Women end up in extreme poverty for a variety of reasons. Some suffer catastrophic expenses – often an illness or a death in the family – that send them spiraling backward. Some become responsible for a household before they are ready, whether through rape, seduction, or simply an imprudent decision. They just have no capacity to manage a home. Some have too many children too quickly, and so their families become too large for the means they have to support them with.

Orana Louis was born into her poverty. She joined CLM in August 2011, and her mother joined the program at the very same time. Orana was living with her husband and children by then, and her mother, Mirana, still had her youngest child living with her, so they qualified for the program separately, and joined it together.

Orana and her husband, Sòn, live with their five children in Fonpyejak, a hilly neighborhood on the outskirts of the central village of Bay Tourib. When we first met them, they were struggling to get by with farming. They had no assets to speak of except their land – just two chickens – and had very little money to invest in crops. They didn’t have a home of their own. The seven of them were living in a small house that belonged to one of Sòn’s brothers.

Their main sources of income were working in their neighbor’s fields and the little they could realize from the sale of bean crops that depended on beans they would borrow from a local peasant organization. Sòn would go to the Dominican Republic now and again to work for a few months, and when he returned to Haiti, he’d try to come with some extra money. Orana would then use it to buy plastic sandals in Tomond, which she’d then sell in the rural markets around Bay Tourib. Each time she would restart her business it would work for a while, but eventually collapse. Often the problem was pregnancy. She’d be unable to sell for a few months, and would feed her children with the money in the business until it disappeared. They were hungry most of the time.

When Orana joined CLM, she chose goats and small commerce as her two assets. She wanted commerce because she liked the possibilities it offered, even though her previous success had been very mixed.

At first she struggled. Her goats didn’t do very well. Of the three that we gave her, two died within a couple of months. The third eventually gave her two kids, which she was able to sell to make another investment. But if it had just been for her goats, she would still be very, very poor.

What really helped her was her commerce. Once she joined the program, it took off. Her success is mainly rooted in her willingness to work hard, to work smartly, and to work in concert with her husband, but her membership in CLM has been a big help as well. First, she received 1500 gourds of start-up capital. That’s almost $40. Second, she received six months of weekly cash stipends that helped her keep her family fed between crops so that she could leave her capital in her business. Third, she and Sòn received coaching that helped them connect the dots between her frequent pregnancies and their poverty. As a consequence, they made a commitment to family planning that allows her to focus on the kids she already has.

Her business really took off. She began sending Sòn to do her purchasing in Port au Prince, where she can buy more varied and less expensive merchandise. By buying well, and turning over her inventory regularly, she was able to set aside almost enough money to buy a mule. She just had to add proceeds from the sale of her goat’s first two kids to accumulate the 12,000 gourds she needed.

Buying the mule, in turn, made a big difference because it meant that she was no longer limited to the amount of merchandise she was able to carry on her head for the hour and a half it takes to get to Regalis or Zabriko, two of the three markets she’d sell in every week. In addition, it opened up a secondary business that eventually became very important to her: She would buy mule-loads of produce in Bay Tourib, and carry them to market in Tomond, a five-six hour hike away.

Then something happened which might have seemed like a disaster. On a trip to Port au Prince, Sòn lost 3500 gourds. He doesn’t know what happened to the money.

But it wasn’t a disaster. Orana just moved on. “I still have some sandals to sell. And I have a load of corn and beans to bring to market. Once I get that sold, I should have enough money to send Sòn to buy again. It was a big loss, but we’ll manage.”

Her well-considered sense that she and Sòn will manage, despite the loss, is a major victory for them. They have succeeded not just in building a better life, with children in school and eating well every day, but they have established a resiliency in the face of misfortune.

There will be bumps in their road forward. But Orana and Sòn have proven that they can face and overcome a pretty large one.

Mannwa is the first CLM region that I really became attached to. That attachment started with the difficulties the region presented.

It is, first of all, beautiful but challenging terrain. Haitians say, “Dèyè mòn gen mòn.” That means, “Beyond mountains there are mountains.” It’s a useful proverb, with numerous meanings. But in Mannwa the proverb is very literally true. It’s a ridge that extends northwest to southeast in north-central Boukankare County, rising up in the west from a mountain stream that separates it from Tit Montay, the county’s isolated western section, and reaching to the east, where it merges with the Balandri ridge that defines much of the border between Boukankare and Tomond, to the north. These two ridges mostly enclose a more-or-less triangular valley. But the valley is not shaped like a cup or a lens or a lemon wedge or like anything regular at all. It’s crisscrossed by a series of lower, but also steep ridges that likewise belong, broadly speaking, to Mannwa. So hiking around Mannwa means constant climbing and descending. It’s rough work.

But that wasn’t the real challenge that attached me to Mannwa. I quickly came to enjoy the hiking. I have to admit that I was very hard pressed any time I had to follow Martinière, our case manager there, along his whole route, because it meant walking farther than I can easily walk in a day and, therefore, walking too quickly as well. He would start his Wednesdays at our satellite base well to the west at Zaboka, in Tit Montay, and then had to visit eleven homes, scattered widely throughout the area. But any chance I had to hike through the region, visiting with only a few of the members, was always a pleasure.

So the primary challenge there was never the geography. It was selecting CLM members. Mannwa was one of the first places where I did final selection without help from other members of our program’s leadership – normally we go out in twos or threes to sweep through a neighborhood as quickly as we can – and when I finished selecting families who seemed qualified for the program, about half refused to join.

It is not that unusual for a family to decline our invitation to join CLM. There are always a few. Generally, they have heard rumors about terrible, crazy sounding things that will happen to them if they join. Sometimes, after families have been in the program for a while, they will tell us the rumors that they heard. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or to scream. A young woman from Mannwa once told me that she heard we would make her dance naked. Her husband said that he was told we’d kill him. A woman from Tit Montay once told a gathering that she had heard that we were going to take all the men to Port au Prince and replace them with others. She added that her husband wasn’t much to speak of, but that she was used to him and didn’t want to change.

But in Mannwa an unusually high number of families refused the program. I can’t say whether it was connected to the prominent role that I, the only non-Haitian on our staff, played in the process or if it had something to do with the peculiar character of the neighborhood and its residents. Though I try to be aware of the effects my foreignness can have on our work, I case reason to believe that, in this case, Mannwa’s peculiarity was party responsible. It is the first place we worked where we were able to discover only one community leader whom the poor could name as someone they could turn to for occasional help.

We had seven members in the area along and behind the main ridge, but had as many families who declined. We invested some extra time in trying to change their minds. I went door-to-door, asking each of the families to reconsider. I then organized a meeting for leaders in the community, at which one of our case managers and I talked to them about the program and what it could offer.

I was especially anxious about one young woman, Micheline, an 18-year-old mother, who had been abandoned by the father of her child. She and the child were living with an older sister, but our surveys showed that she owned almost nothing of her own and was going hungry much of the time. She was almost as poor as a mother of only one child could be. But her sister was refusing to let her join. I couldn’t convince her. Even after she appeared to agree to enter the program, she got cold feet at the last minute. She didn’t show up for the first week of enterprise training. When we had to replace her, we added Sorène, a very poor woman with multiple small daughters, who managed to join us by leaving the husband who did not want her to participate.

So although our data showed us that the Mannwa area had numerous families qualified for CLM, we were forced to start with just seven in Mannwa itself and four more in Deniza and Gapi, on the southern side of the ridge.

The most memorable moment from those first stages of work in Mannwa was the visit I made to Rose Marthe in her home. She had given birth to a daughter only days before I met her, so she could not get up from the sleeping mat she was resting on while we spoke. Haitian women tend not to go outside of the home for about the first week after giving birth. I sat on the ground in front of the house as I spoke to Rose Marthe – she had no furniture – and she answered my questions from the mat inside her small shack, where she lay.

