Mersila has only seven of her children with her now. Her oldest daughter is married and living in Port au Prince, and she took one of her younger sisters to live with her this year to help her with her own child. Mersila lives in Viyèt, a small rural community north of central Boukankare.

Thanks to a gift from an Irish organization called Bothar, she was one of twenty CLM members who received a cow as one of her productive assets. Normally, a cow would be more expensive than anything our program could offer. The cows went to women in Boukankare with large families.

“I was very excited when I heard I’d get the cow, even though my neighbors tried to talk me out of taking it. They said all kinds of things to discourage me —
that it was sent by the devil, all sorts of things. I guess they’re jealous. Even just the other day, someone from up on the mountain said that they heard a rumor that my cow had said that I should stop milking her, that I should leave the milk for her calf. Imagine a cow talking like that. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Bothar members received a cow and two goats as their enterprises, but that left them with a problem: Neither of the two were likely to generate much income by the time their weekly stipends end after six months in the program. That means that, without some good planning, they risk stepping backward at the six months while they wait for their animals to produce. Even if that reverse is temporary, we can’t accept it because it means, in practical terms, that the families will go hungry.

Like many of the Bothar members, Mersila hoped to use savings from her CLM cash stipend to start a small business, but it didn’t work out that way. She needed most of those savings to build her new house. We provide roofing material, nails, some cement, and money to pay skilled labor, but our members have to come up with rock, sand, and lumber. Ironically, it is the poorest among them that have to buy the lumber because they have no land to take it from. Buying the lumber consumed what she had set aside to start her commerce.

We had expected that Bothar members would sell milk to generate income early, but most haven’t. They are so anxious to care for their calf that they don’t want to take milk they think it might need, even though our livestock expert tells them regularly that the mothers need to be milked while nursing to stay healthy. If they take a little bit of milk, they just give it to their own kids.

So Mersila’s main ways of keeping food on the table are her husband’s farming and the charcoal that they make.

They were especially excited when her cow finally had a calf. It happened about three weeks ago. The calf is a small male, and she’s determined to take good care of it. She hopes that she’ll be able to sell it, once it’s weaned, for another female. With two females, she’ll be able to earn more money.

“I have so many children to send to school, and it would be much better for them if we could live closer to the main road. I hope I’ll eventually be able to sell a calf or two to buy a nice piece of land down the hill.”

Rose

My name is Rose Marthe. I live with my husband, our five children, and my younger sister in Wòch Djèp, a neighborhood on a mountain ridge north of Boukankare. I’ve been a member of CLM since last December, and my family has been making progress. We have five goats and a pig, and a house with a tin roof. We don’t worry about rain any more. We even have a latrine. I’ve been buying turkeys and chicken with all the money I can save, too.

Things were going really well until I came down with cholera. I never thought it would happen to me. My case manager, Martinière, taught me and my family how to protect ourselves. We talked about cholera every Wednesday, when he visited us. We treat all our water, and we always wash our hands. But I guess I was careless about drinking water at others’ homes.

I started to feel sick, and started vomiting early in the day. I had diarrhea, too. Our 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 our home, but my husband and our neighbors carried me to a private center in Zaboka, instead. It’s no closer, and it’s expensive, but my husband is from Zaboka, and he wanted me to be near family. He would need to stay with our kids, but didn’t want me to be at the clinic by myself.

I’m fine now. It cost us about 1250 gourds, and that’s a lot of money for us. Martinière helped us with a little money, and I had some money, too, because I kept setting a little bit aside from my CLM allowance without telling Martinière about it. Between that and the sale of our latest crop of beans, we’ll be all right. We’re still managing to send our kids to school this year. None have ever gone before.

I’ll be more careful now. I was lucky.

Jonise doesn’t know how old she is. When I asked her, she said she was 24, but the neighbor she now lives with, a woman who must be in her mid-30s, said that it just could not be true. She named another young woman whom they both know and whom Jonise was born after, and said that she knew that woman to be 21. She told me that Jonise must be something like 18 or 20 years old. Here she is with her case manager, Benson.

She doesn’t know how old her children are either, but her neighbor said that her son is about five, and her daughter about three.

