It is easy enough to explain why walking is so appealing in Haiti. The motorized transport that’s available has so little to recommend it. One finds oneself both shaken and stirred while jammed into crowded vehicles that bounce along roads miserably dusty in the dry season, deeply rutted when it has rained. The one reward is the pleasant company. Shared misery is food for conversation, and traveling Haitians love to chat.

But whenever circumstances allow, I walk instead. I think it saves me considerable wear and tear. And I’ve spent much of my first days back in Haiti walking around Port au Prince.

My walking actually started a couple of weeks before I return to Haiti. In my last weeks in Chicago, I wanted to take in the city, really look around. So although December weather in Chicago did not really encourage casual strolling, I bundled up and made due as best I could. I made the thirty-block walk downtime a couple of times, up Halsted or State Street. I went most of the way to the north side once as well. You see much more walking than you do on a bus or the El.

Some of the differences between the two very different cities are too ubiquitous to even attract attention. Chicago has so many more cars, but traffic flows much more smoothly because the streets are so much better. It would be unusual for a car in Port au Prince to be able to pick up a head of steam. Chicago has much more trash, but it obtrudes less because it’s better managed. I once had the thought that an interesting satire would be a grant proposal to the Corleone Foundation that would request support to bring the Soprano Family to Haiti to train Port au Prince’s criminal gangs in the waste management industry. I thought it could take them out of the kidnapping business and clean the city’s streets. Probably not in the best of taste.

But the most dramatic difference between streets in Chicago and Port au Prince is the level and types of activity they sustain. There are, of course, busy streets in Chicago, the major shopping districts along North Michigan Avenue and State Street in the Loop preeminent among them. On the Saturdays between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when I did most of my walking, they are especially crowded.

But for most of the cold winter walk from Bridgeport, the south side neighborhood where I live, towards downtown, the sidewalks are clear. Here and there I cross paths with another pedestrian or two. Every block or so, I pass a bus station where a handful of people wait.

It’s nothing like the streets of Port au Prince, however, especially the busier ones. A trip through rue du Centre, in the heart of downtown, makes that clear enough. The street is wide enough for four lanes of traffic, but even one lane can do no more than crawl. Men and women buying and selling flood from the sidewalks into the middle of the road. Each car or truck that passes must wait as individual merchants drag and push their wares this way and that. It involves a lot of honking, a lot of yelling, and a fair amount of swearing as well.

Everyone is selling and everyone is buying, and all manner of things are available. Young men wander around carrying long poles, with five or six or seven rods fixed to them. On these rods they display cheap sunglasses and watches. Others walking around with sacks, cardboard boxes, or small thermos tubs on their heads, offering water or soft drinks. Or they have platters loaded with meat pies or cupcakes or plantain chips. Women have baskets in front of them, displaying fruits and vegetables or spices or plastic sandals or canned goods or shampoos or soaps. There are shopping carts rigged as hardware stores, with flashlights, bug sprays, padlocks, hand tools, rolls of tape, and bottles of glue. Small, jury-rigged wooden stands line the roads. They hold clothes and shoes and auto parts and house wares of all descriptions. And amidst it all are crowds of people shouting, arguing, negotiating, swearing, making deals, and failing to do so. Even the city’s less crowded streets are liberally populated with street merchants and their customers.

The levels of economic activity that is everywhere evident in Port au Prince is especially striking during these days of economic distress both in Haiti and in the States. These days in the States we no longer avoid saying “recession.” It’s been months since we euphemized by referring to the “r-word” instead. We are all well enough aware that unemployment is up and economic activity is down. The new euphemism is the “d-word,” and I’ve seen it used several times already.

But what exactly is this economic distress? It’s not that I want to take it too lightly. I know people are struggling. People are losing their jobs, their homes, and the savings their retirements depend on. Even many people who would not describe themselves as “struggling” feel a lot worse off than they were just a year ago. But as I walked up Halsted Street, through downtown Chicago, onto Clarke Street, and continued onward north from the Loop, one thing I noticed was an abundance of expensive-looking hair salons and day spas. And many of them looked busy. So as we are entering a recession, there are plenty of us who can choose to spend $25 or $50 or $100 in a day to look and feel a little better than we otherwise would. The stores – like the enormous Target I passed – are full of shoppers, buying a range of things they might or might not need.

Unemployment is miserably high for us: around 10% nationally, I think, and much, much higher in places. My just-out-of-college roommate has been working admirably hard since September to find a job, and he’s had no luck so far, even though he has an admirable range of skills. But in Haiti, employment, not unemployment is sometimes said to be as low as 5%. That is to say that only about 5% of Haitians have jobs in the formal sector. Maybe it’s more. Maybe it’s 15%, or even 20%. But in any case, the 90% employment we still have in the States is something Haiti can only dream of.

But I don’t want my message to be that we in the States are better off than we normally think we are. There is something to that morale, but it misses too much of what is important in people’s lives.

I don’t really want to suggest a message, or morale, at all. I’m much more interested in the way the sights one sees when strolling through two very different cities reflect the very different lives that very different economic situations impose on the people who live within them.

In Port au Prince, little bits of economic activity are everywhere because the Haitians that live here teeter so close, each day, to losing or lacking the most basic things they need to survive. Its streets have a liveliness, their activities have a a sense of urgency, that Chicago, for all its broad shoulders, fundamentally lacks.

Fonkoze does not aim to lift poor Haitian families out of poverty. It aims, rather, to help the women who lead those families lift them out. This distinction is important. Fonkoze is not an aid agency, but a micro finance institution, one that helps its members assemble the skills, habits, and resources they need to carry their families forward.

