Madolie and her case manager, Sandra

The pillar that our program stands on is the close accompaniment we offer our members. In practice, that refers first and foremost to the visits our case managers make to our members’ homes every week. These visits help us maintain close contact with members. They enable us to keep track of their progress, and thus give us a way to ensure we know when and how to support our members in their struggle.

And there’s nothing casual or informal about the visits. They follow a procedure that has remained more or less fixed since the program was in its pilot phase. There’s even a laminated checklist our case managers are supposed to bring into the field with them outlining the rigid ten-step process.

One of the most important of these steps is the discussion of the weekly issue. In the course of adapting the program to Haiti, Fonkoze identified ten lessons that we believe are most critical to our members to learn as they attempt to change their lives. These lessons all involve changing behaviors with respect to certain key aspects of their lives: Nutrition, management of drinking water, hygiene, pre- and post-natal healthcare are examples of areas we discuss. Each week the case managers discuss one of them. At the end of ten weeks, they return to the first issue and repeat the series.

One of the most important of these issues is family planning. It’s complicated. We can tell someone how much vitamin a they should consume and where they’ll find it. We can tell them how to treat their water. But we cannot tell them how many children they should have.

At the same time, we need to talk to them frankly about the consequences of having a lot of kids. Though we have members with only one or two, the number who have six or seven or eight is striking, and the extra difficulties that very large families will have as they try to move forward are not hard to figure. Each kid is a treasure, but also a regular expense and an added risk of catastrophic, livelihood-destroying major expenses as well.

Sandra, one of our new case managers, and I met Olienne, a new CLM member, while she was bringing her infant to downtown Boukankare to have it weighed. This is part of a regular postnatal health program provided by Partners in Health, the local healthcare provider and the most important provider of health services across the Central Plateau.

The baby is Olienne’s fourth child, and the only one that is with her. She gave away the other three – who have various fathers – because she was too poor to keep them even minimally fed. This fourth child, a boy, was not fathered by the man she now lives with, but that man has said that, as long as the boy is raised to call him “dad,” he will take responsibility for him.

So Olienne presents a case in which a real understanding of family planning seems urgent. At the same time, Sandra’s conversation with her about it was extremely difficult, in two ways.

First of all, Olienne has a hard time at this point really focusing on anything that Sandra tells her. Each week, before they talk about a new issue, case managers review the issue they had discussed the previous week. Olienne claimed to remember nothing at all of the issue Sandra had last discussed – basic nutrition – and had a hard time even repeating or summarizing parts of this week’s issue as Sandra went over them with her. Sandra would repeatedly ask, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” And though Olienne would claim that she did, she would not be willing or able to say what she had understood.

Second, Olienne does not see herself as a decision maker with respect to her own reproductive life. She says that her current partner will not agree to contraception because he wants a daughter. He himself has denied this in separate conversations with Sandra.

But what is most interesting about this is the way Olienne frames the issue: “Lè w kay moun nan, se pa w k ap deside.” That means, “When you live in someone else’s home, you’re not the one who’s going to decide.”

But the translation doesn’t really communicate the force of the phrase. To live “kay moun” or “in a person’s home,” generally means something specific. It’s the phrase used to describe restaveks, the children in Haiti who live in domestic servitude. If Olienne sees herself as living kay moun, she does not see herself as an adult but as a child, without rights of her own.

So Sandra will have to figure out a way to communicate effectively with Olienne, and to help her see herself as an adult with responsibilities and rights. Only when she is successful in these basic aspects of her work will she have any chance of communicating effectively about a more specific question like family planning. But the whole conversation seems not only important, but urgent. Maybe even too late. Because though Olienne’s boy is only six months old, she shows signs that she is pregnant again.

After talking to Olienne, we went to see Madolie. She is a woman about 40 years old. If you ask her how many children she has, she’ll immediately switch to the past tense. She’ll say, “I had ten, but I lost four of them.” Her six surviving children, ranging from girls in their late teens to a boy about six, live with her and her husband in Pyèlwiblan.

Madolie seems firm when she says that she’ll have no more kids, and cites the youngest boy’s age as evidence that she’s no longer in any danger. But though she feels no need to learn about family planning for herself, she was extremely interested for her two older girls. Neither is the child of her current husband, but she says he treats both of them well, as though they were his own. Madolie’s oldest had a baby in July, and her second – who’s just 16 – had hers in January. Neither father is providing the least support for mother or child. The younger girl has been unable or unwilling even to identify the father. If you ask her, she just looks at the ground and shakes her head.

Both babies have thus become additional mouths for Madolie and her husband to feed. So when Sandra starts to talk about contraception, Madolie is glad to have her call the girls over to join the discussion.

We can’t and shouldn’t decide how many children our members should have, or whether they use birth control, or what kind of birth control the ones who choose to use it should use. But the link between their poverty and their many children and the barrier additional children will present to their progress mean that we must at least do what we can to ensure that they feel entitled to make decisions and that the decisions they make are well-informed.

Sandra talked with Madolie’s daughter, too. Here she listens, holding her young son.

Monique has been a CLM member since we brought 300 new families into the program in October. She’s a widow who lives with her children in Danton, a neighborhood of southwestern Sodo that has a very high concentration of CLM members.

I first met Monique in September, during the final verification process. I was the one who visited her home for her interview, and I was struck by what I found. It was midday, and she had not yet been able to provide food for herself or her kids. Nor did they have any prospects for eating later in the afternoon or evening. Their best hope was a little bit of corn a neighbor had given her. She was letting it dry so she would be able to grind it the next day. I wrote about the experience at the time. (See: Final Verification.)

I have been curious to learn about her progress, so I asked Chedlin, her case manager, if I might join him on his rounds.

Her yard was quiet. It was empty when Chedin and I arrived. Her children are now all in school. In September, none were or ever had been. They now attend an inexpensive local community school where tuition is less that $4 per child per year. She pays an examination fee of about $2 more each semester for each kid. These fees had been beyond her means.

