As we start our weekly visits with our new CLM members, we begin to face new issues. Each member has a story. Each faces her own set of difficulties. Our case managers’ first challenge is to get the members to share the problems they face, to talk about them frankly. That’s when our real work begins. Helping extremely poor women begin to strategize about their lives, helping them to look at their lives as something they can change, is the key to everything we do.

Licia lives in Chipen, in the corner of Tit Montay farthest from our base in Zaboka. Her home is high on a ridge that divides Boukankare from Ench, one of its neighbors to the north. The hike up to Zaboka from Viyèt, where we leave our motorcycles, is already almost four hours. Our team makes that trip every Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning, Martinière leaves early from Zaboka to walk to Chipen, almost two and a half hours away through the hills. He is Licia’s case manager, and he starts with her first, because she is the farthest of all. Then he works his way back downhill towards the lower end of Chipen before he hikes back to Zaboka.

When we got to Licia’s house, she announced that she was leaving the program. Martinière asked her why, and what she said shocked us. She’s cursed. The people around her hate her and will block her. Nothing can change her life.

By way of explanation, she told us the following story: For the first six months that CLM members spend in the program, we give them a small cash stipend, just a little more than a dollar per day. It’s designed as a way to protect their new assets. As small as it is, it helps them guarantee that they can feed themselves and their children without selling the animals we give them or reaching too deeply into the commerce they’re trying to build up. Our expectation is that by the time they’ve spent six months in the program, their assets will be earning them enough income to do the work the stipend has been doing.

But many of the women choose to invest these stipends rather than spending them just to buy food. They buy livestock, mostly fowl. It’s not really what the stipends are intended for, but we are so glad to see the women thinking in terms of investment, that we don’t worry too much. We just try to see to it that they have something to feed their kids as well.

Licia decided to buy a turkey. It would be a big investment, but it could pay off handsomely. Turkeys are hardier than chickens, and this is a major consideration this time of year, when many chickens die in the relatively cold weather. Turkeys reproduce well, and are easy to sell for a decent price. So she went to the market in Nansab, in southern Ench, and bought a young female for 600 gourds, or two weeks’ stipend. She had a number of errands to run in the market, so she left her little boy to keep an eye on the turkey, and went her way.

Unfortunately, the little boy was more interested in a soccer match than in his mother’s new turkey. He went off to watch the match, and when his mother returned, the turkey was gone. She looked all over the market for it, but could find no trace. Her investment disappeared the same day she made it. She felt so discouraged by the loss that she decided to leave the program. There was no point in continuing. She was obviously cursed.

Fortunately, she was open to listening. Martinière talked a lot. But the heart of what he said was simple: She should look at the loss as a lesson. Her boy is not mature enough to be left with such a serious responsibility. Haitian’s say “se mèt kò a ki veye kò a.” This means that a body’s owner is the one who should keep an eye on it. Martinière encouraged her to realize that she herself must take responsibility for the decisions she makes and the assets they bring her way. But for her to leave the program right as it is starting would not solve anything. After some discussion, she relented. She will continue with us, maybe a little bit wiser for her loss.

The problem with Léonie is more serious. We are not sure we can keep her in the program because we can’t get her to tell us the truth. I’ve put together her story from evidence we’ve collected from her neighbors, including the local KASEK, the government official who resides in the zone.

Her partner, the father of her youngest child, is married to another woman. Léonie has been living in a small, dilapidated shack made of mud and sticks and covered with straw just a short distance from the man’s fairly nice house. One day, her partner was doing some work for her in her garden when his wife brought him a midday meal. Léonie was furious. She decided to leave him on the spot. So she left the house and went back to live with her mother.

This wouldn’t normally be a problem. It is not unusual for a CLM member to move. They do it from all sorts of reasons, including because they decide to break up with the man they’re with. But her mother lives well across the Boukankare border in Ench. While we plan to enter Ench eventually, we’re not working there yet. If that’s where Léonie lives, we can’t help her right now.

What’s worse, Léonie has been trying to hide what’s she’s doing from us. We know that she comes to the house she used to live in early on Monday morning so that she’ll be there when Martinière comes for his visit. Even if we had no other way of telling, the emptiness of the house and its yard speak volumes. But we’ve spoken to several witnesses as well who confirm that she doesn’t live there and that her children don’t either. She even borrowed a neighbor’s baby, claiming it to be her own, to show Martinière that they are both in the house. Unfortunately for her, Martinière was smart enough to catch her in the lie. For whatever reason, she is conspiring with the man she has left so that she can stay in the program and receive the assets that we offer.

But the situation really is complicated. We’ve heard that she isn’t actually at her mother’s house, either. We’ve heard that she has moved in with another man. The man lives in another area of Tit Montay, an area that we are currently serving. So it would resolve the problem if it turned out to be true. But until we can get her to speak clearly with us, we can’t move forward.

In the meantime, she and her partner are making visits to Chipen difficult for Martinière. They have spread the word that he comes carrying cash for CLM members, having the man’s older children loudly asking him to bring money to them, too. This makes the trip more dangerous than it needs to be.

For now, all I could tell her is that we can’t help her until we feel confident that we understand her situation. Her lies, I said, mean that we need to take more time. We have no choice. We have to put her on hold. Martinière will continue to visit her, but he will provide no stipend and give her no assets.

A third case: Tuesday morning, just after dawn, as the four Zaboka case managers and I were preparing to go our separate ways, an irate man came to see us. He is the partner of a new member from lower Zaboka. He told us the following story.