Fonkoze offers access to credit to the women who are its members. This credit enables them to invest in their businesses and make them grow, along with educational programs that develop crucial life and business skills – like literacy and business skills, for example. Fonkoze is also beginning to facilitate access to health care, helping members learn to use the resources available to them in their home communities. These three kinds of services – financial, educational, and health – form a stable, triangular base, a strong foundation that women can build on.

But lifting their families out of poverty requires more than laying that foundation. A foundation is not a house. Building up a house – what we’re really talking about is building up a better life – requires leadership as well. And though we like to refer to people as “born leaders”, and though some of Fonkoze’s members surely deserve that label, most do not. Developing leadership among its members remains, and must remain, one of Fonkoze’s core objectives.

This simple fact is rich with implications for the design of Fonkoze’s programs. Though, for example, Fonkoze could hire qualified and experienced educators to teach its literacy classes, calling on the same ones year after year and thus minimizing its training costs and maximizing the competence of its team, it does not do so. Instead, it hires literate members, borrowers who do think of themselves as market women, not as educators, and helps them learn to share their knowledge with others around them. That may mean that teaching reading and writing is a little less efficient than it might otherwise be, but the chance to invite Fonkoze members to accept leadership positions, and to nurture their growth as they do so, is an opportunity too important to lose.

The results of that emphasis were on display in two separate meetings over the last couple of weeks. One was for credit center chiefs at Fonkoze’s Active Learning Center, in Lenbe. The other was a gathering of Fonkoze’s most successful borrowers in Kafou, the sprawling suburb south of the capital.

Fonkoze’s office in Lenbe is designed to promote learning in a number of respects. First, it is a fully functioning model branch office, with a staff specially selected from among Fonkoze’s best. With its attached residence hall, the branch becomes a convenient place to train new staff and to provide professional development to staff from other branches. Second, it has a staff trained to do field research, with a social impact monitor, who collects information about the effect of Fonkoze’s programs on its members, and an economic analyst, who studies the relative effectiveness of the different types of businesses that Fonkoze members engage in. Finally, it’s set up to manage experiments that test new ways for Fonkoze to serve its members.

The meeting at Lenbe brought together nine Fonkoze credit center chiefs to discuss a new approach to creating Fonkoze credit centers like the ones that they are part of. A credit center is, in some ways, the basic unit in solidarity group credit. It’s a collection of five-eight groups of five women. Centers meet regularly for disbursements and reimbursements of loans, and for educational programs. They are important because even with 36 offices throughout Haiti, Fonkoze isn’t close enough to where its members live and do business. The credit centers allow Fonkoze to serve members, even ones in very rural areas, in their own neighborhoods by sending credit agents on motorcycles to center meetings as far as two hours from the nearest Fonkoze office.

The keys to these centers are the women elected to lead them, the center chiefs. They are chosen by their fellow borrowers and have several important responsibilities. They advocate for borrowers, presenting their concerns at regional assemblies and, if elected from those assemblies, at the annual general assembly in Port au Prince as well. They are their credit agents’ primary means of contacting other center members. They even approve the size of the loans that each member of their center receives.

Center chief is a volunteer position, but it has its rewards. Marie Edel, a center chief from Lenbe put it well. “I’m a businesswomen. If the people around me have more money to spend, that’s good for more. Anything I can do to help my neighbors helps me too.” As a center chief, she is a force building the economy that surrounds her.

Our experiment involved asking selected center chiefs to expand their roles and offered them, for the first time, the chance to earn some money for their work for Fonkoze. We were asking them to take substantial responsibility for recruiting new members, not by encouraging women to join the credit centers that they already lead. This is something that they already do. We asking them instead to create whole new credit centers by recruiting women in groups of 25-40 at a time.

This would be a major shift for Fonkoze. New centers are currently opened by credit agents, and the way they tend to do it is not without substantial risks. What they tend to do is take their motorcycle to a new area that doesn’t have a credit center yet. They contact a community leader – a priest or pastor or a local politician – and ask him to help them organize a meeting of people that might be interested in credit. The credit agent introduces Fonkoze to those who attend the meeting, and uses follow-up visits to sign up new members in groups of five.

This entails two sorts of problems. On one hand, it’s a problem for the credit centers themselves. They can remain beholden in various ways to the man whom they think of as having brought Fonkoze to them. This hampers the women’s development as leaders. It weakens their position within their communities as it reinforces the position of the men who already have a lot of control. On the other hand, it’s a problem for Fonkoze as well. It feeds the credit agents’ tendency to move farther and farther from their bases, recruiting just the smallest percentage of potential members everywhere they go, rather than working to penetrate the potential market for Fonkoze credit. This maximizes Fonkoze’s costs per loan, already necessarily high. And there are other problems as well.

So we thought we’d see what credit center chiefs could do, without motorcycles, in the paces where they already live and work. They would get a cash payment for every complete center of 5-8 groups of five women they were able to recruit. This would tend to push a denser penetration of areas that Fonkoze already serves, and it would do so without bringing in interference from community leaders who can never be part of these centers. The program started in April, and our meeting at the end of July was a chance to talk about how things were going.

The data is clear enough. So far, 130 new members have been recruited, and two of the center chiefs have earned payments. But our meeting enabled us to go much deeper than such data.

The women were vocal in their excitement about the program, but also about the barriers they’re encountering to making it work. They spoke of competition from another micro finance institution, one that offers an approach that can seem, at first look, to be better for market women. They spoke of aspects of Fonkoze’s approach that can turn potential members off. And they spoke of reasons some market women give for avoiding any formal credit program at all.