When she looks back on the days when she joined CLM, Rose Marthe speaks in striking terms. “CLM has been very good for me. I was hungry. You could almost say I was naked. Now I eat well, and my kids eat well. They go to school. I have my animals and my commerce. Things are good.” The day I went to see her, six months after graduation, she was unhappy because she couldn’t feed me. It wasn’t that she didn’t have food in the house. She knows, however, that I am a vegetarian and she and her daughter had already prepared their meal with goat meat. It wasn’t a holiday. That’s just how she eats now.

Her life had always been difficult. She was born in Regalis, a market town in southwestern Hinche. When she was a young girl, her parents sent her to live with an aunt because they couldn’t afford to keep her fed. She spent two years with the aunt, travelling between Gonaïves and Okap, helping her aunt manage her business.

She left the aunt when she had had enough of her abuse, and she returned to Regalis. “She beat me too much.” But she didn’t stay long. She went as a teenager to Pétion-Ville, and found a job as a housekeeper, where she spent eight years working in the same woman’s house. She was finally forced to leave when she became pregnant with the woman’s brother’s child. “He came to the house all the time, and started to like me. But when I got pregnant, I had to leave.”

She went back to Regalis and started to raise her child. She couldn’t do it alone, so she hooked up with a man. The boy was about six years old when she got pregnant again. Her second child’s father abandoned her before the next boy was born, but by that time she had gotten together with Sepavre.

His real name is Julius Vil, but you won’t find him in Mannwa by asking for Julius. There’s a lot to be said about nicknames in Haiti, especially in rural Haiti. “//Se pa vre//” means, “It’s not true.” I have no idea how that becomes someone’s name. But that’s what everyone who knows Julius calls him.

Sepavre was already married at the time, but Rose Marthe was willing to be a second wife because Sepavre would help her raise the child she was pregnant with when they met. Her first child died during that second pregnancy, and Sepavre buried the boy and organized the funeral.

So Rose Marthe and Sepavre started their life together. She lived in a small straw shack, with her infant boy and a little girl, his daughter from a previous relationship. The shack was just a few hundred yards uphill from his other wife’s house. Sepavre would split time between them.

He was very hard working, but most of the assets he worked with belonged to his other wife. Rose Marthe had very little she could give him to work with, so he had very little he could bring her in return. They got on well together, but as they had more children, their poverty only deepened. She would work as a day laborer in wealthier neighbors’ fields to earn a little cash. The only way she and Sepavre could plant their own fields was to borrow the beans, repaying them with interest when the harvest came in. The interest rate would vary seasonally, but could range as high as 100%.

That’s when CLM came to Mannwa. Rose Marthe now credits CLM for very much improving her life, but her path through the program was not easy. With a newborn in her hands as we got started, she had no way to begin with a small commerce. So the two assets she chose were goats and a pig.

Goat rearing went well for her from the start. We gave her two goats, and she bought herself a third with proceeds from a savings club that she joined with fellow CLM members. Wòch Djèp, the western corner of Mannwa where she lives, is good country to raise goats in. There is plenty of forage, so they’re likely to do well as long as you can keep them out of your neighbors’ fields, which is something that Rose Marthe and Sepavre were very careful to do. Six months after graduation, Rose Marthe had eight goats, even though she had sold several in order to make other investments.

Pig rearing was another story. Rose Marthe joined CLM just as an epidemic of Teschen disease, an incurable and usually fatal pig disease, was sweeping through Haiti’s Central Plateau. Her pig caught the disease, and died.

She was determined, though. She raised what she could from sale of the meat, added some of the money she saved from her weekly food stipend, and bought a second pig.

This second one was just a piglet. It would have taken a lot of time and energy for it to generate a return. But pig rearing, though risky, can return a very high profit. So she and her case manager decided to give it another try. When the second pig died, Rose Marthe wept.

So she turned her focus towards the goats, but also made an important change in the way she farmed. She bought the beans that she needed for planting with cash from her savings. That meant the whole harvest was hers. She and her children would have plenty to eat, she would keep some to plant, and she’d still have something to sell. She added some of her savings to the proceeds from her first cash-based harvest, and was able to begin a small commerce. She’d buy produce – beans or corn, usually – in a either Zaboka or Regalis, remote mountain markets where prices are low, and then she and Sepavre would carry sacks on their heads to other less rural markets where they could be sold at a profit. It might mean hiking four or five hours with their load, but the money was good.

She finally was able to earn enough that she was able to use some of her profits, together with proceeds for the sale of a couple of goats, to buy a mule. It cost 11,500 gourds, or about $275, but it can carry much more than she can, so it has enabled her business to grow even more. In addition, she was able to set aside enough beans that she now lends them to neighbors at a profit.

So economically, even though she has struggled, Rose Marthe has succeeded wonderfully. But she almost lost everything she had midway through her experience in the program when she came down with cholera.

Under the best of circumstances, cholera is dangerous, but when you live in a remote area such as Wòch Djèp, the danger is much greater. Rose Marthe shouldn’t have been vulnerable to cholera. She knew better. Her case manager taught her about cholera every week. She learned about the importance of washing her hands. CLM gave her a water filter. And we helped her build a latrine in her yard. But she was probably careless while snacking in a market. None of the other members of her household caught the disease, but another CLM member who lives nearby and walks to market with her did.

Rose Marthe tells the story: “I started to feel sick and to vomit early in the day. I had diarrhea, too.” Her neighbor, Edres, is a Partners in Health extension agent, so he had some medication on hand. “I drank what I could, but things got worse and worse. By the time my husband knew I was sick, I was too far gone to make any decisions.”

Partners in Health has a free cholera center in Boukankare, a two-three hour walk from their home, but Sepavre and their neighbors carried her to a private center in Zaboka, instead. It was no closer, and was expensive, but Sepavre is from Zaboka, and he wanted her to be near family. He would need to stay with the kids, but didn’t want her to be at the clinic by herself.

I happened to be in Zaboka the day after she was brought to the clinic, and even with a day of intravenous fluid in her, she looked bad. But as dangerous as cholera is, it appears to be relatively easy to cure, and Rose Marthe pulled through without lingering effects.

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It takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to hike from Rose Marthe’s place east to the closest CLM member, Magalie. About the same distance east of Magalie’s house is a separate, north-running ridge. The area from Magalie’s house to this second ridge is called Lalyann. On the southern side of that ridge, close to where you begin a steep climb up to Mannwa, lives Omène. Chrismène lives at the ridge’s northern tip, just when it begins to descend into a narrow ravine.

When we met Chrismène during the member selection process, she told us that her husband, Elgué Jean Pierre, had abandoned her to seek his fortune in the Dominican Republic. Chrismène was just 23 when she joined CLM, with an oldest daughter who must have been eight or nine. At the time, she had little with which to keep her children even minimally fed: just a small plot of land that she would farm, and two chickens.

Her original Poverty Scorecard is confusing. The Poverty Scorecard is the longer, more detailed of the two surveys we use as part of the selection process. Together, they collect a range of information that helps us judge a family’s standard of living. Chrismène’s Scorecard reports her, on one hand, as having a partner who would work the land and was responsible for more than half of the household income. It also says, on the other, that he had left her and gone to the Dominican Republic.

Her other form, the Food Security Survey was much clearer. She scored as badly as one could have. She and her children were regularly going hungry, depending on her husband’s family for an occasional handout to keep themselves going.

But from her first entry into the program, Chrismène flourished. She took excellent care of her animals, and they multiplied. She invested cash that she saved from her stipend in her farming, and was rewarded with strong harvests. And she worked quickly and with discipline to take advantage of the materials the program made available for her to repair her home and build a latrine.

We were at first surprised to see how quickly she was able to get her house built. Home repair is one of the areas in which we tend to see a big difference between the women who live with supportive partners and those who are single. This is because there is a lot we insist that members do towards building their own home, things more easily done with a husband’s help. Though we provide roofing material and nails, along with cement for latrines, members must provide all the lumber, sand, rocks, and mud that construction requires.

