Louna Lamandier is a young woman who lives with her husband and their little girl at the entrance to Kapab, on the ridge that separates the neighborhood from Lonsi and the road to downtown Laskawobas. The yard in front of her home offers broad views of the Artibonit River below.

She was a school girl, and she reached the fifth grade, but had to drop out when her father became ill and could no longer send her. She started a small business selling used clothes, but gave it up when she had her baby, and never had the money to get it started again. The couple has been living on the odd jobs that her husband Wala could find. He generally works as a mason’s helper.

When she joined the program, she asked to receive goats, and her case manager gave her two. She and Wala have been taking good care of them for the most part, though they missed the first anti-parasite campaign. Their case manager will have to bring the medications to their home now, and it’s urgent. One of their goats seems to have some sort of internal bug. She bought a third goat with savings from her weekly stipend. When Wala finally received some long-due money from a job he had done, they bought a fourth. That one was already pregnant, and the couple now has five, including its small kid.

The program also gave her money to go back into business, and things are going well. She started with 4000 gourds. She buys a pile of used clothes in Mibalè or in Laskawobas, and then sells it, either in smaller piles or in individual pieces. “I take the best pieces and I walk around downtown, selling them one by one.” Her original investment has doubled. She last bought for 8000 gourds. And she’s already used some of its profit to buy chickens as well.

Like all members of CLM, Louna is in a VSLA, a Village Savings and Loans Association. But when she saw how it worked, she stopped participating. This is very unusual. Almost all CLM members are pleased with the chance that VSLAs offer to save money and to take out small loans.

And Louna likes the idea as well, but VSLA members can buy between one and five shares in the association at each weekly meeting. In Louna’s VSLA, share’s cost 50 gourds. These meetings are open, organized to foster transparency. But that means that all your fellow members know how many shares you buy each week, and Louna doesn’t want that. She would not want her neighbors to know if she only had enough to buy one or two shares. She says she will join next year, when they start a new cycle and she feels able to buy five shares every week.

Mariciane Céus is a lively, 49-year-old women. She has seven children, and five of them live with her and her husband, Frankel. Their home is on a small, bare hill, down close to the riverside.

She and Frankel have managed for years by counting one their harvests. Mariciane also would sell fish, going to the river to meet fishermen at two or three in the morning, and carrying their catch to Laskawobas for sale. But she stopped. “It is too early. It’s too much to carry. I’m not young any more. I can’t do it.”

They have always worked to send their children to school, though at the start of this year they only were able to send two . And even those two have been sitting at home since the beginning of their winter vacation. They can’t return to school, because neither has a usable book bag.

With her weekly cash stipend, this would be an easy problem to solve, but Mariciane has had another expense to worry about. She’s throwing everything she can save into building materials for her new home. She and Frankel want a big house. The one they are planning will be nearly twice as big as what the support the CLM program provides is designed for.

But Mariciane is determined. “I can’t build a small house. I have to have space for visitors. I can’t promise them a comfortable place to sleep, but they have to have a spot where they can lie down.” Just last week she was visited by a child’s godmother, he husband, and children, and Mariciane was unhappy about the arrangements she could make.

She asked for goats and turkeys as her enterprises, and they are doing well, though they haven’t had offspring yet. It is challenging, however. Kapab might seem green, but their is a curious lack of grass for goats to eat. One has to constantly scavenge leaves from the trees in the area.

She has plans for her animals. As they increase in value, her first goal is to set one aside for her oldest daughter, who is struggling to get by in the Dominican Republic. “She and her husband have trouble finding work over there. I want her to know that if she comes back, she’ll have at least something that’s hers that she can get started with.”

After that, she hopes to be able to buy a mule. She doesn’t feel up to carrying heavy loads anymore, so getting a pack animal is the key to getting herself back into business, selling her own produce and what she can buy in the area at the local market. Her plan is to use the money she’ll have saved in a year of her VSLA. It won’t be enough, but she may be able to complete what she needs by selling a harvest.

Darline is one of Mariciane’s daughters. She’s 21, and she has two young children, ages one and three. Neither father helps her support his child. Everything is up to her. She used to have a small business, selling in the market in Laskawobas, but, when she became pregnant, the money ran out. She and her kids have been dependent on her parents ever since.

Like her mother, she chose goats and turkeys as her enterprises, so the yard around their house is full of animals. Her older son and his uncle, her mother’s youngest boys, spend much of their time running around with the turkeys. One of Darline’s has already has four chicks behind it. If all four grow to maturity, they will give Darline a good start.

