Rose-Manie lives in Bezwen, an area above Kalabat, a small market in eastern Gwomòn that is the location of a parish church. She has one child, a three-year-old boy, whom she is raising without help from his father. The two of them live with her parents and her younger siblings.

She was able to start a small commerce even before she joined CLM. After weaning her baby, she left him in her mother’s care and moved to Gonayiv, the large city south of Gwomòn, to work as a maid. “I cooked and cleaned and did laundry.” She made 7,500 gourds per month, and she refused to spend any of it. So when she returned home after three months, she had 22,500 gourds she could invest. That is about $175. She arrived home during mango season, so she quickly added to her capital by buying and selling mangoes. When she shifted to selling groceries, she had almost $200. She sold rice, cooking oil, and the range of basics that Haitian cooks depend upon.

But Rose-Manie got sick, and her business capital slowly disappeared. For one thing, she continued to have to spend to feed herself and her boy even when she was too sick to work. For another, the medical expenses themselves were considerable. By the time she joined the program, she and her boy were largely depending on her folks.

But things have started to change since she joined the program. She bought a goat with 9,000 gourds of the first 15,000 gourds of her investment fund. She is trying to buy a smaller goat with the remaining 6,000, but she hasn’t found one that she likes yet. She hopes that if she takes good care of the goats, she can accumulate them until she has enough to sell them to buy a cow.

She expects to receive the remaining funds for investment soon, and plans to invest it to start her old business once again. She is optimistic. “Jodi a w ka gen yon bak sirèt. Demen se tout yon boutik.” A bak is a small wooden table that merchants use when they are selling just sirèt, or candy, and maybe some packaged cookies and crackers. It is a standard example of an especially small business. Rose-Manie is saying that one day you have nothing but a small table of snacks, and the next you can have your own shop.

Enide lives above Kalabat as well. Her neighborhood is Filyon. She has five children. A few years ago, when she saw that she could no longer send them all to school, she gave two of the older ones some money, and she sent them to live with a friend in Pòdpè, the major coastal city north of Gwomòn.

She and the two young women thought that the two would run their own commerce in the city and send themselves to school. The plan worked, except that her daughters found that they could not stay with the family who initially hosted them, and Enide had to borrow money to help them rent a room.

She borrowed the money from a village savings and loan association that had been functioning in the area even before CLM got there. She managed to repay what she owed, but then the association fell apart. “People borrowed money, but then they didn’t pay it back.”

The father of her younger children is around the area, but he doesn’t really help Enide with their kids. He’s married to someone else. “I’m their mother and their father. I sleep with them and get up with them every day.”

But she finds it hard to get ahead. She says, “Yon sèl dwèt pa manje kalalou.” That means that you can’t eat okra with just one finger. Okra is famously slippery. The phrase is a common Haitian proverb used to explain the need for teamwork. Everything Enide does, she has to do alone, and that makes life difficult.

She is excited about the goats she was able to buy with the first payment of her CLM investment fund. She bought two. “If I take care of them, and they reproduce, I won’t have to worry how I will send my youngest to school.” Her youngest is a son named Woodkervens, and he is just six, so he has a lot of years of school ahead of him. If she gets the number of her goats up over the next year or so, it won’t be a problem for her to sell one now and again for school fees and related expenses.

She is waiting impatiently for the rest of her transfer. She wants to invest it in her commerce. Her business model is simple. There are two large markets higher up into the mountains, farther to the east, Twa Pòto and Dandi. She buys produce there, and brings it down to Gwomòn for sale. It is a straightforward model. Produce is cheaper in such markets than it is downtown.

Up to now, she has been managing with credit. She goes to neighbors, borrows 5,000 gourds or so, and repays it the next day, when she gets back from selling in Gwomòn. They don’t charge her interest. “If I borrow from a woman, I might give her some of whatever I bought with the money. If I borrow from a man, I just say ‘thanks.’ If they see you always pay, you can usually find a loan.” But without any of her own funds, her business cannot grow. She plans to keep borrowing after she gets the money from CLM, but she’ll be adding to her own funds rather than depending on borrowed money alone.

Jolette lives in another neighborhood of Kalabat. She has a twenty-year-old son finishing high school in downtown Gwomòn and a baby with her in Kalabat. Until recently, she lived with her mother, but her mother kicked her out when she became pregnant with her second child, and she moved in with the girl’s father, Ancelot. She had had her son with another man, but he was married.