He has children by his wife, who is not the CLM member. One of his boys has a goat that he asked the CLM member to look after. When the boy risked being sent home from school because of non-payment of the tuition, the man decided he would have to sell the goat. It would be a big sacrifice because the goat was pregnant, but he felt he had no choice.

When he went to the CLM member to retrieve the goat, she refused to give it to him. She said that she had spoken to her case manager, Orweeth, and that he had told her that she could keep the goat and that he would arrange for her to get legal papers. The man said that, if that’s how CLM works, he would wreck the woman in CLM. Orweeth was there with us as the man spoke, and he gave every assurance that he had told the woman nothing of the kind. Orweeth promised to go by to see her at the end of the day.

As I was leaving Zaboka, I went by her home, and the man was there along with a crowd of neighbors. I asked the woman about it, and she denied outright that she had said any such thing. I told her in front of everyone that I did not automatically believe that she would say such a thing, but that since I wasn’t from the neighborhood, I couldn’t tell who was lying and who was telling the truth. But everyone should understand that CLM will be buying her two goats, but would never simply grant her possession of something that’s not hers.

The case is not simple, though. The woman explained that she has been together with the man for years, that they have children together, but that he’s never done anything for her. She pointed to her home, in terrible disrepair, and added that he hasn’t helped with her farming either. She was breaking up with him, but suggested that confiscating the goat was simply a matter of taking something she is owed. Normally she would receive a kid when the goat gives birth as the price of taking care of it for him. She feels understandably cheated. I asked her to talk about the problem with Orweeth when he comes by at the end of the day, and she said she would. An important part of our job is to ensure that our members get what is their right. We have to help them protect themselves from exploitation and abuse. But we have to find ways of doing so that make sense to the communities they live in.

Taking the man’s goat might be the right thing to do, but it will require discussion. That’s part of what we’re there for.

The hike to Zaboka is hard and long — almost four hours — but also lovely. It starts in the hilly farmland above Viyèt, and winds through Boukankola and Akildiso. It then threads a narrow pass alongside a waterfall. After that, it climbs up and down the steep, narrow slopes that cut through Tit Montay. The pictures below were taken next to the waterfall. Martinière Jasmin, whom I photographed, took the picture of me.

Gauthier, the extraordinary person who leads the CLM program, told me I had to write this story. It has to do with a $50 investment I made last week.

When he recruited me into the program, he warned me that I would find myself reaching into my own pocket once in awhile. We deal with people who are, especially when we first meet them, miserably poor. “Miserably” here not just a word. It reflects the fact that they are hungry, sick, unprotected from most of the harms that might come their way, and without the social or financial resources to change their own lives.

The warning was especially true during the verification process, which preceded our enrolling new members into CLM. The process involves visiting homes in which the program is not yet at work. You see the poverty, but you’re not yet doing anything about it. You find yourself arriving in the mid to late afternoon, with children crying because they haven’t eaten all day and have no prospects of getting a meal before going to bed. The mother tells you her story, and you find yourself giving her 50-100 gourds, or a little more than $1-$2, if you have them, so she can buy what she needs to cook a meal for herself and her kids. It doesn’t feel like a very meaningful gesture. The family needs much more than 100 gourds. But it makes you feel a little better because it means they’ll eat that day.

But we’re past verification now. Our comprehensive intervention into members’ lives has begun. So the desire to hand out small change has faded. But things still come up.

I hiked up to Manwa a few weeks ago, needing to talk to some prospective CLM members. Manwa is on the top of a mountain, and the first structure one sees as one crosses over the ridge is a small church. It houses a small community school, which serves local kids, taking them through the third grade.

When I reached the school, I found Jackson standing in front of it, taking in the scene as the schoolchildren played. It must have been recess. He’s the youngest son of a new CLM member, a 16-year-old boy whom I met when I visited his mother’s house during the verification process. I didn’t know the homes I needed to visit in Manwa, and I thought Jackson would, so I asked him whether he’d be my guide. He said he would, so we spent most of the day hiking around together. At the end of the day, I paid him a little bit for his time, and we chatted as we walked back down the hill together. I asked him what he was doing up at the school. It’s a steep, half-hour’s hike from his mother’s house. He said that when he has nothing to do he likes to watch the children in school. To watch them. He’s never been to the school himself. His mother hasn’t been able to afford it.

So when I went back to Manwa to visit our members with their case manager, Martinière, I was looking for Jackson. He was, as usual, at his mother’s house. Martinière and I spoke to her first. She seems really devoted to the boy, just as he seems devoted to her. She wants him in school, and hopes that the goats and pigs she will raise through CLM will enable her to send him next fall. Her other children are older. It’s probably too late for them to start, but in Jackson she has one hope. We told her that she’d need to get ready for next year, but that we wanted to get Jackson started now, before it’s too late, and that we’d pay for it. She agreed.

When we were finished talking with her, we asked Jackson whether he could take us to the school principal’s home. We didn’t tell him why. When we got there, we asked the principal what we would need to do to get Jackson in school right away. Jackson’s draw dropped. As we negotiated and then paid the school fee for the year, Jackson could only watch. We then took him aside and asked a few questions. We needed to know whether he had shoes, socks, underwear, and pants and t-shirts that could be cleaned to look ok. Though he’d eventually need a uniform, that would take some time. The principal was willing to let him come right away, “in civilian clothes” as they say here, but he’d need to look more or less decent anyway.

Jackson had nothing but a ragged pair of shorts and a t-shirt, also ragged. No amount of cleaning would make them presentable. He’d need a whole new wardrobe. So Martinière agreed to meet him at a nearby market, on an off day, so that they could buy everything he’d need.