This small total is a bigger lump sum than Monique can muster even now, but CLM doesn’t pay it for her. Nor did we ask the school’s leadership to forgive it. The solution was much simpler: We just asked that she be allowed to pay a little bit at a time. The school’s leadership agreed, and the arrangement has been working.

And school attendance means much more than education for her kids, because a large international NGO funds a feeding program at the school. Monique’s kids are thus guaranteed a substantial hot meal everyday in addition to whatever she can offer them at home. Thus they had been hungry, missing meals regularly, or even for days at a time, because Monique was unable to make a $4 lump-sum payment for each of them. And their hunger meant so little to those around them, it was such an invisible part of that community’s life, that there was no one to help Monique ask for a payment plan.

She’s managing her new assets well. Her two goats have both had kids, and her pig is pregnant.

More importantly, she’s been buying chickens with her own money. Some of that money comes from the travel allowance we gave her during her six-day enterprise training. (She walked rather than spending the money on travel.) Some of it she saves from her weekly subsistence allowance. What matters is that this is money she’s accumulated by her own careful spending decisions. Her three chickens are laying eggs that she and her children can eat or sell. She also can hatch some of the chicks and raise them for meat or sale or just add them to her stock. And she’s managed to do all this while contributing much of her subsistence allowance – at first half, but now two-thirds – to a sòl, a savings club.

She uses most what she gets out of her subsistence allowance on her kids’ schooling. That’s how she spent the money she got the first time it was her turn to collect the money from the sòl, and she continues to make payments. She has learned to buy some basic food items in large quantities, which saves her a lot of money. And though she has stopped hiring herself and her boy out as farm laborers, she does sharecrop, which helps her keep food on the table.

Monique isn’t out of the woods yet. Though she is doing a good job developing her assets, her cash flow is still weak. The day I visited with Chedlin, she had not been able to feed her kids before they went to school. The fact that they would get a meal there might make this seem less urgent, but it’s not what we want. Or, more importantly, what Monique wants either. She was waiting anxiously for Chedlin’s arrival, because she was counting on the subsistence allowance he would bring to buy something she could serve them for supper and then for breakfast the next day.

But she has time. She’s been in the program for only about four months, and has two months of weekly subsistence allowance and fourteen months of weekly visits ahead of her. The next time it’s her turn to receive the sòl, she’ll use the money to establish a small commerce, which will strengthen her ability to bring in small amounts of money every day. She’ll also add a pair of turkeys to her livestock. They are vigorous, reproduce well, and are very much saleable.

Given what she’s been able to do thus far, her prospects seem very good.

//Monique and her case manager, Chedlin.//

The heart of our case managers’ work unfolds in the visits they make every week to our members. Each case manager is responsible for fifty families, and these visits are our best chance to track and to facilitate their progress. Our job is not simply to give them the assets they need to change their lives, but to ensure those lives change. The assets we give them are important, but would not be enough because most of our members lack the knowledge and the mindset to make something out of their assets. They need close accompaniment, and that’s what our case managers offer.

And we want the accompaniment to be as regular as possible. We try not to let things interfere with our seeing each member every week. So if Martinière, for example, has to be someplace else, we prefer to have someone cover for him. Wednesday, he was helping us distribute goats to some new members who hadn’t received theirs yet, so he couldn’t make his regular rounds of Manwa, Ti Deniza, and Gapi. So I set off early in the morning to make his rounds for him. These notes about my hike through the hills can serve as a survey of the different sorts of problems that our members face.

The first member I met with was Manie. She’s an older widow, with three children. Only the youngest still depends on her entirely. Her oldest daughter is married and has children of her own. She too qualified for CLM, but her husband forbid her from entering the program. As much as we tried to convince them, we failed. Her second child is a son in his early twenties. He comes and goes, staying with her for days or even weeks at a time, but then disappearing to work odd jobs in Port au Prince, Ponsonde or whatever else he might find them. Her third child is Jackson, whom I’ve written about before. (See: Jackson At School.)

We talked about a number of things but a couple stuck out. First, she has a problem with one of her goats. It’s important that she keeps them tied up. If one of them gets into someone’s garden they could just kill it. If garden’s owner is gentler, they’ll confiscate it until Manie pays damages. She might be able to afford to pay, but she certainly has better things to do with her money. So she’s conscientious about keeping them tied. But if you tie them, you need to keep an eye on them, because if they get themselves twisted in the rope, they can panic and do themselves harm.

The first thing Manie said when we sat down together was that she had something to confess. One of her goats had gotten one of its legs twisted in its rope and panicked until it got cut. She had run to the local veterinary worker, and he had dressed the wound, but it hadn’t completely healed. She was following the veterinarian’s instructions, treating the wound with ashes from her cooking fire, and she was hopeful, though upset at what she sensed as her own negligence.

The other thing that stuck out was something she said about her sòl. That’s a kind of savings club that is very popular in Haiti. A group gets together and agrees to contribute a certain amount every day, every week, or every month. They then take turns receiving the whole pot. If, for example, there are ten of us contributing 100 gourds each week, every week one of us will get 1000 gourds. Manie and the other members from Manwa and vicinity have a  sòl. Martinière organized it for them. Each week the ten of them give him 100 gourds from their 300-gourd subsistence allowance and he gives one of them 1000 gourds.

But last time Martinière had visited the area, he had distributed two weeks’ worth of subsistence allowance to each member, so they paid two weeks’ worth of contribution to their  sòl. Manie had gone along with it, because she looks at Martinière, who’s managing the  sòl as an authority figure, but it turns out that she hadn’t really understood why she was paying 200 gourds. So when I gave her the 300-gourd subsistence allowance, and asked her to give me back her  sòl contribution, she tried to give me 200 gourds. She insisted that Martinière had taken that much.

When I refused to take more than 100, she accepted that just as she had accepted the fact that Martinière had taken twice as much. Since I didn’t really understand the problem until later in the day, when I had spoken to another member, I couldn’t really explain things well to her. But I passed the word to Martinière so that he knows he’ll need to talk with her about it next Wednesday.