Chrismène is a small woman, and her children are still too young to help her. When the program started, she didn’t yet own a pack animal. Though she could help get the building materials to her home, she would need someone to do the heavier lifting. Getting building materials from Kafou Jòj, the nearest approach a loaded truck could make, up the slope to Mannwa, and then back down the other side to Lalyann would be no joke. And with Elgué in the Dominican Republic, we were not sure how she’d manage.

It turned out not to be a problem. Plentiful help came from what at first seemed a surprising source. Omène is a slightly older woman, and is married to Elga Jean Pierre, who had been introduced to us by Omène and Chrismène as Elgué’s twin brother. We were continually impressed by his willingness to come to his sister-in-law’s aide. He helped her collect the lumber she’d need to build her house, to get her materials to Lalyann from Kafou Jòj, to work in her fields, and to manage her animals.

It also turned out to be less surprising than we had thought. One day, Chrismène’s case manager, Martinière, was passing through the neighborhood, and went by a meeting that Edres was holding for all the mothers in the area. Both Chrismène and Omène were there, and one of their neighbors, looking at how well they seemed to be doing since entering the program, remarked that Elga’s wives were looking good. Martinière looked at the two women and they looked at him. The three of them could only laugh.

Elgué never went to the Dominican Republic. He is, in fact, Chrismène’s son. Her husband is actually Elga, the same man who is husband to Omène. The women explained that they had been afraid to tell us the truth, worried that we would accept only one of the two wives into the program. So they conspired to deceive us – not that they needed to – and they succeeded for a while.

Elga and Chrismène

The real Elgué, Chrismène’s son, on the right. On the left is Benole, Omène’s son and Elgué’s brother.

In French, a “matelot” is a sailor. The word appears to be connected to the word for mattress. Two sailors would share one hammock by sleeping at different times. The shared sleeping arrangement turned into a name for the class of sailors themselves.

The Creole word “matlòt” is most likely derived from a feminine version of the French, but its meaning is somewhat different. Matlòt are woman like Chrismène and Omène, who share the same husband.

It’s not an unusual arrangement in rural Haiti. We regularly come across situations in which men have two or three wives. They may be married legally to one of them. With or without a legal marriage, community members may recognize one of the women as the madanm marye, or the real wife. In Elga’s case, Omène is the madanm marye. But the men are not necessarily legally married to any of them. Sepavre is married neither to Rose Marthe, nor to the other woman who lives nearby. In fact, he left the other woman a few months after Rose Marthe graduated, quickly taking up with a new second wife. Sometimes the men have reasonably stable relations with all.

And it is, perhaps, not surprising that such families are very well represented in CLM. Men who establish two or more households are bound to have more trouble supporting their wives and kids. Both their harvests and whatever cash they might earn have to be spread around more thinly. Omène and Chrismène are two of the more fortunate examples of a phenomenon we see all the time: Polygamy is a rich source of extreme poverty.

Chrismène also had more than Elga to aide her. She also received help from her older sister, Joceline, who is also a CLM member, but who lives with her husband in another part of Boucan Carré. The sister returned to Lalyann while Chrismène was building the house to help collect the stones and the mud that construction would require.

Chrismène wasn’t born in Lalyann, but in Pidem, a small, hilly region of western Boucan Carré, close to the river that cuts the commune almost in half. Her parents died when she was a little girl. By then, the family’s poverty had forced them to send Joceline away to live as a domestic servant in Elga’s parents’ home. When the parents died, Joceline asked Elga’s family to take her little sister in as well, and they agreed to do so. Chrismène moved into their home when she was about seven or eight years old.

Elga started flirting with Chrismène just a few years later. “I wasn’t quite ten,” she explains. Within a few years, she was pregnant with their first child. She could only have been thirteen or fourteen. That first child died, but they had their second only about a year later. Not long after that, Elga started dating Omène, whom he eventually married. He and Omène have five children together, and he has three surviving children with Chrismène. Though Elga and the two women are clear as to who his legal wife is, he says he is unswerving in his commitment to Chrismène. “I could never abandon her, “ he says, “I’ve made her suffer too much.”

Both women transformed their lives during eighteen months of the program. When they were evaluated for graduation in late June 2012, both women scored perfect 10s, meeting or exceeding all graduation criteria. They could have graduated with scores as low as seven. Omène, the less wealthy of the two, had succeeded in accumulating assets worth over 18,000 gourds – or about $440. That’s more than three times the assets that are minimally required for graduation. Chrismène had over 21,000 gourds’ worth – more than $520 – mostly in livestock. She had turned the two goats that we has given her into seven; she had bought a horse that had already given her a colt; she had a small pig and five chickens; and was continually earning new income by farming the small plot that was hers. A few months after graduating, she sold three goats, a live pig, some pork meat, and part of a crop of beans to buy a cow.

Her success was the source of some jealousy. Omène was not able to buy a horse until shortly after she graduated, and she seemed to resent the fact that Chrismène was ahead of her. But she didn’t let her resentment amount to anything. In general, she remains the same woman who joined in the conspiracy about her husband that they thought would be necessary for both her and her matlòt, Chrismène, to be accepted into CLM.

Elga and Omène

Both Omène and Chrismène are facing hardship six months after graduating from CLM. Chrismène woke up one morning to find that her horse had died. Fortunately its colt is old enough to survive, but it is a very big loss. In Omène’s case, the mother horse is fine, but its first colt was stillborn.

But both are confident that they can overcome their difficulties. And they have reason to feel confident. They are resilient now, capable of managing the steps backwards that they’ll face now and again. Chrismène has her cow, her colt, and three large female goats. Two of the three have kids, and the third is pregnant. Though food is not right now as plentiful in her home as has been recently – she’s reached the last weeks before her large millet harvest – she still has plenty of yams and pigeon peas to ensure that she and her children manage well enough. They aren’t hungry. Omène has eight goats and her horse, and a small field of plantain trees right next to her house. They both have chickens that they use for eggs, meat, or can sell if they need a little cash.

Most importantly, all three women – Chrismène, Omène, and Rose Marthe – are truly graduates in the sense that they have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty and are now leading different, sustainable, and still-improving lives. Talking with them, one senses their optimism. One feels that they each have plans and the capacity to carry their plans out.

Wideline is a single mother. She lives with her little boy, Alinsky, right next to the Partners in Health clinic that is our base in Bay Tourib. They share the small house that her father built for her with the resources that CLM made available.

Like many of our members, she joined the program without appearing on our initial selection lists. We create those lists at community meetings that we hold when we first start working in an area. In Wideline’s case, members of her community didn’t mention her because they didn’t think of her as an adult. She is in her late teens, and was living with Alinsky in her parents’ home. “We had food to eat, but I had nothing of my own. No way to get started.”

Her story is simple. She had made it as far as the sixth grade, but she failed the national primary school exam. Before she could decide whether or how to continue in school, a man from the neighborhood raped her. Alinsky is the product of that rape. She wanted to have the man arrested, but her parents decided against going to the police. “They’re church people. They don’t believe in the government.” The parents just took their grandchild into their home, where they were already raising three other grandchildren. The three youngest of their own kids were also in the house, and her mother was pregnant with what she hopes will be her last child.

Alinsky’s father lives nearby, but he doesn’t come to see his boy. Wideline is determined to have nothing to do with him. “He can’t come here. He has no child in my house.”

When she joined the program, she chose goats and a pig as her two enterprises. The larger of her two goats got into a neighbor’s field, and he killed it. It was pregnant at the time. “That’s why he and I don’t speak to each other.” The smaller one took some time to grow, but has finally given her its first kid. She decided not to take the pig right away because she was worried about the epidemic of Teschen disease that was killing many of the pigs in the area. So she deposited the cost of the pig in her bank account, and waited to decide what she should invest it in.