When we said our goodbyes and headed down the hill, Jackson’s last words were “lendi m pral lekòl.” Or, “I’m going to school Monday.” The matter-of-fact-ness of these words, their expression of a simple, unexpected realization was as striking as the excitement behind them.

If there could have been any doubt about his enthusiasm, it was eliminated the day he met Martinière in the market in Domond. I said that it’s near Manwa, but “near” is a relative word. It’s easily a four-hour hike each way. And Jackson’s lame. He stubbed his toe painfully walking around in his front yard, ripping off a toenail, and limps badly. But he and his mother made that walk and spent an hour in the market with Martinière. Jackson didn’t know how to try on clothes. Martinière told me that it was as if he’d never done it before. At 16, he was trying sneakers on the wrong feet, choosing pants much too large or much too small, picking the first of everything he would see. Maybe he was just afraid that if he took too much time over things, it would all turn out to be unreal. Martinière had to give lots of firm guidance. But they got their shopping done. Jackson even came with a handwritten list of books he’d need. The principal wrote it out for him. They bought those, too. All told, we spent about $50.

So Jackson’s excited. We hope it lasts. He has a tough road ahead of him. As a big and growing teenager, he’ll be sitting in class with kids half his age, kids who are now well ahead of him. He’s got a slight speech impediment due to a significant overbite. He’s surely in for some teasing. Limping to the Domond market and back showed a lot of determination of a certain kind, but the determination to face the small, daily difficulties that will follow is another matter.

In a sense, his situation is emblematic of what our members face as they join our program. They suddenly find that they have access to resources and support that they could hardly have imagined. They have assets to manage, food to eat, and a well-trained advisor to guide them. But their daily struggle to change their lives has just begun.

Jackson and his mother, Manie

Eileen’s parents died before she can remember, so she spent her early years living at an aunt’s house. As she began to come of age, she started to feel as though she was headed down a dead-end street. “Pat gen anyen ki t ap mache la,” she said. That’s like saying that nothing much was going on around her aunt’s house.

So she left her aunt’s and started wandering around the other parts of Boukankare. Eventually, she met Don and his wife, and they took her in. At the time, they were relatively well-to-do farmers. They have a big family now, but at the time only a couple of their oldest children had been born. So Eileen moved in, and started to lend a hand around the house. To a certain degree, it must have seemed beneficial all the way around. Don and his wife gave Eileen her meals and a place to stay, and Eileen did chores around the house. She became unpaid domestic help. Eight years ago, Eileen became pregnant. She gave birth to a little boy. The boy’s father showed no interest in her or him, so they continued to stay with Don and his family.

Eileen was selected to join CLM in November. The choice was easy enough. She is an adult woman, sleeping on the floor of a stranger’s home because she has nothing of her own. No assets, no income, no prospects of having either any time soon. She attended two weeks of training in December, having selected goat and pig rearing as her two enterprises because, as she said, “They reproduce quickly, and can make money quickly, too.”

When her case manager, Sandra, first went to meet her last week, she discovered a couple of problems. First of all, Eileen’s boy wasn’t living with her. It turns out that, about a year ago, Don decided he could no longer support both Eileen and the boy. He has six kids and a grandchild to care for. His oldest daughter became pregnant while she was living away from home to go to high school. So he took in her son, and sent her back to school. He also has a younger brother whom his parents left in his hands. He has a fair amount of land and livestock, but it doesn’t go far with a family as big as his.

So he sent Eileen’s boy away, back to the aunt whom Eileen had grown up with. Since only women who are responsible for children are eligible for CLM, Eileen would have to be dropped from the program.

Sandra understood that. She just didn’t want to leave it at that. She wanted Eileen to be able to live with and raise her own child. And she wanted her to be able to be part of CLM. So she talked with her and with Don, and convinced them to send for the kid. Don even said he would give her a corner of his yard where she could build a little house. Eileen would have her own income soon, so she’d be able to support him herself.

But there was another problem. Don raises goats and pigs already. Our program requires members to build little shelters for goats and pigs. It helps them keep an eye on their animals, and protects the animals from the elements. To Don, it all seemed a little silly. He’s very successful raising his animals, and wanted to put Eileen’s together with his own. They would be able to take care of them together, and her animals would immediately be less trouble for him.

We didn’t like the proposed arrangement. We felt it would hold Eileen back as she struggles to establish herself as a woman of independent, though very limited, means. So I had a long talk with Don, explaining to him how important it would be for Eileen’s education for her to keep her animals apart, somewhere where she could really sense her full responsibility for them. It took some time, but Don finally agreed. He even offered to help her collect the materials she would need to build the structures. He seems to mean well.

We’ll have to see. Helping Eileen negotiate a path to independence will be a challenge for Sandra. Don and his wife are used to receiving her full, unpaid attention. Her new assets could be a lot of work. She might start to find herself too busy to do everything they ask of her. It’s hard to foresee how they will react.

But without CLM, Eileen is unlikely to ever be anything more than a servant in their home, doing everything from hauling water and light housework to the heavy farm labor in Don’s fields. With CLM, she just might be able to begin building a life for herself and her son.