It was Rose Marthe’s turn to receive the  sòl, so she and I spent most of our time talking about how she wanted to invest it. She had her two CLM goats, but wanted to buy a third with the  sòl money. It’s not really a great investment, because the goat that she’s likely to buy for only 1000 gourds will be too young to get pregnant. It will take some time for her to make much from this. But she had her heart set on it. She likes taking care of the animals, and doesn’t feel pressed to make money more quickly because she and her husband have enough food coming in from the fields right now that they are able to keep themselves and their children fed.

Omène lives with her husband and their children in a home in her in-laws’ yard. And that has become a problem. Her husband comes and goes. He sometimes leaves for weeks at a time when he can find agricultural work in the fields of Ponsonde or Lascahobas. When he’s not there, his folks are nasty to his wife, treating her like a child that they can boss around and even punish. When she said that she would go to spend a few days visiting her own parents, they forbid it, threatening to beat her if she disobeyed. It was the last straw. Martinière had heard this from her. She had explained to him that she would be moving out of the house to get beyond their reach. He had asked her to have her husband there for his next visit. He wanted to hear the husband’s side of things. He was committed to taking Omène’s side come what may. That’s his job. But the problem has a very different look depending on whether the husband is with her or against her. He wanted to make sure he had the full picture.

It turns out that he’s with her. 100%. He’s ashamed of the way his parents treat her, and anxious to get her into a new house as quickly as possible. He’s already cleared a piece of land in the corner of a small field that he’s been farming for years, and he’s begun to collect the materials he’ll need for construction: rocks, sand, support poles, and the palm seedpods that the poorest peasants use as roofing material. I asked him and Omène to be sure to coordinate the move with Martinière. On one hand, that will help ensure that Omène continues to receive our support. On the other, Martinière will be able to provide construction materials – a little cement and some tin roofing – that will make a small house better than it would otherwise be.

Marie is the last member I saw on the way out of Manwa before descending into Deniza. She’s an older woman, but when I arrived at her home she had an infant on her lap. Haitian say, ”lè w pa gen manman, ou tete grann.” It’s a way of saying that you make the best of things: “If you have no mother, you nurse at your grandmother’s breast.” I had always thought that it was just a saying, but there was Marie, nursing her grandson. One of her older children had abandoned two young children to her care.

Marie is doing well by a number of criteria. She’s been managing her subsistence allowance carefully, and has been able to buy several animals – beyond the ones we have given her – already. But there’s a problem: When I arrived at her home at about 2:00, she hadn’t made food yet that day. She was waiting for her subsistence allowance to go to the market. She wouldn’t have any food prepared to early evening. Her youngest son – a boy about ten – was getting ready to grill some hard kernels of corn over a fire for himself and some friends just to ward off the hunger pangs.

Marie seems to feel so much pressure to augment her assets that she is using the money we give her to feed herself and her kids right now to plan for a better future. While that’s admirable in a way, it leaves her children and grandchildren suffering needlessly in the short term. We are in a hurry to see her make progress, just as she’s in a hurry to move forward, because we all know that 18 months is not a lot of time to change a life for good. But 18 months is still 18 months, not 18 days. If we can convince her to trust the process, she could spend a little more money now to improve her children’s lives right away. That’s something for her to talk about with Martinière.

The last woman I’ll mention is Gertha. She’s one of our poorest members. She has no home at all, having to live with her son in the corner of another CLM members home. She had to leave her own home because every time she would accumulate any sort of possessions of value, they would be stolen. Her children’s father had abandoned her, but his family continued to feel free to take anything she had. She met Oranie at the training session we held in December for new members, and moved in with her and her husband.

She’s starting to make some progress. Her goats are pregnant, and she bought a turkey with savings from her subsistence allowance.

But turkeys like to wander, and hers made it into a neighbor’s yard. The neighbor’s kids were chasing it off by throwing rocks, and hit it in the head. So it died.

Unfortunately, Gertha is only too accustomed to losses. And the truth is that there’s no use crying over spilled milk. So we talked about how she can keep anything like that from happening again. For now, she’ll put savings into her bank account instead and use the money to set up a small commerce when it’s enough. She might have to wait until it’s her turn to receive the  sòl.

As we start our weekly visits with our new CLM members, we begin to face new issues. Each member has a story. Each faces her own set of difficulties. Our case managers’ first challenge is to get the members to share the problems they face, to talk about them frankly. That’s when our real work begins. Helping extremely poor women begin to strategize about their lives, helping them to look at their lives as something they can change, is the key to everything we do.

Licia lives in Chipen, in the corner of Tit Montay farthest from our base in Zaboka. Her home is high on a ridge that divides Boukankare from Ench, one of its neighbors to the north. The hike up to Zaboka from Viyèt, where we leave our motorcycles, is already almost four hours. Our team makes that trip every Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning, Martinière leaves early from Zaboka to walk to Chipen, almost two and a half hours away through the hills. He is Licia’s case manager, and he starts with her first, because she is the farthest of all. Then he works his way back downhill towards the lower end of Chipen before he hikes back to Zaboka.

When we got to Licia’s house, she announced that she was leaving the program. Martinière asked her why, and what she said shocked us. She’s cursed. The people around her hate her and will block her. Nothing can change her life.

By way of explanation, she told us the following story: For the first six months that CLM members spend in the program, we give them a small cash stipend, just a little more than a dollar per day. It’s designed as a way to protect their new assets. As small as it is, it helps them guarantee that they can feed themselves and their children without selling the animals we give them or reaching too deeply into the commerce they’re trying to build up. Our expectation is that by the time they’ve spent six months in the program, their assets will be earning them enough income to do the work the stipend has been doing.

But many of the women choose to invest these stipends rather than spending them just to buy food. They buy livestock, mostly fowl. It’s not really what the stipends are intended for, but we are so glad to see the women thinking in terms of investment, that we don’t worry too much. We just try to see to it that they have something to feed their kids as well.