What was most striking was that they were the ones that spoke. They did not come to a meeting at Fonkoze’s branch office looking for Fonkoze staff to answer their questions, but for an opportunity for dialogue with one another. In fact, the one time that they got an extended explanation from Fonkoze staff – I gave them a detailed account of where Fonkoze gets the capital it lends them – they complained that I was talking too much, that they could work things out on their own.

Those that had struggled with the new competition shared the problems they had discovered in its method of offering credit, problems that had convinced some women to choose Fonkoze instead. They talked about the realities behind some of the things that new members can dislike about Fonkoze’s method – why Fonkoze asks personal questions, why Fonkoze is relatively slow to get its credit to new borrowers, why Fonkoze’s first loans are relatively small – and brought up explanations for each that they think can be convincing.

And they defended their own interests as well. The criteria that determine whether they can be paid were poorly designed, and they negotiated a revision of them with the branch manager that will work better for them and, perhaps, for Fonkoze as well.

Not everything was purely positive. Of the fourteen women who were initially invited to participate in the program, only nine came to the meeting, and only two of them had succeeded in earning a payment thus far. But it’s a start, and they are confident that, within a couple of months, the numbers will look very different.

The meeting in Kafou was much larger and very different. It was a weekend gathering of almost 50 of Fonkoze’s most successful members. These are women who started with solidarity group loans of 1500 – 3000 gourds and are now managing individual loans of 50,000 – 100,000 gourds or more. (The current exchange rate is about 40 gourds to the dollars.)

We had invited them to the Kafou meeting to celebrate their success in a particular way. We wanted to talk with them about how one might be able to meet with a business women who’s not succeeding and help her understand how to turn her business around. We would then have a large group of struggling solidarity group borrowers come to Kafou for a half-day’s work with the more successful women. The more successful women would, in other words, become unpaid business consultants.

What was initially most striking was seeing how the women relished the opportunity we were offering them. They are rightly and vocally proud of what they have accomplished, and they’re not too shy to admit that they’re good at what they do. They were excited about an invitation to share their know-how.

In a sense, that’s not surprising. Why wouldn’t they be glad for the recognition? At the same time, they were very clear about the thought that I quoted Marie Edel as expressing. These women, when asked what the barriers to their own further success are, listed their neighbors’ ability to run their businesses well as one of the more important ones. They know that they can move farther if their neighbors are moving forward too.

So when we welcomed twenty-five struggling market women to join us Saturday afternoon, they all got right to work. We paired one or two of the successful women with each of the struggling women, choosing women from the same part of Haiti, and they spent the rest of the day talking. They spoke of how they were managing their businesses and their households. They talked about how they partnered with the men in their lives, or how they managed if they had no stable partner. They exchanged thoughts about the particular businesses they are in or about special challenges they are facing of whatever sort.

Fonkoze staff stayed out of these conversations. We wanted to create an environment in which the women would look to one another, and I think we succeeded well.

There’s much more work left to do. The successful women said they would be willing to serve as consultants for women in their home communities, and Fonkoze will need to follow up to make sure the opportunities arise. We’ll also want to check to see whether the advice that the women give actually helps the women who receive it. But the heart of the matter, that Fonkoze women are willing and able to take the lead as they do their work, is in pretty good shape.

“Concentrated Language Encounter” (CLE) is a fancy name for what can be a pretty straightforward, but very interesting, way to teach basic reading and writing. It makes writing primary, inviting learners to write and illustrate books about subjects that are on their mind. The IDEAL school in Cité Soleil has been learning the process with help from the staff of the Matènwa Community Learning Center.

It’s an interesting partnership: Experienced teachers from a school well out in the Haitian countryside given their time and energy to support a group of young people creating a start-up in Haiti’s most notorious urban slum. The Matènwa school’s excellent first grade teacher spent almost a week in Belekou when the school opened, and during that stay he led the children through the creation of a book about their first day. That was back in January, and here’s the book: firstbook

On the last day of school, I met with the same kids, and we made a second book. The difference between where they were in January and where they are now was plain and very encouraging. The first book was simply a summary of the first day’s activities. For the second book, they wrote about what they like about school.

“We enjoyed making pretty pictures.”

“We love to draw.”

Here are the two pages created by Lovely. The one above is the first one she did the second day of school, and the one below is the page she did six months later. Although the most obvious difference might be that, in June, she was able to write her own name and included letters in her illustration, the quality of the drawing is also quite distinct. She uses much more detail. She seems to have put much more time and care into her work.

Next are the two pages by Marie. Again, the upper one is the one she did in January, and lower one is what she did in June.

“We need to know how to write.”

It’s much the same story: more detail, more effort to give her figures shape. She writes her name well.

Reginal’s two pages follow. A very small boy, one of a couple of kids that started in January at the right age for a first grader and without any school experience behind him, his progress has been especially striking.

My photography, unfortunately, cut off the texts. The upper one says, “We made rules for the class.” It refers to the way Robert led the children through the creation of classroom rules on the first day of school. The text for the second picture was, “We love the IDEAL school,” but Reginal added quite a bit to it. He wrote, “I made the IDEAL school. I made two children. This school belongs to Reginal.” He didn’t know a single letter of the alphabet in January, but now he writes short sentences.

And the differences between the two drawings is just as impressive. The time and effort he put into drawing a school that fills up the page, and in coloring the school in brightly, suggest that he really is happy to be there.

The last two drawings are by Bebeto. I know him well. He’s a somewhat older boy, the nephew of a member of IDEAL. His uncle, Picard, is a guy in his early 20s, who left primary school before graduating in order to fend for his widowed mother. He supports Bebeto because the boy’s mother and father – Picard’s older brother – are too sick to work.

Bebeto had been to schools before, even to free ones, but never stayed for more than a few months. His history of dropping out had already marked him with a reputation as a //vakabòn//, or bum. And that before his twelfth birthday.

