“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.

I left the office today at about noon. It had been hard to get from Pétion-Ville down to Fonkoze’s office in Port au Prince in the morning, and I was afraid I would have to walk home – three hours, uphill, in the midday sun – so I left early.

What made it hard to get to Fonkoze in the morning, and promised to make the trip home even worse, were street demonstrations. Inflation has been getting steadily worse, particularly with respect to food, and people are really feeling it.

Early in the morning, I had walked from Kaglo to Pétion-Ville. Once there, I had had to weave my way through the downtown streets before I eventually found a pick-up truck headed down the hill to Port au Prince. I was the last on to get a place on the truck, standing on the step up to the bed. I hung onto the roof, as we headed off.

It took some time to get started, because the driver wanted to explain that he couldn’t promise to get us all the way to Port au Prince. Word was that demonstrators were blocking the main road, Bourdon, and if they cut off the secondary route that he planned to descend, he’d have to turn around. But we made it down the hill without incident, and I was at the Fonkoze office before 7:00.

I heard demonstrators in the streets on and off through the morning as I worked.

When I left the office, I walked across Avenue Christophe to Bourdon. I figured that I could walk up Bourdon in any case, and that I should at least see whether there were trucks heading up the hill. When I got there, I thought I was in luck. I saw a flatbed truck barreling uphill, overloaded with passengers. Though it was much too full for me to get a place, it gave me hope. I decided to walk down Bourdon to get closer to where the trucks start loading for the trip uphill. It seemed like the wisest course.

But I had gotten about a block and a half further down the hill, when I saw something that surprised me: A couple of minibuses and a pick-up truck that were heading down the hill made quick u-turns in front of me. Then I saw a couple of pedestrians doing the same thing. I looked up, and I saw why: Several hundred demonstrators were marching up Bourdon. They were still a couple of blocks away, but they were headed in my direction.

I’m not afraid of Haitian demonstrations. It’s not that I’m brave or reckless. It’s that experience has shown me I have no reason to fear them. I’ve been caught in the midst of them before, and have never suffered even a scratch. They make a lot of noise, but are generally peaceful, even cheerful. I know that’s not always the case, but it has been my experience.

But most of those experiences are of happier times, the times around René Préval’s election as president. He replaced the unpopular government that had been imposed by Haiti’s “allies” after President Aristide had been swept away in a coup d’état. Very many Haitians were excited by his election, optimistic that the country was taking a good turn.

But that optimism is gone. I can’t evaluate whether it is rightly gone. There is visible progress in Haiti, but not enough for a people that has been living in some of the worst poverty in the world.

So I turned quickly back up the hill. I see no reason to look for a first bad experience. I had resigned myself to what I then expected would be the long walk home, when I saw a pick-up truck making a u-turn right in front of me to head up the hill. I jumped on as it passed – it slowed to turn even if it didn’t stop – and got a tight grip on its roof.

Within seconds, however, it had come to a stop. Passengers were pouring out. They themselves were, I expected, headed downhill, and so wanted to get off a truck that I assumed to be heading back up.

But I was wrong. When the truck took off, it turned and headed back along Avenue Christophe, the cross street I had walked. At first I thought this meant that the driver was, prudently, taking a secondary road back up the hill. But when he got to the main road leading to and from Champs de Mars, he turned downhill again. He was still trying to get downtown. I asked him to stop, and jumped off. His assistant asked me why I wasn’t paying, and I answered that I was headed uphill, not down. He explained to the driver, and then told me to get back in. They would let me ride with them until they turned around, then they’d take me up the hill. “We can’t leave you here when the streets are like this,” he explained.

So I jumped back on.

Champs de Mars is the main park in downtown Port au Prince. It stretches uphill from in front of the presidential palace. There are trees and statues and benches. There’s the national history museum in the middle of it, and swings and slides for kids. There are a fountain or two and even a stage for concerts. It’s nice.

When the pick-up got to Champs de Mars, it stopped. I wasn’t sure why. Neither was the other guy sitting in back, a teenager amusing himself with questions about the slightly ragged-looking blan in the truck with him. The driver’s assistant signaled with his hand that we should be patient. Then he got out of the truck, and came back to talk with us. A woman who had been sitting in the front seat, between him and the driver, got out as well. She walked off into the crowd.

As it turned out, she was going after her son, a first grader at a private downtown school. She had convinced the driver to wait for her. This is what the assistant explained. They could not, he said, “leave the boy downtown . . .” So we parked in a corner of the park and waited.