She had struggled to build the room of her mother’s house that she lived in. She sold cosmetics or groceries. Her business changed from time to time. But the expense of sending her son to school eventually ate up her capital. The shack she moved into with her girl’s father was falling apart even before she got there.

When she first joined the program, she struggled to eat even once a day. “If I ate on Sunday, I wouldn’t have anything on Monday.” The weekly stipend helped a lot. And it helped her support her son in school, too. “If I ate 50 gourds of food, I would save 50 gourds to send to my son.”

She used the first payment of her investment fund to buy a sow and a goat. “The pig will have piglets, and I will be able to sell them. My boy will be ready for college this coming year, and it will cost a lot.”

All through the conversation, Jolette keeps returning to her son’s needs. She barely seems to think about other things. “Everything I do is for my children.”

Wilnise lives in Klènot, a small community on one of the main roads that leads west out of downtown Bonbadopolis. She and her husband, Brenlove, live with three kids. They had just one when they joined CLM less than a year and a half ago, but her sister left the area, leaving her two children with Wilnise. She thinks that they are her children now, and she reports that Brenlove has really embraced them too.

They live in a house that belongs to her father-in-law, and he’s been supportive. But they have always wanted to build their own home. They started the work long ago, using whatever they could bring in, but they have never had the resources to finish the job.

Even before the couple joined the CLM program, they were part of a savings and loan association. They were able to make their weekly contribution because Wilnise carefully managed the money Brenlove was paid as a day laborer in their neighbors’ fields, struggling to save something of the earnings to make their deposit each week.

Eventually, they borrowed 5,000 gourds from the association. That’s a little less than $40. They used the money to buy a tree for charcoal. Brenlove chopped down the tree and cut it into pieces, burned the pieces underground to make the charcoal, and loaded the charcoal into sacks. Wilnise then sold the charcoal.

When she joined the program, Wilnise asked the team to buy her goats, and she received two. The team bought them for her with 15,000 of the 30,000 gourds that it designed for Wilnise to invest in a business. The goats have had kids. Just just one of the kids survived. But Wilnise bought two additional goats with money she earned through her new businesses, so now they have five.

She took another 15,000 gourds of investment funds, and used it to start a business. Her business involves a lot of back and forth, but it is working well. She buys charcoal from producers along the road between her home and the port down the road. She then loads her charcoal onto small freighters and sends it for sale in Gonayiv. She doesn’t want to travel by boat herself, so she meets it in Gonayiv, sells it there, and then uses money from the sale to buy produce in Gonayiv that she can sell at the market in Bonbadopolis.

Her business is succeeding, even growing, but she feels she needs to make a change. “The road is so risky. If the truck breaks down, your vegetables will spoil.” The next time she travels to Gonayiv, she plans to buy cosmetics, rather than produce. “Cosmetics don’t spoil.”

Wilnise has big plans as her means increase. Her first goal is to finish the home that she and Brenlove began to build already.

But that house is not on their own land. The land belongs to her father-in-law. “When you’re an adult, you want to live in a home of your own.” She hopes that as her goats reproduce, she be able to trade them in for more valuable livestock, but then eventually that she and Brenlove will be able to buy their own land.

When Jean Belson was a young boy, he was afraid to let anyone see him. “When people came to my step-father’s house, I would hide under the bed.”

Jean Belson was born with significant disabilities. His undersized legs fold under him. He cannot stand up. He grew up walking on his two knees, steadying himself with his hands. His hands, too, are misshapen, but he can use them perfectly well. He lives in a house that belongs to his stepfather. His mother passed away, but her former partner has always been good to him.

Early friendship with Cius, the man who eventually became his CLM case manager, is what initially brought Jean Belson out of his shell. They were neighbors from Jean Belson’s youngest days, and Cius took to him. When Cius went to a community gathering, he would bring Jean Belson along. People who saw him would be moved to give him small gifts of money. “People would make a small gesture, and I was careful not to waste what they gave me.”