Her real break came when Fondation KANPE, which funds CLM in Baille Tourrible, decided to help all the schools in the region pay teachers for a year. Baille Tourrible doesn’t have a lot of educated people. Those who make good progress in school move to Hinche, Thomonde, or Port au Prince. That’s where they see their opportunities. So even though Wideline hadn’t graduated from elementary school, she was relatively qualified to teach a class, at least in one of the lower grades. So her case manager helped her apply to teach at a small private school a short walk from her home. She’s now in her second year as a first-grade teacher.

She took the money that she had received to buy a pig, put it together with savings from her salary, and bought a cow. She’s saving money from her second year’s salary to buy another cow. “My father and my little brothers can take care of them for me.”

So Wideline is starting to accumulate some wealth, and she has a regular income that enables her to take good care of Alinsky. But she’s not satisfied. She wants to go back to school. “Next year I’ll stop teaching so I can go through sixth grade again. I want to pass the exam and then move to Hinche to go to high school. I can live with my older brother there. My mother can take care of Alinksy for me.”

She’s not sure where she wants her education eventually to take her. That’s probably ok. The more successful she is, the longer she’ll have to decide. But with her growing wealth and her secure little house, she is restarting her life with good reason to be hopeful.

Things are starting to look up for Lucienne. Her progress as a CLM member has been slow, but she finally seems to be settling into a new and better life.

I’ve written about Lucienne before. (See: Still Hungry. I’ve made a few corrections since I originally wrote the piece.) Lucienne lost most of assets in the program’s first few months. She invested her funds for commerce to plant beans that returned a very poor harvest, and she lost two of the three goats that we gave her. She was left with just the one adult female goat and savings from her six months of food stipends.

We know very well that CLM is 18 months of hard work and invention. Gauthier, our program director, is well-known for saying, “There’s always a way.” So Lucienne and her case manager made a plan. She would sell a young billy goat, the survivor from her nanny’s first litter. She would then take the proceeds from that sale, add most of her savings, and buy a small horse. The horse would make it possible for her to start a small commerce. A good plan.

The problem is, she didn’t follow it. Her son, Lorès, sold the goat for her, but they decided to invest the money in another crop of beans. She figured that a decent harvest would allow her to buy a bigger horse and leave her plenty of additional money to invest in the commerce itself. But this second bean crop failed badly, too. She did not harvest even enough to plant another crop. And her savings alone were too little by themselves to allow her to buy the horse.

So she was moving backwards. She still needed to dramatically increase her asset base. She wouldn’t be able to graduate with just the one goat and her savings. More importantly, she’d have very little chance of sustainable success unless she could establish a stronger foundation.

But all that remained for her was the one goat and her savings. We encouraged her to use the savings to buy a couple of smaller animals, and she wisely chose to invest diversely. She split almost all of her money equally between two purchases: a large nanny goat and a 40% share in a neutered pig that Lorès bought. That left 500 gourds, or roughly $12.50, that she used to buy a big male turkey.

Now her first nanny goat is pregnant again and she thinks that the new one may be as well. The pig is growing under Lorès’s care. The turkey is a bit of a problem, because until she buys a hen it will tend to wander off and it won’t offer her very much return. But she’ll have a little farming income in the upcoming month, and she knows that a female turkey must be a high priority.

So things are looking up. Though she lost two crops of beans that she and Lorès planted for sale, she’s had good returns on her millet this year, so there’s plenty of food in the house. She also had a good harvest of pigeon peas. They don’t bring in as much money as the black and red beans that she planted, but they are giving her something to work with.

Now her biggest worry has to do with her daughter, Jeslène. She’s a 20-year-old woman, the only child whom Lucienne was able to send to school. Jeslène made it to the sixth grade, though she was unable to pass the national primary school graduation exam. Not long ago, Jeslène told her mother that she was ready to marry. She has been dating a young man from the neighborhood. He’s a farmer, and he’s worked hard enough to build a small house for Jeslène already . Lucienne had hoped the Jeslène would remain with her a little longer, waiting to marry until she was older and better established. She had also hoped to send her back to sixth grade and then, if she graduated, to try to send her even farther.

But that won’t happen now. Jeslène is determined, and Lucienne admits that she is old enough to decide. She also admits that she likes her future son-in-law and that Jeslène could do much worse. What’s more, Jeslène is pregnant, so marriage seems like a reasonable choice. Perhaps the best way to put it is that Lucienne wishes that it wasn’t so. She’s ready to celebrate in January nonetheless.

Jeslène will remain within shouting distance, but Lucienne says she’ll miss her. She and her husband will still have Lorès, but he’s getting older, too. They also have two grandsons on their hands, and are very happy that they can now send them to school without difficulty. But those small boys could become more than they can manage if Lorès eventually moves out.

In the meantime, Lucienne will keep struggling to move forward. She knows what she’s working for: She seeks a better future for Lorès, who is her youngest. “Everything I have is for him.” And with the small but solid foundation she’s finally established, she has good reason to hope.

Lucienne and Jeslène:

Elimène lives in Fond Pierre Jacques, a hilly neighborhood just southeast of the town of Baille Tourrible. It sits along both sides of the road that winds from Thomonde up towards the Partners in Health clinic that is our base in the region. It’s just beyond and uphill from the clinic. The region has nothing but houses, trees, and farmland. Residents of Fond Pierre Jacques plant fields both there and in the unpopulated region further to the east, along the path that leads to Platanal.

She wasn’t one of the women originally selected to be part of the CLM program in the Baille Tourrible region. We had not initially even visited her house when our selection process began. Somehow, she didn’t get onto our list for home visits. It’s not that unusual. Sometimes potential CLM members are so isolated from their communities that the local residents who help us develop our lists fail to even consider them. They don’t exist.

In Elimène’s case, though, that’s hard to imagine. Her house sits right along a major path, and it’s a substantial house, though it was in very bad disrepair. It’s much more likely that she and her husband learned to conceal their poverty, their regular hunger, from their neighbors. We develop our lists at public meetings, so if her neighbors had learned to overlook her poverty, her name would have ended up on a list of families that don’t need CLM.

Final selection of CLM members is complicated in all sorts of ways, from the basic need to get to the truth out of people who have every reason to think they should hide it to the funding-driven need to find exactly a certain number of members. The latter issue means solving a puzzle. Nothing ensures that the number of people who need CLM in a region is equal to the number we can serve. In fact, it’s pretty unlikely. To launch a cohort with exactly the number of members that a grant requires, we must piece together pieces of a territory that give us the number we need and figure which other areas we can most sensibly leave out of the program until the next funds come along.

We invited the right number of women for our new cohort to the first enterprise training in Baille Tourible, but by the end of the training we knew we had a couple of slots to fill. Several of the families whom we had invited to join decided not to participate, and a few of the families we had thought qualified turned out to have additional assets that we hadn’t initially seen. So by the end of the training we were short a few families.

Our case managers are always looking for families that need the program so that we’ll be ready when an opportunity arises. One of the ones working in Elimène’s neighborhood was Wesly, the most experienced one we had on the original Baille Tourrible team. Wesly noticed Elimène’s house, and thought that it deserved a closer look. And when we realized we needed to fill out the cohort, he interviewed her at length. He felt that she was qualified, so he had her meet Emile Mésidor.

Emile was helping us manage the launch of the CLM program in Thomonde. He would have the final word. Elimène remebers her meeting with Emile very well. “He asked me a lot of questions, about what I had and how we lived. He asked where we kept our cow, but I told him we didn’t have one. He asked about my horse too, but I said it belonged to my husband. I didn’t have any animals of my own at all. He ‘s the one who said I could be in CLM.”

