Rosemitha says, “Bagay yo bon. Mwen santi, mwen se yon lòt moun.” “Things are good. I feel as though I’m a different person.”

When I last spoke to her, she was struggling with her new business. She had bought tomatoes and onions in Kolonbyè and sold them farther up the road in downtown Savanèt. It didn’t go well. She had made her first trip, and the price she could get for her tomatoes was too low. She ended up returning home with less money than she started with. She was discouraged. She planned to make one more attempt with tomatoes and onions, but was resolved to switch products if it didn’t work.

And she ended up switching after one more trip. She decided to invest in kerosene and cooking oil instead. She buys cooking oil because she needs it at home and can make a little money with it while always ensuring she has enough to cook with. But her main business is kerosene. By moving it from Kolonbyè to Savanèt, and separating it into small portions, she can make about 100% profit on her investment of 500 gourds, or about $8.30. She makes the trip once a week, and her commerce is now what her family mainly lives on.

Her husband is busy working in their rice field. He’s able for the first time to invest all his time. In the past, he would have to take time off from his own farming for day labor. Unless he brought in something every day, the family wouldn’t eat. Now he can just focus on their harvest. It looks good, and when it comes in, they will be able to eat even better. All this means that Rosemitha feels great about herself because she knows that she’s contributing. “He contributes, and I contribute, too.”

Idalia’s main concern over the last several weeks has been the health of her youngest son. He suffers from shortness of breath, a condition all the more debilitating because they live on the face of a steep slope. She had been especially frustrated by her feeling that her case manager Titon wasn’t taking her problem seriously.

There were, in fact, problems of communication between her and Titon. Planning a visit to the hospital in Mirebalais is complicated. The hospital is over-busy, and though our close partnership with Partners in Health means that we can get our members care, it does not mean that getting them the care is easy. The hospital’s staff have to insist that we do things in very particular ways to get our people through lines that others might not be able to get through, so case managers and our staff nurse give members detailed instructions as to when they must appear and where, and Idalia seemed to always ignore them.

She doesn’t seem to be able to grasp the importance of exact instructions. Doctors want her boy to undergo a series of tests, both blood work and an x-ray. Getting it all done involves waiting in the right lines in the right order at the right time. Nurse Ezianie gives Idalia specific instructions, and Idalia says that she understands, but then she doesn’t follow through. She ends up doing something else. If Ezianie asks her to repeat the instructions, she can’t do it.

We will have to work with her on this, or find another solution. One of her older boys lives in downtown Mirebalais, not far from the hospital, and our first thought is to recruit him to accompany his mother and brother. The younger boy was eventually hospitalized the first time she brought him, and she was told to bring him back after he was released, but she’s not sure when she will do so. Titon will need to work closely with her to make sure she can see the path to the care her son needs all the way through. For the time being, it is at least good to see that she realizes that Titon and Ezianie are on her side.

In the meantime, Idalia is making progress in other areas. Her home is almost complete. It needs mainly some finishing work, and she thinks that she has the materials that she’ll need to get it done. She’s waiting for the builder to become available, but in Gwo Labou builders are also farmers, and at a time when there is a lot of work to do in the fields, it is difficult to get one to spend a day doing anything else.

And though her pig died just as several of the pigs that belonged to CLM members in her area, and though she like others has had trouble collecting the money that’s owed her for its meat, her situation with her goats is starting to improve. She purchased a third goat out of savings, and it appears to be pregnant.

Juslène is still struggling. Her pig died, as did one of her goats. And she hasn’t been able to collect the money she’s owed by those who bought the meat. She and her partner planted corn, and they’re waiting for the harvest. They have access to other land that they could have planted with beans, but couldn’t afford the investment.

The two of them and their toddler still depend heavily on her sister-in-law, her partner’s sister, for much of what they eat. They’ve been living in the older woman’s home for some time now, ever since their own house was destroyed by a storm. Their new house is nearby, and it is almost finished, but they don’t have the nails they need to put the palm wood planks that the walls will consist of into place. The only nails that CLM provides are the ones used to attach the tin roofing to the frame.

Juslène had saved some money to buy the nails with, but it disappeared. She says it was stolen, and she probably believes that it was, but we have our doubts. We know from experience that she has trouble keeping track of things. It is part of whatever her developmental issue is, and it is affecting her ability to progress in various ways.

