Haitians are terrible with money. I mean this in the most literal, least interesting sense.

It’s not that they are especially worse than others are at managing their money. Or at least I should admit that I’m unqualified to make that judgment. Fonkoze might have years of experience of market women who have too little control of their income and expenses to know even whether they are making or losing money, but in a country in which over 50% of the population is somehow living, and not simply dying, on less than $1 per day, it would be rash to assert that people don’t know how to deploy their very limited resources.

When I say that Haitians are bad with money, I mean only that they badly mistreat the bills they use to buy and sell. Wallets are not in common usage. People are much more likely to shove money into their pockets or bags in any old way. The bills get crumpled and twisted. They end up getting terribly worn.

As I began the training I would need to become one of Fonkoze’s branch managers, I learned who pays the price. At the end of my first day, I was counting the money that was to go into the safe, making sure that the cash matched the transaction record, and I was having a terrible time. Not only were the worn and torn bills insistently sticking to each other, but they were spewing a moldy dust that was making me sneeze and wheeze.

Watching me counting, miscounting, and recounting piles of crumpled bills turned Thomas nostalgic. Thomas is the manager of Fonkoze’s office in Lenbe, home to its Active Learning Center. It’s where I did my first bit of training.

His start in banking was as a teller in a commercial bank, and he remembers the training he received. Each trainee was handed a couple of packets of bills, and they had to count them over and over again in whatever regular or syncopated rhythms that their trainer would call out – one-two-three-four, one-two-one-two – until they could handle packets of a hundred bills quickly and accurately. He spent two days doing little else.

Learning to count piles of money will be a challenge, but it will surely be the least of my problems. My friend Dr. Job has already promised to give me a couple of surgical masks so I can protect my lungs from the moldy dust, and even my fingers are bound to get more nimble eventually.

And though there are a lot of policies and procedures to learn, and some software to master, the part of my work that will essentially be a desk job isn’t what worries me either.

I anticipate two real challenges. One is that I’ll need to develop and strengthen a staff that has been functioning poorly until now. The second is that I will need to get into the field, and help the Marigo credit team improve the branch’s loan portfolio. Success at the second will depend on success at the first.

The loan portfolio at the Marigo office is not in good shape. On one hand, loan delinquency is relatively high. On the other, borrowers leave the program too quickly.

Each is a serious problem because each interferes directly with Fonkoze’s core objective, which is to help Haitian families lift themselves out of poverty. Real progress for the families of Fonkoze borrowers is a long process. It probably takes five years at least for even a moderately poor family to establish a stable and sufficient livelihood using Fonkoze loans. Slow repayment can only make that journey longer. And stepping out of the credit program is, for most borrowers, a dead end.

But these problems don’t just interfere with the institution’s effectiveness. They threaten its existence as well. Though Fonkoze was not established to make piles of money for investors, its profitability is important as a sustainability strategy. Profitability is not, for Fonkoze, and end in itself, but is an important means to an end. Unless its branches can generate the income they need to support themselves, their operations will always be at the mercy of our luck with donors. And few donors will want to give money to a cause that has no hope of ever carrying its own weight.

And for most Fonkoze branch offices, especially those that are, like the Marigo office, outside of Haiti’s major cities, profitability depends almost entirely on the income from loans. Since initial expenses with new borrowers mean that Fonkoze does not break even until a borrower’s third loan, high borrower turnover makes lending a losing proposition.

The only way for me to address these issues is for me to invest almost all my time into working directly with the credit agents who’ve been making Marigo’s non-performing loans and the borrowers who are saddled with them. We need to work together to figure out why the system isn’t working for them what we can do to repair whatever damage has been done so that we can move forward. At the same time, I will need to pay close attention to new loans that the office makes to ensure that they have the best possible chance of helping the borrowers who take them and, therefore, Fonkoze itself.

This will mean getting onto the back of a motorcycle almost every day to accompany a credit agent into the field. The Marigo office serves a broad and varied swath of the Haitian southeast, from the mountains that rise into one of Haiti’s surviving pine forests above Seguin to the coastal city of Belle Anse, halfway between Jacmel and the Dominican border, and much of its territory was ravaged by the hurricanes that hit Haiti last year.

And it will mean convincing credit agents and the borrowers they work with of the merits of doing things the right way. Credit agents and borrowers alike need to commit themselves to build lively and active credit centers by participating in regular meetings, discussing relevant issues vigorously and openly, and addressing problems together. They need to pay close attention to loan sizes, ensuring that loans match the real capacity of a borrower’s business, rather than her ambition and the maximums established by Fonkoze.

It also means making sure that everyone involved has a sober understanding of the state of things for Fonkoze in Marigo, a clear sense of the role they’ve played in letting things degenerate as they have and the role they can play in turning things around, and a well-grounded feeling of cautious optimism as to what we can achieve as we move forward together.