Jonise is by no means a typical CLM member, if there is such a person. When I refer to her “neighbor,” I’m stretching the word. The woman is actually a fellow CLM-member who decided to take Jonise in, to give her a temporary home. Jonise’s own situation was difficult. She had been living with her children’s father, in a house on his mother’s land, when he decided he’d had enough of her. He threw her out. Her neighbor became fond of her while they were in enterprise training together, and when she saw her out in the street, she invited her into her home. That helped Jonise a lot. Jonise has a cousin who has since made a small piece of land available, and now her children’s father is building her a little shack to live in. The day I saw her, she was excited because he had finally agreed to give her their two kids.

Jonise and Benson will have a lot of work to do, because Jonise is going to have a hard time developing ways to support herself. In Creole, they say “li pa konn lajan,” or “she doesn’t know money.” Typically, that can refer to two different cases, either to someone who can’t do the simple math required to make change or to someone who cannot distinguish between bills of different denominations.

We know that Jonise has the first problem. We’ll know next week whether she has the second as well. Benson is using little stones to try to teach her subtraction. We don’t yet know wheter she’ll make progress or how long it will take. Next week, he will give her the 300-gourd food stipend in a combination of 50- and 100-gourd notes. I’ve asked him to spend some extra time with her studying the differences between the two bills if she has trouble.

Not every new member seems likely to have such a hard, hard time. Some take to CLM like fish take to water, showing energy and discipline that were always apparently inside them, just waiting for a chance to get to work. Gladys is a little like that.

She’s a 19-year-old mother of two girls, ages five and two. She can read and write some. She was in the third grade when she got pregnant, and her parents never sent her back to school, but she seems to have remembered a lot of what she learned. That’s her in the picture above, with her three new goats.

Her case manager is Titon, and she promises to make his work relatively easy. When she finished her training in goat rearing, she built a little shed for her goats right away. It’s not a typical part of Haitian husbandry, but it protects them from rain, which can seriously affect a goat’s health and productivity, so we try to insist that each of our members build one. Some resist us. It seems so unnecessary to them. But not to Gladys.

As a reward, we made sure she was one of the first to get goats when we started distributing them in Bay Tourib. We hope it will help her and her fellow CLM members stay focused on getting things done right.

Jonise and Gladys do not have much in common except for the town they live in and the unhappy, life-changing fact that they had children when they were very, very young. Our CLM team is now doing what we can to give each of them a chance to move on with their lives. They present us with very different and, at least apparently, very unequal challenges. But to sustain the remarkable level of success we’ve enjoyed so far, we’ll have to find effective ways to work with each.

The strategy at the heart of our program is to enable extremely poor families to develop reliable incomes by training them to manage assets, and then giving them the assets they need to get started. In practice, this means we give them two or three female goats, a young female pig, a combination of barnyard fowl, or 1500 gourds’ worth of merchandise — between $35 and $40 — small commerce. Whatever they choose. Ideally, the eighteen months we spend with them should begin the moment they receive their assets, because before that moment, there’s little progress they can make.

But the reality is more difficult than the theory. For the group of 350 new members in Bay Tourib and the corner of Boukankare north of Mannwa, the reality means buying over 750 young, fertile female goats, just to take one example. Though I dream of ordering them for two-day home delivery on Amazon.com, that’s not how it works. It takes time and a lot of effort to get these assets into members’ hands, which means that the time they have to develop their assets is actually less than eighteen months. It is, perhaps, the single factor that most seriously threatens our continuing to achieve the 96% success rate we had before scale-up.

We can buy some of the assets locally. There are three markets where livestock is available within a two-hour hike of our base in Bay Tourib proper. The largest is Regalis, just over the border in Ench. The closest is in Koray, only a short walk down the main road from Bay Tourib. And the third is on the Boukankare side of the border in Nan Mango, which is especially close to the fifty or sixty southernmost families in this new group. Each market is a weekly event, and we can probably count on buying fifteen to twenty goats at each of them any time we go.

But that’s only about fifty or sixty goats per week, and the math is easy enough. 750 goats, divided by fifty or sixty per week, is too much time.