As he grew older, he became something of an entertainer at public events. Cius brought him to the first CLM graduation in their town. By then, Cius worked for the program. Jean Belson collected 1,750 gourds after his short performance, he managed the money carefully, and was able to buy a gallon of kleren, the local rum, and a couple of packs of cigarettes. That was the initial merchandise that he used to start a business.

Having joined the CLM program, he’s been able to make that business grow. He’s continually adding new products. He had a booth built by the side of the road, and he’s turned it into a convenience store. It can be busy. He eventually had to take the side piece of an old wheelchair to serve as a barrier in the store’s doorway. He needed a way to keep customers from creeping in to help themselves.

But he is not willing to depend on the store entirely. He keeps a pile of rocks and a hammer next to the shop, and during down time he takes up the hammer to turn the rocks into gravel for construction. It is a reliable second source of income, if only small, occasional lump sums.

His ambition is simple. he has long been grateful for his stepfather’s love. His stepfather is happy to have him use the program’s help to put a decent roof on the shack his been living in on the older man’s land. But even so, he wants his own place to live. He’d like to buy his own land to put his home on.

Kalabat is the site of a parish church and a weekly open market in eastern Gwomòn. It is a challenging ride on a motorcycle from Gwomòn’s downtown area. The road follows a river, crossing back and forth in more than two dozen places. The riverbed is covered with rocks of various sizes, and the muddy water makes the rocks invisible, creating an unpredictable ride.

Gertrude lives in Abela, a small community above Kalabat. She shares a home with her husband and five of their seven kids. One of them is actually her late sister’s child. The girl has been living with her aunt since her mother became seriously ill.

Gertrude used to support the family with income from her small commerce. She was something like a grocer, selling basics like rice, oil, and sugar to her neighbors. She earned enough to keep the family fed and to send the children to school. Her husband added what he could be farming, but he earned very little. But when her sister grew ill, Gertrude spent what she had to try to save her. It only took a few months of trips back and forth to the hospital to burn through the capital in her business. Funeral costs ate up whatever medical expenses hadn’t burned through.This year, the children could not go to school. The family has not had food to eat every day.

She says she looks forward to the program. She has used most of her cash stipend so far to buy food for her family, but she also bought a chicken.

She has asked the team to give her money to re-start her grocery business, but also goats to raise. She wants to raise goats because they can help her send her children to school. If they reproduce, she explains, you can sell one now and again to pay fees. But goats are also insurance. She points out that if she had owned livestock, she could have spent money on her sister’s health without eating up her business.

She hasn’t worked out clear goals for her time in the program yet, but she isn’t worried. “Once you have possessions, you’ll see what to do with them.”

Figenie and her husband have seven children, but just six live with them at home right now. The oldest went off to live with a cousin in Pòtoprens just a couple of weeks ago. “My cousin told me they’d send my child to school.” Figenie has never been able to send any of the children to school herself. They do not even have birth certificates, nor does she have one herself.

She and her husband have supported the family by working in their neighbors’ fields. They “vann jounen.” That means that they sell their labor by the day. They can earn a couple hundred gourds on days when there is work, but that is not a lot for a family of nine. Occasionally, she has been able to buy a gallon of rum on credit, which she then sells by the shot. She might buy tobacco, too, to sell with the rum. But those who sometimes lend her money are reluctant to do it during planting season, when they need all the money they can muster. So she, her husband, and the children must get by on day labor.

She joined the program, and she started to look at what she could do if she had money. The first payment of her weekly stipend was four weeks’ worth, 2,400 gourds, or a little less than $20. She put away 1,000 gourds to use to buy shares in the savings and loan association that the CLM team has set up for her and her fellow members, but she also bought a couple of measures of pigeon peas that she has planted on her own small plot.

She’s asked the team to buy her a pig and some goats that she can start to raise, but she does not have a clear idea what she will do with them. She says clearly enough, “I don’t have a plan yet.”

Mulène is from Kalabat itself, but she only moved back there recently. She had been living as a widow with her daughter in Kwadeboukè, Pòtoprens’s northernmost suburb until about a year ago. She supported herself and her daughter selling groceries. But gang activity drove her out of the room she rented there. She lost everything. She fled back to Kalabat, where she moved in with her mother and her younger sister. She says that they have been living mostly off of neighbors’ charity.

