Louisimène lives with a daughter in a small shack in Gwo Labou. She has two other children, who live with their fathers. Three of her children are dead.

She grew up in the same extreme poverty that has marked her adult life. Her parents lived in Gran Platon, a mountain community. Her father was never part of her life, and her mother was seriously handicapped, so she was raised by an uncle who treated her well even if he could not send her to school. When she first fell in love, her young partner sent his parents to her uncle to ask for her hand and they set out on their life together. He worked his father’s land, but they were never able to get ahead. They couldn’t earn enough even to buy just a few animals to raise as a source of informal savings.

The situation was especially complicated because her partner always had other women. Eventually, he decided to move to Port au Prince with one of them, abandoning Louisimène and their daughter in Gwo Labou.

Louisimène has tried to send the girl to school, and the girl made it to second grade last year, but she’ll have to repeat the grade because she stopped going when she tore her sneakers and Louisimène couldn’t afford to replace them. The girl’s father doesn’t help. The girl explains, “He never buys anything for me. I could ask her for five gourds (less than eight cents) and won’t give it to me.”

Though their house is in disrepair and the yard that surrounds it is small, Louisimène is careful about its appearance. She sweeps all around it meticulously each day. “Even if you’re poor, when people go by your house, they’ll look at you.”

Louisimène is motivated to try to learn to write her name. She quickly bought the cheap copybook and pencil that Ricot, her case manager, told her to acquire so that he can give her writing lessons. But her progress is slow. The pencil is still awkward in her hand. She struggles even to copy the L’s that Ricot assigns her as homework.

The week’s lesson is about malnutrition, and it starts out oddly. Both Ricot and Louismène seem frustrated that Louismène remembers so little of the previous week’s lesson, and Louisimène’s response is to start by repeating everything Ricot says this week, line by line. He can pause to take a breath without her echoing what he’s just said. It takes some convincing, but he eventually gets her to relax and just listen.

She has a hope for the program, but she initially frames it in very general terms. “Jan nou te ye, nou p ap konsa ankò.” That means that she and her daughter will no longer live the way they’ve been living. When she’s asked to explain, she focuses on her home. “Even if you’re only living under a tree, you have a home,” she says, but her current house is on family land. The land isn’t hers. And she worries that she could die and her daughter could have trouble enforcing her claim to it. So she wants to buy herself a plot.

Miramène is just 21 years old. She, her mother, and a sister-in-law live with their children in a small hillside house made of palm wood, in Gwo Labou, a mountain community in Kolonbye. The sister-in-law is also a CLM member.

She says that there are families that have the means to live, but hers never has. “Gen mount ki genyen. Nou men, nou pat janm genyen.” Her mother had six children, and supported them by farming. But with access to only very little of her own farmland, she had to struggle by renting plots or working them as a sharecropper. But hunger, Miramène says, wasn’t a serious problem when she was growing up. “The land used to yield more.” The family was even able to buy livestock. Her mother still raises some animals, even though things have gotten harder.

Miramène has one child, a girl who was born in January, just after the girl’s father left to look for work across the nearby border, in the Dominican Republic. He returned for a visit in April, and Miramène says that he was glad to meet their child.

As a girl, she had the chance to go to school. She made it to the second grade, but she explains that she got sick, anemic, and so had to give it up.

CLM took her into the program, she says, because she lacks. “M pa genyen.” That means that she doesn’t have. It’s not that she lacks this or that particular thing, but that she just doesn’t have possessions. Though she can occasionally earn a little bit of money when her mother gives her something out of the garden that she can carry to market and sell, she explains that she has nothing of her own she can lay her hands on to sell it if she needs cash.

She’s been seeing her case manager for almost a month, but she’s still uncomfortable talking with him. Ricot sits close to her, and speaks encouragingly, but she shifts constantly in her chair, always turning so she can look away. The day’s subject is malnutrition, and Miramène whispers that she doesn’t know what it is. But she follows Ricot’s explanation closely, repeating the key points when he asks her to.