So we have to go to the larger markets, farther from the area we are serving. Our most successful buys have been in Opoto, a large rural market just north of Gonaïves, and Gwomòn, a major town on the road that leads from Gonaïves to Port de Paix, a city on the northern coast. We have been able to buy over 150 goats in a single trip by hitting those two markets on the same day. Big purchases like that can speed things up considerably. If we make those trips alongside, rather than instead of, the visits to local markets, and hit a couple of medium-sized regional markets as well, we should be able to get the goats we need within a few weeks, or a month at the most.

But it’s not quite that simple, either. The big purchases at larger, more distant markets present problems of their own. Getting the goats we buy to our members and ensuring that they are in good health when we do is hard. We have only two trucks, a pick-up and a small flatbed. The flatbed is two-wheel drive, so it can’t get anywhere near Bay Tourib. The pick-up can’t hold more that fifteen goats. So the important problem with these big buys is the challenge of coordinating delivery: getting the goats somewhere where our members can meet us and letting our members know that their goats are on the way. Our members don’t have phones, and there are few who have a cellphone signal where they live.

But that’s only a nuisance. What’s more important is that the roads we use to get where we need to go are in terrible shape, so whatever vehicle we use is certain to give the goats a less-than-comfortable ride. Some of the goats we buy at the more distant markets will die on route. That’s money wasted. The ones who do make it will be weaker, slower to mature sexually, and more prone to miscarriages than the locally purchased goats. And this directly impacts our members’ progress out of extreme poverty.

Monday we purchased the first goats for members in Bay Tourib. A professional buyer went to Regalis for us, and came back with seventeen very good-looking young females. Two or three were pregnant already. We distributed them late that evening to members who live especially close to the base. By the time I left bay Tourib Thursday morning, he had purchased fourteen more for distribution this weekend. We will be at two regional markets this week, and at the Gonaïves markets next week. So things are underway.

The work of CLM is not simply about making poor people wealthier. It can’t be. Helping extremely poor people transform themselves economically is, of course, at the center of what we do, but to emphasize economic transformation would damn the process to failure, at least for many of our members.

We need to help our members transform themselves socially and psychologically as well. We need to help them change who they are. Because although some of them are more or less success stories waiting to happen, women whom easily-changeable circumstances or unfortunate events have kept extremely poor, there are others for whom poverty is an apparent destiny, women whose situation within their community or whose own behaviors and attitudes seem to lock them where they are.

These are the women we must focus on as we head into the second half of our 18-month journey. We know from experience that many of them can and will change their apparent destinies, but it won’t be easy.

One of the most extreme examples among our current group of members is Jean Manie. I’ve written about her before, though I called her “Eileen.” (See: MeetEileen.) She grew up living in domestic servitude in Mousa’s home. He’s a relatively wealthy farmer in Chimowo, near central Boukankare. Jean Manie’s mentality and her social situation are combining to block the economic progress she needs to make to change her life, and it is not yet clear what we can do to change that.

There has been one important and positive change in her life. Her boy Patrice, who had been living with her family in another part of Boukankare, has been with her for months. He was even able to start school last year. At eight he was only a couple of years late. And though he missed the first several months of the school year because he wasn’t yet with his mother, he was able to pass and is ready now for second grade.

But right now, that is about the only good news in Jean Manie’s story. When I arrived yesterday with her case manager, Alancia, for her weekly visit, Jean Manie wasn’t even home. She was off working in Mousa’s fields.

This is a big deal. We really insist that our members be present for these weekly meetings. We know that they need our advice and encouragement, and these weekly visits are our best way to ensure they get it. The visits are the foundation our approach is built upon.

But her mere absence wasn’t the worst of it. We found Patrice there, getting ready to go help his mother work in the fields for Mousa, and told him to show us her animals. They are in terrible shape. Her sow just lost an entire litter of five piglets. The sow itself was miserable, unable to stand and unreactive to our presence. It appeared near death. Patrice brought his mother’s two ragged goats out to us from the savanna where he had tied them to feed. Both have had miscarriages since we gave them to her, and neither is pregnant again yet. Jean Manie is not taking good care of her animals, and she’s approaching a level of failure from which she will not recover.

