Tit Montayn

>>**Tit Montayn**<<
  
>>August 4th, 2010<<
  
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 the 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?” 
  
http://www.apprenticeshipineducation.com/images/climbingtitmontayn.jpg
  
>>CLM staff hiking to Tit Montayn<<