But the IDEAL school really worked for him. The teachers made him feel welcome, and he responded. He barely missed a day, and participated enthusiastically in all the school’s activities.

“We met our teachers.”

“We love doing subtraction.”

There was a major auto accident about a long block away from the school right around when we were doing the second book, and it made an impression on Bebeto. I asked him why he had drawn a child apparently killing an adult, he just shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

As striking as the violence in his second drawing is, however, so is the improved detail. He took the time to give the people and things he drew shape. And the dramatic shift in the size relation between adult and child from one picture to the next might reflect his growing sense of his own power.

The school itself has a ways to go. The children made two books this year, and both were made with visitors’ help: Robert was there to lead them the first time, and I led the second. The IDEAL team will need to develop the confidence in themselves that’s necessary for them to lead such activities on their own.

But seeing the two books is helping them develop that confidence. They see more clearly than ever the difference they are making in the lives of the neighbors’ kids. And they feel good about that and good about the recognition it leads to. One of the confided to me, for example, that he likes the fact that his neighbors no longer address him by name but instead call him “mèt”, the title that Haitians give to the men who teach.

Fonkoze’s efforts to redefine the way it works with its member-borrowers have been forced by a simple observation: An increasing number of those borrowers are having trouble repaying their loans. Some are falling into delinquency, some so seriously that Fonkoze is forced to consider writing their loans off. That’s bad both for the borrowers and for Fonkoze.

It’s bad for Fonkoze because it damages its financial bottom line. Though profitability is not Fonkoze’s central goal, it is part of its sustainability strategy. The more its work can be financed through the revenue it generates, the more its leadership can focus on just doing that work well, rather than raising money, and the more durable the institution will be over the long haul.

For the borrowers, it threatens a downward economic spiral through which any gains they’ve made as businesswomen could disappear. Women and their families could even end up worse off than they started. Their businesses can evaporate, and they can be left with no way to access the credit they would need to start over again without turning to loan sharks.

And just to be clear: The issue in Haiti is not whether someone might be forced to declare bankruptcy. It’s whether they will have a way to feed their children and themselves.

Finally, the fact that the borrowers in question, as delinquent as they might be, are members of Fonkoze, and not merely its borrowers, means something too. It would be bad enough if Fonkoze were just being forced to write off loans to the women it was founded to serve. But those women belong to Fonkoze as members, not just clients. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Fonkoze belongs to them. Writing them off has an aspect of self-immolation. Writing them off feels like tearing away a piece of the living fabric that Fonkoze is made of.

So it is imperative that Fonkoze develop an approach that can serve women who are on the verge of failure. Fortunately, a detailed blueprint for such an approach is available.

It should surprise no one that the blue print was developed by the Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh. Grameen is the source of the worldwide microfinance movement. It’s the institution founded by Nobel-prize-winner Muhammad Yunus, and the microfinance support organization that it established in the United States, Grameen USA, is probably Fonkoze’s most important source of technical advice.

About a decade ago, the Grameen Bank was having some of the same problems Fonkoze is having now. Its inflexible approach to lending, which served as a model for Fonkoze’s standard approach, was failing more and more of its borrowers.

Grameen reinvented itself with a strategy that has come to be called “Grameen Two”, and that strategy could serve as a model for the new Fonkoze. Grameen Two loan periods changed from six months to variable. Grameen Two borrowers who fell behind had the option to negotiate extensions. Most importantly, access to Grameen Two credit no longer depended entirely on the performance of the entire five-women solidarity group that a borrower belongs to. Instead, each borrower became eligible for credit as soon as she finished repaying her loan.

For over a month now, Fonkoze has been trying to make its way through the tracks Grameen Two left in the snow, experimenting in a handful of branches with ways to make the credit it offers more adaptable to each particular member-borrower’s needs and abilities. (See: NewStructure). It’s hard work.

And giving Fonkoze’s programs a new form means more than just restructuring delinquent loans. It means offering credit to strong re-payers who would otherwise be blocked. The easy part of doing this is to take women who are up-to-date but who belong to delinquent groups and offering them new credit before their fellow group members are ready. The more difficult piece is finding strong re-payers whose loans have already been written off because their fellow group members have failed to repay.

These women are harder to reach because it’s harder to establish contact with them at all. For understandable reasons, they aren’t that excited about talking with Fonkoze. They feel as though we’ve cut them off. And our information about them can be dated as well.

But we can find them. I was with Naël, a Fonkoze Social Performance Monitor in Marigo as we spoke with several.

“Social Performance Monitor” may be an awkward title, but the function it represents at a Fonkoze branch office is easy to understand and obviously important. The monitors are field researchers. They are the ones who enable Fonkoze to track the impact of programs on its members’ lives. Every time a new group of five women signs up to receive a loan, their loan officer fills out a detailed survey with each woman that allows Fonkoze to evaluate the economic aspects of her family’s quality of life. We learn how many people live in her household, how often they eat and at meat, what kind of house they have, how much land they own: there is a whole array of quality of life indicators we capture. We capture this information for every new borrower in the Fonkoze network.

But in offices where there is a monitor, we are able to do much more. The monitor both verifies the information already taken from 20% of new borrowers, and takes two additional surveys. They then re-do the same three surveys with the same women at the end of every other loan they take, or approximately once a year. Monitors thus provide Fonkoze with good data that closely tracks life improvements for 20% of its members, a large enough sample permit detailed conclusions to be drawn.

Though Fonkoze is only beginning to see the results of this new initiative, the initial data is exciting. Though the sample we are already able to report on is small, the results are clear: After one year in the program, the 2006 entering cohort showed an 8% reduction in the percentage living below $1/day and a 9% reduction in those living below $2/day.