It’s her turn to receive the sòl. That’s the pot from the savings club that Ricot has organized for her and the other women he works with in her neighborhood. The women contribute 200 gourds of their 350-gourd stipend each week, and one of them gets it all. On the one hand, it can serve as a way to help women learn to plan. Their case managers will talk with them about the different ways they could use the money and what their priorities are.

On the other, it can help them organize the money they’ll need to complete their home repair. The CLM program helps them. We provide some of the materials and stipends for the builders, but the families themselves have a lot they are responsible for, and some need cash to make the work happen. Without the money they can save through the sòl, they’d have a hard time getting it done.

But Miramène has no idea what she wants to do with the money. Ricot asks her several times in several different ways, but she doesn’t know how to respond. So they agree that he will deposit it as savings.

Laumène lives in Gwo Labou, a sweeping mountain community just across the river from the road that leads through Kolonbyè to downtown Savanèt. She joined the CLM program in August, and has been receiving home visits for almost a month.

She’s not sure how old she is, but her life has already been full. She’s not from Gwo Labou, but from Lasous, a more remote area farther into the mountains. Her mother gave birth to twelve children, but only seven of them survived. None were able to go to school.

Her first partner was a young man from the same area. When they fell in love, he sent his parents to her parents to ask for her hand. They had six children and they struggled together. Four of the children survived. He would farm a small garden on land that belonged to his father, but it was never enough. When money and food would start to run out, he would sneak across the Dominican border to look for work. That’s where he died, hacked to death with machetes in a dispute with Dominicans.

After he died, she began to have trouble with his family. She didn’t like the way they treated her and her children. So she took the kids and moved back in with her family. When her second partner asked her to move in with him, she agreed. He was already married, but her parents couldn’t help her, so she didn’t see any other reasonable choice. When her father passed away, her mother even joined her in the small yard when her partner built her a home.

They’ve had seven children together and lost two. The five who remain still live with her. Her partner continues to live mainly with the other woman, with whom he has six children. This other woman is his “madanm marye,” or principal wife. In Haitian Creole, the two women are matlòt, the word for women who share the same partner, a situation that is not unusual in the Haitian countryside.

When asked why she thinks the CLM team chose her for the program, she has a simple answer, “Yo pran m paske m malviv.” “They took me because I live badly.” Four of her younger children should be in school this year, but she isn’t sure yet how she’ll send them. Last year, she counted on a small community school that was organized in a roughly constructed palm-leaf tent a few minutes up the hill from her home. But she’s not sure when it will open this year or where she’ll get the 350 gourds – currently about $5.50 – it will cost for each child. And that doesn’t include the cost of uniforms or books or pencils and pens.

She simply and accurately describes the poverty trap she lives with. Gwo Labou is a farming community. “Travay,” the Creole word that generally means “work,” is a synonym for “to farm” in the general parlance there. “If you don’t have means to work, you won’t have a big harvest. When you bring it to market to sell, you won’t be able to buy what you want and need. My husband has to work in his wife’s field first. Then he can help me out a little. But I don’t have the money to buy seedlings. I have to make do with whatever seeds I can borrow. People will lend you seeds for the summer planting, but you have to have your own in the fall.”

Though she’s only just started in the CLM program, Laumène has already adapted well to some of the routine. Her case manager, Martinière, has given her two goats, and she knows just when one of them was mounted by a buck. She also remembers enough from her enterprise training to know when she’ll have confirmation of its apparent pregnancy. She’s working hard to learn to write her name, but she has a long way to go. To this point she can only write the first two letters. She remembers much of what she heard from Martinière already about Vitamin A, and willingly joins his responsive sermon about fresh fruit and Sweety, the cheap powdered drink that is popular in rural Haiti.

“If you sell your fresh fruit in the marketplace to buy Sweety for your kids, you’re selling what?”
“Health.”
“And buying what?”
“Malnutrition.”

She doesn’t yet have a plan, only a vague hope. “Yo wè w pa alèz. Yo mete w nan chemen an. Ou travay. Ou pa parese. W ap genyen pi devan.” “[The CLM team] sees that you’re not living well, and they put you on the right path. But you work. You’re not lazy. And so you can succeed.”