She doesn’t share her mother’s ambitious plan to build a large, new home. Darline is aiming for just one small room. Even that may be challenging without a partner to help her accumulate the materials she needs. She’s started to buy lumber with her weekly stipend, however, and she remains hopeful. They have already purchased some of the extra sheets of roofing tin they will need, and they think that they’ll be able to get the rest by taking the few good sheets left on their current house.

She would like to get back into business, and thinks she should be able to do so either with savings from her stipend of with a loan from her VSLA. But she’s limited. “I should sell in the local market, but unless I have someone to leave my children with, I can’t. I’ll probably start my business right here, selling in front of my home.”

Natacha Antoine lives across the main path from Mariciane and Darline, closer down towards the river. She’s nineteen, and both she and her younger sister are in the program. She and her husband have a young girl. The younger sister has two children already.

She chose goats and a pig, and she hasn’t had much luck with livestock so far. When her pig started to look sick, she sold it right away to be butchered. She only got 2000 gourds, but it was a lot better than getting nothing. She wasn’t able to get anything at all out of the goat that died.

With the encouragement of her case manager, she started a small business in front of her home. She sells snacks, like crackers, friend dumplings, and akasan, a beverage made from corn that’s popular for breakfast. The business is going well. She began with 1000 gourds that her husband gave her from his farming income, and it’s already worth double that much.

She and her husband are working on preparing the materials to build a home. Right now, Natacha lives with her parents, and her husband lives with his. But, like Mariciane, they want a big house, or at least Natacha’s husband does. His reasoning is not the same as Mariciane’s, though. He wants space in the house that can serve as a storage shed for his farming tools and also for his harvests. Natacha is willing to go along with him, even though she knows that it will mean extra investment and, so, extra work for them both.

She is very excited to be part of a VSLA. She made it to the ninth grade, so she is more than capable of being one of its secretaries. She hopes to have the discipline to save 13,000 gourds in the first year. That’s the most she could possibly save. And she already knows that she wants to use the money to buy a horse. It won’t be enough, but if her business continues to grow and some of her livestock starts to succeed, she should be able to find the rest of what she will need.

Dieumène Thélusma is a grandmother with five dependent grandchildren. They live in Ti Sitwon, a hillside community above the road leading into Dezam from Mibalè in the east and Ponsonde in the west. Her grandchildren have been with her ever since their father, one of Dieumène’s two children, passed away. Though they sometimes go to see their mother, they really depend on Dieumène. They used to depend on her husband, their grandfather, as well, but he has been sick. He now depends on Dieumène as much as they do.

One of their granddaughters, Louinèse, has her own two small children. She was away giving birth when the CLM went through the selection process in the neighborhood, so the team missed her, though she herself easily qualifies for the program. Fortunately for her, however, one of the families who was initially thought to qualify turned out to have been lying to the team. They were removed from the list, and that left a spot open, which was immediately offered to Louinèse. She is not excited to get to started.

Dieumène has been really struggling, especially since her husband became unable to help out. She’s been cutting up the trees on her husband’s land, turning them into charcoal

She’s unhappy because her house is falling apart. “I have no one to help me.”

She and the children don’t even always have enough to eat. “If I have nothing to give them, they go to bed without. They just lie down like that to sleep.”

She’s asked the program to give her goats and small commerce, and she has ideas about each. About small commerce, Dieumène says that, “As long as I have a business in my hands, my kids won’t go hungry.” Though she doesn’t yet know what kind of business would suit her best, she is sure that she can begin to make money if she is able to start going to the downtown market with some cash in her hands.

About the goats, she says “I’ll keep them tied where they find plenty to eat, I’ll give them water, and someday I’ll sell some to buy a cow.”

Marimène Jean lives closer to the road, in a home with her husband and their five sons. Her husband helps her support the kids by farming. The couple doesn’t have their own land, so they farm as sharecroppers.

She used to earn income with small commerce. She’d sell laundry detergent and bleach by the cupful, but her business was built upon borrowed money. She never had capital of her own. She was always owing someone. Her last pregnancy made it impossible for her to sell at all, and her merchandise ran out before she was even able to pay everything she owed. She still has some debt, and she has been hoping for a way to get started again ever since.

The couple’s older children are all in school now, though only one was in school before Marimène joined CLM. Her fourth boy has a godmother who sends him to school. Marimène began sending the others just this year. “People were telling me that now that I’m in a program, I have to send my kids to school.” She sends them to the local public school. It’s inexpensive, but she’s not sure where the little money it cost will come from.

Unlike Dieumène, Marimène doesn’t even have a home to call her own. She’s been living in a house that belongs to one of her husband’s relatives. Things are looking up, however. When a local leader heard that she and her husband would have the chance to build their own home, she agreed to sell them an inexpensive plot of land to build on on credit. They can pay her as they have it. Marimène is thrilled. She and her husband have already had the pit for their latrine dug on the new plot of land.