They were living at the time with their youngest son and a granddaughter who had been left in their care, supporting themselves by farming and with a small tobacco business. Elimène would buy the tobacco in Hinche or Thomonde and then sell it in one of two markets in Baille Tourrible.

She was making a small profit now and again, but she couldn’t sustain it. Whenever it came time for heavy agricultural work, the commerce would collapse. She wouldn’t have time to buy or sell. She’d drain it of capital to buy food for her family until harvest. And even then, they never had enough. They were always hungry until their crops came in. Even in good years, they might have stretches of several weeks when they had little to eat. In bad years, things could be much worse.

So we invited her to join the program. She chose goats and a pig as her assets, and got right to work.

Goat rearing didn’t start very well. We gave her two goats, but they were small ones. One of them quickly became sick. Elimène, however, was determined. “I struggled and struggled with it. It finally pulled through.” The other was healthier, but they both were small when she received them. They have finally produced offspring, but it took much longer than it should have.

Pig rearing was more successful. It is risky business. Mortality among pigs is relatively high. But it can be quite profitable when it works. Elimène’s pig managed to raise four piglets. She sold three of them, and is now raising the mother and a younger female. She chose to sell them very young. It is less profitable, but a lot less risky and a lot less work. Pigs require a lot of care. She figured she’d have an easier time if she wasn’t managing too many of them.

She took the money she got from selling two of the pigs and bought beans at harvest, when their price was low. She’s now storing them until planting season, when she’ll be able to sell them profitably.

Her biggest success, however, has been with small, regular commerce. “They didn’t give me commerce, but Titon [her case manager] said I should try to start one if I could.” She talked to him about the tobacco business she once ran, and they agreed that she would try again. “You have to sell something that other people don’t sell. I’m the only tobacco seller in Baille Tourrible.”

So she took some of the money that she had saved up from her weekly food stipend, added the money from the third piglet, and went to Hinche to buy. There, she discovered a new product. “I always sold local, Haitian tobacco. But people were asking for the darker imported tobacco that they like to use for snuff. Now I sell both.” She found that she could get a cup of prepared snuff in Hinche for 200 gourds, or about $5. But she could buy the unprocessed foreign tobacco it’s made from for half that much. She makes the snuff by drying the tobacco in the sun, and pounding it into a fine powder. She then discovered that she could cut her costs even further buy blending the darker tobacco with the less expensive local product.

So her tobacco business is more profitable than it ever was and, what is just as important, she has come to see its fundamental importance. “I won’t ever let the business collapse again. Even if I can only sell on Saturdays and Sundays, I’ll keep it up because it means we always have food in the house.”

And her ambition is now larger than food on the table. She wants to start buying more land. As committed as she is to commerce, she really sees herself as a farmer. “Whatever you think I look like, I know how to work with a hoe and a sickle.” She wants more farmland so she can make more from her crops.

Her plan is simple: “I’ll keep taking good care of my animals, and put away money whenever I can. If you can sell a couple of goats or pigs, and can add some money from a harvest, you’ll already have enough to buy a small plot.” In a couple of months, she’ll buy a horse so she can get larger crops and the fruit from the trees in her yard to market, too. That will add a lot to her income.

It is pretty clear that Elimène is well on her way to a better life. She has solved her family’s hunger problem, and is looking to a future with an ambitious but very well-founded hope.

One of the fundamental criteria for selection for the CLM program is that a household must include an adult woman who is capable of working. We can stretch the meaning of “adult” so that it can include mothers as young as fifteen or so and, in certain unfortunate instances, older sisters who are even younger than that.

It’s harder for us to compromise on the question of ability to work. The key to CLM is that its members work their own and their families’ ways out of poverty. We have very few women who have minor handicaps of various sorts but who have families that can do their work, under their supervision, for them. But we also come across households that turn out to be, in a sense, poorer than the poorest of the poor because they depend on a woman who is too old, too sick, or too handicapped to earn a living. We can do nothing for them.

But it is not always easy to evaluate who will be able to work. The distinctions are more fluid than the straightforward yes-or-no form of the question might suggest. Some of the most difficult cases we deal with are women whom we think to be able to work but who for various reasons find working very, very hard.

Lemène Louis is from Regalis. That’s an important market in rural Hinche, just over the Hinche – Thomonde border from Bay Tourib. From our residence, it’s less than an hour’s hike. And hike you must, because there are no roads of any kind leading to the market. As large a market as it is, everyone who comes to buy or sell arrives on foot. Larger merchants have pack animals, but most carry their merchandise or their purchases on their head.

When we met Lemène during the CLM selection process, she was living in Koray, the corner of Bay Tourib closest to Regalis. One hears the saddest stories during selection, stories of families stuck in extreme poverty and of the miserable circumstances they endure. But few of those sad, sad stories are sadder than Lemène’s.

She is a small woman, perhaps around fifty. She and her first husband had ten children. She lost the first nine. Only the tenth survived. He is with her still, a ten-year-old boy named Leyonel. She lost Leyonel’s father, her first husband, when Leyonel was just learning to crawl. About a year and a half later, she got together with her current husband, Mèsidye.

They lived together for a time, but he eventually decided to take another woman because Lemène did not have a child with him. He built a small straw shack in the back of their yard, and moved Lemène and Leyonel into it so that his new wife could move into his house. Lemène wanted to leave Mèsidye – Who could blame her? – but when she tried to return to her family, they sent her back. They said they could do nothing for her and that Mèsidye would at least help her take care of her boy.

So she returned to Koray, and settled into the shack. She would earn a few dollars now and then by working in other people’s fields. Mèsidye also continued to provide some help. But the two together were not earning enough for her to do more than barely survive. She and her boy were hungry almost all the time, regularly going for days with nothing to eat but what they could forage, lighting a fire in their kitchen no more than once or twice each week.

When she joined CLM, she chose goats and poultry as her two enterprises. We gave her two young female goats. She took care of them, but they never produced for her. Each pregnancy ended in miscarriage. We’re not sure why. Eventually, she sold the goats and bought replacements. One of those new goats became pregnant, but the other was killed by Hurricane Sandy.

When it came to buying poultry, she was reluctant to take all that we wanted to offer her in birds. She asked us to buy her a small pig and several chickens. She’s taken good care of the pig and it is growing. She still has some chickens, but she can’t keep their numbers up. Partly because she sells them whenever she needs cash to cover a pressing expense, partly because they are stolen by neighbors or eaten by local predators. She always seems to have a few around the yard, but not as many as she would need to use them as the basis for strong progress.

She was careful with the weekly food stipend she received for the first six months. She managed to save over 2000 gourds, and that money is still in her savings account. In addition, she participated in a savings club with other CLM members in her neighborhood. Each week, the women would contribute 100 gourds, and one would get the whole pot. When it was Lemène’s turn, she used the money to buy another pig, one larger that what she already had. But that pig died of Teschen disease.

So Lemène is really struggling. She is managing, more or less, with her animals. She hasn’t made great progress, but she and Leyonel are in a nice little house with a good tin roof and, even more importantly, Leyonel has started to attend school.

But it is hard for her to earn a steady income because it is very hard for her to work. She’s asthmatic. She rarely suffers real attacks, but her breathing is labored almost all the time. Heavy farm labor is out of the question. Small commerce would be difficult because she can’t count on her ability to walk to the markets in the region. If her goats would produce for her, she could sell some young and add the proceeds to her savings to buy a horse. That would make it easier for her to go to market, but it isn’t clear whether, given her asthma, it would really become easy enough.

But buying a horse or another large animal is not really her priority. She wants to buy land. She doesn’t own the land that her CLM house was built on. She has no land of her own. It was built, instead, on land that belongs to Mèsidye. He has offered to sell her the land cheaply, but she isn’t interested. She is worried for her boy, and he is the one thing that really matters to her. Mèsidye has other children, both young ones with the woman who replaced her and adult children from a previous relationship. Her boy, however, is not his son. She worries that if anything should happen to her, Mèsidye’s children could drive him away with nothing. She doesn’t believe in Mèsidye’s ability to sell her the land in a way that will convince other interested parties that it is definitively hers.