But she has gotten off to a quick start in the program. She took the four weeks’ worth of stipend that she received, and immediately went into business. She bought a range of snacks — cookies, crackers, popcorn — and began selling them off of a small table that she sets up in the schoolyard near her home. Business is good. The schoolchildren buy her inexpensive snacks.

She thought about using the stipend for household expenses, but it didn’t seem right to her. “If someone gives you something, you can’t just wreck it. You can’t just eat it up.”

She’s already thinking ahead. The school year is almost over, so she will need to make a change in her business soon. She hopes to start selling her snacks in the market, but she wants to go back into the grocery business as well. She will be able to do that, she says, as soon as the CLM team transfers to her the funds for income-generating activities that it plans for her. She wants to raise goats as well, but in the light of her experience as a grocer, raising goats still seems a little like an afterthought.

The CLM program is just getting started for Rositha, a 31-year-old single mother of six from the hill above Kalabat in the Rivyè Mansèl section eastern Gwomòn. The father of her first three children abandoned them and her, but then she found another man and had three more kids with him.

He helped her take care of the kids she already had, and the couple was struggling along. The man farmed, and she had a small business selling corn in downtown Gwomòn. Sometimes she’d buy plantains near her home and hike downtown with them, carrying them on her head, for sale there. She and her children lived then, as they live now, in one room of a home that belongs to her brother. Other family members live in the home’s other two rooms. Her partner lived nearby, with his parents.

But the man grew sick. She spent all the capital in her business trying to help him back to health, but he eventually passed away. She was left on her own with her kids. Family members took the two oldest to lighten her burden. They are now in school, but they aren’t with her. She’s been struggling along with the other four, living mainly on charity from family members.

When the CLM staff started working in her neighborhood, she did not think much of it. When they visited her a couple of times, asking questions, she was happy to respond. She didn’t know what it was about, but she says, “I thought I might make something out of it.”

She enjoyed the six days of training that launched her into the program, and she looks forward to the chance to apply what she learned. She hopes to be able to use the investment that the program will make in her livelihood both to return to small commerce and to begin raising goats. She thinks that commerce is important because it can give you the money you need to manage your family and also allow you to save something. And she wants to raise goats because they give you something you can sell if you run into a sudden need.

She does not yet have a real vision of what she wants to accomplish in the 18 months she will spend in the program. For now, she says only that she hopes when she graduates to be able to hold onto what she has come to possess.

Germène lives in her mother’s house with three of her kids. One daughter spend the school year in downtown Gwomòn with family that sends her to school, but she comes home for vacation. The children’s father is not around. “He’s not here because life is hard. He goes around looking for work. He is in Okap now. The children like to talk with him on the phone when they can.”

She is supported, as is a younger sister who is also now a CLM member, by their mother and stepfather. Their stepfather farms. She too has land she could farm, but she doesn’t have the resources she’d need to plant.

She didn’t see anything odd about the questions the CLM asked her during their selection visits. “I didn’t know why they were asking all those questions. Now I know.”

She’s been frustrated by her struggle. “You get up in the morning, but you don’t do anything. you have children you don’t send to school. It’s like you’re no good to them.” She hopes that CLM will give her a way to acquire things that she has not been able to have.

Like Rositha, she’s is interested in small commerce and goats, and for some of the same reasons. Goats are easy to care for, and they give you a way to get your hands on money if you have a problem you need to solve. Small commerce gives you a regular income. You can take care of your family and deposit money in a savings club.

During her six days of training, she received a daily stipend. All the new members did. This small stipend, worth less than $2 per day, was originally conceived to cover transportation costs, but over the years members have almost always decided to walk to training so that they can use the stipend in other ways. Germène used hers to begin making contributions to a savings club. The members of the club take turns receiving the whole pot after each regular contribution. Germene’s turn hasn’t come yet, and she initially hoped to be able to use her turn to set herself up in a small business, but the one child she sent to school this year was sent home for non-payment of fees. So, she now thinks that the money will have to go to the school.

Edouarin and her husband Vercius have a large family. One of their younger daughters helps Edouarin count how many live together in their home. They have eleven children, though just six still live with them. The two oldest now live in their own homes. Another three, Vercius says, are “out in search of a living.” They have five grandchildren with them as well. So, they are 13 all together.

Edouarin says that the house they live in belongs to her brother-in-law. Their own house was in a miserable state, and the brother-in-law was living in Gonayiv, the large city to the south of Gwomòn, so he said that they could just use his.