Bringing one thousand new members into our program has been challenging in many ways. They live scattered across the wide, varied, and mountainous terrain of two large rural counties, which are connected by only a few roads, almost of which are poor. The families we’re looking for are only loosely tied to the communities around them, the networks of local leaders who might otherwise be able to introduce you to them quickly and easily. They remain hidden, scarcely visible, even to those whom they circulate among every day. Let alone to outsiders. They are shy of contact, even distrustful, living according to a well-tested belief that nothing that outsiders like our CLM team could bring to their community is really for them. And at the same time they are surrounded by neighbors who are on the lookout for any development initiatives that might be in the area and who are expert at drawing available resources to themselves.

But an especially difficult aspect of the challenge has been the number itself, one thousand. We’ve had to enroll exactly that many. Not 999, and not 1001. And we’ve had to respect a firm deadline for completion of this first step in our journey. It’s not been easy.

We can’t afford to enroll fewer than a thousand for two reasons. On one hand, our donors expect it. The grant agreements that permit us to access the funds we need are contracts. We’re to serve a certain number of what they call “beneficiaries” by a certain date. To serve fewer would be to fail to keep our word. It could make it harder to get new money down the line. On the other hand, and more importantly, the misery of our prospective members’ daily lives means that failure to serve as many as we can would be a major moral failing, a kind of criminal negligence.

But we can’t serve more than a thousand either, because our budget is narrowly calibrated to that number in all sorts of places. Adding even one or two unfunded families could deprive those we enroll of the resources they need to succeed. We hope and expect to get new chunks of funding now and again, so the 1001st family will just have to wait.

For the last couple of weeks that elusive number has been an important guide in our work, and we still aren’t exactly sure whether we have it quite right. Getting there involves a couple of challenges. First, new members come in chunks. The program is designed to work neighborhood by neighborhood. So a team that spends a day doing what we call “final verification” and “enterprise selection”, the last two steps in the process might enroll three or seven or fifteen families. And in our hurry to finish in time, we can decide to send two or three teams into the field at once. So it’s impossible to foresee how many families we’ll enroll in a day. That didn’t matter when we were 200 families short of the goal, but as we close in on one thousand, it begins to make a big difference.

It’s become even more complicated as we find that some of the people we think we enroll end up not joining the program. They went along with the last steps in the process, but then didn’t show up for the initial six-day-long training we provide. There might be lots of reasons for this. We’ve heard explanations of all kinds. But it seems likely that part of the problem is how hurried we been about these final steps. We’ve found ourselves taking short cuts, decreasing the contact we would normally have with prospective CLM members before things get started.

So both during the training, and right after it, we were out in the field again, trying to convince those who didn’t show up to change their minds and reaching a couple of neighborhoods that fell between the cracks when we were covering the counties with Participatory Wealth Ranking.

And qualifying members in these new neighborhoods is now complicated by two additional factors. First, we are working in areas where we haven’t had Participatory Wealth Ranking sessions.(See TheRightPeople.) That means that we have no map of the neighborhoods’ homes to work from, no community-generated lists of likely families. We have to work from our own observations, and the kind of homes we’re looking for can be very hard to find. Second, we’ve completed enterprise selection in most areas. That’s the step in the process that lets folks know what we’re about. Word gets around that we’re giving animals or other assets away to the families we enroll. So we start getting much less reliable data. A family can be awfully poor without being CLM-poor. People whose needs are real, but who are too well off to qualify for CLM, lie about their assets in hopes of qualifying.

We have a range of techniques to deal with these problems. We’ve seen enough families to have a sense of what a CLM family and its home looks like. So we make much of our observations. We sometimes tell lies, talking of veterinary agents who will be coming by to vaccinate livestock in order to get people to talk about animals that might otherwise deny that they have. In order to find hidden homes, we ask women whom we qualify to point us towards neighbors whose lives are hard.

But it becomes a process with a catch-as-catch-can feel, lacking the discipline of the long, usual process, rooted in community participation, which we prefer. Our nostalgia for lost discipline might look like officiousness, but sacrificing discipline to speed may have grave consequences. Wednesday I went with two teams to a neighborhood called “Premye Pas”, the last place you go through before you start the climb towards Tit Montay. We found and enrolled seven families, but have no way of assuring ourselves that there aren’t two or seven or fifteen more.

And this matters a lot. Our commitment to working neighborhood-by-neighborhood means that we won’t return to Premye Pas again. We’ll spend 18 months with the CLM families there, but will turn elsewhere after that. Any family we’ve missed has forever lost its chance to join CLM. And it’s hard to imagine what other chance a family that needs CLM will ever find.

So as we look to further expansion in the coming year, we’ll need to apply what our experience has taught us. We need to get more disciplined, more focused during the selection and enrollment process. We can’t let our need to hurry push us to cut corners, miss steps, or spread ourselves too thin. Haitians say “two prese p ap fè jou a ouvri.” That means that too much hurrying doesn’t make the sun rise. It’s wisdom worth bearing in mind.

The first hectic days of our program for the more than 300 women who bring us up to 1100 new members for 2010 are behind us. Between finalizing the selection of our new members, inviting them all to their first training, helping each one choose the income-generating activities she wants to start with, and opening the training sessions in four locations, there’s been a lot to do. And there are plenty of details yet to be cleaned up before the end of the year. But things have gone astonishingly well so far: the training sessions are full, and our new members and their case managers/trainers seem to be hitting it off.

Things have been rushed because our commitment to our funders has been to get the new members into the program by the end of the year. We have been rushing up against the deadline recruiting precisely the correct number of participants, a task that only grew more difficult as information about the nature of our program spread.