And it’s not just the animals, either. The other members whom Alancia serves are well on their way to having nice new houses to live in. Those houses may be small, but they have good tin roofs, and can keep their families dry in heavy rains. Jean Manie is not yet at square one. She doesn’t even have a place to build it yet.

Mousa said long ago that he would give her a little space, but that’s not a good idea. She is a servant in his household and will remain one as long as she is on his land. That is what we believe, and that is what members of their community, who have spoken to her case manager, have said that they believe as well. They have told us several times that if she builds a house on his land he will always view the house as his.

But it isn’t clear what her alternative is. She could go back to the part of Boukankare that her family comes from, but she says that she has nothing there. She can’t accumulate the resources she’d need to buy or lease a small plot of land because she can’t care for her animals. She’s too busy working for Mousa to even try. And her animals are her only hope. She can’t do commerce because she can’t do even the simple arithmetic that making change requires.

But the most tenacious impediment to Jean Manie’s success is her attitude. Her response to any proposition that you make is that she can’t. She has a servant’s mentality, a sense of beholden-ness to Mousa and his wife that puts their interests first. She doesn’t seem to imagine herself as someone who could live a different way.

The relationship between her living situation and her mentality may be something like a chicken and an egg. Growing up as a servant may have made her passive, accustomed to always having someone else to decide. It may have robbed her of the tendency to plan on her own behalf or to think on her own. And the demands that Mousa and his wife make may have created or may at least encouraged that mentality. Is he giving her so much work that she cannot take care of her animals? We have heard that she’s had boyfriends, but that they’ve given her up when Mousa started to treat them as unpaid farmhands too.

But chicken-egg questions are unanswerable. Proverbially so. We tend to put them aside almost as soon as they are raised. They can be interesting, but not much more.

We cannot know whether there is a way to transform Jean Manie’s situation, but we must assume there is. To dismiss her life as a destiny, or as a cycle we can’t break, would be to condemn both her and probably Patrice to servitude for life.

After something like three months spent selecting new CLM members in Tomonn and Boukankare, we are finally beginning to offer them the services they need. Friday, I was in an area of Boukankare called “Laplenn,” meeting with new members.

Until now, the limit of my territory in north-central Boukancare had been Mannwa and Balandri, two high mountain ridges that overlook the more populous southern part of the county. But they also overlook a secluded valley behind them. That valley is sprinkled with neighborhoods, but Laplenn is its overall name. It means “the plain,” though there’s not much about the terrain that deserves that name. Steep but low ridges crisscross it thoroughly.

Getting to the area is a real nuisance. Hiking up Mannwa and then back down into the region is long and hard, and it leaves you with the unfortunate necessity of hiking back up the steep hill to Mannwa at the end of a hot day. Instead we went through Balandri. That allows you to bring your motorcycle quite close to the area, but only by driving up the aptly named “Mòn Dega.” “Dega” means “damage,” and the road is hard enough to manage that it feels as though it could do you harm at any time. It’s steep, narrow, and winding. But what’s worse is that it’s covered with loose rocks. All you can do going up is put the motorcycle into first gear, give it gas when you hit big rocks, and try not to let it get out of your hands. I haven’t figured out the best way to go down yet. Fear of falling as I roll down the hill presents more danger than the hill itself does, but I haven’t been able to conquer that fear just yet.

Things seemed much easier for Wesly, the case manager whom I accompanied. He’s experienced on a motorcycle, and experienced as a case manager as well. In June he graduated a group of 50 members in Sodo, near where he lives. He’s now starting with his second group.

The first week we work with new families, we do not visit them in their homes. Instead, we meet with them by neighborhoods. Wesly had invited all 15 of the women from Laplenn who have been assigned to him to meet at one member’s centrally located home.

At this first meeting, they accomplish a couple of different things. First, they establish what his weekly schedule with them will be. Wesly had planned, for example, to visit Laplenn every Wednesday, but the women told him that Wednesday wouldn’t work well because it is the local market day. So they set Thursday instead, and then determined the order he would see them in. Second, they meet their case manager. Though they had already seen and worked with Wesly during their six days of enterprise training, they had not known that he would be their case manager. At the training, they had worked with other case managers as well. On Friday, they learned that they’d be working with Wesly, and he gave them an initial talk about his hopes and expectations, a pep talk. Finally, they learn about their weekly food stipend. We give CLM members 300 gourds per week during the first six months of the program. That’s about $7.50. Wesly gave them their first installment at the end of the meeting.