The couple survives by Vercius’s farming. Some of the land is theirs, but mostly he works as a sharecropper, giving up half the yield to the land owner in exchange for the right to work it.

Edouarin wants to start raising livestock with the program. She’s hoping to have both goats and pigs. They offer what she calls a “garanti.” She explains that the garanti is the young that the animals will have. For her, it is a profit she can count on.

But she also wants to get into small commerce, and she explains that she wants to contribute money to the household. She does not want to count on her husband’s farming for everything. “If he pays for the rice, I can buy the oil and the salt.” And she adds, “I’ll will feel differently about myself when I have my own [economic] activity.”

She doesn’t yet have much in the way of specific goals for CLM, but she know what is important to her. “I do not ever want the children to have to sit at home again. I want them to always be able to go to school.”

Merjina Jean lives in Gwo Moulen, but she isn’t from the area. She’s from Flande, a busy y-shaped intersection that connects the road to Mibalè with the roads to Laskawobas, Beladè and the Dominican border in one direction and with the road to Savanèt in the other. She was living with her mother there when she had a child with a young man from Mibalè. Her mother threw her out of the house. The father’s mother ask her to give her the child to raise, but Merjina couldn’t bear to part with it. “He was the only child I had.”

She drifted for a short time, then she met the father of her second child, her daughter. He was from Gwo Moulen, and he brought her there to live with him. She would stay at home with her two small children, and he would travel back and forth to the Dominican Republic, working odd jobs there, and then coming home with what money he could.

One day, while he was in the D.R., the man’s mother came to tell Merjina that the man wanted her out of the house. The house was on his family’s land, so Merjina felt she had no choice. She had to leave, but she had no place to go. A neighbor finally invited her to move with her two children into a small shack on his land. By then she was part of the CLM program. She was selected while still living with her daughter’s dad.

When it came time to invest in assets to develop, she decided that she wanted livestock. The CLM program used to acquire the assets a member wanted and then transfer them to the member, but the program has been evolving, and it now transfers funds for investment in cash. Members make an investment plan in consultation with their case managers. They discuss the total amount that the program can offer to them, and they work out what different investments they will make. When they are ready to make those purchases, the case manager gives them the cash and follows up to see what they end up buying. Merjina took the money the program made available, and she bought two goats and a pig.

But it appears as though the purchases were not good ones. Her pig withered and then died not long afterwards. She now suspects that it was sick when she bought it, that the seller somehow concealed the pig’s condition. She still has her two goats, but neither has reproduced yet. She probably needs to sell them to buy others. She cannot afford just to hold onto them. The program had a lot of reasons for switching from in-kind transfers to cash ones, but Merjina’s experience shows that it has work to do as far as helping members buy well.

In the meantime, Merjina is now dating another man. She and her new partner are now planning to use Fonkoze’s contribution to home repair to fix a home that belongs to him. Then Merjina plans to move in with her two children.

She’s is pleased to have a partner again, and he seems happy to be able to help Merjina. He thinks, for example, that he can help her buy better goats when she decides to replace the ones she bought herself. And they are already farming together on land that belongs to him. She is not from the area, so she doesn’t have any farmland of her own. A single good bean crop could go a long way towards improving Merjina’s finances.

But there is one problem they will need to work through. Her partner wants them to have a child together as soon as possible. For him, it is a way to cement their relationship. Merjina wants to wait. “I have two children, and I can’t do anything for them yet.” A three-way conversation about this, and the need to make it a subject of serious and honest discussion between the two of them, takes up a large portion of the time their case manager spends with them on the day of our visit.

Clautilde’s life was once very different from the one she leads now. She and her husband were succeeding. Their farming had enabled them to buy land, both for their home and for farming. They also bought a mule to help with chores, but to enable Clautilde to carry merchandise between their home on the ridge east of Gwo Moulen and the market in Laskawobas, too.

But her husband abandoned her and their three children. He went to live with another woman. When she joined CLM, she depended on charity from her family.

She has, however, been working hard and successfully since she became part of the program. She bought three goats with the investment money that Fonkoze made available. Only one had its first litter, but the kid did not survive. Now two of them are pregnant, so she is hopeful.