So we need to find her a way to start earning a steady income, be it ever so small, that is not physically taxing. That will relieve the pressure on her livestock so that she can wait for them to increase. Perhaps it will make it possible for her to realize her dream.

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Jonise Decaillon presents another sort of problem. She is a young, single mother of two. Her first boy, Abèy, is about four years old. Then this summer she had twin girls, though one died suddenly just this week.

I’ve written about Jonise before. (See: Jonise Decaillon.) She seems to have developmental issues. Her case manager, Benson, spent considerable time when he first started working with her just teaching her to add and subtract. Almost all the women we deal with, whether or not they are literate, can do numbers in their heads. But Jonise couldn’t do even the simplest subtraction. Benson would take small rocks and move them from pile to pile to help Jonise understand.

We began to feel as though she was doing better. She had been living in a corner of another CLM member’s home. Abèy’s father had thrown her out of his house. But Benson was able to pressure him into building a house for Jonise on land that a cousin of hers offered. She began to look better, healthier, less lost.

But then she became pregnant. She was already hard-pressed to take care of her boy, but things became much harder when she was with child. She never was especially good at finding the forage she needed to feed her pig. She seemed to have trouble really focusing on the task. It began losing weight. She had two goats, and one had a kid. But the other goat died. She just couldn’t take care of it. And as excited as we had been for her about her home, it created a problem as well. It was a little out of the way. She was more-or-less alone, without another adult around to give her the help – really the direction – that she needs every day.

When she gave birth, and she turned out to have been carrying twins, we could only groan. We doubted her ability to manage them without much more help than she knew how to organize. Within a month, they were losing weight. Our partner, Partners in Health, was willing to send her some infant formula to supplement the breast milk she gave them, but I suppose it was not enough. I do not know if the baby died of malnutrition, but I know that she had very little chance to prosper.

Even for Jonise, there is hope. She has come to realize that her current home isn’t good for her. She feels too alone. And she has spoken to one of her older sisters about moving her house to the sister’s yard. Abèy’s father likes the idea. He is only interested in his son, but he sees it as a good thing for the boy. Benson was able to convince him to take responsibility for moving the house once the sisters have agreed. We don’t yet know the sister, but have heard well of her. We hope that she is willing and able to be much more than a neighbor. Jonise needs close supervision all the time, and we’re not sure where else she’ll find it if this plan doesn’t work out.

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We certainly do not regret the decisions we made to invite Lemène and Jonise into the program. Neither Lemène’s asthma nor Jonise’s inability to focus on the task before her presents an obvious enough handicap to justify excluding them, especially when one considers that there is currently no alternative for those we cannot take. We have to hope that they can learn to do enough to improve their lives, and then try to create a situation that makes lasting improvement possible.

If during the few months that remain before graduation, we can get Lemène into a simple small commerce that she can manage without much reliable physical strength, we will have put her on the way towards caring for Leyonel as she would like to do. She regularly gets offers from people who would like to take Leyonel for her. “He’s such a good child,” she likes to explain. He has an older sister, Lemène’s stepdaughter, who has pressed the point often, thinking that’s she’d be helping both her brother and Lemène. But Lemène can’t bear to part with him. “He’s all that I have.”

If we can get Jonise into a house of her own in her sister’s yard before her pig and her last goat die, she may be able to turn things around. We’ll still need to help her find a reliable source of income – we have some ideas – but the presence of a strong, guiding, sisterly hand might be what she needs to ensure that she succeeds.

To have prejudged that either woman would be certain to fail in CLM would have been almost understandable from an administrative point of view. Each started the program with special barriers that were more or less evident from the start. Neither has shown herself capable of the work she needs to do.

But we must go through the selection process assuming that the chance we offer is the very last chance that our members will have to live a different life. We have no reason to think that there are other programs out there that will work with those whom we can’t help. Under the circumstances, the only reasonable, the only human thing for us to do is to take on any family that might possibly succeed, and then do anything we can to make sure that they do.

by Hébert Artus

Luciana “Jésula” Noël: The rebirth of hope.

Jésula was born on 1973, in Tèblanch, a savanna located a couple of miles to the northeast of Mirebalais, just off the main road to Hinche. She’s from an extremely poor family that was not able to send her to school. Like her four brothers and sisters, she stayed at home, working in the fields and doing household chores. At fifteen, she got pregnant and decided to leave home with Solon Marcelus, the man who let her pregnant. At the time, she didn’t really know what it meant for her to be pregnant.

Because she came from an extreme poor family, she and her husband had nothing. They built a little straw roofed house close to her family’s, and there she gave birth to eight children: two boys, and six girls. Unfortunately, her husband was lazy. So she was the one who had to work to feed the entire family and pay to send the children to school.

To do so, she got into business, even without any stable capital. She had never had much of her own capital to start with. She would borrow money in the market itself to buy and then resell anything she could find. She would take the profit she made home and give the capital back to her creditors at the end of the day. She managed to earn enough that way to pay school fees for some of her children. She even bought a couple of goats.

Unfortunately, two of her daughters became sick. “When I asked my husband to help me pay for the treatment they needed, he told me to let them die.” Jésula sold all she had to save her girls. “That was the end of my relationship with him. I couldn’t stand his abuse any more. He would beat me. He wouldn’t do any work.” Having sold what little she had, she couldn’t pay anymore for her kids’ school.

She decided to move forward with a new partner, Jean Louis-Jacques, who already had his own family. She had one additional kid with him, but they broke up a few years later. Now, her youngest child is five years old.

When CLM began selecting members in Tèblanch, Jésula was accustomed to spending as much as a week without any food to cook. She had one goat, but was carefully saving it unless she needed money to pay for a sickness or death. “I was losing hope. I had too many problems. I couldn’t sleep at night. I used snuff to keep my mind away from my trouble.”

Since she joined CLM, she began receiving the food allowance, about $7 per week. She has received two goats, and she will have at least fifteen birds – a combination of chickens and turkeys – by the end of this month. She has now begun to dream.

She wants is to become a “grandanm.” That’s a word used for a wealthy woman. To Jésula, that means owning a cow, goats, and land to build a house on. She also wants to be able to sign her name. She dreams of being a respected member of her community.

She is very happy to be part of the program. She’s already begun learning how to write her name, and has 1600 Haitian gourds – about $40 – in her savings account. She promises that she will graduate from the program. “Now I realize I take less snuff because I have hope. I sleep at night.” Looking forward, it is easy to see her succeeding.

Marie Lourdes Pierre: The search for autonomy and dignity.

Marie Lourde lives in Six Evain, a village close to downtown Mirebalais. She’s a 30-year-old mother of seven children with three different fathers. Only six of her children are still with her, one of the died. Her first was born when she was just 16 years old. Her current partner, Marcelus Espagnol, is an older man married to another woman.

Like many CLM members, Marie-Lourdes does not know how to write her name. Her father never had the means to pay to send her to school. At 30 years old, she has never done anything to earn money. Feeding her family was a heavy duty because Marcelus was the one who earned whatever the family would eat. If he didn’t stop by the house, there was no food for that day. She has no profession, no job, no capital to start a small business, not even a chicken in her yard.

When she joined the CLM program in September, she chose goat-rearing and pig-rearing as her two activities. She has already received her two goats, and will receive the pig next week. She started receiving weekly food stipends from the start, and has saved 3250 Haitian gourdes, or about $77. But her challenge is serious. She has difficulty communicating, tending to merely laugh in answer to any question you ask.

Nevertheless Marie-Lourdes sees her life already changing. “I couldn’t send my kids to school. Even though the school was free, I couldn’t buy uniforms. With CLM, all my kids are attending school this year because I have a little cash to pay for them.”