One of her two goats died, and the other is failing to flourish, and we think it is mainly due to her lack of care for them. Normally members keep their goats tied up, but they move them around during the day, making sure they can find food and are out of the sun. But Juslène’s case manager, Titon, discovered that Juslène hardly moves her surviving goat at all. He had always complimented her for making sure that the goat was in her yard whenever he came by. We ask all our members to do this so that their case manager can have look each week. But when Titon went by once on an off day, he found the goat right where it always is when he comes by. A little tough questioning – and a short conversation with the sister-in-law—revealed that Juslène had just been leaving it in one spot, so it wasn’t getting enough to eat. She knows, in some sense, that she needs to move it around, but she just doesn’t think of it. Titon decided to enlist the sister-in-law’s support to help Juslène focus on what she needs to do, and the woman seems willing.

But Juslène’s problems enter other areas of her work as well. I watch a case manager hand her a 250-gourd bill to pay for the nails, and when he asked her what the bill’s denomination was, she couldn’t tell him. She just hid her face in her hands. As Haitians say, Juslène “pa konn lajan.” She doesn’t know money. We regularly find such women among those who join the program, and we have to work with each on strategies that help them adapt.

And here is where Juslène showed us an encouraging sign. After hiding her face in embarrassment at her inability to identify the bill, she ran up to a neighbor, who is also a CLM member. She showed her the bill, and asked her its value. Then she pulled down the neckline of the other woman’s jersey, and stuffed the bill into her bra.

It was a striking scene. There were a couple dozen of us there: two case managers, a bunch of CLM members and their husbands, and I. The case managers were vaccinating the gathered members’ goats, and we all had to giggle. But what we all saw is that Juslène has found a friend whom she trusts to guide her and, in a sense, to protect her from herself. She asked the case manager to explain to the other woman what the money was for, and seemed relieved to get the problem out of her own hands.

Louisimène is pretty frustrated with her progress to date. She now has three goats, rather than the two we started her with, but her pig died, and she hasn’t yet been able to collect anything from the people who bought the carcass.

Rural Haitians typically sell dead or dying animals to local butchers unless the cause of death is something known or thought to make the meat harmful to consume. Or the cut the animal up themselves and sell portions to their neighbors. But these sales are made on credit. Whether the animal is purchased as a whole by a butcher or in pieces by individual consumers, the transaction usually includes a payment date, which can be months away. CLM members can have a difficult time collecting these debts. Their lack of status in their communities make them easy to fail to pay, especially since their neighbors are often jealous of the benefits they receive, especially of their livestock. Case managers or members of the village assistance committee often help them by arranging for fellow CLM members to buy the meat in small lots and then sharing responsibility for collections, but though these arrangements help ensure that a member gets paid eventually, they make it harder for the CLM member herself to feel empowered to collect what’s owed her. Louisimène feels that she herself can’t collect, that her case manager will have to do this for her.

But her real source of frustration comes from the failure of one of her harvests. Farming is the activity she really believes in. “Tout sa pou fè w miyò se yon gode pwa w plante.” That means, “It’s the cup of beans you plant that can make your life better.”

She had taken 1000 gourds – or, about $16 – of her savings to start a small commerce, but it wasn’t working. She couldn’t keep from selling on credit, and couldn’t get people to pay what they owed. “When I saw that people were just carrying off the money in my business, I decided to use it to buy beans instead.” But she planted them too late. Farmers in her area who planted in March got all the rain they needed, and are seeing a strong harvest, but she planted more than a month later, and her beans are a total loss. “Life’s treating us badly. I look at what I planted and it’s all lost.

The curious thing about this is that it is not really all lost. I know from a case manager that she also planted beans in March in one of her fields and that, like her neighbors, she looks to have a strong harvest from that field. But Louisimène is so focused on her failure that she doesn’t even think about her success. That’s something for her case manager to talk with her about.

The one part of her life that she’s happy about these days is her home. She’s finished repairing it, and feels great about that. “I still want to add a door between that two rooms, but the doors to the outside are up. We don’t get wet in the rain anymore.”

Laumène has been a CLM member for about ten months now, and she is happy with the turn her life has taken, “M fè sa m vle. Menmsi m pa anfòm nèt, m pa jan m te ye.” That means, “I do what I want. Even if I’m not doing great in every way, I’m not the way I was.”

Her livestock is multiplying. She purchased a goat to go with the two she already had, and added turkeys and ducks as well.