In addition to track such trends, the monitors do member-satisfaction focus groups and exit interviews with members who decide to leave Fonkoze. They thus become the most important way that Fonkoze has of judging whether it’s doing its job.

Naël had interviewed a group of members who had been written off three-six months ago. They were angry with Fonkoze because they felt they had been treated unfairly. They had, they said, always repaid their loans on time. They belonged, however, to solidarity groups that included other members who hadn’t been able to repay.

He and I spoke to one woman who can serve as an example: She told us that she and three of the other members had always repaid on time. In fact, until their most recent loan, which was written off in December 2007, all five of them had managed well enough.

But one of her friends took her part of their last loan to Miragwann, a major port on the coast south of Port au Prince. She invested her whole loan in a shipment of used clothing. When she got the shipment back to Marigo, she discovered that the clothes she believed she had purchased had been exchanged for stuff with a much lower value. She lost a very high percent of her investment, and could not repay her share of her loan. Normally, her fellow group members would pick up the slack, but with the economic situation in Haiti deteriorating, and their own sense that she would not be able to pay them back, they did not feel that they could.

From what was Fonkoze’s perspective at the time, all the members of such a group were delinquent. Fonkoze had not offered individual loans to any of them, but had offered loans to groups of five. Each woman had signed a loan agreement stipulating that she was part of a group loan, sharing with the group’s other members the responsibility for ensuring that the whole loan was repaid.

Thanks to Naël’s work, Fonkoze had re-established contact with women who wanted to be considered for new loans. But the decision to offer credit to a woman who’s been written off once needs to be made with care. Fonkoze needs to talk with her, to hear her story. It needs to check her repayment history. It needs to be able to assure itself that it makes sense to put new credit in her hands.

So Naël had taken me to see the group together with Domerson Millien, Fonkoze’s Regional Director for Credit and Operations in the southeast. It took the three of us almost the whole day to meet with three members, if you count the amount of time we spent getting to their village outside of Marigo, waiting for them in yard where their credit center meets, and walking back and forth between that village and a market about 45 minutes away in Peredò.

It’s a lot of staff time to commit to three or four out of 54,000 borrowers, and Domerson isn’t finshed working with those women yet. He will have some work to do going through records to confirm that a new loan makes sense, and then he’ll have to meet with the women again to explain what he thinks he can offer them. But right now Fonkoze’s situation simply requires such efforts.

When we arrived at Jezimèn’s home, she was finishing some ironing. A large wooden case was open on her front porch. It was filled with snacks – crackers, lollipops, and cookies – that she was selling. She put away the shirt she had finished, and welcomed Judith and me. She had been expecting us. Judith had called her to let her know we’d be stopping by, and she had arranged three comfortable chairs in a shady corner of the same porch.

Jezimèn lives in a neighborhood of Peredò, a coastal town east of Jacmel, the main city in the Haitian southeast. Earlier in the day, I had arrived at the nearby Fonkoze office in Marigò after a long morning’s travel and work. I had begun the day at home, then spent the morning interviewing Fonkoze members in Lavale, an area served by a very large branch in the mountains outside of Jacmel. I then hurried over to Marigò to conduct more interviews, hoping to be able to get back to Port au Prince that same day.

Judith is Fonkoze’s education coordinator at the Marigò branch, and she was coordinating the Marigò part of my day. I do field interviews now and again, in part because Fonkoze’s major funders insist upon it. Fonkoze will eventually be able to pay for education programs through the revenues its various programs generate. But it isn’t there yet. For now, the programs are financed through grants we submit to a range of organizations. We send those organizations reports about how their funds were spent, with lots of financial data and information on the number of participants that their funds reached and the programs those participants were offered.

The funders, however, want and need more. They like to have profiles of participants. They want to hear about the programs from the participants themselves. They can use such profiles to gain a richer sense of the effect the education programs have. Participants speak eloquently of the importance they attach to them. One hears all sorts of powerful testimonials:

“Before I started with Fonkoze, if I said ‘A’ it was because an insect bit me. Now I can sign my name to receive new credit. I don’t have to leave meetings with a ink stain on my thumb.”

“I’m not ashamed to attend parents’ meetings at my child’s school anymore because I can sign the attendance sheet just like everyone else.”

“I thought I knew how to run my business, but Fonkoze taught me that I didn’t even know whether I was making or losing money. Now I keep track of all my income and all my expenses.”

And the funders can then pass on the profiles, and the lessons they learn from them, to their supporters and funders. After all, the organizations that finance Fonkoze don’t print their own money. They have to find it somewhere as well. Good participant profiles can strengthen a case for support.

The organization looking for stories from Marigò is a particularly strong Fonkoze partner named Plan International. Plan is an NGO devoted to combating the various effects that poverty has on the young. It became interested in microfinance when it concluded that one good way to help the young is to help their mothers earn the money they need to care for them.

Its microfinance partner in Haiti is Fonkoze. Plan provided the start-up costs for the branch in Marigò – and has funded other branches as well – it provides a couple of hundred thousand dollars each year to the education unit, and it has underwritten, almost single-handedly thus far, Fonkoze’s research and evaluation unit, called “Social Performance Management.” So assuring the Plan gets the information it needs is a priority for Fonkoze.

Jezimèn has a business that depends on its location in the southeast. The little business I saw on her front porch is just a little aside. One of her adult daughters keeps a one-room house in Ansapit, a Haitian port on the Dominican border with a large bi-national market. It’s an overnight trip, by sailboat, from Marigò. Jezimèn buys things in Jacmel that she can sell in Ansapit, and brings them to her daughter, who does the selling. She also takes merchandise that her daughter buys at the market in Ansapit, and brings it back to Marigò and Jacmel.

