Only the last five hours of the hike from the Boukan Kare market to Bouli, the gateway to Tit Montayn, are uphill. You spend the first hour or so crossing and re-crossing the Boukare Kare River. There is nothing like a bridge. You just roll up your pants and do your best to keep your feet as you struggle through the river’s swift, thigh-deep waters. The steep and rocky path that rises after the last crossing – the eighth by my count – is entirely unshaded, so you spend the whole trip under a tropical sun. And reaching the Boukan Kare market is already a challenge, even if there is something like a road that takes you there.

Tit Montayn is, in other words, hard to get to. Neither trucks nor motorcycles can make the trip. There is no road. It is one of Boukan Kare’s four “communal sections.” Boukan Kare itself is a “commune,” something like a county, and a communal section is the next smaller geographical division in Haiti.

Through its Chemen Lavi Miyò program, Fonkoze is committed to removing extreme poverty from Haiti’s Central Plateau, and Boukan Kare is one of the first two counties we entered. But to eliminate extreme poverty from Boukan Kare means eliminating it from all its communal sections, so whatever special challenges a region presents, we know we will have to overcome them. Bringing our program to Tit Montayn will present an array of challenges.

We spent a day last week making a first exploratory visit, hiking up Thursday in time to eat, bathe, and recover. And not much else. Friday morning we walked around a little, talking to community leaders about their section, learning as much as we could in a few hours before we had to head back down the hill.

Tit Montayn is a nickname. The area’s full name in French is Petite Montagne. It is a mountainous region, with steep hills on all sides. From Bouli, the paths stretch out for two to three hours in three directions, toward Ench and Mayisad in the north and east and to the Artibonit River to the west. It’s a lot of territory to cover. We learned that it is sprinkled with little farming communities. There are, perhaps, several hundred of the sort of extremely poor households we will need to work with.

Our case managers can generally serve about 50 households each, so we will surely need to have several of them in Tit Montayn, with a regional director to guide and support their work. There is, of course, no question of their hiking up the mountain every day, so we will have to establish a satellite office with a residence attached. We will have to get equipment up the mountain, but also get people and equipment through and around the hills once they are there. So we will need to acquire some horses and mules. We will need to find ways to ensure communication – cell phone coverage is spotty – and food and water and everything else that staff will need to work full-time in a region far from their homes.

And there’s more. Once we have selected households for the program, we will need to buy them the assets that the program requires. If there are a couple hundred of participating households, and they all choose, say, goat-rearing as one of their enterprises, we will have to get two-three goats into each family’s hands. That’s a lot of goats. Perhaps we’ll be able to buy most of them, or even all of them, in the small markets that we’ll find in the hills, but we cannot be sure of that. And getting large numbers of animals up the hill from Boukan Kare will be a nuisance. Something worth trying to avoid.

And that may not be the worst of it. Our program depends on a certain amount of cash. During the first months after households receive their new assets, we give them a small weekly cash stipend. It’s only 300 gourds, or a little more than $7, but it helps them protect their assets by relieving some of the pressure they normally feel to turn everything they have into cash and consume it right away. After all, their children are hungry. If we find just 200 households in Tit Montayn, that means getting $1400 up the mountain every week, without even considering other expenses.

And the need to transport cash will be multiplied by the fact that we do not implement the program in a vacuum. It works together with Ti Kredi, a credit program for families who are just slightly better off than the ones who qualify for CLM. We will need to be able to deliver loans and collect reimbursements in and around the Tit Montayn hills. And within six months, those Ti Kredi members should be ready to graduate to regular solidarity-group credit, which means larger loans and larger repayments.

All of this means moving around with large amounts of cash in one of the poorest places on earth. Until Brinks comes up with an armored mule, our agents and case managers will need to just throw the money in their backpacks and be as inconspicuous as a stranger in a very isolated region can be. Whatever plans we make for managing our cash will have to be made in close collaboration with the Fonkoze credit staff in the Boukan Kare office, which will be responsible for serving the families of Tit Montayn long after CLM and Ti Kredi have moved on.

So there are a lot of good reasons not to go to Tit Montayn. And there is plenty of need in other, much easier-to-reach places. It is not as though a decision to skip Tit Montayn would have us sitting around, twiddling our thumbs. But we are out to prove that it is possible to eliminate extreme poverty, so we cannot cherry-pick the poverty most convenient for us. Tit Montayn carries an importance for us beyond the families whose lives we hope we’ll permanently and dramatically improve.

Our question cannot be “whether?” but always only “how?”

CLM staff hiking to Tit Montayn