Her home repair was completed some time ago, and she’s pleased with it. Her home is now shaped like a U, with two large rooms along the base and smaller ones, each with a separate entrance, forming the two legs. She feels as though the larger two rooms along the back wall give her the space she needs. She’s lent one of the smaller from rooms to her brother. He’s working on his own home, and she likes being able to offer him space in hers. Especially since the front room is entirely separate from her living space. He isn’t in her way.

She uses the other room to store her small commerce in. She keeps the only key herself. She sells a funny mix of products: bread, rum, laundry detergent, and cooking oil. But it follows its own logic. The rum, for example, she lugs to anywhere there is a gathering of men. It sells well at cockfights, Vodoun ceremonies, and wakes. Bread sells out of home, and moves quickly. She can sell a load in a couple of days, even more quickly if she’s willing to walk around with it. Laundry detergent and oil are staples that sell reliably, if less quickly than the bread.

She started the commerce with money she says she borrowed from her case manager, Martinière. But that’s not quite what happened.

Normally we open savings accounts for all CLM members. But we find that we are working in areas where the costs to our members of any transaction they’d have to make render the accounts impractical. Just getting to the bank could cost more that a withdrawal she’s like to make. So, we have been experimenting with several alternatives, and Laumène is involved in two of them. She’s part of a village savings and loan association, and she has savings in a group account managed by her case manager.

Her savings and loan association meets every week, and its members buy shares at every meeting. The shares are used as loan capital. Group members can take out loans, which they repay with interest. Once a year, the association empties the pot and each member collects a pay-out based on how many shares she’s purchased. Martinière noticed that Laumène wasn’t buying shares, so they talked about her weak cash flow. They agreed that she would start her small commerce, something they had been discussing for several months.

So Martinière gave her money from her savings in the group account. But they also agreed that she should look at it as a loan. She has other things she wants to use her savings for down the road, but this seemed important in the short term.

Laumène has been sick. She hasn’t been able to work around the house. She was having a hard time even just getting out of bed. She felt rotten, but she wasn’t going to do anything about it. “I was waiting for it to pass.”

Her case manager, Martinière, was having nothing of it. “When he got up here to see me, he was really angry. When he calmed down, he called his office on the phone to get them to send a truck to pick me up, then he came back to my house and helped me organize myself.” Laumène credits Martinière with setting things in motion for her. “He was right. My life was important to him.”

Laumène ended up having to spend four days in Mirebalais, between an initial doctor’s visit, lab tests, and second consultation based on results. Thanks to Martinière’s arrangements she felt well cared-for for all four days. “They took care of me at the office, and found a good place for me to spend the nights. All of that took effort.”

The experience left her feeling good about the CLM program and the team she works with, but her own recent efforts have her feeling good as well. Her home repair is complete. She has a little u-shaped house with two small rooms across the base and a separate, even-smaller room on each side. The smaller rooms are only accessible from the outside. They’re not connected to the larger ones. She set one aside as a storeroom. “I’ll keep the key to this room myself. When I start my small commerce, I’ll need a place to keep things secure.”

And for now, her brother has borrowed the other. He’s repairing his own house. “I like having an extra room. If family comes to visit, I can give them a separate room. If our sheets are dirty, they don’t have too see. And I like having larger rooms, too. I’m still not feeling well, so I didn’t feel like clearing my sleeping mat off the floor. But in this house the kids can just walk around it.”

Though she’s been dealing with some set backs around her livestock – she lost a goat and her pig – she’s working hard to overcome them. She bought another goat and a couple of very young turkeys, too.

Miramène is also struggling. She’s been in her new house, but she hasn’t been able to make the other progress she’d like to make. Her goats are starting to multiply, and her pig is growing, but she had hoped to buy a turkey, too, and hasn’t been able to just yet.

Her girl’s father had sent her the money to do so, but since the end of her weekly stipend she’s had a hard time just dealing with daily expenses, so she talked to the man, and they agreed that she would use the turkey money to buy food and some other necessities. He’s promised to bring money for a turkey when he comes back from the Dominican Republic for an Easter visit.

But she knows she needs some way to start earning money regularly, and she has a plan. “I want to start a small commerce. I’ll sell sugar and roasted coffee. My mother sells bread, and her customers are always asking for sugar and coffee, too.” She’s talk it over with her case manager, and he thinks it’s a good idea. They agreed that she’d withdraw 1000 gourds – a little less than $15 – from the account she keeps with him to get started.