These feel like platitudes as I prepare to settle in. Achieving anything will take a level of collaboration with a frustrated team that is daunting for someone still very much a foreigner in this country. Such hope as I can muster is rooted in the encouragement I’ve been getting from the first-rate colleagues I’ve had the chance to work with at Fonkoze over the last four years. It all starts in less than two weeks.

I’ve been back in Haiti for just over a month, and I can’t really say that I’ve settled into any particular focus. I’ve made a couple of trips into the field for Fonkoze, attended a conference of the leading Haitian practitioners of Reflection Circles, participated in a few meetings with the guys in Cité Soleil, and made lemon batteries — actually, we used sour oranges — with students and teachers at the Matènwa Community Learning Center. And I’ve spent a lot of time talking with friends, neighbors, and colleagues, trying to get a sense of the lay of the land.

My sense is this: Things are worse than they were just a few months ago.

It’s not surprising. Food prices were already increasing rapidly before hurricanes swept through Haiti in August and September. Lives and homes were lost, and the crop losses they occasioned did double harm, even in my home community of Kaglo, where the damage was less dramatic and the people are a little better off than in most areas of the country. On one hand, a harvest that would normally supply much of the food my neighbors consume disappeared. They now must buy everything that they eat. On the other, they have less money to purchase food with because their crops are also an important source of income. And this came, as I said, as food prices climbed especially high.

I had a long talk with a young friend the other night. He’s an 18-year-old 7th-grader who attends a small private school down in Pétion-Ville. He hikes down the hill each morning with his best friend, and back up under the searing afternoon sun. It takes about an hour to go down the hill, but much longer to return. He gets a cup of coffee at most before he leaves, and these days he never knows whether food will be waiting for him when he gets home.

His father is a mason who hasn’t worked since October. His mother is a market woman. She normally sells their agricultural production, but it was wiped out by the hurricanes. They have seven of their children on their hands, and cannot provide even one substantial meal every day. That’s the simple reality. And the family is by no means one that you would normally identify as among the poorest of the poor. They have a well-built house, substantial farmland, some livestock, and five family members who at various times earn income of different sorts. But right now, there are days when they have no money for food.

So while my friend goes to school — he has an older friend who pays his way — most of his siblings don’t right now. Paying school expenses must seem hard to justify when you can’t put meals on the table.

Stories like his, and the economic situation in Haiti generally have pushed me to consider my role. I have spent a lot of time working with teachers at various levels in the hope that together we can improve, maybe even transform, certain aspects of the education they offer. I work with community organizations to help them learn about themselves and their situations in the hope that better self-knowledge can guide the decisions they make to change their world.

I learn a lot in these collaborations, and I think they do some good. But evidence of the urgency of the current economic situation is everywhere around me. I am increasingly convinced that education can only be transformed and transforming if the families and communities that it happens in can make themselves less poor. Education is surely not just for the rich. But it’s not for the extremely poor, either. Minimum standards of nutrition, for example, probably must come first. So I began to ask myself whether there was more I could do towards the economic side of community development in Haiti.

Even as I’ve had these thoughts, I realize that I’ve been working closely for four years with an organization and an approach that aims directly at helping Haitian families lift themselves out of poverty. It’s Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest microfinance institution. I began helping out with an interesting assignment that had me tinkering with its excellent literacy program, but have been involved in more and more aspects of the organization as the years have passed.

So my sense has been over the last weeks that Fonkoze should have an increasingly important place in my working life, at least insofar as its needs correspond with a contribution I can make.

These have been hard days for Fonkoze. As the economic situation in Haiti has deteriorated, borrowers are having a harder time repaying their loans. They’re also less able to make the savings deposits that are Fonkoze’s least expensive and most sustainable source of loan capital. Their businesses are providing less income, and their household expenses are increasing.

In all but the best-managed Fonkoze branches, this has led to decreased repayments rates. Repayment rates for microcredit are traditionally very high. They hover around between 97% and 99%, and Fonkoze has been right up there. But except for a few very well managed branches, where it is 100%, it is much lower now.

The problem is that Fonkoze does not know exactly what goes into good branch management. Fonkoze has a handful of excellent branch directors, but does not know how to reliably produce more.

So management and I have decided that I will take over one of the branches as its director. My goal is two-fold: to make the branch I am assigned a high-functioning one – to help its staff turn it around – and to learn as much as I can about what good management requires. I hope that will help Fonkoze develop more good managers in the years to come.

It is a strange departure for me. Though my work with Fonkoze has gradually brought me closer to the financial side of the operation, it is still very far from what I feel I know. In addition, the closest I have come to running an organization was my turn as dean of Shimer College. I mainly used what I would call the “I’ll-do-it-my-own-damn-self” approach to management, and it was ineffective for Shimer. It would be disastrous for Fonkoze. I’ll have to learn to be in charge, and do it in a culture that is still in many ways foreign to me.

But I feel as though I have very little choice. If I can play even a small role in Fonkoze’s effort to strengthen itself for the fight against poverty, that is an opportunity too important to pass up.