By the time that the woman got back with her boy, it was too late to drive off. The demonstration was approaching us from two directions. Most of the shouting was against hunger. “Down with hunger!” “We won’t die of hunger!” Not much to argue with there. There was also music and dancing. Several demonstrators asked me what I was doing there as they marched by, but no one did anything more violent than tugging on the loop of my denim painter’s shorts. Thanks to Papouch, Madan Anténor’s 18-year-old son, I had a belt on, so the shorts stayed right where they belonged. The driver’s assistant had his eye on me the whole time.

The demonstration continued past us, down towards the palace, and we jumped on the truck and sped off. The driver wound through back streets, until he emerged onto Bourdon, well uphill of the excitement. As soon as he pulled over, his truck filled up. There were 18 adults in the back, six on each of two benches, three standing in the space between the benches, and three sitting on other passengers’ laps. The assistant was as bossy and hard-nosed about collecting fares as people in his position usually are, but every passenger seemed just glad to have found a space. Both sides of Bourdon were crowded all the way up the hill with those who hadn’t been as lucky, those who had had to walk.

I will probably never see the driver or his assistant again. There are so many in this city of more than two million people. But who knows? I gave them a little something more than the fare because I appreciated the way they took an interest in my safety, but they had not had any reason to expect that I would. Their interest appeared to be the kind of simple good will I’ve seen so much of in Haiti over the years.

I’ll call her “Ellen.” She’s eighteen, from Upper Glo, the poorer side of the community where I’ve been living on and off for over ten years.

I little over three years ago, she was at the center of a great scandal. Great, at least, by the standards of this very small community. She was pregnant, and she claimed that there could be no doubt as to who the father was. She said that she had only ever been with one boy. I’ll call him “Mark.” Like Ellen, her was about fifteen at the time. She and an older sister appeared at the boy’s house – his father is a prominent member of the community – one Sunday afternoon. It caused quite a stir.

Mark admitted that he had been with her once, but his family was not willing to simply accept that Mark was the prospective father. So his mother agreed to take full but temporary financial responsibility for Ellen. All through her pregnancy, she would ensure that she ate well and got good prenatal care. But the family also arranged to have a DNA test done as soon as the baby was born.

That test was conclusive. Mark was not the father. So, his family ceased supporting Ellen and her child, leaving her on her own and her father’s hands. She and her family continued to insist that the baby could only be his, that she has never been with anyone else. They claimed that the laboratory had been bribed. I have very good reason to believe that such was not the case.

Ellen was young, but she took motherhood very seriously. As soon as she was able, she started a very small business to support herself and her child. She sold crackers, hard candy, and cheese puffs at the side of the road, under the mapou tree in front of my house.

These are all inexpensive items, and her profit could not have been much to speak of, but she persevered. She sat there all day, every day, making a few pennies at a time. The only time she ever left her post was to do her buying down in Pétion-Ville or to look in on her little boy. She would get one of her little brothers to watch the business for her, but she had to be careful. If she left them for too long, they were a little inclined to help themselves. Not a lot. But every penny counted because she was working for her boy.

She kept at it consistently over the last three years, and had reason to be proud of what she had achieved. Her boy was a big, healthy-looking baby, and she had set aside enough money to send him to kindergarten in the fall.

That would be impressive enough, but it means more when you know something about her family situation. Her mother’s been dead for years. And her father has shown no interest over the years in sending his kids to school. Her teenage younger brothers, for example, are only now in the second grade, because they didn’t stat until they were able to pay for their own school expenses. She got, perhaps, advice and encouragement from adult women around her. She has, for example, a wonderful relationship with the fried snacks merchant whose business is next to her. But this is something she did entirely on her own.

Last Sunday, she and an older neighbor brought the boy to Madan Anténor, who is, among other things, the closest thing Ka Glo has to a nurse. She’s a trained midwife and a health-extension worker. She does vaccinations and basic first aide.

I was with her at the time. The child was struggling terribly, taking short, shallow, rapid breaths. He had a high fever, and looked weak. Madan Anténor gave the boy some children’s medicine to reduce the fever, but told the girl to take him down to Pétion-Ville. She feared pneumonia and, therefore, the worst.

Ellen got her boy down to Pétion-Ville to see a doctor as quickly as she could. It’s a half-hour hike, a long way with a sick three-year-old on your hands, no doubt. Apparently, she didn’t get him down the hill quickly enough. When I return to Ka Glo today, a week after it all happened, Ellen’s youngest brother told me that the little boy was dead.

I went to see Ellen, and we had a long talk. I wanted to tell how impressed I had been by what an attentive, caring mother she had been. It’s not as though I expected to be able to cheer her up. Nothing but time could possibly help with that. But I thought it was important to say something to her.

