mother died about a year ago. The father had died long before that. The mother left the seven children, including an infant she had had with another man. That infant died shortly after their mother did, leaving just six. After the baby’s death, relatives took the three younger survivors, having decided that the older children would have a hard enough time taking care of themselves. So the three oldest now live together.

The two younger, Sorel and Maudeline, grew up in Port au Prince, with another aunt, because their mother could not feed them. One hears all sorts of horror stories about the many, many children in Haiti who are focred to grow up outside their parents’ homes. They are often little more than unpaid servants, subject to every form of abuse. But Sorel and Maudeline were lucky. Their aunt took good care of them, sending them to school when their mother could not do that much for the children who remained with her.

They had to return to Yawo and their mother after the earthquake of 2010 destroyed their aunt’s home in Port au Prince. The aunt came shortly afterwards with her children. But by then, both women were sick, and both eventually passed away. Sorel and Maudeline joined Julienne and their siblings in a house that belongs to one of the dead women’s sisters, and the aunt’s children, who are still quite young, moved in next door with another aunt, who is a single mother, and her kids. She joined the CLM program together with Julienne.

Saintanette Denval lives in Demare, a hilly agricultural area behind the important market in Labasti. She and her husband have two children, a girl about eight and a 16-month-old boy.

Demare is not really an area that one would expect to find as full as it is of families who qualify for the program. The land is rich. Sugarcane and corn grow well, and there’s plenty of forage for livestock. In addition, the market is right there. Residents can get their produce sold with very little difficulty.

But for the many landless and almost landless families who live in the neighborhood, Demare offers very little except the chance to earn about one-fourth of the minimum wage – the Haitian minimum wage – for a day of farm labor.

When CLM case manager Hilaire Nozan visited Saintanette in her home during the selection process, he was shocked by what he saw. Her baby was clearly starving. He was fourteen months old and lacked the strength even to lift up his head. Saintanette explains that she could see that the baby never ate anything, “But I didn’t know what to do.”

Hilaire knew he needed to act, so he arranged for the CLM driver to drive Saintanette and her boy to the Partners in Health hospital in Cange the very next day. Doctors there found the boy to be severely malnourished, and they admitted him for treatment. He was in such terrible condition that they had to keep him for almost two weeks, feeding him first intravenously and them with Partners in Health’s special fortified peanut butter.

The boy is fine now. And Saintanette couldn’t be more grateful. “If Hilaire hadn’t taken us to the hospital, my boy would not be here with me.

Guilène is a single mother of two, who lives in Pòsab, right along the national highway that runs south from Mirebalais to Port au Prince. She and her husband were struggling hard together. They had one child, and they started building a new home while Guilène was pregnant with their second.

He worked as a day laborer on a truck that would carry goods from Belladère, on the border with the Dominican Republic, to Port au Prince. One day, his driver took the dangerous unpaved route over the mountains, through Zoranjè to Titayen, so that he could avoid the customs office on the main road. While descending a steep hill, the truck’s brakes gave out. Both the driver and his workers died in the accident. Guilène was a widow, eight months pregnant with her little girl.

So she finished the house in the front of her mother’s yard. Her stepfather did much of the work that she couldn’t do herself. And she began to sell her furniture and her other household items in order to buy food to feed herself and her boy.

The March 8th graduation of 338 CLM members from Bay Tourib and north central Boukankare was an achievement our team was rightfully proud of. Here’s a blog that Mackenzie Keller, of Fonkoze’s staff, wrote about it: http://100millionideas.org/2013/03/07/women-the-backbone-of-society.

And here are her photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/101507663468736938297/CLMGraduationBayTourib?authkey=Gv1sRgCLiO0pTajfe5pwE.

But it merely marked the end of one assignment, not the end of the CLM team’s work. Fonkoze has charged its CLM team with eliminating extreme poverty across Haiti’s Central Plateau, and the only way to make meaningful progress towards achieving that goal is to keep working.

So on the Monday after the Friday graduation, work began on recruiting the next cohort of CLM families. Our team is charged with finding and enrolling 360 this time. THe group will be financed through a gift from Artists for Haiti. Graduation should take place towards the end of 2014. We’ve been in the field for the past couple of weeks.

I had very little to do with the work at the beginning. The team worried whether my presence too early in the process – my white, foreign presence – could complicate their work. Folks are already be inclined to imagine that someone is planning to do something for them when our team starts asking lots of questions about their neighborhood and its residents, and that suspicion makes good information harder to come by. My being around would only make their hard job harder.

But last week we began final verification, and that’s the point in the selection process at which I have to be involved. I’ve written about final verification before. (See: Final Verification.) It’s the last stage of our selection process. It’s when a member of the CLM management team, like me, visits a series of women whom CLM case managers have recommended for the program. Our role is to verify whether the prospective families really need CLM.