Wesly’s going to have his work cut out for him this cycle, and it’s not only because he drew especially challenging terrain. There are women in the Laplenn group who probably have a tough road ahead of them.

I say “women,” though in the case of the member who struck me most, that seems a stretch. I saw a very young-looking girl at the meeting and assumed that either she had come with her mother or that her mother had sent her in her place. I did not want to imagine that a girl so young could have qualified for the program. After all, for us to have selected her, she would have to have a child, and she only looked to be twelve or thirteen years old herself. I was startled to hear that she was a new CLM member nonetheless.

Her name is Louneda, and it turned out that we hadn’t selected her. She has no children. We had selected her mother. But the mother died giving birth to twins just a few weeks ago, leaving a 17-year-old boy to fend for his four younger sisters and the twins, who survived. The father lives with another woman and does not support his kids. Their situation seemed dire, so we took Louneda, the oldest surviving girl — there had been an older sister, but she died several years ago — into the program and told the brother, the family’s de facto adult, that he’d need to give her his support.

His name is Fanfan, and the two of us talked while Wesly met with Louneda and the other members. Fanfan’s the one who explained to me how his mother died. When I asked about the twins, he told me in an apologetic tone that he had carried them across the mountains to the central Partners in Health hospital, which is just a couple of hours away on foot. He said he had to give them away because he had no idea how to take care of them. I tried to assure him that I understood, though “understood” is surely the wrong word. I cannot remotely imagine standing Fanfan’s shoes.

His biggest concern right now, he said, is school. He explained that he knows he won’t be able to go to school any more. He has to take care of his sisters. What’s really troubling him right now is that he doesn’t see how he’ll be able to send the girls to school this year, either. There’s a community school only about a half-hour away on foot, and it’s not terribly expensive, but it’s hard enough for him to keep his sisters fed. His one source of income is working in his neighbors’ fields for the dollar or so a day that farm work pays. Scraping together the $20 or $30 tuition for the coming year is more than he can do.

He and Louneda will have a hard time. But if they manage the assets we give them well, they should be able to steer their household towards a better future. Doing so will, however, require them to think like adults. Fanfan makes a good first impression. I haven’t spoken to Louneda yet. At the meeting she seemed terribly shy. Helping them make this too-early transition to adulthood will be Wesly’s challenge. I’m glad they have experience on their side.

To date, CLM has been astonishingly effective. Its job, to help the poorest of the poor permanently improve their lives, would be hard enough under any circumstances. But in Haiti, everything is harder. Problems ranging from the broken or nonexistent infrastructure to the frequency of disasters of all sorts combine to make challenges more challenging and problems harder to solve.

And despite it all, the program’s success rate has been 96%. That is to say, 96% of the ultra poor families that have passed through CLM end up with multiple dependable income sources, assets to insure them should troubles arise, reasonably good health, and a plan to move ahead. Their children eat regularly and go to school.

We have to be honest: We don’t know yet how our dramatic scale-up will affect our success rate. We moved from handling less than two hundred women at a time to ten times that. A number of aspects of the program have gotten even harder as we’ve grown. But we do not expect a significant drop off. We can’t afford one. The cost would be too great. A family whom will fail will continue to face hunger and misery without any concrete hope that their lives could still somehow change. We can’t accept that.

At the same time, as effective as the program has been, it is not uniformly effective. Not in the strict sense. Different women move forward at different speeds. Some take to CLM as though they had been waiting for it all their lives. They jump right in and quickly convert their new assets and their increased know-how into better lives for their children and themselves. Some of them have what seem like intellectual or developmental issues that are severe enough to get in their way. Others seem rigidly resistant to change. It’s not as though they are accustomed to comfortable lives. On the contrary, their lives are terribly hard, filled with persistent hunger, sickness, and suffering of all sorts. But they are resistant to change even though it’s pretty clearly for the better. Or at least it seems pretty clearly better to us.