Her dream is independence. She wants to be able to support herself. And she wants to feel herself respected, just like other members of her community. She has never been invited to any kind of community gathering. The only one she ever attended was a funeral. “Nobody ever invites me because I am poor. When you are poor, you get no respect.” She used to be resigned, “malere pa sou moun” she explains. That’s hard to translate, but it’s like saying, “When you’re poor, you keep to yourself.”

She believes that she will graduate from the program. She will work hard to be successful, because she thinks it is her last chance to get her independence and the restoration of her dignity.

Elienne lives with her husband, Odak, and their two children in Gran Dlo, a small hillside neighborhood that runs along the stream across from the Partners in Health hospital in Bay Tourib. Though she is just 24, and though Odak is only a few years older, they have been married for eight years.

Until this year, they shared a one-room straw shack with Odak’s mother. It was tight quarters, but they managed. But now, thanks to Elienne’s participation in CLM and Odak’s hard work, they now have their own stone house, covered by a good tin roof. “We were able to give the old house to my mother-in-law. It’s close enough that we can be together, but it’s nice to live by ourselves.”

And the house isn’t the only change in their lives since they joined CLM. They used to get by on Elienne’s small commerce. “I would sell rice and oil and things like that.” Since they had no other assets, her commerce was regularly disappearing because as she would have to reach into it to feed her mother-in-law, her husband, and her kids. The couple had no other assets, so each time they ate up the assets in her small commerce, she would have to wait until Odak could earn enough money doing odd jobs to set her commerce up again.

But CLM gave them two goats and a pig, and their animals have flourished thanks to Odak’s care. And several of Elienne’s fellow CLM members hired Odak to build their CLM-financed houses, bringing in additional income that allowed them to add to their livestock and invest more in their crops as well. Odak is proud. “I’m not afraid of hard work.”

Last week, the couple was able to withdraw savings Elienne had accumulated from her six months of $1-per-day food stipends, add some of the money that Odak earned building houses, and buy a horse. It was expensive. They paid 4750 gourds, or almost $120. But it’s a good horse: still young, but big enough to carry a load for the six hours it takes to walk down to the market in Thomonde, and to the smaller markets closer to her home as well. I wanted a horse that was healthy, but also gentle. It has to be willing to carry my wife,” Odak says.

The purchase represents a key moment for a CLM member. It’s a moment we call “asset transformation,” when members take the smaller assets they have accumulated in the early part of the program and use them to make bigger investments. The bigger investment might be a large animal, like a horse, a mule, or a cow. Or it might be a plot of land.

Asset transformation is important for two reasons. On one hand, it puts a family’s livelihood on a bigger and broader basis. A family might choose to buy a cow, which can provide milk and raised status right away, and large annual chunks of income as it has calves. Or it might choose a pack animal that dramatically increases the potential for small commerce.

On the other hand, the process is important because of the choice it represents. Few of the women who join the program have had the luxury of learning to plan their future. They are too busy thinking about how to get food each day. Asset transformation is an opportunity to make a decision as part of a strategy the woman is developing for her family’s future life. The women get significant coaching from their case managers as they make this decision, but we make sure they are making it themselves.

Now Elienne has to make the choice she made with Odak work. “I go to market as much as I care. My case manager, Thermil, says that if you buy a horse but don’t use it to make money, you didn’t need it in the first place.”

“Our life is different now,” she says. “We had no goats, no pig, no house. Thanks to CLM, things are good.”

Sometimes it feels as though CLM is almost magically effective. That’s not to say that the work is easy. Our case managers and the members they serve struggle very hard for our success – with the elements, with each other, and with the realities of poverty and of rural life. That success thus belongs entirely to them. But approximately 98% of the families that complete the program are sustainably self-sufficient within 18 months. That record can sometimes lead us to expect success to follow us as inevitably as the day follows the night.

And many member families do take off almost as soon as we begin to work with them. The combination of assets and individualized coaching that we offer is enough to set them quickly and reliably onto a good path.

But for others, the road is much longer. All sorts of problems can interfere with the progress they need to make. I’ve written of such cases before, cases like Marie Paul. (See: More About Marie.)

She started the program in debt, and rather than setting the problem before her case manager so they could try to figure out a solution together, she concealed it, liquidating most of the assets we gave her to pay off a loan shark who was threatening her life and then lying about the sale. Even then, her case manager, Martinière, worked out a plan that could have enabled to restart with a reduced asset base and have an excellent chance to graduate nonetheless, but she would not take his advice. She would not even stay home on the day of his weekly visit so they could talk. She missed so many of their appointments, that he eventually became discouraged. Her home forced him more than a half an hour out of his way on his Wednesday route, which was already an especially long and hard one. The two of them never developed the relationship of trust that is far and away the most important element of everything we do. And so she languished. Her new home was never quite completed, and her assets never quite grew to what they need to be. She is very hard working, so we hope that she and her children will eventually be ok. But she could not graduate with the rest of her cohort in eighteen months. It’s a shame.

Lucienne lives close to our base in Bay Tourib. Five of her nine children survive. All are grown, but the two youngest are still unmarried and live with her and her husband. When she joined the program, the four of them were living in a corner of an older child’s house. That was about a year ago. When we began the process of home repair, she decided to add a room to that house for herself , her husband, and the two kids rather than building something separate, and that’s where they live now.

The two enterprises she chose to receive from us were goats and small commerce. We gave her three fertile female goats and made 1500 gourds, or about $ 37.50, available to purchase merchandise for her to build her commerce with.

But it has all more or less gone wrong.

Part of the challenge has to do with her husband. He is crippled by pain in his feet. He can barely walk, let alone work. The whole burden of running the house has fallen on her, and on their kids.

She and her case manager decided to invest the commerce money in beans. With her son’s help, she planted ten mamit. A mamit is a large coffee can, which is a standard dry measure in rural Haiti. But the crop was almost a total loss. They’ve pulled up and dried the plants, and are preparing to hull them, but she already sees that she’ll get a lot less than the ten mamit she planted.

Her goat rearing has not done much better thus far. One of the goats successfully raised its first litter – a single male kid – and is almost ready to give birth again. But another one died. Lucienne was able to sell the meat, but only by letting neighbors buy on credit. It went for 850 gourds, only about a quarter of the goat’s live value, but Lucienne hasn’t yet been able to collect any of what she’s owed.

The fate of the third goat is a more complicated story. The short version is that her son Lorès took it and sold it behind his mother’s back. Lucienne can’t even talk about it without sobbing.

It happened shortly after we transferred the goats to Lucienne. At the time, Lorès was competing with another young man for a young woman’s heart. As Lucienne tells the story, the girl and her family made it clear that they preferred her son. They pressured him to spend money he didn’t have on the girl, and eventually convinced him to sell his mother’s CLM goat towards that end. He caved in, sold the goat, burned through the cash by buying gifts for the girl, and then immediately regretted what he had done.

Knowing that Lucienne’s case manager would insist on seeing the goat during his next weekly visit, Lorès was forced to confess to his mother. That’s when Lucienne first became aware of the stage that his relation with the girl had reached, and she put a maternal veto on any further progress. Her boy chose to stick with his mother and accept her word. But by then she had lost two of her three goats.

A case manager’s first move in a case like this, in which a CLM member or a member of her family sells one of her assets without our approval, is to pressure the member to find a way to replace it. And Lucienne and Lorès agreed to do so.

But the more she considered it, the less sense it really made to Lucienne. Their crops had failed, and there was little beyond their farming that could bring in the cash they would need to buy a new goat. Lorès said that he would sell a small plot of land that Lucienne had given him for him to farm on, and use the proceeds from the sale to buy a goat, but Lucienne could not see the sense in his doing so, and we had to agree with her.