She’s had the business for a long time, since before she joined Fonkoze and before her daughter could be much help. She joined Fonkoze because her business was starting to shrink, as her children grew older. Paying for their educations was getting more and more expensive, so much so that it was eating into her capital. She joined Fonkoze figuring that the money she could borrow would put her business back on sound footing.

When she found out that Fonkoze would offer literacy classes in her credit center, she was excited. Her mother had tried to send her to school, but in her first year one of her classmates had become pregnant. Her father blamed the school, and when her mother insisted that she continue to go, the father gave them each a beating and threw them out. They eventually moved in with her mother’s older sister, but the two women had no way to send Jezimèn to school. Thanks to a couple of months in her Fonkoze literacy program, she can now sign her name, and looks forward to learning more. She wants to take advantage of any opportunity her credit center might offer.

I asked Jezimèn how long she’s been with Fonkoze. “I would have about four or five years, but I took some time off after my son died. It was about seven months. I just didn’t want to do anything.”

Jezimèn

Judith and I asked her about the boy. It turns out he wasn’t a boy at all, but a 22-year-old young man, in his second-to-last year of school. He was ready to take the rhéto exam, a national entrance examination for the final year of school, when he died in a car accident.

“He was a really big kid,” Jezimèn said.

“Oh, really?” Judith replied.

“Yes. Just look at his shirt.” She pulled out the last shirt she had been ironing when we arrived, a very large short-sleeved shirt with a colorful floral print. “Whenever I miss him, I take out his clothes and iron them.”

She has five other children, the youngest a teenage girl who’s still with her. Fonkoze helps her ensure that she has a way to support them. Plan’s partnership with Fonkoze means that she gets not only credit to help her business grow, but also educational programs that she wants and needs.

One of the surprising realities of the microfinance world is the rate at which clients typically repay their loans. The industry standard is something like 97%. And this is true even though the borrowers are poor and even though they usually offer no collateral beyond a small savings account. The guarantees that a microfinance institution (MFI) relies upon are its members’ sense of honor, their continuing need for credit, and the solidarity that develops among them.

And such guarantees are enough as long as borrowers can repay. That is to say: as long as the profits they make using the money they borrow and invest are sufficient to help them support their families and to pay back their loans. As the father of the international microfinance movement, Muhammad Yunus, has said, “the poor always repay.”

But good repayment is not simply a matter of goodwill. Sometimes, despite their need for ongoing access to credit, and despite their desire to repay, they simply can’t do it. Poor families are, of course, much more susceptible to mishaps that other families are. The minimal livelihoods they manage are fragile. A single accident immediately pushes them to or even over the edge. A child is sick. Bad weather ruins merchandise, a crop, or a house. A thief walks away with one’s cash or property.

Add to those accidents the mistakes that an MFI can make that undermine repayment. For example, inexperienced borrowers can believe that it’s in their interest to borrow as much as a lender will give them, and a lender with inexperienced field staff can end up making loans in excess of what a borrower’s business can absorb. Borrowers are left with extra cash on hand or extra merchandise they can’t sell. Suddenly they’re responsible for interest on money that’s not working for them, earning profit. Their reimbursements then are bound to exceed what their business can produce.

Until now, Fonkoze, like many MFIs, has had a single way to help borrowers face such problems: Solidarity. What that means in this context is that borrowers do not take their loans out individually, but in groups of five. Five women form a “solidarity group.” They take out their loans and make their repayments together. If one member is struggling, other members are expected to pick up the slack. They pitch in to help one another make scheduled repayments, and settle up on their own. Ideally, Fonkoze never even knows that one of its members was short. The women simple handle such instances among themselves. And this ideal case is reality often enough.

But that single and simple approach to repayment problems has been proving less and less satisfactory. The economic situation in Haiti has been deteriorating, and so it’s been harder to get members to help one another repay. It’s not for lack of good will. They simply can’t do it. Food and other living costs are spiraling upward, so running their own households is getting more and more expensive. In addition, those who earn their living selling things other than food are making less and less money because their customers have less cash on hand to spend.

The traditional structure of solidarity group microfinance then multiplies the problem. The loans really are group loans, and cannot be disbursed individually. If I can’t repay my part of the loan, my friend Anne can’t get a new loan either, even if she’s repaid her part of our loan on time. So, quickly enough, Anne’s livelihood is threatened just as mine already was. Borrowers become frustrated and repayment rates tumble. Some who would otherwise want to repay can even choose not too if they foresee that their fellow members’ inability to repay will mean that they won’t be able to get another loan. They can feel as though they have no choice but to hold on to the cash that they would normally be using to pay back their loan just to have something on hand.

Seeing its repayment rate decline over the last year, Fonkoze knew it had to take aggressive action. Too many of its borrowers were simply frozen. Some have debts they do not know how to face. Some are prevented from taking out new loans by their fellow borrowers’ delinquency.

Fonkoze decided to try an experiment. It would go to some of the branches that are having the most trouble, and fundamentally change the way it makes loans. It would send teams out into the field to speak with both delinquent borrowers and borrowers prevented from getting new loans. The news for the former would be that Fonkoze is ready to renegotiate repayment calendars to make repayment possible. The news for the latter would be that, for the first time ever, Fonkoze was now willing to offer them new loans whether or not the other members of their solidarity groups had finished repaying their share.

In effect, Fonkoze would be experimenting with a shift from the classic form of solidarity-group microfinance that has been its hallmark – with all the useful simplicity that its rigidity provides – to something more flexible and complex, something we hope can help Fonkoze members with the very real impediments they face.