The information can have a range of effects. Some families whom you interview in the field to verify their need for the program will hide assets so that they are more likely to qualify. Though this is always a problem, it becomes more serious as the character of the program becomes better known. Boukankare is full of families who would be happy to receive free livestock. Many of these, though not poor enough for CLM, are genuinely poor. Their needs are real, even if they are not grave enough to call for the comprehensive and expensive approach we offer. You cannot blame them for trying to work their way into a chance to do a better job at feeding their kids. Our staff’s straightforward challenge has been to see through such efforts.

But there’s another, more challenging consequence as well. Some people, upon seeing that they have not been selected for the program, let their jealously guide them. They begin to spread rumors about the program, hoping to discourage neighbors who really need us from joining.

And we see its effects. After two days of our six-day training had passed at Kafou Jòj, we saw that six of the people who were not attending were from the same neighborhood, an area called Mannwa, on a high mountain overlooking the rest of Boukankare. So one of the case managers and I made an unscheduled hike up the hill to talk with them. We wanted to see what was keeping them away. We spoke to most of the women individually, and heard a range of stories.

Rose Marthe’s was the easiest to understand. She had given birth only days before the session began, and couldn’t make the hike downhill with an infant not yet ready to be taken outside the house. On the workshop’s fist day, she had sent her younger sister to participate for her, but the girl was very young, so the case managers sent her away, not quite understanding why she was there. The girl herself hadn’t been able to explain things clearly. Rose Marthe agreed to send her husband instead for the next three days, and that should solve the problem. Her case manager will have to teach her the stuff that she missed when her weekly visits begin.

Micheline is an 18-year-old mother living with her older sister, who’s been her guardian since their mother died about a dozen years ago. She was selected for the program because she herself has nothing. The baby’s father abandoned her. On the day we selected her for the program we had to go by her house three times. She had hidden from us the first two times. Finally, a smart neighbor sent me off on a wild goose chase, explaining that the girl was at another sister’s home higher up the hill. While I was climbing, the neighbor got the girl to his house, where he then called me to join them. The girl was willing to talk to me, but only in the presence of a trusted adult. Her sister/guardian wasn’t around.

Micheline hadn’t come to the training’s first three days because her sister told her not to. The sister had heard that our program had a hidden agenda. She had heard that we would keep our own key for the house we would build for her, that the animals we’d provide would turn into a curse in some way. We talked with the sister a lot, and think we finally convinced her.

But there were others we couldn’t convince. And it’s not surprising. I have no standing, no credibility in the community. Why would anyone in Mannwa believe anything I say? The Haitian case manager who was hiking with me can communicate a lot better than I can, and he is at least Haitian. But he’s from Cap Haitien in the north, the farthest thing from local. He’s not someone they know or trust. His credibility is scarcely better than mine. It’s a problem that we can’t expect to solve by ourselves.

So we won’t address it by ourselves. We’ll return to Mannwa again next Tuesday, our sixth trip in the last two weeks. We’ve sent word by a sympathetic local leader that we’d like to hold a meeting Tuesday morning in his front yard for everyone in Mannwa who’s interested in learning about our program. We’ve asked him to especially encourage community leaders who could have some influence on public opinion to attend. We will lay all our cards on the table, hoping to create an atmosphere in which the whole community sees how it stands to gain when its eleven poorest families join us.

Success is critical for us in a bureaucratic sense. Our funders want a certain number of what they call “beneficiaries.”

But of course our ability to report promised results for our members, while important, is our smallest problem. It is difficult to imagine what hope there is for Micheline and her child other than CLM. For now, she is stuck in her sister’s home. And that sister is hardly well off herself. The baby she’s caring for right now is, we hear, her second. We don’t yet know where the first one is. Without CLM, she may be doomed to accumulate more and more children as she searches for a man willing to support her and hers. Her poverty may thus only deepen. And it is already pretty deep. If we can get her into the program, she’ll start developing her own assets, sources of income with the potential to give her some degree of control over the way she moves forward.

And Micheline’s not alone. The women who need us really need us badly. We’ve got to do whatever is necessary to convince them and the communities they live in that joining us is the right thing to do.

Barbara lives in Opisa, in the hills between Fèyobyen, the large market to the east of central Boukankare, and Tit Montay, the mountainous region above it. She and her husband live with their four kids in a small house that his parents built. It is the house he grew up in, and they’ve been living in it since his parents passed away. “I haven’t been able to build my own home yet,” he explained, “so my sisters let us live in our parents’ place.”

Their children aren’t in school yet. “You’d like to help your children learn something,” Barbara says, “so they won’t be humiliated down the road.” But she and her husband just haven’t been able to afford to send them. The schools in Boukankare aren’t that expensive. There are places they could send the kids for only a little more than $30 for the year. They’d have to find a couple more gourds for books, uniforms, and sneakers, but it wouldn’t amount to that much. But it’s money they don’t have. They use family planning now, she says, because “things aren’t going well. It’s a struggle just with the kids we already have.”

Barbara explained that as she started to have children, she had to figure out a way to keep them fed. “When your children are crying at your feet, it breaks your heart.” So she looked around, and had an idea. It turned into a steady activity, at least when there’s been some rain. She goes into the fields above her home early each morning and collects edible greens that grow wild there. Then she rinses them and brings them to market, earning between $1.25 and $2.50 in a day.

Her husband can earn more than a dollar on the days he finds work in his neighbors’ fields. Between the money they earn, and the little food they can harvest from the small garden behind their home, they do the best they can to keep their children fed. On days when they have nothing to give, the children can sometimes get something from their aunts, but Barbara and her husband just do without.

Barbara, with her husband and one of their daughters.