Lucienne speaks very clearly: She is working only for her two kids. That is to say, for her daughter, Jeslène, and Lorès. For Lorès to sell off land that she’s given him in order to return an asset to his mother can only feel like a step backward for her. Haitians describe a step like that as, “//Lave men, siye atè//.” That means, “Wash your hands and dry them in the dirt.” There’s little reason for her to develop productive assets if she can only do so by impoverishing the son who is her reason for developing them in the first place. They need to find another way.

The assets she has to work with are the mother goat and its first offspring, 3400 gourds in her Fonkoze savings account, and the 850 gourds owed to her for the goat meat she sold.

So this is what she and her case manager plan to do: She will have her son sell the young goat. They’ll need to do it quickly. By the middle of August, goats will start flooding the market, as people need cash to pay tuition for their kids’ schools. But if they sell right away, they should be able to get somewhat more than 1000 gourds. By withdrawing almost all her savings from her account, she’ll have over 4000 gourds, enough to buy a good, small horse.

That horse should be able to unlock small commerce as a real opportunity for Lucienne. She is no longer strong enough to carry heavy loads on her head, so without a horse she would almost have to sell from out of her home. And the reality in rural Haiti is that women who sell out of their home almost have to sell on credit if they are going to sell at all, and women like CLM members can lack the social capital they need to consistently collect what’s owed them.

But she still needs seed capital to get her new commerce started, so her case manager will have to help her collect at least a substantial portion of the 850 gourds she is owed. 500 gourds or so would be a start, if a very small one, and it would be enough to give us some hope that, despite very substantial obstacles, Lucienne will succeed in the end.

All that will require a lot of hard work, and that’s where we come to Lucienne’s most urgent problem. She’s been really sick. She was rushed to the clinic in Bay Tourib after collapsing in the market nearby. She was very weak, and showed strong signs of anemia. Her blood pressure was extremely low. The doctor gave her iron pills, but those pills don’t address the fundamental issue, which is that despite almost twelve months in the program, Lucienne cannot yet ensure that she and her children eat a meal every day. It is too early to call her situation something as final sounding as a “failure,” but to call it anything less than that would seem to trivialize how difficult her life still is.

The day I spoke with her, it was midmorning, and she and her children had not yet cooked or eaten anything. We gave her a few gourds, which her daughter very quickly turned into a bowl of stew, but such handouts won’t really help her succeed. She will need to quickly turn her horse and the merchandise it carries into food to feed herself and her kids and profits that can help her grow.

It won’t be easy. But we are optimistic. The fact that she lives so close to our base means that we can watch her especially closely, helping her track and manage her commerce as she tries to make it grow. We can also work closely with her boy, who seems very much motivated to make up for his lapse.

So Lucienne’s battle is far from over. Only time will tell whether it is one we can help her win.

Jasmine isn’t from Bwapen, the isolated corner of Opyèg where she now lives. She’s from Delmas, the densely populated residential city just north of downtown Port au Prince. That’s also where she met the man who is father to her two young kids. “We wanted to have children, but he wanted to have them in the countryside, so he brought me here.”

They build a small shack on his uncle’s land, and started a new life. Jasmine learned to farm. “They taught me how they plant beans, how they weed.” She would earn a dollar or so now and again for a day of labor in her neighbors’ fields. She would also wash their clothes or their dishes and get paid in food that she could share with the children. The father returned to Port au Prince to try to earn a living, initially travelling back and forth between Opyèg and the capital. Slowly Jasmine saw less and less of him, and when he would come he’d have less money for his family. By the time Jasmine joined CLM in August 2011, he had stopped coming or sending money at all. She was abandoned.

On entering the program, the first challenge that she and her case manager, Litelton, faced was to find a way for her to build a home. The uncle had been willing to let her continue to live with her children in a straw shack, but when they asked him to sign the small corner of land over to her so that she could build a more permanent shelter, he refused.

This was a significant barrier. CLM helps members build new homes. For us, it’s a matter of both health and security. Without a good tin roof over their heads, families are vulnerable to heavy rains. Without a door that they can close and lock, they cannot securely store either the merchandise or the cash that their small commerce requires. But we don’t build homes for CLM families. We think it’s critical that they do their part. We provide roofing material and nails, and we pay builders, both the one who puts up the frame and the roof and the one who builds the walls. But members must find a piece of land and provide the necessary lumber, rocks, dirt, and water.

Every part of this was going to be hard for Jasmine. She had no land to build on, but also nowhere to cut lumber for posts and planks. And her assets were growing too slowly to help her purchase what she would need.

Litelton would have to help her figure something special out, and that’s what he did. He started talking with her neighbors about Jasmine’s plight, working to convince them that they should help her out. They began to feel ashamed that a stranger was living so miserably in their midst. One family stepped forward. They would sell Jasmine a small plot of land at a very much reduced price. The land they were offering was right next to the home of another CLM member, so moving to it would also help Jasmine reduce her isolation. It seemed like a good idea.

Litelton got the landowner to lower the price even more by talking to the uncle, making him feel how shameful it would be if Jasmine, mother to his niece and nephew, had to move away. This set off a bidding war between two landowners that eventually got the price down to 4000 gourds, or about $100.

Now, Litelton just had to help her come up with that money. First, he went to the carpenter who would be building the house. We would normally have paid him 1000 gourds. Litelton had already hired him to build several members’ homes. He explained the situation to him, and asked him to build this one additional house for nothing, and the man agreed. Then, he talked to Jasmine and the CLM member who would be her new neighbor and got them to agree to building one latrine for both households. The 1000 gourds that would have gone to a builder for Jasmine’s latrine could go towards paying for her land instead as well.

Litelton was halfway towards his goal. He and a colleague then contributed another 1000 gourds each out of their own pockets, and the land belonged to Jasmine. He got the lumber by motivating a group of neighborhood teenagers to carry planks and support posts to the construction site. Jasmine earned the money to purchase a front door herself, by working in the kitchen for three days during a CLM training session.

So she and her children have a nice, one-room house. But helping her create a steady income is proving to be a more difficult challenge. She originally chose goat rearing and pig rearing as her two enterprises. We gave her two goats, but one of them died. The other is only now pregnant. “I haven’t been lucky with animals.” She and Litelton agreed to postpone her purchase of a pig. She didn’t have the resources to take good care of what would have been a very risky investment due to the prevalence of Teschen disease around where she lives.

But now that she had another CLM member as a neighbor with whom she could exchange childcare, Jasmine started thinking about small commerce. Opyèg is a major rural market, so it seemed like a likely choice. Litelton authorized her to withdraw about 500 gourds from her savings account, and she invested it in used clothing. Within a couple of weeks, the clothing had all been sold, but most of the money was gone as well.

Apparently, Jasmine wasn’t good at bargaining. She buys too high and sells too low. The used clothing business is especially dependent on good bargaining skills because very little about the pricing is fixed. So, she and Litelton agreed that they had to make a new start. She still had 2900 gourds of savings from her six months of stipends and 2000 gourds that would have been used to buy a pig to work with. She had invested that money in beans, but had been able to harvest it at a small profit, and it was now available for a new investment.

Here’s their plan. They will take one thousand gourds and buy a new commerce. They’ll make a point of buying merchandise that requires little bargaining. They’re thinking of rum or kerosene, whose prices tend to be fixed. They’ll also use a thousand gourds to buy a very young pig. It will be risky, but could be very profitable if it works. That leaves her 2900 gourds, and they plan to use it to buy a pack animal. This will permit Jasmine to earn money both at Opyèg, but at the other very different markets in other parts of the region.

We don’t know yet whether the plan will work. Our record of success suggests that Jasmine’s chances are very good, but each case is a new case, and there are no guarantees. Jasmine’s example illustrates clearly how important an enterprising and devoted case manager can be for the families that are most needy. Without Litelton’s commitment and his smarts, Jasmine could never have come as far as she has so far.