Licia decided to buy a turkey. It would be a big investment, but it could pay off handsomely. Turkeys are hardier than chickens, and this is a major consideration this time of year, when many chickens die in the relatively cold weather. Turkeys reproduce well, and are easy to sell for a decent price. So she went to the market in Nansab, in southern Ench, and bought a young female for 600 gourds, or two weeks’ stipend. She had a number of errands to run in the market, so she left her little boy to keep an eye on the turkey, and went her way.

Unfortunately, the little boy was more interested in a soccer match than in his mother’s new turkey. He went off to watch the match, and when his mother returned, the turkey was gone. She looked all over the market for it, but could find no trace. Her investment disappeared the same day she made it. She felt so discouraged by the loss that she decided to leave the program. There was no point in continuing. She was obviously cursed.

Fortunately, she was open to listening. Martinière talked a lot. But the heart of what he said was simple: She should look at the loss as a lesson. Her boy is not mature enough to be left with such a serious responsibility. Haitian’s say “se mèt kò a ki veye kò a.” This means that a body’s owner is the one who should keep an eye on it. Martinière encouraged her to realize that she herself must take responsibility for the decisions she makes and the assets they bring her way. But for her to leave the program right as it is starting would not solve anything. After some discussion, she relented. She will continue with us, maybe a little bit wiser for her loss.

The problem with Léonie is more serious. We are not sure we can keep her in the program because we can’t get her to tell us the truth. I’ve put together her story from evidence we’ve collected from her neighbors, including the local KASEK, the government official who resides in the zone.

Her partner, the father of her youngest child, is married to another woman. Léonie has been living in a small, dilapidated shack made of mud and sticks and covered with straw just a short distance from the man’s fairly nice house. One day, her partner was doing some work for her in her garden when his wife brought him a midday meal. Léonie was furious. She decided to leave him on the spot. So she left the house and went back to live with her mother.

This wouldn’t normally be a problem. It is not unusual for a CLM member to move. They do it from all sorts of reasons, including because they decide to break up with the man they’re with. But her mother lives well across the Boukankare border in Ench. While we plan to enter Ench eventually, we’re not working there yet. If that’s where Léonie lives, we can’t help her right now.

What’s worse, Léonie has been trying to hide what’s she’s doing from us. We know that she comes to the house she used to live in early on Monday morning so that she’ll be there when Martinière comes for his visit. Even if we had no other way of telling, the emptiness of the house and its yard speak volumes. But we’ve spoken to several witnesses as well who confirm that she doesn’t live there and that her children don’t either. She even borrowed a neighbor’s baby, claiming it to be her own, to show Martinière that they are both in the house. Unfortunately for her, Martinière was smart enough to catch her in the lie. For whatever reason, she is conspiring with the man she has left so that she can stay in the program and receive the assets that we offer.

But the situation really is complicated. We’ve heard that she isn’t actually at her mother’s house, either. We’ve heard that she has moved in with another man. The man lives in another area of Tit Montay, an area that we are currently serving. So it would resolve the problem if it turned out to be true. But until we can get her to speak clearly with us, we can’t move forward.

In the meantime, she and her partner are making visits to Chipen difficult for Martinière. They have spread the word that he comes carrying cash for CLM members, having the man’s older children loudly asking him to bring money to them, too. This makes the trip more dangerous than it needs to be.

For now, all I could tell her is that we can’t help her until we feel confident that we understand her situation. Her lies, I said, mean that we need to take more time. We have no choice. We have to put her on hold. Martinière will continue to visit her, but he will provide no stipend and give her no assets.

A third case: Tuesday morning, just after dawn, as the four Zaboka case managers and I were preparing to go our separate ways, an irate man came to see us. He is the partner of a new member from lower Zaboka. He told us the following story.

He has children by his wife, who is not the CLM member. One of his boys has a goat that he asked the CLM member to look after. When the boy risked being sent home from school because of non-payment of the tuition, the man decided he would have to sell the goat. It would be a big sacrifice because the goat was pregnant, but he felt he had no choice.

When he went to the CLM member to retrieve the goat, she refused to give it to him. She said that she had spoken to her case manager, Orweeth, and that he had told her that she could keep the goat and that he would arrange for her to get legal papers. The man said that, if that’s how CLM works, he would wreck the woman in CLM. Orweeth was there with us as the man spoke, and he gave every assurance that he had told the woman nothing of the kind. Orweeth promised to go by to see her at the end of the day.

As I was leaving Zaboka, I went by her home, and the man was there along with a crowd of neighbors. I asked the woman about it, and she denied outright that she had said any such thing. I told her in front of everyone that I did not automatically believe that she would say such a thing, but that since I wasn’t from the neighborhood, I couldn’t tell who was lying and who was telling the truth. But everyone should understand that CLM will be buying her two goats, but would never simply grant her possession of something that’s not hers.

The case is not simple, though. The woman explained that she has been together with the man for years, that they have children together, but that he’s never done anything for her. She pointed to her home, in terrible disrepair, and added that he hasn’t helped with her farming either. She was breaking up with him, but suggested that confiscating the goat was simply a matter of taking something she is owed. Normally she would receive a kid when the goat gives birth as the price of taking care of it for him. She feels understandably cheated. I asked her to talk about the problem with Orweeth when he comes by at the end of the day, and she said she would. An important part of our job is to ensure that our members get what is their right. We have to help them protect themselves from exploitation and abuse. But we have to find ways of doing so that make sense to the communities they live in.

Taking the man’s goat might be the right thing to do, but it will require discussion. That’s part of what we’re there for.

The hike to Zaboka is hard and long — almost four hours — but also lovely. It starts in the hilly farmland above Viyèt, and winds through Boukankola and Akildiso. It then threads a narrow pass alongside a waterfall. After that, it climbs up and down the steep, narrow slopes that cut through Tit Montay. The pictures below were taken next to the waterfall. Martinière Jasmin, whom I photographed, took the picture of me.

Gauthier, the extraordinary person who leads the CLM program, told me I had to write this story. It has to do with a $50 investment I made last week.