Her other areas of investment have been more successful. She used some of the funds left over after her purchase of the goats to start a small commerce, and some of them to buy chickens and ducks.

The poultry has been flourishing. She has to keep them locked up in a shed for the moment. They’d do too much damage to the bean fields, which are everywhere in her neighborhood right now.

The commerce was initially made easier because she already had a mule. She buys produce in Gwo Moulen, and brings it for sale in Laskawobas. There, she buys basic groceries: food stuffs like rice, sugar, and oil and laundry products as well. She sells this merchandise both in the market where she buys them and out of her home on the top of the hill.

She has a couple of problems she needs to manage, though. For one thing, her mule hasn’t been well. It has been refusing to climb certain parts of the trail with its load. She’s thinking that she needs to just put it out to pasture so it can regain its health and then sell it to buy another.

For another, she has more money than she would like in the hands of customers who buy on credit. “Things have been really hard, and when your neighbors ask you to sell on credit, it’s hard to say ‘No.'” That’s common enough for merchants that sell basic necessities out of their homes, but Clautilde explains that neighbors will seek her out in Laskawobas, too. They will find themselves in the market with too little money to buy what they need, and they’ll ask for her help. For now, she still has enough merchandise to keep selling, and she feels confident that the folks who owe her money will pay.

She has been making weekly deposits in her savings and loan association, called a VSLA. She has a loan in her hands right now, having borrowed 20,000 gourds — a little over $150 — to both reinforce her business and invest in planting beans. Her first repayment is scheduled for later this month. In July, when the association’s 12-month cycle finishes, she will receive 26,000 gourds of savings along with whatever interest it earned on loans.

The beans she planted are looking healthy. A good harvest will be a significant addition to her income. Between that money and the money she will receive from her VSLA, she has two large projects in mind. She wants to buy a cow, and she’d like to buy more farmland as well.

In the meantime, her ex-husband has been talking to her family, telling them that he wants to come back to her. Her family has asked her to hear him out. “I will listen to what he has to say this once.” But she does not think they’ll get back together. She does not believe he’ll leave the woman he left her for.

Rosemène lives in Senadò with her teenage son. He is her youngest child. She was born and raised in Senadò, but she moved away when she met her first husband. They had four children together, but when he passed away, she could not see how to raise them by herself. By then, her mother was living across the border in the Dominican Republic, and the older woman asked Rosemène to send the children to her. They’ve been with their grandmother ever since.

Rosemène returned to Senadò, where she found an old family home should could inhabit. She had a child with another man, and he occasionally contributes some money to help her support the boy, but they haven’t been together as a couple for years. Most of the boy’s needs fall on Rosemène.

She’s done two principal things to support her son. She works in her neighbors’ fields when they will hire her, but that was never her preferred option. She always preferred to borrow money from friends or neighbors so she could buy sour oranges or meliton, a vegetable popular in Haiti. She would load a basket on her head, and hike more than two hours down the mountain to the market in Laskawobas. She would then sell her load, hike back home, repay her loan, and prepare for the next trip. Without a pack animal, the work was both physically demanding and limited. She could only sell as much as she could carry herself.

But she has not even been able to do even that much for a while. She developed a cavity, and it appears to have become infected to the point that she developed an abscess. Though the abscess was eventually lanced, the tooth continues to bother her. She can’t carry loads on her head at all anymore, so she and her boy have to make do with what little she can earn in the fields.

She bought a pig and two goats with the money the CLM program gave her to invest in business, but when she saw the the pig was getting sick, she sold it for meat. Selling a sick pig for meat in the Haitian countryside almost always means selling on credit, and that’s what Rosemène had to do. She had purchased it for 7,500 gourds, and she was able to sell it for 6,500, but she won’t be paid until June.

Her goats are doing better. They have been thriving under care from herself and her boy. One has given birth to its first kid, and the other is pregnant.

She has been making slow progress towards building a new home, but she may have reached an impasse. She borrowed 6,000 from her brother-in-law to buy the first load of palm wood planking she needs for the home’s walls, but when he asked her to repay him, she had to take out a loan from her VSLA. She was able to borrow the 6,000 gourds she needed, but she can not see how she will repay. It was a two-month loan, and with interest she’ll owe 3,120 this month, but she doesn’t have any ideas right now about where that money will come from. It is hard to see it coming from the little bit she can earn from field work, and she still can’t carry a load to market. And she has more building expenses waiting for her after that loan has been repaid.