That’s when she ran into a problem, however. They made their plan last time he visited, and he even recorded the transaction. Then he forgot to hand over the money before he went to the next house. The whole thing seems to have slipped his mind.

That’s okay in a sense. He remembers now, and will correct his error. It has just set her back a couple of weeks.

But the larger issue is that she let him walk out of her yard without saying anything. She wasn’t comfortable enough to say, “Hey, you forgot to give me the money.” His status as an authority figure, even one whom she’s fond of and trusts, got in her way.

The two will have to works towards building her confidence. She won’t succeed in the long term until she is comfortable asserting herself.

Louisimène was out in the field, working in asosye, to help someone plant beans. So the next house was Juslène’s, and she and her case manager have a lot of work to do.

It is increasingly clear that Juslène has developmental issues in her way. She doesn’t communicate well, nor has she been able to think through even a small part of a plan.

Progress on building her home has stopped, and she seems hard pressed to explain it. She’s been depending on her partner for all the work that the couple must contribute, but he seems responsible for the initiative as well. His focus is elsewhere lately, probably on getting his beans into the ground, so there hasn’t been any progress at all.

But Juslène’s inability to get focused enough to make a decision has broader implications. Her boy is sick. Poor hygiene has left him with rashes on both of his legs. He seems sick, and she’s not planning to get him to help. Though she followed her case manager’s instructions to bring him to a mobile clinic we arrange to check him for malnutrition, she doesn’t think the rashes are important enough to do something about.

Her economic progress has been limited as well. Though one of her goats had a kid, the kid soon died. More importantly, her pig, which was her largest single asset and the one with the greatest potential for return, died as well. Thanks to the intervention of a member of her Village Assistance Committee, she was able to sell it to a butcher. But butchers don’t pay cash for sick animals. They buy them on credit, and Juslène hasn’t seen the money yet.

Idalia has made some progress since we last saw her. She’s settled into the idea of remaining in Gwo Labou until she graduates from the program. Then she plans to return to her home in Jinpaye, in the mountains between Kolonbyè and Granbwa.

But she doesn’t want to stay in Gwo Labou permanently. She and her husband were able to build a house and install a latrine on a small piece of land that overlooks a rental plot they farm and another plot they work as sharecroppers. But she doesn’t like living on land that isn’t hers. What’s more, she doesn’t feel comfortable with her neighbors. “They’re the kind of people that don’t bother to ask us how we are, even though they’re my husband’s family.”

So she’s decided make her investment in her home minimal. She had her son build the house so that he could get the stipend that CLM provides to builders, but he isn’t really a skilled builder, and the work he did was poor. She, her husband, and two of her boys now live in one small room, and though it is covered with tin, the roof is much lower than CLM homes normally are. Not only that, but she and her husband decided not to buy the palm trees they would need to wall the room in sturdily. They used tach, the palm-seed pods normally used as the roofing material of the rural poor, so the house is very fragile. She and her case manager will need to talk over that decision.

She is struggling with her livestock, just as Juslène is. She lost both her pig and one of her two goats. Like Juslène – and Laumène, for that matter – she hasn’t been able to collect the money she’s owed for the lost livestock. All three had livestock sold for them by a committee member, but of the three, only Laumène seems comfortable pursuing the matter.

She took the first steps to getting her older boy to a doctor, but her youngest one is asthmatic, so he really needs to get treatment, too. Getting them care is possible. Her case manager can work together with the CLM nurse to ensure that the boy gets seen if Idalia can bring him to the hospital, but she has consistently been missing or showing up late for appointments. The hospital is so overloaded, that its staff feels it has to be strict about the way it provides care. So if Idalia can’t learn to arrive on schedule, her children may miss out on the care they need. That’s something for her case manager to work on with her.

Rosemitha is making progress, though she’s still struggling. Her three goats are now five, with one of the adult females ready to have kids.

Her small commerce nearly disappeared when a load of plantain ripened before she could get it to market, but she and her husband decided that she should try again. So she took the 600 gourds – about $8.70 – that remained, and she bought tomatoes and onions at the market in Kolonbye. She then carried that load for sake in the main market in downtown Savanèt.

Her results were poor. She returned with only 500 gourds, though she resisted her desire to snack during the day. She thinks she made a mistake, but she’s not quite sure whether she bought too dear or sold too cheap. She had calculated a profit after her purchase, but when she got to Savanèt she fold that she had to break up her merchandise into larger piles than she had anticipated. Customers expected a pile of six tomatoes for the price she had expected to sell a pile of only four.