When he recruited me into the program, he warned me that I would find myself reaching into my own pocket once in awhile. We deal with people who are, especially when we first meet them, miserably poor. “Miserably” here not just a word. It reflects the fact that they are hungry, sick, unprotected from most of the harms that might come their way, and without the social or financial resources to change their own lives.

The warning was especially true during the verification process, which preceded our enrolling new members into CLM. The process involves visiting homes in which the program is not yet at work. You see the poverty, but you’re not yet doing anything about it. You find yourself arriving in the mid to late afternoon, with children crying because they haven’t eaten all day and have no prospects of getting a meal before going to bed. The mother tells you her story, and you find yourself giving her 50-100 gourds, or a little more than $1-$2, if you have them, so she can buy what she needs to cook a meal for herself and her kids. It doesn’t feel like a very meaningful gesture. The family needs much more than 100 gourds. But it makes you feel a little better because it means they’ll eat that day.

But we’re past verification now. Our comprehensive intervention into members’ lives has begun. So the desire to hand out small change has faded. But things still come up.

I hiked up to Manwa a few weeks ago, needing to talk to some prospective CLM members. Manwa is on the top of a mountain, and the first structure one sees as one crosses over the ridge is a small church. It houses a small community school, which serves local kids, taking them through the third grade.

When I reached the school, I found Jackson standing in front of it, taking in the scene as the schoolchildren played. It must have been recess. He’s the youngest son of a new CLM member, a 16-year-old boy whom I met when I visited his mother’s house during the verification process. I didn’t know the homes I needed to visit in Manwa, and I thought Jackson would, so I asked him whether he’d be my guide. He said he would, so we spent most of the day hiking around together. At the end of the day, I paid him a little bit for his time, and we chatted as we walked back down the hill together. I asked him what he was doing up at the school. It’s a steep, half-hour’s hike from his mother’s house. He said that when he has nothing to do he likes to watch the children in school. To watch them. He’s never been to the school himself. His mother hasn’t been able to afford it.

So when I went back to Manwa to visit our members with their case manager, Martinière, I was looking for Jackson. He was, as usual, at his mother’s house. Martinière and I spoke to her first. She seems really devoted to the boy, just as he seems devoted to her. She wants him in school, and hopes that the goats and pigs she will raise through CLM will enable her to send him next fall. Her other children are older. It’s probably too late for them to start, but in Jackson she has one hope. We told her that she’d need to get ready for next year, but that we wanted to get Jackson started now, before it’s too late, and that we’d pay for it. She agreed.

When we were finished talking with her, we asked Jackson whether he could take us to the school principal’s home. We didn’t tell him why. When we got there, we asked the principal what we would need to do to get Jackson in school right away. Jackson’s draw dropped. As we negotiated and then paid the school fee for the year, Jackson could only watch. We then took him aside and asked a few questions. We needed to know whether he had shoes, socks, underwear, and pants and t-shirts that could be cleaned to look ok. Though he’d eventually need a uniform, that would take some time. The principal was willing to let him come right away, “in civilian clothes” as they say here, but he’d need to look more or less decent anyway.

Jackson had nothing but a ragged pair of shorts and a t-shirt, also ragged. No amount of cleaning would make them presentable. He’d need a whole new wardrobe. So Martinière agreed to meet him at a nearby market, on an off day, so that they could buy everything he’d need.

When we said our goodbyes and headed down the hill, Jackson’s last words were “lendi m pral lekòl.” Or, “I’m going to school Monday.” The matter-of-fact-ness of these words, their expression of a simple, unexpected realization was as striking as the excitement behind them.

If there could have been any doubt about his enthusiasm, it was eliminated the day he met Martinière in the market in Domond. I said that it’s near Manwa, but “near” is a relative word. It’s easily a four-hour hike each way. And Jackson’s lame. He stubbed his toe painfully walking around in his front yard, ripping off a toenail, and limps badly. But he and his mother made that walk and spent an hour in the market with Martinière. Jackson didn’t know how to try on clothes. Martinière told me that it was as if he’d never done it before. At 16, he was trying sneakers on the wrong feet, choosing pants much too large or much too small, picking the first of everything he would see. Maybe he was just afraid that if he took too much time over things, it would all turn out to be unreal. Martinière had to give lots of firm guidance. But they got their shopping done. Jackson even came with a handwritten list of books he’d need. The principal wrote it out for him. They bought those, too. All told, we spent about $50.

So Jackson’s excited. We hope it lasts. He has a tough road ahead of him. As a big and growing teenager, he’ll be sitting in class with kids half his age, kids who are now well ahead of him. He’s got a slight speech impediment due to a significant overbite. He’s surely in for some teasing. Limping to the Domond market and back showed a lot of determination of a certain kind, but the determination to face the small, daily difficulties that will follow is another matter.

In a sense, his situation is emblematic of what our members face as they join our program. They suddenly find that they have access to resources and support that they could hardly have imagined. They have assets to manage, food to eat, and a well-trained advisor to guide them. But their daily struggle to change their lives has just begun.

Jackson and his mother, Manie

Eileen’s parents died before she can remember, so she spent her early years living at an aunt’s house. As she began to come of age, she started to feel as though she was headed down a dead-end street. “Pat gen anyen ki t ap mache la,” she said. That’s like saying that nothing much was going on around her aunt’s house.

So she left her aunt’s and started wandering around the other parts of Boukankare. Eventually, she met Don and his wife, and they took her in. At the time, they were relatively well-to-do farmers. They have a big family now, but at the time only a couple of their oldest children had been born. So Eileen moved in, and started to lend a hand around the house. To a certain degree, it must have seemed beneficial all the way around. Don and his wife gave Eileen her meals and a place to stay, and Eileen did chores around the house. She became unpaid domestic help. Eight years ago, Eileen became pregnant. She gave birth to a little boy. The boy’s father showed no interest in her or him, so they continued to stay with Don and his family.