Much of this work is easy, especially with a group of very experienced case managers such as the ones on the Artists for Haiti team with me. They are very good at determining the situation of the women they speak with. The great majority of women they decide to recommend obviously deserve the help we can offer. Sometimes a quick look at the hungry small children hanging around their mother, who appears to be without any hope of feeding them, is all one needs to sign the form that will make it possible for us to offer a family such help as we can.

I think of Jésumène and her daughter Rosemène, her oldest child, both of whom I met last week. They live in the same straw shack. They have no land they could farm, and no resources to invest in small commerce. Jésumène’s husband left her to take up with another woman. Rosemène rejoined her when she left her husband because of his abuse. The women have eight younger children between them.

Their main means of support is Jésumène’s twenty-year-old son, her second child, who finds people who allow him to make charcoal for them out of trees that they own. He must give the landowner half the proceeds from the sale, but can give the other half to his mother. A sack of charcoal sells for about $5 in the countryside, so if he can get a couple of sacks out of the wood his neighbors offer him, he can give his mother about that much. Making charcoal takes several days, however, so they would not get that money more than about once a week. It’s doubtful that he can make charcoal even that often. And often the wood that he makes consists mainly of scraps. He may not always get even a full sack.

The kids surely scavenge some. It’s almost mango season, and there’s sugarcane these days too. And the family may receive occasional gifts from neighbors or relatives as well. The boy probably works in neighbors’ fields as well, which would earn him about $1.25 a day. But the picture as a whole for Jésumène and her children is very grim. It was not hard to decide to qualify both women for CLM.

There are borderline cases that are more difficult. One way to look at the decision that we need to make is to ask whether our Ti Kredi program could serve the family we are considering. It offers six months of very small loans and more coaching than our standard credit program does, and prepares women to enter the larger credit program.

So when I met Julienne, I had to give that question some thought. She’s currently only able to send two of her eight children to school, but she and her husband have a relatively decent two-room house and, more importantly, she has both a salt business with about $6 of capital in it and a donkey that she uses to carry the salt from the market where she buys it to the one she sells it at.

So she already has a small business, and she’s had the discipline and the acumen to keep her $6 intact for a while, though it hasn’t been able to grow. I considered referring her to Ti Kredi, figuring it could give her the tools to slowly build her business into something larger. But with her eight children to feed, and the pressure she’ll rightly feel to put more of them in school, I just couldn’t see it. Especially when I saw the handful of younger ones hanging around their front yard late in the afternoon looking very hungry. We come across other women whom I do refer to Ti Kredi. They might seem to have fewer resources than Julienne does. They have neither a business nor an asset as valuable as a donkey. But they have fewer children and fewer signs of hunger.

Another difficult case was Elène’s. She and her husband appear to be in their late sixties, but they have no idea how old they really are. Neither they nor any of their children have birth certificates, and their parents did not even teach them who was president when they were born, which is a standard way to approximately remember birth years in rural Haiti. They live in the front room of a two-room house. It’s a nice house, in good condition, though its roof of straw and palm seed pods probably leaks unless they invest a lot of time in keeping it in good repair. Their youngest child is a twenty-something man, who lives by himself in the back room. He’s not a dependent.

She and her husband wouldn’t come under consideration, but they have a severely handicapped granddaughter living with them. The girl moves the way I remember seeing children with muscular dystrophy move, though I am not competent to diagnose her real problem. Imagine a twelve-year-old girl with muscular dystrophy whose family has never talked to anyone who might know how to develop such capacities as she has. She mainly lies on the house’s dusty dirt floor, and playing by herself. Her mother, Elène’s daughter, left her in Elène’s hands, and the grandparents have no idea what to do for her beyond keeping her fed and as clean as they can.

Elène’s husband has a small yard around their home that he plants with plantains, corn, and millet. They also rent two small pieces of farmland that he works. So life is clearly very difficult for them, but they seem to be feeding themselves and investing in their long-term well being probably isn’t for us. It’s a hard call.

At times, final verification can feel hard. You wander from house to house, hearing the horrible stories of lives on the edge. One hears again and again of hunger, of lost or even absent opportunities, of violence. You are charged with deciding who, among very poor people, is poor enough to require CLM’s help. It feels hard.

But dwelling on its difficulty is a trap. You can’t pretend that such difficulty is meaningful in the face of the misery you encounter, especially since you wander around with the knowledge that soon, if not immediately, you team will be able to begin showing the families you select a path towards hope.

Jésumène Zidor graduated from CLM in June 2012. When she joined the program at the end of 2010, she was one of the poorest women we recruited. She was living with six children and two grandchildren in a straw shack in the upper end of Viyèt, a very poor agricultural area in north central Boucan Carré. Viyèt is all farmland, and the land is fertile, but its concentration in the hands of relatively few ensured that it would be fertile ground for CLM’s selection process, too. Viyèt, and its immediate vicinity, is home to around seventy members.