She and her husband have decided that she should give it one more try with tomatoes and onions this coming week. If she doesn’t make money this time, she will think about another business.

As a CLM regional director, I was responsible for three cohorts of families: 250 in Northern Boucankare, 350 in Western Tomond, and 360 in Southern Mibalè. What I didn’t notice at that time was that the three regions shared an important characteristic. All are areas where the high quantity of clay in the soil means that poor families can build their homes out of rocks and mud. If the mud is well mixed and allowed to set, it can serve as reliable mortar.

This makes a big difference to CLM members, for whom home construction or repair is one of the central parts of the package. The program expects members to contribute considerably to repair or build of their home. We provide only roofing material and cement for a floor. Structural lumber and the material for the walls are the family’s responsibility. Providing the rocks and mud for walls involves only finding them and carrying them to the construction site. Members do not normally have to buy them. Where members have to use palm wood, however, they have to buy trees and then pay to have them chopped down and cut into planks. It can add several thousand gourds to their costs.

So it should not be surprising that completing home repair and construction is one of the biggest challenges that CLM members in Kolonbyè face as they approach nine months in the program. When the six in Fon Desanm and Kaprens were asked how they are doing, they all responded as though I had asked them how their home construction is progressing. The chance for a new home, and the serious challenges they must overcome to complete one, is dominating their thinking these days.

Rosana’s made good progress with hers. Three of the walls are complete, and a fourth is partially finished. She needs some palm wood planking to finish the fourth wall, and then six planks of hardwood for the doors.

But as far as she’s come, that leaves her with a lot to accomplish still. Palm wood isn’t sold by the plank, so she’ll need to buy another tree, even though she doesn’t need all of it. She can save money because her husband has the tools and the skills to prepare the planks himself, but she still expects to have to come up with another 3,000 gourds to finish their new home. That’s more than $40.

And her commitment to getting it done has already made her life harder. She had been sharing responsibility with her husband for earning the money they need to feed themselves and their children. He does day labor in their neighbor’ fields, and she had her small commerce, selling bread, sugar, and coffee out of her home. But she drained the capital out of her business buying palm trees for the house, so the family has had to eat on the 50 gourds – less than $1 – that her husband can earn for a day’s work. And there are eight children.

Keeping their children fed is especially hard this year. They are farmers, but they lost both of their most important staple crops. Their millet was destroyed for the second consecutive year by disease, and their pigeon peas were eliminated by Hurricane Matthew. They didn’t have enough cash to plant anything this year for next year’s harvest, so they’ll need to increase their other forms of income just to get by.

Rosana took a first step towards building up her income by taking out a loan from her Village Savings and Loan Association. These are organizations that we are now establishing everywhere we work. Members buy from one to five shares at weekly meetings. Share prices are determined when the group meets together the first time. They can take out loans for as much as three times what they have contributed, and they repay them with interest. At the end of a year, the whole pot is divided, each person receiving a portion determined by the number of shares she purchased over the course of the year.

Rosana took out a loan for 2,500 gourds, and she invested it in beans. She would buy them each week in Savanèt, and then sell them in Kolonbyè. She’d be able to buy about 30 mamit, or cans full, and make about ten gourds per can. But here, too, a thousand gourds of her capital ended up going into buying palm trees, which left only 1,500 in her business. That wasn’t enough to make her trips to Savanèt worth her while. So for now she will go back to selling bread, sugar, and coffee. She’s still trying to figure out how she’ll repay her VSLA loan.

Marie Yolène hasn’t gotten nearly as much done towards building her new home as Rosana has. She needs three more palm trees and the lumber for her doors, and she isn’t yet clear how she’s going to take the last steps.

One of her goats had a kid, but the kid didn’t survive. The other is pregnant. Her bigger hope rests right now on her pig, which should have piglets in April. Like Rosana, she and her husband lost their millet and pigeon peas last year. Since she has no small commerce at all, they are entirely dependent on the 50 gourds her husband can earn as a day laborer.

Like Rosana, Marie Yolène would like to borrow money from their VSLA, but Marie Yolène feels she needs to do it just to buy what she’ll need to finish her house. And if she borrows money for something other than commerce she could have trouble repaying the loan, as other VSLA members are discovering.