Beverly lives with her husband and their two daughters in Viyèt, a wooded, hilly area just northwest of Difayi, one of Boukankare’s small towns. Their second girl is less than two weeks old; she has not yet been carried outside of their small house, nor does she even have a name.

Beverly is something new for our CLM program: a second-generation member. We’ve had mothers and daughters who are members at the same time, just as one would expect we would. Extreme poverty runs in families. The unwritten rules of disinheritance, of exclusion, are as rigid as the laws that rule the passage of property from parent to child. But Beverly is different: Her mother is graduating the program, having successfully removed her household from extreme poverty just as Beverly is joining us. It’s not what one would hope. We like to believe we are helping families help themselves once and for all. But her case is easy to understand.

She didn’t grow up at home. She’s her mother’s oldest child. Their dire poverty forced her to send Beverly to be raised by a wealthier neighbor, who had a home and a business in the nearby city of Mirebalais. There, Beverly grew up as a servant. She never was paid. She was not sent to school. But she was fed and clothed, which was more than her mother could do for her.

Just as her mother was joining CLM, Beverly became pregnant. The woman who had raised her, sent her away, and she and the father of her child were left without a place to live. Her mother had just moved to her father’s land, and the old man gave his granddaughter a little plot to live on as well. Beverly’s husband built a small house, and there they have remained.

It hasn’t been easy, though. They have no land of their own to farm. The husband has worked land as a sharecropper, but he was sick during this past planting season and, so, never got anything into the ground. Beverly learned to run a business by watching the woman whom she served, but without any capital to invest, she hasn’t been able to get anything started. They have no animals.

So they’ve been hungry. Even as the infant grew within her, even in the days since she gave birth. She wraps her stomach tightly before she goes to bed because it relieves some of the hunger pains.

Beverly, with her husband and their two daughters.

Ann lives in Giyòm, a roadless, hilly area between the town of Boukankare and the Artibonite River to its south. The area is sprinkled with houses and small farms, but mostly it’s an uncultivated grassland. There are some trees, but most have been cut down for cooking fuel.

The first thing she told us when we asked her how she was was, “Yo di, se gason ki mèt kay la. Men depi nèg la atè, ou nan dlo.” That means, “They say that the husband is the master of the house, but when the man’s laid up, you’re up the creek.” Her husband has been nearly paralyzed with back pain since early last summer, and so Ann’s been left to fend for him, for herself, and for six of their seven surviving children. The seventh lives as a household servant with a neighbor who has a home in Port au Prince. She gave birth to two others, but they did not survive.

Before her husband became sick, things were looking up. He gave her a crop of sweet potatoes to sell after last year’s harvest that was big enough that she was able to buy a horse. She even had some money left over to start a small commerce. A neighbor lent her an additional 5000 gourds — about $125 — and she was in business.

Then one day in late December, he came home with nice, new New Year’s clothes for all the kids. But he wasn’t feeling well, and he asked to lie down. Since then, he’s gotten steadily worse. Now he cannot rise without help. Since they have no furniture, someone sits behind him as a brace if he wants to sit up.

Then the horse died. And the neighbor needed her 5000 gourds back.

Ann was left with 1500 gourds of her own money. She would hike to the market with her little bit of capital to buy rice, oil, kerosene, and bouillon cubes and then sell them at a profit. But her husband’s illness and her need to feed her kids ate up what was left of her business quickly enough.

But Ann also said that “fanm pa konn pa devlope.” That’s like saying that a woman always has something cooking. She explained that, these days, she’s hiking into the hills to cut gwann, the leave of a miniature palm, which she dries and ties into bunches for buyers who come through her neighborhood about once a week. She can earn about five or six dollars in a good week, as long as the gwann lasts. She has a sister-in-law who sends her food now and then to help her feed her kids. Her oldest son’s godmother sends him to school, though he’s the only one of her kids who can go.

She’s not quite sure yet what she’ll do when the gwann season is over. She is worried about her husband’s recovery. “If he could even sit up,” she said, “or just go to the bathroom by himself, you’d have hope that he might be able to work again some day . . .” Her voice then trailed off.

She doesn’t know how long she can really depend on her sister-in-law. She’s not that wealthy herself. Her husband has a good deal of farmland, but right now she and her children have no way to work it.

Cholera is something new in Haiti. Preliminary results of testing at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta suggest that the strain that has recently appeared here is South Asian.

With representatives from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka serving in the U.N.’s “stabilization” force, the most likely source of the epidemic is more or less clear. Signs point to a poorly planned, poorly managed septic tank at a Nepalese U.N. base near Mirebalais, not far from one of the smaller rivers that eventually joins the Artibonite, the most important river through the center of Haiti and the center of the epidemic. DNA testing is continuing.

But knowing the source of the epidemic is only so interesting, because it doesn’t contribute very much to the only thing that really matters right now: preventing people here from getting sick and dying, as they are doing in increasing numbers. The search for solutions has only grown more urgent as Tomas has brought heavy rains.

Our CLM members are, of course, especially vulnerable, especially when we are just beginning to work with them. Their extreme poverty guarantees that.

When we begin working with them, they have neither access to safe drinking water nor knowledge of its importance. Most are accustomed to drinking river water or water from springs that can be quite unsafe. And they’ll tell you when you ask them about it that they’ve been drinking the same water all their lives without it ever having caused them any problems. If, however, you ask them whether they have problems with upset stomachs or heartburn, they’ll tell you that they’ve had those problems all their lives, too. But they’ve never made a connection between such issues and the water they drink.