So for the past couple of weeks, one of the jobs I’ve taken on is that of a loan officer, restructuring delinquent loans and giving out new credit at two Fonkoze branches in the Artibonite Valley, in northern Haiti.

Senmichèl is a small city well off the main road that leads between the major coastal city of Gonayiv and Okap, Haiti’s largest city in the north. It sits in the midst of what is, to all appearances, a fertile agricultural region, rich with sugarcane and small distilleries that convert the cane to rum. Though Senmichèl feels out of the way, there are a surprising number of large, fancy houses, a sign that there is money in the town.

The Fonkoze office in Senmichèl is about three years old. It’s an offshoot of the very large office down the road, in Gonayiv. Credit agents used to travel several hours by motorcycle from Gonayiv to get there, and they eventually developed a pretty good-sized portfolio, one large enough that Fonkoze decided it should establish a separate Senmichèl office. The office has had its ups and downs ever since. Right now, it is struggling, so choosing it to be one of the offices that would attempt the experiment was easy.

I went to Senmichèl with Thomas Prophil, a Fonkoze regional director of credit and operations. He already has one branch turn-around to his credit: He took over a struggling branch in Pòmago, and led it to profitability and eventual transfer to Fonkoze’s commercial sister, Fonkoze Financial Services, within a few months.

Our goal in Senmichèl would be to meet with as many Fonkoze borrowers as quickly as we could, working with them until they see how they can get unstuck, how they can get themselves moving forward again. We would offer new credit to those who were ready, and restructured credit for those who have fallen behind.

But our first discovery would be that there could be nothing quick about the work. On one hand, just getting word to all the members we wanted to see would be a challenge. One of the difficulties at the Senmichèl office is that communication has been poor, both between the office management and its credit agents and between the credit agents and the members they serve. We arrived on Tuesday afternoon, worried that we were late for a meeting with nearby members that had been scheduled since the previous Friday. When we arrived, however, we discovered that the meeting hadn’t even been arranged. Somehow, word never got from the branch manager to the credit agents.

So Thomas pitched a fit. He told the credit agents that he was holding the meeting in 30 minutes and that their clients had better be there. It was a good piece of theatre: an unspecified threat that managed to feel very real. Within an hour we were meeting with a handful of Fonkoze members, and the work had begun.

It wasn’t surprising that borrowers didn’t respond to the invitation in droves. Exactly the members we most needed to see were the ones initially least motivated to talk with us, some because they were behind and thought they had no prospect of catching up, others because they were up-to-date but thought they could get no new credit. But several representatives of several different solidarity groups came. We knew that once we started working more flexibly with a first few, word would get out and others would come, hoping that we could help them as well.

On the other hand, even once borrowers were assembled, the work would still be slow. We needed to talk to each client individually and at some length about her situation. We needed to know, for example, how borrowers had fallen into delinquency. We needed to know how viable their businesses still were. We needed to know what sources of repayment, however small, might be available to them. All that would take time. And explaining our new approach would be time-consuming as well. Members very much accustomed to Fonkoze’s one way of doing things would be excited once they heard what we were offering, but it would generally take some time to sink in.

Thomas and I were the only ones at the office who knew enough about the experiment to hold those conversations, and Thomas needed to concentrate on planning an overall approach for the office. So I drew the job of meeting with women as they came in.

Most who came had fallen behind in the reimbursements. And the stories they told were varied and, mostly, sad. Children or parents had been sick or had died. Or the women themselves had been sick. Or they had been robbed on business trips to Pòtoprens or Dajabón, a market town just across the Dominican border, where many of them go to buy. Some of them had very nearly repaid their loans, and some had a long way to go. All of them seemed pleased just to have the chance to tell their stories and even more pleased to see a way to get themselves back on track.

Mariella can serve as a case in point. She’s a widowed mother with three kids, girls age twelve and sixteen and a boy age ten. She’s a long-time borrower, a sandal merchant who used to buy her merchandise in Okap and sell it in the markets in and around Senmichèl. But her little boy was sick, and needed to be hospitalized. She lost time from her work while she was caring for him, and the expenses she incurred ate up her capital. Fortunately, the boy is now well, but her sandal business no longer exists. She was left with a debt of 5200 gourds, about $135.

She used the last of her cash to buy a barrel of cane syrup. She knew she could distill it, and repay her loan from the sale. Once she had repaid her loan, she would see about getting her business back on its feet. But somehow the rum was spoiled. I don’t know enough about the distilling process to really explain what happened. But she said, “It turned to water.”

Mariella and I spoke for about an hour. She has a plan to get herself moving forward again. Hopelessness is not an option for a widowed mother of three. One of her late husband’s brothers is willing to lend her a barrel of syrup. Apparently, if she mixes a good barrel with her spoiled barrel, and distills them together, she can produce rum she can sell. But the timing of this enterprise will be hard. Once the rainy season starts in earnest, the local roads turn to mud, and she won’t be able to transport the barrel her brother-in-law is offering.

We established a conservative repayment schedule for her, but here the timing is tight as well. She needs to be able to get new credit in time to buy merchandise for back-to-school sales. It’s a time when lots of money is being spent, and getting her business up and running by then could be key to ensuring that she can send her own children to school next year. For all her problems this past year, her kids did not lose a year at school.

Restructuring a handful of loans for clients in trouble is time-consuming, but not really hard. Fonkoze’s real challenge will come if the experiment succeeds. Turning upper-level management – and middle-aged foreign volunteers – into loan officers is not a long-term solution. The loan officers themselves – and there are a couple hundred of them – will need to be retrained and the tools they use – forms, contracts and the like – will have to be redesigned from scratch.

But it will be more than worth the effort if it can transform Fonkoze into an institution fundamentally more powerful as a servant of the poor.