If she is able to repay her loan, she has a plan for the savings she’ll receive when the cycle ends this summer. She knows the most important thing she can do for herself and her boy would be to get back into business, but she needs a pack animal to do it well. She hopes to be able to combine her savings with money from the sale of a goat to buy a donkey. She thinks she can buy one for 20-25 thousand gourds. “I know how to do business, a just need a little donkey to do it.”

Marie lives uphill from Rosemène, on an opposing offshoot of the main path through Senadò. She and her husband, Rodrigue, live with their three children. They have been working neighbors’ fields since before they joined the program, earning whatever the daily rate has been.

They have been able, for the most part, to feed the family and to send the children to school. “If you earn 500 gourds, yo might eat 300, but you try to save 200.” Paying for school, however, has involved borrowing money from the local credit union. They still owe 900 gourds of interest on the loan they took out to pay tuition.

But Rodrigue would also going down the mountain to central Laskawobas, where farmers pay lump sums of 1,500 gourds or more for a single job that lasts several days. These lump sums enabled the couple to to do most of the work towards building a home, but they never had the money to complete the work. The house has been sitting for years with doorways where the doors should be and incomplete walls.

They were able to complete work on their home quickly once they received CLM support. They bought the lumber they needed for doors, and hired a carpenter to make and mount them. They bought some additional planking, and they had the carpenter complete the open walls.

Marie is excited about the livestock she has been able to acquire. “Someone was letting me take care of their goat.” Normally, she might eventually be paid in kind from the goat’s offspring. “But now I have two goats of my own. One already had a kid, and the other is pregnant.” She also bought a pig and a turkey.

She has a plan. She wants to sell offspring from her livestock, add the money to what she has saved in her VSLA, and buy a cow. “Once your cow has a calf, you can begin selling milk.” She explains that a gallon sells for 500 gourds, and she can use that money to feed her kids, though she and Rodrigue plan to continue doing the fieldwork they have always done as their main source of income.

Ivronie lives on the main path between Senadò and the center of Gwo Moulen, but she hasn’t been there for long. She was a single widow, raising three children by herself, living in a home that did not belong to her. She would take care of the children by working in they fields that her late husband left for her and with a business bringing produce to market.

She met a man. He’s showing himself to be a good partner, willing to help her take care of the kids she already had. He had purchased a small piece of land, but neither had the money to build a home on it. He also bought a horse to help her with her commerce. When, however, she gave birth to another child, her first with her new husband, she was no longer able to go to market. “I have no one who can watch the children consistently. My husband has to be away too.”

Joining CLM changed her situation in several ways.

Using support from the program, the couple has been able to build a new home on the land they own. They installed a window on one side of the home that Ivronie can use to run a small grocery business. “It’s not a good business. Neighbors buy on credit, and it’s hard to get them to pay.” For now, however, with a baby in her arms, it is the best she can do. Her husband takes the baby on Mondays, when she goes to market to buy. She hopes that when her baby is a little older she’ll be able to do more business going back and forth to the market in Laskawobas.

As small as it is, her business is important to her because it enables her to save money in her VSLA every week. The livestock she bought with funds from the program is starting to prosper, and she hopes, like Marie, that when her VSLA cycle is over she will have enough money between her savings and what she can ear from selling off other livestock to buy a cow. Unlike Marie, she does not have a plan for her cow once she buys one, but she know she wants one.

Giresline lives well off the main dirt road that cuts through Bedeyenn from Ma Wouj to Answouj and beyond. She and her partner Gracilien have one child together, but she had three children before they ever got together. Her older daughter lives with her mother, who needed a child to help her out, and her older son lives with the boy’s father’s family, though both Giresline and Gracilien would like the boy to come them eventually. Giresline speaks well of Gracilien, “He loves children. If it was up to him, we’d have all of them with us.”

Since they got together, the couple has been living with Gracilien’s mother. They do not yet have a home of their own. Giresline isn’t from the area. She is from Ma Wouj, the major market town in the hills farther up the main road towards the northern coast. “My husband saw me in the market there, and he started talking with me.” The couple has a small plot of land that Gracilien bought with earnings from charcoal-making in the years before he met Giresline, but they have never been able to build a home on it.