And drinking water isn’t the only problem. They are malnourished, and so their health is generally fragile. And almost all families when they join CLM lack even the most basic sanitary facilities. They have no outhouses, let alone anything like a reasonable bathroom. They use the fields around their homes for what Haitians euphemistically call “doing what’s necessary”.

Our older members, families that have been working with us a year or more, are in reasonably good shape to face the epidemic. They all have filters for drinking water. They’ve learned to use these filters together with chlorine to fight impurities. We’ve help them build hygienic latrines and taught them the importance of using them. They know about the importance of washing their hands. We will need to re-emphasize all these lessons with them as cholera spreads, but we’ve made a good start.

But we also have 400 newer members, 100 who joined in August and 300 who just joined. None of them have water filters yet, nor do they have outhouses. And though we’ve had the chance to talk to the first 100 about hygiene and drinking water, the more recent 300 have just begun to hear these messages. So, our highest priority is to get the news about safe drinking water out as quickly as possible.

Our first effort to do so ran into problems. It can show how hard it is to build the necessary degree of mutual trust with members we will be working with for the next 18 months.

The epidemic appeared right before our scheduled inauguration in Sodo. Though Sodo had not yet seen any cases of cholera — it has since then — we felt we should use the chance to speak with 300 families at once to make a first attempt at educating them about the crisis. In addition, we found some water purifying chemicals that we decided to distribute with instructions for their use. So we spent some time during the ceremony talking about hygiene and the importance of treating drinking water, and we distributed the purifiers we had.

But we don’t yet have these new members’ confidence. Most are happy to be in the program. Many have shown their excitement at receiving goats or other assets. They aren’t used to getting help. Such aide programs as might have passed through their neighborhoods in the past would fail to reach them, bringing scarce resources to people who need them a lot less than they do. Typical CLM members have been invisible. They have failed to matter enough to those around them to attract the attention they deserve. So they are surprised to discover that we really mean to work precisely with them.

Many are so surprised that they don’t quite believe it. It seems too good to be true, I suppose. They imagine that we’ll end up taking the goats back, or that we have some devious plan that will work against them in the end. These concerns are so real that in a few cases women refuse to be part of a program that costs them nothing and offers them multiple assets and other advantages as well, a program that offers them their best chance to escape from the miserable poverty they struggle with.

And even the families who join us — the vast majority of those whom we select do agree to join the program — do so with some trepidation. And their initial distrust can have consequences that are quite real.

Thursday morning, we learned that a new CLM member, one of the ones who had been part of October’s inauguration, had died of cholera. We wondered what happened. After all, she had had water treatment stuff.

This is what we learned: She hadn’t been using it. Most of the new CLM members in her village — a very poor area with a number of new members — had decided not to. A rumor had been going around that the chlorine we had passed out was a poison, that it was causing all the sickness and death. Apparently, someone decided to test the chlorine’s safety by feeding directly to chickens. The chickens died, of course. This made the water purifier, which could have been protecting them from cholera and other microbial dangers, come to seem like the danger to be avoided.

So now we’re rushing into the field with rehydration fluid and more education. We also hope to have more water treatment material to make available to members soon.

But as we make this additional help available, we’ll need to work hard to develop a deeper relationship of trust with our members. One sees that trust in those members who have had a little time to experience the way our case managers work with them and for them. It eventually becomes both far-reaching and implicit. But building up trust usually takes time, and we don’t have time. The presence of the cholera threat has made the first steps of our work more urgent than they’ve ever been.

The initial CLM pilot served 150 families in three parts of Haiti. With its successful completion, Fonkoze decided that the most effective way to continue with the program would be to choose one of those areas to expand in. The logistics involved in operating in three places at once seemed like a gratuitous imposition on ourselves. We chose the Central Plateau because the strong presence here of Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health would simplify assuring our members the access to health care they so badly need.

We then spent more than a year raising money. Each time we received a chunk of it, we began a new process of member selection. We would assign fifty new members to each case manager, and start serving them. We eventually enrolled 350 new members, 50 to 100 at a time. In August, we had a ceremony in a church near the gateway to Sodo for the last 100 of those 350 new CLM members. Sodo is the town where our base is located. It seemed like a big step forward.

But with funding from the Mastercard Foundation, we have been positioned to serve 1000 new members, which would represent a real change in the program’s dimensions. Through September and the early part of October, however, we’ve been so exclusively focused on the selection of these new members, that the real work, which begins when we hand the women we select their new assets and start to meet with them every week, has seemed far away.

All that changed on Friday, as we celebrated the lansman, or inauguration, of 300 new members. The lansman ceremonies are major gatherings. All the women come, some with family members, and they wear whatever passes for their best clothes.

One of the goals of the ceremony is to help the women start to feel good about their being a part of something larger than themselves. We know that CLM membership will be good for them. And they do as well, at least to the degree to which they believe what we’re promising at this point. So there is some singing and dancing at the ceremony. The women really enjoy it.

The stars of this lansman were two graduates of CLM, women who had been thorough the program when we were piloting it. They had started in the very same misery that the new members know every day right now. They each had a lot to say to the new members. They talked both about the terrible lives that CLM had helped them leave behind, and about the new lives they had discovered. Because they had already travelled the same road that the new members now face, their words carried real weight.

There were also short speeches from local leaders. The mayor of Sodo came, and assured the women that they should feel free to come to him with their problems.