I won first prize.

It was at the airport in Okap. As I was getting onto a plane to return to Pòtoprens, the ground crew that was sending us off drew the number of my boarding pass from a small dish of folded scraps of paper. The prize was a new cell phone.

I already have a cell phone. I dislike it. Not because of its look or the features it offers. Sometimes I just wish I didn’t have one at all. Often enough, I just turn it off. Until recently I had two, one for each of the major carriers in Haiti, but I finally gave one of them away because I was sick of carrying both. So I didn’t need another. But I was glad that I won because I thought right away of Ti Kèl.

He’s the 18-year-old who does chores around my house. If I’m expecting company, he cleans. If I run out of propane, he lugs my empty tank down in Pètyonvil and lugs the full one back up. If I need sugar or candles or kerosene or anything else, and I don’t want to go get it myself, I can always send him. He also studies math with me on Sunday mornings, at least whenever I’m home.

Ti Kèl has wanted a phone for the longest time. They are quite the rage in Haiti. There only are about 8.5 million Haitians, and about 1.8 million households, but there are well over a million cell phones. And the number just seems to be increasing. Not too long ago, when President Préval was asked about increasing poverty here, he’s reported to have answered that he hears about hunger, but then sees that every household has five cell phones and that people find the money to buy minutes for all of them.

I can’t speak to the accuracy of that claim, but I did think of Ti Kèl when I heard it. He’s wanted a phone, even though his household already has other phones and even though he has all sorts of more important needs.

Including figuring out how to pay for school in September. He’ll graduate from the local public primary school in June, and will have to go to private school in the fall if he wants to continue. He’s too old for public high school.

But he’s wanted a phone, and I had one I didn’t want, so I gave it to him. I did threaten that, if he wastes a lot of money buying phone cards, I’ll take it away. But he knows it’s not true, and he’s not foolish enough to make that kind of mistake with the little money he has anyway.

He was delighted. He thanked me a half-dozen times in the first three minutes of our conversation Saturday morning. Then we kept on talking. We hadn’t seen each other all week. I had been near Okap, and the week had been eventful, especially in the Pòtoprens area, where there had been lots of political unrest around rising food prices. We had lots to talk about.

I asked him how the week had been, and his answer was stunning. “I’m just glad,” he said, “that my father didn’t raise us to eat a lot. Most little kids, if they got only coffee in the morning and nothing the rest of the day, would be making a lot of noise, but my little brothers and sisters haven’t complained.”

Ti Kèl’s father, Decéus, is an aging mason at a time when construction is slow. His mother, Adelcia, is a market women when there is produce from their garden to sell, but it’s the end of the dry season, so she has little to work with. In other words, even if things were otherwise better in Haiti, this would be a hard financial moment for them.

The two of them have six children together: Boubout, Ti Kèl, Ti Fanm, Da, Wolan, and Fara. All of them still live at home. Decéus’s older daughter, Natacha, lives in her own place. Adelcia has four children from her previous relationship, and though the two oldest, Kale and Titi, live elsewhere, the two younger ones, Bèn and Boul, live with Adelcia and Decéus. Bèn is a young woman with two very small children of her own.

So the household is thickly populated. And lately, it seems, there are days when it goes entirely without food.

Though Ti Kèl’s answer took me off guard, hunger in Haiti is not as surprising as one would like it to be. It is increasing. Haiti is very much a part of the worldwide food crisis. Prices for the basics here – rice, beans, oil, corn, sorghum, flour, sugar – have been rising quickly, and incomes have not. Since Haiti was already a country where most people do little better than get by – more than half the population lives on less than $1 a day, and more than 70% on less than $2 – dramatic inflation necessarily has an immediate impact. And that impact does not affect whether one buys a new car or a house, or whether one takes a needed vacation or goes out to a nice restaurant. It affects how much, and even whether, one eats. Hunger here is common enough these days to have earned a new nickname, “//klòwoks//”, or “clorox”, for the way it burns your insides.

Ti Kèl and I arranged right away with Ti Fanm to make a big Saturday lunch. The two of them must have worked together much of the morning, between the shopping and the cooking. My own share of the enterprise was limited to finance – it cost me about $5.20 – and eating.

It was just one meal, but it gave me lots to think about. Whenever I go past Ti Kèl’s house, Adelcia and Ti Fanm offer me coffee. My fondness for the stuff is well known in Kaglo. I had long known that theirs is a family that does not have a lot, but I hadn’t really considered that the little snack they offer me might sometimes be all they consume all day.

It’s hard for me to know where I’m going with this. I must admit that I don’t want to shift the emphasis of my activities in Haiti to charity. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and energy giving what I can to Ti Kèl’s family and to other neighbors or, for that matter, to strangers, whose needs come to my attention. Nor do I want to spend more time finding resources that I can merely funnel towards them.

But I am around urgent needs all the time. I don’t think it would be right to pretend that I’m not or that I don’t notice them or that there’s nothing I can do.

It’s tempting to dilute the impulse to act – the call to conscience—by reminding myself that I can’t help everyone, by reminding myself that the needs here exceed what I’m able to give. It’s likewise tempting to remind myself that charity only encourages dependence. Both arguments are true, but they ring hollow when you’re thinking of children who might have nothing but coffee to keep them going throughout the day.

As I said, I don’t know where this is leading. I don’t see any conclusion that would seem true. Nor does it seem right to let things stand on a truism like, “There is no right answer.”

The knowledge that Ti Kèl, for example, is hungry a lot of the time ought to change my life. And, through me, it ought to change his. That does not mean that I’m ready to take responsibility for ensuring that he has all he needs to eat. But I cannot pretend that there’s nothing I can do.