She’s thinking of using some of the money she saved for her boy’s first year of school so that she can go back to school herself. Pregnancy forced her to drop out of fifth grade. Mainly, she’s just sad.

I have had to read and write about various mortality and morbidity statistics since I came to Haiti. There’s plenty of data to show that bad things happen to the poor. But even though there are poor all around me here in Haiti, it’s not every day that those statistics strike so close to home.

Monday was an unusually hard day of travel. It started at about 2:00 AM in Hinche, a city in the middle of Haiti’s Upper Central Plateau. Job and I boarded a pick-up truck to head back towards Port au Prince. I had come to Hinche Saturday to attend a friend’s baptism. Job had been in nearby Cerca Carvajal, planning some work he had to do there. I had wanted to leave Sunday afternoon, but it was Easter Sunday, so no transportation was available.

The truck had found us on our way to the station. It was roaming the streets, beeping its horn and revving its engine, looking for passengers. It wouldn’t leave for Port au Prince until it was full. Job and I got seats, but they were on the roof rack above the cab. In some ways, they were good seats. You get less dust up there. But you have to hang on tight. The truck left at about 3:00.

Job was going all the way to Port au Prince, but I had to get off in Mirebalais, about halfway there. I met the manager of Fonkoze’s office in Belladère. He spends weekends with his wife in Mirebalais, but then heads to his office on Monday. I had some work to do in his branch, so I got on the back of his motorcycle and made the hour-and-a-half long trip with him.

When I got there, I found out that they wanted me to do my work in Baptiste, a mountain community outside of Belladère. It’s another hour or more away on motorcycle, up a hard, mostly-unpaved road. Worse than unpaved, it’s formerly paved. Chunks of pavement combine with rough gaps to make the ride especially bad.

A Fonkoze credit agent drove me up the hill, and accompanied me as I did my work. We got back down to Belladère mid-afternoon, and I finished what I needed to do by about 4:00.

I had planned to spend the night in Belladère, but it’s really better not to. The first trucks don’t leave the city until after 8:00 AM, so you don’t get to Port au Prince until noon. Half your day is shot. Usually, however, trucks don’t leave Belladère late either. The last ones load for neighboring Lascahobas in early afternoon. Belladère is on the Dominican border, and so it’s not that oriented towards Port au Prince. There just isn’t a lot of traffic in that direction.

But I was in luck. Monday is market day in Elias Piña, Belladère’s Dominican neighbor, so there are more passengers looking to head back towards the rest of Haiti on Monday afternoons. I was on the back of a pick-up, headed to Lascahobas by 4:30, and it was loaded and ready to go by 5:30. I had another long wait in Lascahobas, waiting for a truck towards Mirebalais to fill, and by the time I got to Mirebalais it was 8:00. I was tired and hungry, so I slept well.

I left early Tuesday morning on the back of a pick-up headed on the very dusty road back to Port au Prince. The other passengers and I joked that we’d all be the same color by the time we arrived.

We got to Croix des Bouquets by 7:30, but the driver stopped there instead of going all the way to the downtown station. It was a nuisance, and my fellow passengers were furious, but he was not going to change his mind. I walked 20 minutes to an intersection where I thought I would find a pick-up or a bus headed downtown, but I didn’t see any. I settled for one headed to the Shada intersection. There I knew I’d find one.

Or I thought I knew. I had no luck. I started strolling, looking over my shoulder to see whether I’d find the ride I needed.

When I got to Croix des Mission, I came across a familiar smile. It was Marie Ange, one of the women from the KOFAVIV group that I met with regularly over the course of about two years. KOFAVIV is the Commission of Women Victims for Victims, an organization of rape victims who offer support to other rape victims. I no longer meet with them, though I see some of them now and again. I hear about them often enough because a couple of them have gotten jobs with Fonkoze as the agents that offer Fonkoze credit to the others.

We each spoke some about our work. We hadn’t seen each other in quite some time. She too no longer attends the KOFAVIV meetings, but she still works with victims in her neighborhood. She was curious to know about the various parts of Haiti that my work takes me to and about the different groups I see.

She asked me what I doing, and said I looked kind of lost. I explained that I was trying to catch a ride downtown.

I was tired and dusty. I must have looked pretty ragged even by my own, rather low standards. But I had no idea how ragged until she reached into her purse and gave me 50 gourds. It was an event entirely without precedent in all my years here. She must have thought that I lacked even the ten gourds for bus fare, though I told her I did not.

I’m not used to thinking of myself as a charity case, and part of me was sorry to be taking her money. She can’t have much to give. But, for what is, I think, the better part of me, her generosity simply made my day.