We also had a short speech from Julio, the very experienced manager of Fonkoze’s Sodo office. He’s an important ally for our CLM team, because all the women will open savings accounts in his office. Julio can do a lot to help them learn to use those accounts if they come to see him. One thing he pointed out to them is that they should make an effort to get to know his office and to meet him. They have so little experience in anything like an office, that his assurance that he’ll look after them means a lot.

The key moment in the ceremony is when the women sign their contracts and receive their ID cards. Few of them can actually sign their names — as the woman in the photo did — when they join the program, though almost all of them will be able to do so — and a good deal more — by the time they are ready to finish.

Their ID cards entitle their family to VIP service at any of Partners in Health’s clinics. Since many of them are still without any government-issued ID, and don’t know how to get one, their CLM ID may be the closest thing to an official ID that they’ll have for awhile. At least until their case managers can coach them through the official process. The contracts they sign commit them to follow the CLM rules, especially to protect their new assets. Though the assets belong to them, they are not ready to make major decisions about them — when to sell a goat or to use savings to buy a horse, for example — without their case manager’s advice.

Welcoming 300 families into our program in a single day was great cause for celebration. It’s twice as many as were part of the original pilot, and almost doubles the program’s size. And it’s only the beginning. Despite barriers and setbacks of various sorts, we are on track to add 700 more before the end of this year.

And these aren’t just numbers. Every new member leads a family barely surviving through all the wretchedness that extreme poverty brings its way.

Photos by Hébert Artus

The scenery around Deniza, one of the three main areas of Tit Montayn.

Deniza is the easternmost corner of Tit Montayn. It’s a tough, two-hour hike over a steep mountain pass from Bouli, the region’s central village and the location of our CLM team’s base. Deniza is also accessible by a direct route from Boukankare. The route passes along a waterfall, where it’s steep and narrow enough that pack animals – horses, mules, donkeys – can’t make the trip. They have to go over a higher, but easier, ridge. Deniza is especially mountainous, even compared to the other parts of Tit Montayn, thickly threaded with steep, rocky ravines. Hiking around Deniza is hard work for those unused to it.

But it’s also a populous area with several small villages and plenty of households scattered throughout the farmland that spans the slopes that separate them. There’s been a lot of work for our CLM team to do in Deniza to blanket it with our member selection process. We created a temporary secondary base in Deniza to help us as we conduct wealth ranking meetings and both preliminary and final verification visits.

As always, the final stage of the work involves re-visiting households whose residents were absent the first or second time we went by. It’s frustrating work because you can pass by a house any number of times in vain. Especially right now, when the folks across Tit Montayn are especially busy with their farms.

On my first full day in the region, I was to go with Lenord, one of our case managers, to Mablanch, Pay Diri, and two or three other neighborhoods well over an hour away from our base. I was chagrined when I learned that Jean Romain would not be available to join us. He needed the day to take his daughter down to Boukankare so that she could be measured for her school uniform and he could pay her school fees.

Jean Romain is the newest member of the team. When we decided to enter Tit Montayn, we thought that work in so remote a region would be much easier if we had someone on the team with real local knowledge. Fortunately, we needed a Ti Kredi agent anyway. Ti Kredi is the special credit program for families too wealthy for CLM, but to poor for standard solidarity-group credit. So we hired Jean Romain, who grew up in Deniza as the son and grandson of important local leaders, and he’s been a key member of our team ever since.

Without him, I thought our trip to Mablanch would be a miserable affair. Lenord was not one of the case managers who had been to the houses the first time, so he knew them no better than I did. We could have used the map that was produced at the wealth ranking session, but that would be challenging because the maps tend, in the best of circumstances, to be only moderately accurate and would surely be less so in Deniza, where the terrain is so irregular as to make any mapping hard.

There are no roads in Tit Montayn, only footpaths. Right now, at the peak of the fall harvest, in a year that’s had plenty of rain, the paths are almost invisible if you don’t know them. They’re entirely overgrown with the grasses that cover the uncultivated areas here. It grows over six feet high. Without someone who knows their way around, it’s hard to find anything.

Paths winding through Deniza. I took the second photo at eye level.

Jean Romain, however, showed no sign of concern. He would send us with Elie. Jean Romain is 29, his parents’ eldest child. Elie is their youngest. He’s eleven, and doesn’t look a day older than that. So when Jean Romain told us that Elie would be our guide, I was more than surprised.

Now, I know that children grow up differently in different cultures. An American child is not a Haitian child. And even within Haiti, there can be big differences among the various ways that children grow up, differences that greatly affect what they are able to do and when. But I was still surprised to find an eleven-year-old able to guide two strangers through a maze of footpaths in an area well more than an hour from his home, able to hike with us uncomplainingly for over six hours through bright sunshine and heavy rain. He led us to the homes of people he barely knew, people who didn’t know him at all until they asked him who his father was.

But that’s what Elie did: speaking only when spoken to, waiting patiently for Lenord and me when we fell too far behind, carrying Lenord’s water, but not presuming to drink any until it was offered to him, not eating a thing except an occasional wild guava until we all got back to the base and could eat together. When we returned to his parents’ house, he was giddy, pleased with himself for having discovered a series of little paths that he hadn’t known about before.

Elie is in school. He’s scheduled to leave Tit Montayn next week for his family’s apartment in Boukankare, where he’ll spend weekdays throughout the school year. He’ll hike home some weekends, but told me that he’ll stay down in Boukankare sometimes, too. The five-hour hike to get home is long. He’s fallen behind some in school, but not very far behind. He has to repeat third grade this year. Last year, he didn’t pass. But for all the academic skills that he may lack, he’s clearly a boy who knows a lot.