We measure poverty in various ways when we are selecting families for our program. We use Fonkoze’s poverty scorecard, a survey designed to evaluate poverty across a range of simple indicators. We don’t just look at how much money a family has, but how they live. What kind of house and what kind of land do they have? How many children? What sources of income? What other assets? On this two-page form, Jésumène and her family scored 11.5 out of 63.5. An average score is 31.8. New CLM members sometimes score as much as 20.

Three of those eleven points came on a question about water. Upper Viyèt has a capped spring that gives Jésumène’s family fairly easy access to pretty good water. It’s important, but it doesn’t do much to keep them fed or clothed. In the second section of the questionnaire, which investigates the family’s assets, they score only one point. While the family did own two chickens, they owned no other animals. They owned no farmland, so their only sources of income were day labor, sharecropping, and making charcoal out of scavenged deadwood.

The second survey we use is a food security index, which helps us assess a family’s nutritional situation. Jésumène’s family scored as badly as it possibly could, indicating that they were consistently missing meals, sometimes going for days at a time by foraging, without ever lighting a fire. She had had to send three of her children to live as servants in other families because she simply couldn’t feed them.

Most striking was their score on a third survey we used. It’s called the PPI, or Progress out of Poverty Index. It was developed by an international team from the Grameen Foundation to allow comparison between levels of poverty in different countries. On this ten-question form, Jésumène’s score was zero.

Jésumène described the situation straightforwardly: “We didn’t have food to eat. The children weren’t in school.”

Jésumène flourished in the program. Because she and her husband were so very poor, with so many children on their hands, they qualified for a special benefit. Thanks to a gift from Bothár, an Irish development organization, we were able to offer them a cow as one of their two types of income-generating assets.

The hardest challenge for those who receive cows is establishing a daily income. Cows take a long time to produce anything they can sell. But Jésumène managed her secondary asset — she received two goats — well, and also invested savings from her six-month stipend in poultry. In addition, she took some of that stipend and gave it to her husband to work with. He makes and sells chairs, having used his wife’s initial investment to start buying the materials he would need.

Jésumène loves CLM, and her reasoning is simple: “Tout sa yo di, se sa yo fè.” That means, “Everything they say they’ll do, they do.” She adds, “They helped us build a house. We had been getting soaked every time it rained, but now we can stay dry. We have a good house. We have livestock. We even have a latrine.”

But the progress that has meant most to her is just as simple. She says, “M gen yon ti kal tè pou m chita.” That means, “I have a little spot of land where I can sit down.” Before joining the program, she and her family were sleeping on straw mats on the floor of a hut that didn’t belong to them on land they didn’t own. She was renting, having to figure out each year where to find the money to pay a landowner who didn’t really want her on the land. She made a first down payment with sale of some of her goats’ offspring and completed payment for the land with the sale of her cow’s first calf.

When she was preparing to graduate from the program, she and her case manager considered how she could best move forward. She decided she’d start a small commerce, so they made a plan for her to join Fonkoze’s Ti Kredi after graduation. She would use the loan to start her commerce.

Ti Kredi is a six-month introduction to microcredit. Members take out three loans, the first for one month, the second for two months, and the third for three. The loan values increase as well, starting from 1000 gourds, or about $25 and growing to 2500. After graduating from Ti Kredi, members typically go on to standard solidarity group credit, where loans start at 3000 gourds and can grow to more than ten times that.

When Jésumène took out her first loan, she bought bread and sugar and sold them mainly from her home. But when she took out her second loan, she started to discover that simply adding to the amount of sugar and bread she would buy didn’t increase her profits because it didn’t increase her sale.

So she continued to sell bread and sugar, but put some of the capital aside. She went into the hills behind the area where she lived, and bought a sack or two of charcoal. She then carried the sacks down to the market downhill from Viyèt, where she sold them at a profit. She would only make about 50 gourds of profit on a sack. That’s about $1.25. But by turning the money over quickly, a couple of times each week, she was able to make a useful addition to her income. She took out her third loan, the one for 2500 gourds, and with her two businesses working well, she is paying it back easily.

But she is already thinking about her next step, and plans to change her business again. “I don’t have a horse yet, so I can’t carry enough charcoal to market to make that business grow.” She plans to buy a horse with proceeds from the sale of some of her small goats, but isn’t ready to just yet. Instead, she will become a voltijè. That means she’ll go to the market early in the morning and buy livestock as cheaply as she can. She won’t go home with it. She’ll turn it over again before she leaves. If she is disciplined and astute, and is willing to hike to several different markets, she will be able to make a good profit three or for times a week. It could turn into pretty good living.

Jésumène dreams of moving forward even farther with her life. She wants to keep investing in livestock and land. She has lots of kids and would like to leave them something when the time comes. And she has good reason to hope for further success. Her willingness to think creatively, flexibly about how to build her business is a promising sign.