Monise has made some progress on her home, but she still has a long way to go. She started out with an advantage because she was able to take some of the palm wood planking that she needed from an extra room in the home she was already living in, and her older boy’s father sent her enough money to buy another palm tree. But she still needs two or three trees. And the man was killed in an accident in Port au Prince. He was changing a truck’s tire, with the truck up on a jack, when it was hit by another truck and fell on him.

She seems to have begun taking a more clear-eyed look at her situation, though. Until recently, she had been counting on her infant’s father to return from the Dominican Republic and help her with the expenses of setting up her new house, but a couple of promised visits failed to materialize, and she now recognizes that she has no idea when or even if he’ll come back. “Now I’m both mother and father to my kids,” she says.

One of her goats had a healthy kid, and the other is pregnant. She’s taking good care of her boar, and it’s growing. She hopes to use it eventually to buy a cow. “Cow’s are more valuable. And if you have a female, it will give you calves.”

She gave up her small commerce for now. She felt that she’d be better off using the money to plant a crop of beans in April. If her harvest is good, it could really help her progress.

Altagrace is close to finishing her home because she decided to take a short cut. After sitting down with her husband and her mother, who owns the house they all live in now, she decided to repair that house rather than building a new one. “I wanted to stay with my mother. I’m all she has. And my husband agreed to the plan.”

Part of the house is already covered with tin roofing. There are just a few rusted sheets that need to be replaced. After that, she’ll need about ten sheets of the sheets we gave her to cover the rest of the house, which is still covered with tach, the roofing material that poor rural Haitians get from palm trees. When she’s finished, she may even have tin left over that she can sell to neighbors.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this plan is that it seems to have been hers, motivated less by the cost savings than by her desire to continue living with her mother. In our early meetings with Altagrace, her husband would sometimes dominate the conversation. He seemed very much in charge and not very respectful. When, for example, she told us that she had her first child as a 13-year-old sixth grader, he injected with a smile that she was in too much of a hurry though he, too, had been a student at the time. And we think that, at least at first, he was making most of the decisions about the weekly stipend she received. So we’re happy to see signs that she might be establishing a role as a decision maker.

The two still need to work together, because since Altagrace does not have a small commerce, they depend on day labor to keep the household fed. “I’d like to earn the money myself, but things are hard.” They work in fields in two different ways. Most of the time they simply vann jounen or “selling a day.” That means one of them, usually her husband, works in someone’s field for 50 gourds and a meal. He can bring home the cash and, perhaps, some of the food as well. But sometimes they work asosye, or “in association.” One or both of them will work in a large field as part of a team that’s hired as a team. Here they are paid for a job – whether weeding or planting the whole field, for example – and the team divides the fee. For the time being, their relationship seems to be working, though we hope we’ll continue to see signs that Altagrace is able to assert herself.

Solène’s home is almost finished. It lacks only doors and windows, and the hardwood planks she’ll need to make and install them is ready. She’s just waiting for the carpenter to finish his job. She may have felt more rushed than other members of this group. “I was living in the shed we made for my goats, and we’d get soaked every time it rained.”

But getting her new home to the point that she could move in took everything she had and more. She used the money she had in a small commerce to buy some of the palm trees she needed, and then borrowed money from her VSLA to buy the rest. But now she and her husband depend on his day labor both to feed the household and to repay the loan.

It’s just not enough. The first installment of her loan was about 800 gourds, and she was short almost 300, even though she cut down on household expenses so much that she felt she had to stop sending her children to school. She can’t afford anything for them to eat first thing in the day.

Her livestock is beginning to develop, but it will be some time before she can count on it for any returns. So for now things will just stay difficult.

Modeline is excited about the progress that she has been making. Ever since her child’s father moved back to her from the Dominican Republic, his collaboration has helped her move ahead.

He came for a holiday visit with some of the money that they needed to buy lumber, and they now lack only a palm tree and some hardwood planks. And ever since he returned he’s taken over much of the work of caring for her livestock.

She’s also excited just to have him around. In the past, he’s come to Haiti only for short visits, but now he seems ready to stay for a while. “He’ll always go back and forth, but now he’ll stay more because we have something for him to work with.” Because he’s decided to stay in Haiti more, his mother is letting him farm some of her land, too, which only gives him more reason to stay around.

Having him in Haiti has had an unplanned consequence. Modeline thinks she’s pregnant,

Right now, the two are focused on organizing the funds they need to make sure he can farm the land. Most of it comes from saving a few pennies out of the 50 gourds he earns in the field every day.