The international movement of programs like CLM distinguishes between fast and slow “climbers.” I suppose we like to look as the movement out of extreme poverty as an ascent. One thing is certain: the more we know about the characteristics that distinguish fast climbers from slow climbers, the more we can adapt our techniques so that we continue to succeed with almost every family we serve. Staff members who have been with the program for a few years have a lot of stories they can share about the women who made their jobs relatively easy and those who made their jobs hard. But we haven’t really collected our team’s judgments in any organized way. Until now.

For the last couple of months we have been trying to learn some things about how some members, and not others, succeed so well. We’ve been looking at the progress hundreds of new members have made up to the six-month point. We’ve had an Irish intern working closely with some of our case managers to create a simple survey to distinguish fast from slow. And we’ve asked other case managers to categorize each of the members they serve as fast, slow, or something in between.

Now, when you ask case managers which members are fast and which are slow, their first reaction is to ask what criteria they should judge them by. But this very reasonable question misses the point. We don’t yet have the criteria. Appropriate, predictive criteria are what we seek. So the case managers have to work in a manner that seems backwards. They categorize each member first, and then try to define what makes them view the member the way they do. We hope these observations will give us the information that we need.

A lot of what they conclude is predictable. Many fast climbers, for example, have spouses who collaborate with them closely. Many of them take quickly to the social messages that CLM offers: For example, they starting keeping themselves, their children, and their houses clean. They tend to make plans that guide them. Slow climbers lack a steady partner’s support. They lack initiative. They don’t seem very motivated to change.

But even if such conclusions are unsurprising, they’re still useful. We decided to spend more time and energy getting husbands to buy into the program. That might really make a difference.

The case managers’ notes are filled with interesting details.

Here’s what Martinière, a case manager, says about Oclanie, a fast climber: “She keeps her children clean, and she’s learned to write her name. She’s pregnant again, but her husband helps her a lot with her assets. She’ll be able to take care of her husband and kids. Since I started weekly visits, I’ve never shown up to find that her kids hadn’t eaten unless the pot’s still on the stove. When the weekly food stipend ran out, she took the money from her savings account and bought three goats, which she sold right away at a profit.”

Another, Bonissant, says this about Julienne Pierre: “Julienne was a true CLM. She has nine children and had no assets to speak of. Now she has 29,000 gourds worth of animals, including poultry, goats, a pig, and a cow. Her nine kids will be in school in October. She’s learned to write her name and the numbers from one through ten. She’s making quick progress because her husband works hard with her and she really likes both commerce and farming. She’s a fast climber.”

But here’s what he says about Alourdes: “Her social situation is not good. Her home is always dirty. She still can’t write her name even though we’ve been working hard at it. She’s //egare//. She doesn’t know money. Her husband has to keep track of any money that comes her way.” (This requires explanation. “Egare” can mean anything from confused to scatter-brained. “Not knowing money,” means that she can’t identify the denominations of different bills.) Bonissant continues: “She’s progressing very slowly because she lacks good sense.”

Helping women like Oclanie and Julienne is almost easy. They certainly needed us. But they were positioned from the start to take advantage of what we can provide.

Bonissant has his work cut out for him to make Alourdes succeed. He’s already counting on her husband, which is a little bit risky, and he’s getting help from other CLM members that live nearby. Just recently Alourdes went to market with a sack of charcoal for sale, but another member, who also had charcoal, went with her, and made sure they both got the right price.

Alourdes is not our only hard case. Working around the special difficulties she and other women like her present is the key to keeping our success story alive.

Zaboka has a very different look these days. It’s the main town in Deniza, the eastern side of Tit Montay, the hard-to-access region on the northwestern corner of Boucan Carré. Zaboka is one of the areas where our activities are most concentrated. There are almost sixty CLM members living in close proximity to one another in and around the village.

One of the things that first struck us about Tit Montayn when we started working there was the poor quality of the housing stock. Not just future CLM members, but even some of their wealthier neighbors were living in structures that barely deserved to be called “shacks.”