Eileen was selected to join CLM in November. The choice was easy enough. She is an adult woman, sleeping on the floor of a stranger’s home because she has nothing of her own. No assets, no income, no prospects of having either any time soon. She attended two weeks of training in December, having selected goat and pig rearing as her two enterprises because, as she said, “They reproduce quickly, and can make money quickly, too.”

When her case manager, Sandra, first went to meet her last week, she discovered a couple of problems. First of all, Eileen’s boy wasn’t living with her. It turns out that, about a year ago, Don decided he could no longer support both Eileen and the boy. He has six kids and a grandchild to care for. His oldest daughter became pregnant while she was living away from home to go to high school. So he took in her son, and sent her back to school. He also has a younger brother whom his parents left in his hands. He has a fair amount of land and livestock, but it doesn’t go far with a family as big as his.

So he sent Eileen’s boy away, back to the aunt whom Eileen had grown up with. Since only women who are responsible for children are eligible for CLM, Eileen would have to be dropped from the program.

Sandra understood that. She just didn’t want to leave it at that. She wanted Eileen to be able to live with and raise her own child. And she wanted her to be able to be part of CLM. So she talked with her and with Don, and convinced them to send for the kid. Don even said he would give her a corner of his yard where she could build a little house. Eileen would have her own income soon, so she’d be able to support him herself.

But there was another problem. Don raises goats and pigs already. Our program requires members to build little shelters for goats and pigs. It helps them keep an eye on their animals, and protects the animals from the elements. To Don, it all seemed a little silly. He’s very successful raising his animals, and wanted to put Eileen’s together with his own. They would be able to take care of them together, and her animals would immediately be less trouble for him.

We didn’t like the proposed arrangement. We felt it would hold Eileen back as she struggles to establish herself as a woman of independent, though very limited, means. So I had a long talk with Don, explaining to him how important it would be for Eileen’s education for her to keep her animals apart, somewhere where she could really sense her full responsibility for them. It took some time, but Don finally agreed. He even offered to help her collect the materials she would need to build the structures. He seems to mean well.

We’ll have to see. Helping Eileen negotiate a path to independence will be a challenge for Sandra. Don and his wife are used to receiving her full, unpaid attention. Her new assets could be a lot of work. She might start to find herself too busy to do everything they ask of her. It’s hard to foresee how they will react.

But without CLM, Eileen is unlikely to ever be anything more than a servant in their home, doing everything from hauling water and light housework to the heavy farm labor in Don’s fields. With CLM, she just might be able to begin building a life for herself and her son.

Bringing one thousand new members into our program has been challenging in many ways. They live scattered across the wide, varied, and mountainous terrain of two large rural counties, which are connected by only a few roads, almost of which are poor. The families we’re looking for are only loosely tied to the communities around them, the networks of local leaders who might otherwise be able to introduce you to them quickly and easily. They remain hidden, scarcely visible, even to those whom they circulate among every day. Let alone to outsiders. They are shy of contact, even distrustful, living according to a well-tested belief that nothing that outsiders like our CLM team could bring to their community is really for them. And at the same time they are surrounded by neighbors who are on the lookout for any development initiatives that might be in the area and who are expert at drawing available resources to themselves.

But an especially difficult aspect of the challenge has been the number itself, one thousand. We’ve had to enroll exactly that many. Not 999, and not 1001. And we’ve had to respect a firm deadline for completion of this first step in our journey. It’s not been easy.

We can’t afford to enroll fewer than a thousand for two reasons. On one hand, our donors expect it. The grant agreements that permit us to access the funds we need are contracts. We’re to serve a certain number of what they call “beneficiaries” by a certain date. To serve fewer would be to fail to keep our word. It could make it harder to get new money down the line. On the other hand, and more importantly, the misery of our prospective members’ daily lives means that failure to serve as many as we can would be a major moral failing, a kind of criminal negligence.

But we can’t serve more than a thousand either, because our budget is narrowly calibrated to that number in all sorts of places. Adding even one or two unfunded families could deprive those we enroll of the resources they need to succeed. We hope and expect to get new chunks of funding now and again, so the 1001st family will just have to wait.

For the last couple of weeks that elusive number has been an important guide in our work, and we still aren’t exactly sure whether we have it quite right. Getting there involves a couple of challenges. First, new members come in chunks. The program is designed to work neighborhood by neighborhood. So a team that spends a day doing what we call “final verification” and “enterprise selection”, the last two steps in the process might enroll three or seven or fifteen families. And in our hurry to finish in time, we can decide to send two or three teams into the field at once. So it’s impossible to foresee how many families we’ll enroll in a day. That didn’t matter when we were 200 families short of the goal, but as we close in on one thousand, it begins to make a big difference.

It’s become even more complicated as we find that some of the people we think we enroll end up not joining the program. They went along with the last steps in the process, but then didn’t show up for the initial six-day-long training we provide. There might be lots of reasons for this. We’ve heard explanations of all kinds. But it seems likely that part of the problem is how hurried we been about these final steps. We’ve found ourselves taking short cuts, decreasing the contact we would normally have with prospective CLM members before things get started.

So both during the training, and right after it, we were out in the field again, trying to convince those who didn’t show up to change their minds and reaching a couple of neighborhoods that fell between the cracks when we were covering the counties with Participatory Wealth Ranking.

And qualifying members in these new neighborhoods is now complicated by two additional factors. First, we are working in areas where we haven’t had Participatory Wealth Ranking sessions.(See TheRightPeople.) That means that we have no map of the neighborhoods’ homes to work from, no community-generated lists of likely families. We have to work from our own observations, and the kind of homes we’re looking for can be very hard to find. Second, we’ve completed enterprise selection in most areas. That’s the step in the process that lets folks know what we’re about. Word gets around that we’re giving animals or other assets away to the families we enroll. So we start getting much less reliable data. A family can be awfully poor without being CLM-poor. People whose needs are real, but who are too well off to qualify for CLM, lie about their assets in hopes of qualifying.