So there isn’t much leftover that they could invest in the rest of the lumber they need. He will probably cross the border in May, when he’s done planting, to try to earn some quick cash.

Rosemitha feels as though she has made progress. “I was really in a bind. I never had the money even to buy a little oil to cook my rice with. Now I buy what I need to go with our rice.” They had a solid rice harvest on land that she and her husband work as sharecroppers. It won’t provide any income, because she thinks she’s better off storing it for food than selling it. “I’d only have to use the money to buy us food.” But it should keep the family fed for awhile.

Her goats are doing well. Two of the three we gave her had young already, and although one of the three kids died, the other two seem healthy. The third mature goat is pregnant and should have its litter soon.

Not everything has been smooth, though. She started her small commerce with 1500 gourds — or about $23 — worth of plantains. Her business plan was to buy plantains in the hills around her home and then transport them for sale to Mibalè. And the plan started to work. But then on two occasions she had trouble arranging transportation for her merchandise. The plantain ripened before she could get them to market, so she could only sell them as individual bananas locally. Her 1500 gourds had increased to 2000 when she was selling plantains by the bunch, but the loss she took reduced her capital to about 750.

Instead of using that money to keep buying plantains, she and her husband made a decision. They decided to invest it in black beans to plant on land that belongs to her mother-in-law. She still wants to have a small commerce, however, so when they harvest the beans, she plans to use income from the sale to buy kerosene and oil. She might not make as much as she would with plantains, but it will be less risky because neither product can spoil.

She and her husband finished repairing their house, but they’ve had problems there, too. One of the palm trees that they bought for the walls was too fresh. The planks that were made from it shrank as they dried after they were nailed in place, leaving wide gaps between them. There’s really no solution except to buy another palm tree and let it season before they cut it into planks. And until they harvest their own beans, they won’t have much income beyond the 50 gourds her husband makes every day that he works in their neighbors’ fields.

Working with Juslène is going to be challenging. She is cheerful and seems willing to work, but she also seems to have some kind of developmental disability. The people around her say she is egare, which means something like scatter-brained. Her memory seems to be very poor. She can’t say, for example, how many months old her infant boy is. And she seems to lack basic knowledge. She could not, for another example, identify by name a couple of colors I pointed out to her. She is still marking receipts with a thumbprint even as her fellow members begin to sign their names. Though she and her case manager work dutifully in her copybook every time he visits, she cannot yet reproduce even the J her name starts with.

She’s moving forward with construction of a new home. In her case, there was no question of repair. She has been living in a corner of her sister-in-law’s house ever since her own was destroyed in a storm. So she and her husband have to build a new one. And since they have no land to build it on they rented a plot a couple of hundred yards from the sister-in-law’s place. They’ve had the frame built, and will put the roof on soon.

But Juslène has forgotten how much of her money they paid, and she’s forgotten how many years they’ve leased the plot for. When I try gently to provoked her memory, her sister-in-law chimes in rudely from across the yard with the rental price — 2500 gourds, or about $37 — and she adds a few choice words about Juslène.

Juslène has had trouble with her livestock as well. Her pig died of Teschen disease. She will be able to recuperate some of the loss. She sold the meat. But when a butcher buys an animal that has died, she generally does so with credit. The woman who bought Juslène’s pig says that she’ll pay in March.

One of Juslène’s goats had two kids, but they both died almost right away. According to Juslène, they never had the strength to stand. The other goat is pregnant, and though we teach CLM members to keep careful track of their livestock’s pregnancies, Juslène can’t say when the goat got pregnant or how long the pregnancy will be.

When I ask Juslène what she is planning to do to keep herself fed once her stipend runs out in just two weeks, she still doesn’t know. But she responds cheerfully, “M pa konnen. M ap rete.” Or, “I don’t know. I’ll do without.”

In a sense, it is not surprising that we find women like Juslène among those we work with. For someone like her, it might be difficult not to be extremely poor. Titon, her case manager, has his work cut out for him. The most reliable way to improve the family’s situation might be to work more with her husband than with her. And that’s probably part of what Titon will do. He’s dealt with similar cases already. But he’ll need to do it without dismissing Juslène or locking her out of the picture. Only a commitment from him to integrate her into everything he does with the family offers any hope of help her personally make whatever progress she can make.