With her first CLM investment funds, Giresline set up a small commerce on a table in the front of her mother-in-law’s yard. She sold basic groceries, like rice. But it never worked. “People always bought on credit.”

Her problem is that she is no good at getting people to pay. “I just can’t ask people for money.” When she saw that most of her capital was disappearing, she took what remained, and bought a couple of chickens.

She has now started selling charcoal. She can buy two sacks a week for 600 gourds each and sell them for 1,000 gourds each at the large market in Ma Wouj. She sells it at the market, and there is no question of credit. Her customers have to pay cash. That’s 800 gourds each week, or about $6.15. Gracilien still makes charcoal whenever he can.

With her second transfer of investment funds, Giresline met her case manager at the market, and they bought two goats. She’s excited about the opportunity they present to her. She says that she’ll use the goats to pay for her children’s school. “If they give birth to bucks, I can sell them to pay school fees.”

She is most excited, however, about the support the program is giving her to help her and Gracilien finally build a home. They had not yet been able to start construction, even though they had the land. Giresline gets along well with her mother-in-law, but she wants to have a home of her own.

Norelia and her husband Frechenel were doing well. Frechenel earned a steady income for the couple farming, raising livestock, and working as a laborer loading the big trucks that carry all sorts of loads between the lower Northwest and Gonayiv, Haiti’s second city. And the couple needed his steady income. They have eleven children.

But they were able to support them, sending them to school. Just one of the eleven was sent to live away from home with an aunt in Pòtoprens, when the aunt asked for him.

The story of their situation, and the reason they are part of CLM, is clear when one looks at their home. They live in the wide, hilly area between the main road through Bedeyenn and the commune’s small, quiet downtown area. They have their own lakou, or yard, and there are a couple of small structures in it. The principal house is the one they themselves were building with cinder blocks and a poured cement roof, a much more expensive construction than a CLM member would normally be able to afford.

But the home is unfinished. Its walls were never covered with the thin layer of cement that Haitian use to give cinderblock homes a smooth appearance. What’s worse, the couple has not been able to install solid doors. One of the three front doorways is covered by a sheet of roofing metal that’s been nailed in place. The other two doorways, the ones that lead onto the covered porch, are covered with old doors made of scraps of lumber. Something blocked the construction.

In 2023, when they were still working on the home, Frechenel had a stroke. He hasn’t been able to work since then. He spent some time, initially, at the largest local hospital in Jan Rabel, but eventually he and the couple’s oldest daughter moved in with family in Ma Wouj, the market town, where he can get regular physical therapy. Norelia is excited because he is just now about to feed and even dress himself. “He will come back home.”

Since he stopped working, the family has depended entirely on Norelia. Once a week, she borrows a pack animal from a neighbor, walks with the animal to the salt flats in Answouj, where she buys a load of salt for 1,000 gourds. She brings it back to Bedeyenn, and then brings it for sale the next day to Ma Wouj. She can usually sell it for 2,500 gourds, a profit of about $11.50. That is her main source of income to manage her large family.

The map shows her home, a red star marked “Norelia’s Home,” and her locations both for buying and selling, similar stars with labels in red.

She’s used the funds Fonkoze could invest for her to buy goats. She and her case manager purchased four. One has already given birth to a kid. The other three are pregnant. “Goats are important. They give you a way to manage your problems. When you have a lot of children, you have to have a place to look just in case.”

But she would eventually like to establish a larger, more profitable business. She’d like to sell sandals, underwear, stuff that sells especially well, she says, around the holiday season but sells to a degree all around the year. But she’s reluctant to start. She explains that the work on the house’s interior is even less advanced than the outside. There are no interior doors at all. She has no place inside she can secure merchandise, and she explains that, when you have a lot of kids, they and their friends can get into things. As if on cue, her youngest girl opens up her sack of course salt and steals a few small chunks to suck on.

So, Norelia is planning with her case manager to use her home repair budget to finish work on the house that she and Frechenel started. Once she has a room within it that she can lock, she plans to start buying merchandise to start her new business. She would eventually like to buy a pack animal, even if only a donkey, because going to the various markets her work takes her to will be much easier and more profitable when she has one of her own.