Gerbelin Brevil has long been a leader in Do Bwa Wouj, a market community near the ridge that separates Laskawobas and Savanèt, two communes in central Haiti. He’s a farmer, but people in the community look to him for leadership generally. “Someone who wants to try something up here probably needs to contact me.”
The CLM team was working in Pouli, a populous area at the base of the hill below Do Bwa Wouj. One of its staff members was a local man, and he made sure that the team was aware of the community up the mountain from the area where they were working at the time. He also gave them Brevil’s name as a contact for when they began to look at the area. “When the CLM team first came up the mountain, folks here didn’t even want to talk to them until they could say that they had spoken with me. I organized the first meetings. I even found them a house to rent so they had a place to stay.
Since Fonkoze first piloted the CLM program in 2007, it has been organizing committees of local leaders to support the work. Members of these committees are, in a way, selected by the program members. When women are first invited to join CLM, the same person asking them to join the program also asks them who there is in the community whom they can turn to when they have a problem. Some will tell you that they have no one, but many will cite a name or two. The team compiles lists of the names that come up most, and it invites them to serve on a committee that will support the program’s work.
Brevil was named by many of the members, and he was happy to serve, especially when he heard what the program would offer. “It seemed like the kind of thing that I would have wanted to do myself if I had had the means.”
CLM seemed different to him from other programs that he’s heard of. “It’s just different. First of all, they took the time to find the people who really need it. Second, they do everything they say they are going to do. Third, they don’t just give people stuff. They accompany them.”
He likes being part of a committee. “It teaches us things, and it becomes a source of motivation.” He is especially pleased with the savings and loan associations that he and his fellow committee members have helped the team establish for program members. “We need to keep the associations going even after the CLM team is gone.”
His committee has already accomplished important things for the program members, beyond helping them establish their associations. The committee kept one member from selling a pig at the local market without having discussed it with the team. He also talks of members who need lumber as support posts for the hut that encloses their latrine or for their new home and about how the committee has helped them get hold of such posts and of palm trees that can be made into planks to use as their homes’ walls.
But now he’s working on a more serious situation. One of the members in his neighborhood doesn’t have land to build a house on. She’s been living on a parcel that belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, and Brevil has taken on the job of negotiating with the sacristan, the chapel’s main authority, for the member to be able to build her new home on church land.
“We are the program’s eyes. Case managers see members once a week, but we are with them all the time. We keep track of what they do. We help them keep from wasting what they’ve been given.”