We have a range of techniques to deal with these problems. We’ve seen enough families to have a sense of what a CLM family and its home looks like. So we make much of our observations. We sometimes tell lies, talking of veterinary agents who will be coming by to vaccinate livestock in order to get people to talk about animals that might otherwise deny that they have. In order to find hidden homes, we ask women whom we qualify to point us towards neighbors whose lives are hard.

But it becomes a process with a catch-as-catch-can feel, lacking the discipline of the long, usual process, rooted in community participation, which we prefer. Our nostalgia for lost discipline might look like officiousness, but sacrificing discipline to speed may have grave consequences. Wednesday I went with two teams to a neighborhood called “Premye Pas”, the last place you go through before you start the climb towards Tit Montay. We found and enrolled seven families, but have no way of assuring ourselves that there aren’t two or seven or fifteen more.

And this matters a lot. Our commitment to working neighborhood-by-neighborhood means that we won’t return to Premye Pas again. We’ll spend 18 months with the CLM families there, but will turn elsewhere after that. Any family we’ve missed has forever lost its chance to join CLM. And it’s hard to imagine what other chance a family that needs CLM will ever find.

So as we look to further expansion in the coming year, we’ll need to apply what our experience has taught us. We need to get more disciplined, more focused during the selection and enrollment process. We can’t let our need to hurry push us to cut corners, miss steps, or spread ourselves too thin. Haitians say “two prese p ap fè jou a ouvri.” That means that too much hurrying doesn’t make the sun rise. It’s wisdom worth bearing in mind.

The first hectic days of our program for the more than 300 women who bring us up to 1100 new members for 2010 are behind us. Between finalizing the selection of our new members, inviting them all to their first training, helping each one choose the income-generating activities she wants to start with, and opening the training sessions in four locations, there’s been a lot to do. And there are plenty of details yet to be cleaned up before the end of the year. But things have gone astonishingly well so far: the training sessions are full, and our new members and their case managers/trainers seem to be hitting it off.

Things have been rushed because our commitment to our funders has been to get the new members into the program by the end of the year. We have been rushing up against the deadline recruiting precisely the correct number of participants, a task that only grew more difficult as information about the nature of our program spread.

The information can have a range of effects. Some families whom you interview in the field to verify their need for the program will hide assets so that they are more likely to qualify. Though this is always a problem, it becomes more serious as the character of the program becomes better known. Boukankare is full of families who would be happy to receive free livestock. Many of these, though not poor enough for CLM, are genuinely poor. Their needs are real, even if they are not grave enough to call for the comprehensive and expensive approach we offer. You cannot blame them for trying to work their way into a chance to do a better job at feeding their kids. Our staff’s straightforward challenge has been to see through such efforts.

But there’s another, more challenging consequence as well. Some people, upon seeing that they have not been selected for the program, let their jealously guide them. They begin to spread rumors about the program, hoping to discourage neighbors who really need us from joining.

And we see its effects. After two days of our six-day training had passed at Kafou Jòj, we saw that six of the people who were not attending were from the same neighborhood, an area called Mannwa, on a high mountain overlooking the rest of Boukankare. So one of the case managers and I made an unscheduled hike up the hill to talk with them. We wanted to see what was keeping them away. We spoke to most of the women individually, and heard a range of stories.

Rose Marthe’s was the easiest to understand. She had given birth only days before the session began, and couldn’t make the hike downhill with an infant not yet ready to be taken outside the house. On the workshop’s fist day, she had sent her younger sister to participate for her, but the girl was very young, so the case managers sent her away, not quite understanding why she was there. The girl herself hadn’t been able to explain things clearly. Rose Marthe agreed to send her husband instead for the next three days, and that should solve the problem. Her case manager will have to teach her the stuff that she missed when her weekly visits begin.

Micheline is an 18-year-old mother living with her older sister, who’s been her guardian since their mother died about a dozen years ago. She was selected for the program because she herself has nothing. The baby’s father abandoned her. On the day we selected her for the program we had to go by her house three times. She had hidden from us the first two times. Finally, a smart neighbor sent me off on a wild goose chase, explaining that the girl was at another sister’s home higher up the hill. While I was climbing, the neighbor got the girl to his house, where he then called me to join them. The girl was willing to talk to me, but only in the presence of a trusted adult. Her sister/guardian wasn’t around.

Micheline hadn’t come to the training’s first three days because her sister told her not to. The sister had heard that our program had a hidden agenda. She had heard that we would keep our own key for the house we would build for her, that the animals we’d provide would turn into a curse in some way. We talked with the sister a lot, and think we finally convinced her.

But there were others we couldn’t convince. And it’s not surprising. I have no standing, no credibility in the community. Why would anyone in Mannwa believe anything I say? The Haitian case manager who was hiking with me can communicate a lot better than I can, and he is at least Haitian. But he’s from Cap Haitien in the north, the farthest thing from local. He’s not someone they know or trust. His credibility is scarcely better than mine. It’s a problem that we can’t expect to solve by ourselves.

So we won’t address it by ourselves. We’ll return to Mannwa again next Tuesday, our sixth trip in the last two weeks. We’ve sent word by a sympathetic local leader that we’d like to hold a meeting Tuesday morning in his front yard for everyone in Mannwa who’s interested in learning about our program. We’ve asked him to especially encourage community leaders who could have some influence on public opinion to attend. We will lay all our cards on the table, hoping to create an atmosphere in which the whole community sees how it stands to gain when its eleven poorest families join us.

Success is critical for us in a bureaucratic sense. Our funders want a certain number of what they call “beneficiaries.”

But of course our ability to report promised results for our members, while important, is our smallest problem. It is difficult to imagine what hope there is for Micheline and her child other than CLM. For now, she is stuck in her sister’s home. And that sister is hardly well off herself. The baby she’s caring for right now is, we hear, her second. We don’t yet know where the first one is. Without CLM, she may be doomed to accumulate more and more children as she searches for a man willing to support her and hers. Her poverty may thus only deepen. And it is already pretty deep. If we can get her into the program, she’ll start developing her own assets, sources of income with the potential to give her some degree of control over the way she moves forward.