She’s asked the program for goats, and she’s interested in poultry for her other asset. But she doesn’t want chicken as long as she and her family are where they are right now. They are too easily stolen. She’d rather have turkeys, which are easy enough for her case manager to provide.

Her plan for the goats is simple. She wants to take care of them until she has enough to buy a small cow, or, even better, a small plot of farm land. Someday she hopes that she and her husband will be able to stop sharecropping and farm their own land instead.

Rose Marie and her husband Sonèl live with their four children in Gad Mamon, a small rural area on the border between Tomond and Ench. Before they joined the CLM program, they got by through hard work. Rose Marie did laundry for wealthier families in Tomond and Mamon, and Jonel worked in local sugar mills, boiling down sugar cane juice to make molasses, which is sold by the barrel to makers of rum.

Rose Marie chose goats and a pig as assets for the CLM program to give her, and she is doing well with both. She now has four goats, and, thanks to her sow’s first litter, she has four pigs as well.And the original sow is once again pregnant.

The couple’s progress is otherwise clear to see as well. Their large three-room house stands right in front of their previous home, and the difference is striking.

When Rose Marie told her case manager Manno that she wanted to build a large, three-room house with a front patio, he was skeptical. Many CLM members want their new homes to be bigger than they can really manage. Though CLM helps them with home repair or construction, they have invest a lot themselves. And the larger the home, the more the CLM family will have to spend. Families can leave themselves unable to finish the job before graduation. Or they can end up spending money that they really needed for other things.

But Rose Marie and Sonèl were determined, and their success is nearly complete. What is interesting is that they have not sold off any assets to manage the expenses they’ve incurred. They sold no livestock, and Rose Marie has added a small new business, not cashed out of one. She now goes to Ench early every Saturday morning and buys 2500 gourds-worth of frozen chicken meat, which she sells the same day in their neighborhood. She makes 500-700 gourds per week.

Rose Marie explains that they have built the new house using the same earnings that they’ve always depended on: namely, her laundry and his work at sugar mills. That part of their lives — their principal sources of income — has not changed. And that begs a question: If they were able to build such a nice house with their own resources, the same that they’ve always had, why were they living in such a wretched shack before they joined CLM? The couple was really struggling. Rose Marie especially talks about the cost of sending children to school. “Sending the kids to school is expensive,” she explains. “You have to pay the school, buy uniforms, give the kids something to eat.”

The did have income, but everything they earned passed right through their hands. They couldn’t get ahead. They even moved backward. Shortly before they entered the program, their youngest child fell awkwardly, hurting his knee. He ended up spending a week in the hospital in Ench. Sonèl had to borrow a pig from his brother, which he sold to cover the medical expenses. Then he had to work hard just to replace the pig.

Rose Marie says that the program’s push mobilized them. Every week, with every bit they earned, they focused on saving as much as they could to invest in the house. And her father decided to help out as well. When he saw the opportunity that CLM was offering his daughter, he decided to give her much of the lumber she would need. That made the undertaking much less expensive than it otherwise would have been. It is something he could have done years before, but he didn’t.

Rose Marie has visions of further progress. She wants to buy a cow. When asked whether she will sell off livestock to do so, as most CLM members do, her answer is surprising. She wants to keep all the livestock she has. She and Sonèl would rather continue to manage the earnings from the hard work they have always done than sell what they’ve come to own.

Four pigs is already a lot to handle. Pigs can demand a lot of attention and some expense as well. But Rose Marie wants more. She explains they when they get to be too much for her, she’ll start giving them to neighbors to take care of. Profit earned from a pig in someone else’s keep, whether it comes through new litters or through simple growth, must be shared with the animal’s keeper. But it could still get to be a lot. And Rose wants to continue to accumulate pigs and goats, and eventually cows, until she can sell them to buy land.

If Rose Marie’s progress sounds remarkable, that’s because it is. And one key is the excellent, supportive relationship she has with Sonèl. Their priorities seem aligned, and they both seem willing to work hard. But we’ve noticed the relationship in another way as well.

Manno has been teaching Rose Marie to write her name. She never went to school. “When my father heard he’d have to buy two books and two notebooks, he said it was too much.” She’s made some progress, but last week Manno noticed something curious. Rose Marie was writing “Marie” in cursive letters.

CLM case managers do not teach cursive. They teach printing. It is generally so much easier. Manno’s first guess was that she actually had been to school, even if only briefly, and was starting to remember what she had learned. We’ve seen cases like that before. But that wasn’t it. It turns out the Sonèl saw his wife’s efforts, and he decided to help. Without training, he simply showed her to write “Marie” in the only way he knew, which was cursive. And he’s been working on it with her ever since.