Often, homes were nothing more than two walls of pressed corn stalks, set to lean against each other. There might be a couple of large, fibrous palm pods folded across the top to help keep the rain out. The triangular back of the house would be made of more corn stalks. More sophisticated homes had walls of woven sticks, covered with dried mud. Palm pods and straw were the standard roofing materials. We regularly heard from women who told us that they would take their children out from under the roof when it rained in order to seek such shelter as they could find under nearby trees. Their homes simply didn’t protect them.

But now the 59 CLM members in Zaboka all have small but solid homes, with good tin roofs. On a sunny day, these roofs shine brightly on all sides, like little mirrors, sparkling in the sunlight along Zaboka’s various steep hills.

The centerpiece to the CLM approach to poverty alleviation is the effort we make to help our members develop reliable income-generating activities. We know that, unless they can earn regular income, they will not be able to address their children’s persistent, health-threatening hunger or to send their children to school. As I often say to groups of our members the first time I speak to them: Every family has problems, but families that have money coming in every day have ways to solve many of those problems. So we provide enterprise training in our members’ choice of two income-generating activities, and we give them both the assets they need to get their businesses started and the ongoing coaching they need to succeed.

But we also know that their businesses will not succeed unless they can stay healthy themselves and keep their children healthy as well. A woman cannot make a steady income if she can’t work, and she won’t be able to work if she is sick herself or is busy taking care of a sick child.

So we also work hard to help our members protect their families’ health. We make sure they have access to free health care at any of the Partners in Health clinics in the region. We provide them with lots of training about health-maintenance and good nutritional practices. We teach them about safe drinking water and ensure that they have everything they need to guarantee that their families’ drinking water is clean. We help them install latrines in their yards. And we help them construct a room that gives them a dry, protected place to sleep.

We have to be careful about this. We never tell our members that we will help them build a house. We can’t afford for them to have an exaggerated sense of what we can do for them. Building a house can be an expensive undertaking. Even CLM members can tend to have dreams much bigger than anything we can satisfy. What we do is very limited: We provide them with enough tin roofing material, nails, and cement to make the roof and the floor of a three-meter square room. If members live somewhere that cement delivery is especially hard, they can take extra roofing material to make a larger house instead of the cement. We also pay the builder who constructs the walls and another who puts on the roof. The members need to scrounge up the support poles and the other lumber that they need, and to provide rocks and sand.

It’s an approach that is hard to implement for lots of reasons. It can be hard to get building materials, even the easier to transport ones, where we need them. Members who don’t own their own land can have a hard time finding a piece of land that someone will allow them to build on or finding the lumber they need to build with.

But the members themselves can also create difficulties. Many of them want much more of a house than we can offer. In Haiti, where mortgage financing is rare, building a house can take years. A family will save up to buy materials sufficient to take one step in the construction process, but then put the process on hold until they’ve accumulated more savings. The version we face in CLM is that members can be unsatisfied with nine square feet, or even with the larger home they can build if they convert their cement into tin roofing. They’ll want to start construction of something much larger, something that they’ll have no hope of completing anytime soon. That might be ok for those who already have a safe place to live, but for CLM members it means remaining in structures that fail to provide even minimal protection from the elements.

Case managers have to argue with the members, convincing them to make the best of what we offer right away, and dream of something greater down the line. It’s not always easy. But in Zaboka, and in almost all the areas where we currently work, it’s a battle we’ve successfully waged. The houses our up, and we’re moving to other challenges.

Saliciane and her Case Manager, Alancia

Saliciane has been a member of Fonkoze’s CLM program since her family was selected in December. Until very recently, she and her husband lived with their children in a small shack in a little valley just off the nearest road in Viyèt, a neighborhood between the center of Boukankare and the mountains to the north. Viyèt has been a fertile territory for CLM, filled with the kind of desperate poverty the program designed to address.

With eleven children, Saliciane’s situation was especially hard. Though they don’t all live with her, many of them do. “Our house is so small. The kids are with me during the day, but every night they scatter to neighbors’ houses to find someplace to sleep.”

Thanks to Bothar, the CLM program was able to offer Saliciane something special: a cow. Cows are much more valuable than the assets that CLM usually offers, but twenty especially large families were selected to receive them from Bothar.