And Micheline’s not alone. The women who need us really need us badly. We’ve got to do whatever is necessary to convince them and the communities they live in that joining us is the right thing to do.

Barbara lives in Opisa, in the hills between Fèyobyen, the large market to the east of central Boukankare, and Tit Montay, the mountainous region above it. She and her husband live with their four kids in a small house that his parents built. It is the house he grew up in, and they’ve been living in it since his parents passed away. “I haven’t been able to build my own home yet,” he explained, “so my sisters let us live in our parents’ place.”

Their children aren’t in school yet. “You’d like to help your children learn something,” Barbara says, “so they won’t be humiliated down the road.” But she and her husband just haven’t been able to afford to send them. The schools in Boukankare aren’t that expensive. There are places they could send the kids for only a little more than $30 for the year. They’d have to find a couple more gourds for books, uniforms, and sneakers, but it wouldn’t amount to that much. But it’s money they don’t have. They use family planning now, she says, because “things aren’t going well. It’s a struggle just with the kids we already have.”

Barbara explained that as she started to have children, she had to figure out a way to keep them fed. “When your children are crying at your feet, it breaks your heart.” So she looked around, and had an idea. It turned into a steady activity, at least when there’s been some rain. She goes into the fields above her home early each morning and collects edible greens that grow wild there. Then she rinses them and brings them to market, earning between $1.25 and $2.50 in a day.

Her husband can earn more than a dollar on the days he finds work in his neighbors’ fields. Between the money they earn, and the little food they can harvest from the small garden behind their home, they do the best they can to keep their children fed. On days when they have nothing to give, the children can sometimes get something from their aunts, but Barbara and her husband just do without.

Barbara, with her husband and one of their daughters.

Beverly lives with her husband and their two daughters in Viyèt, a wooded, hilly area just northwest of Difayi, one of Boukankare’s small towns. Their second girl is less than two weeks old; she has not yet been carried outside of their small house, nor does she even have a name.

Beverly is something new for our CLM program: a second-generation member. We’ve had mothers and daughters who are members at the same time, just as one would expect we would. Extreme poverty runs in families. The unwritten rules of disinheritance, of exclusion, are as rigid as the laws that rule the passage of property from parent to child. But Beverly is different: Her mother is graduating the program, having successfully removed her household from extreme poverty just as Beverly is joining us. It’s not what one would hope. We like to believe we are helping families help themselves once and for all. But her case is easy to understand.

She didn’t grow up at home. She’s her mother’s oldest child. Their dire poverty forced her to send Beverly to be raised by a wealthier neighbor, who had a home and a business in the nearby city of Mirebalais. There, Beverly grew up as a servant. She never was paid. She was not sent to school. But she was fed and clothed, which was more than her mother could do for her.

Just as her mother was joining CLM, Beverly became pregnant. The woman who had raised her, sent her away, and she and the father of her child were left without a place to live. Her mother had just moved to her father’s land, and the old man gave his granddaughter a little plot to live on as well. Beverly’s husband built a small house, and there they have remained.

It hasn’t been easy, though. They have no land of their own to farm. The husband has worked land as a sharecropper, but he was sick during this past planting season and, so, never got anything into the ground. Beverly learned to run a business by watching the woman whom she served, but without any capital to invest, she hasn’t been able to get anything started. They have no animals.

So they’ve been hungry. Even as the infant grew within her, even in the days since she gave birth. She wraps her stomach tightly before she goes to bed because it relieves some of the hunger pains.

Beverly, with her husband and their two daughters.

Ann lives in Giyòm, a roadless, hilly area between the town of Boukankare and the Artibonite River to its south. The area is sprinkled with houses and small farms, but mostly it’s an uncultivated grassland. There are some trees, but most have been cut down for cooking fuel.

The first thing she told us when we asked her how she was was, “Yo di, se gason ki mèt kay la. Men depi nèg la atè, ou nan dlo.” That means, “They say that the husband is the master of the house, but when the man’s laid up, you’re up the creek.” Her husband has been nearly paralyzed with back pain since early last summer, and so Ann’s been left to fend for him, for herself, and for six of their seven surviving children. The seventh lives as a household servant with a neighbor who has a home in Port au Prince. She gave birth to two others, but they did not survive.

Before her husband became sick, things were looking up. He gave her a crop of sweet potatoes to sell after last year’s harvest that was big enough that she was able to buy a horse. She even had some money left over to start a small commerce. A neighbor lent her an additional 5000 gourds — about $125 — and she was in business.

Then one day in late December, he came home with nice, new New Year’s clothes for all the kids. But he wasn’t feeling well, and he asked to lie down. Since then, he’s gotten steadily worse. Now he cannot rise without help. Since they have no furniture, someone sits behind him as a brace if he wants to sit up.

Then the horse died. And the neighbor needed her 5000 gourds back.

Ann was left with 1500 gourds of her own money. She would hike to the market with her little bit of capital to buy rice, oil, kerosene, and bouillon cubes and then sell them at a profit. But her husband’s illness and her need to feed her kids ate up what was left of her business quickly enough.

But Ann also said that “fanm pa konn pa devlope.” That’s like saying that a woman always has something cooking. She explained that, these days, she’s hiking into the hills to cut gwann, the leave of a miniature palm, which she dries and ties into bunches for buyers who come through her neighborhood about once a week. She can earn about five or six dollars in a good week, as long as the gwann lasts. She has a sister-in-law who sends her food now and then to help her feed her kids. Her oldest son’s godmother sends him to school, though he’s the only one of her kids who can go.

She’s not quite sure yet what she’ll do when the gwann season is over. She is worried about her husband’s recovery. “If he could even sit up,” she said, “or just go to the bathroom by himself, you’d have hope that he might be able to work again some day . . .” Her voice then trailed off.

She doesn’t know how long she can really depend on her sister-in-law. She’s not that wealthy herself. Her husband has a good deal of farmland, but right now she and her children have no way to work it.