When Saliciane received hers back in January, she was really excited. “I’ve never had a cow before,” she explains, “because I had no money to buy one.” Her friends and neighbors had mixed reactions. “They didn’t really believe that someone would give me a cow. Some of them would keep trying to tell me that something was wrong, that it was the devil’s work. Some people encourage you and some try to discourage you. But my family was really happy.”

Saliciane received more than just the cow. CLM members always receive two different kinds of assets, and Saliciane chose goats to go with her cow. But her choice of two different kinds of livestock left her with a problem: Neither would earn her money right away, so neither would help her feed her large family in the short term. Though she would receive a small weekly food stipend for the first six months of the program, it wouldn’t go very far. It’s only about a dollar per day. Many CLM members use savings from these stipends to buy more assets or to invest in establishing a small commerce. But with all the mouths she had to feed, Saliciane had nothing left over.

But she figured out a solution: she borrowed 1000 gourds from a cousin and started a charcoal business. She buys the charcoal in the mountains above Viyèt, from the people who make it. Then she carries sacks of it down the mountain on her head, and sells it by the sack in the markets in Difayi and Domon. “Before I joined CLM,” she explained, “no one wanted to help me. No one would lend me money. Now that people see what CLM is doing for me, they look at me differently. I have a cow and some goats. I am somebody. People are happy to lend a hand.” The profit she’s making will ensure that her children continue to eat decently even after the weekly cash stipend runs out in June.

She still has problems. One is with the cow itself. It still isn’t pregnant. If it still isn’t at the end of this month, Lissage, the sector specialist for livestock, will sell it for Saliciane and replace it with another. CLM members’ assets have to produce. But Saliciane is optimistic, and she’s already making plans. “Once the cow has a calf, I can sell the calf to buy the land that my little house is on. Right now, it’s not mine.”

But her optimism about the program and the future it offers her children was badly damaged a couple of weeks ago. Her husband died very suddenly. It’s not clear just how. There are no autopsies in Viyèt. The funeral was very expensive. Two of her little boys sold their goats to buy a sack of cement for the tomb, but most of the money for the coffin and the food to serve at the wake was borrowed.

The very progress she had made in her neighbors’ eyes created a financial trap. Whereas previously they might have helped her bury her husband as quickly and as cheaply as possible, her improved status created expectations. They convinced her to buy and expensive coffin, even though she had to buy it with credit. They made her feel as though she needed to provide lots of food and drink to those who came to the wake, even though she didn’t have the cash to buy much of anything. And now Saliciane has no idea yet how she will pay it back.

But her problems are, of course, much deeper than merely the expenses she was not prepared to make. This is true, even if we we only look at the economic side of her loss. “I feel like my arms and legs have been broken,” she told us. “He was the one who worked in the fields. He was the one who took care of our animals. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

She will have to pull herself together. Her children depend on her. And CLM will be there with her. We aren’t yet sure just how extensive our extra help will be. But we will surely give her a hand.

With one of her boys and her late husband, together with their cow

The following is taken from an interview a did while selecting new members of CLM in Tomonn. There are about 40 Haitian gourds to the Dollar.

“My name is Madan Canot I must be 50 or 55 years old. Canot and I live with our youngest daughter in a two-room house that overlooks Bay Tourib, in the mountains above Tomonn.

“I had nine children, four with my first husband and five with Canot, but only four are left. The others all died.

“The hardest to lose was my oldest boy. Canot has been unable to work almost since I met him, over twenty years ago. But my boy always did his best for me. When he saw that his stepfather and I were stuck living in a cornstalk lean-to, he saved his money and bought me a little house. He even began paying to send his little sister to school. Then he told me he was moving to Pòtoprens to find work so that he could really support me. I never heard from him after that. Next thing I knew, someone told me that he was dead. I sold my last farmland to pay for his funeral.

“Without him, and with a husband who can’t work, things are really hard. I go out in the mornings and work in other people’s fields. I can earn 25 or 35 gourds for a half-day’s work. That’s what we live on. Or that and what we can make out of gifts our neighbors give us. Sometimes someone gives us some money or a cup or two of food. Last month, the local peasant association gave me beans to plant in the little plot behind my house. If the harvest is good, I’ll be able to sell some.

“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.”