Yolène is very happy about the way things are going for her. Her goats are healthy and both should have kids in January.

She’s been managing her stipend carefully, using little bits that she can save to buy more livestock. She bought a large chicken the first time she had built up enough, but the chicken was stolen almost as soon as she purchased it. She was frustrated, but not discouraged. As soon as she had saved another hundred gourds, she purchased another small hen. “Keeping chickens is useful. If you run into trouble, you can grab one and sell it to get the money you need.”

She’s right, but it also shows that she thinks of her poultry mainly as a way to keep savings, not as a moneymaking venture. She looks at her larger livestock differently, though. She doesn’t feel as though she’s made progress since she joined the program, but she has a clear idea of what will count as progress for her. “It’s when your animals start to have young that you can start to move forward. You can sell some to buy larger animals.”

Solène has been working hard since we last spoke with her. She and her husband have been collecting the materials they will need to build a new home. They’ve been living in a house that belongs to her mother-in-law, and are anxious to move into one of their own.

She explains their activity with a Haitian proverb: “Se pa lè w gen domi nan jè w, ou ranje kabann.” That means that you don’t wait until you’re sleepy to make your bad. It’s one of the proverbs that the members from Kolonbyè discussed with their case managers and with one another at the three-day workshop they attended a few weeks ago, and Solène picked right up on the sentiment.

They are still struggling. Hurricane Matthew destroyed a field of beans that she and her husband had planted. They managed to plant 15 mamit, or coffee cans, and won’t see any harvest to speak of. What’s worse is that they bought eight of the cans on credit, promising to repay them in beans with 100% interest, and they still owe 16 cans of beans even though their farming failed.

She’s happy that she now has a latrine and some goats, but their lives haven’t improved very much. She has two children who should be in school, and she can’t send them yet. “I bought their uniforms and the books and other supplies they need, but a don’t have the school fee.” The fee this year is 1000 gourds per child, or about $30, for both for the year. The school’s principal won’t let anyone send a child unless they can pay at least half up front, and Solène doesn’t have 1000 gourds yet.

And it is still hard to feed her children every day. “Yo sou kont ou, fò w fè.” That means, “They depend on you, so you have to do something.” She says that the stipend helps, but that her husband continues to work in their neighbors’ fields for 50 gourds, or less than $1, a day.

Modeline has moved. She and her partner were living in an abandoned house they borrowed from a kind neighbor who had moved to a larger town, but her partner left for the Dominican Republic, so she and their baby moved back in with her mother and stepfather, who live uphill from the house they were in.

But Modeline isn’t upset about his departure. It is part of a plan that they made together. “We made the decision together. We have a lot of stuff to do. He left to earn the money we’ll need. He’ll be back in December.”

Their most important project is their home. They have both spent their lives as stepchildren. And though their stepfathers have treated them well, they started life together with nothing to build on. They don’t have any land of their own. Modeline’s brother-in-law has given them a small plot of land to build their home on, but they have no trees they could harvest to provide the limber they’ll need. They’ll have to buy all of it, and the money Modeline will get from CLM won’t be enough.

Modeline was careful about her return, though. She’s welcome in her mother’s home, but it isn’t easy. She left her water filter in the abandoned house she’s been staying in. She goes down every day to treat water and carry it back to her mother’s in gallons. “If I bring the filter, the kids will play with it, and it will break.”

While her partner’s away, she’s getting by. She has a small business. It has just 225 gourds in it – that’s less than $3.50 – but by rolling it over constantly, she can sometimes may as much as 150 gourds, or $2.25, in a week. And she’s a student of her own work. “I sell sugar and bread. I can’t make money of the sugar, but I can make money selling the bread. And they won’t come to buy bread if they can’t get sugar, too.”

She’s already saved enough on her own to buy a chicken. It’s the second one she purchased since joining the program. She bought the first by selling a small can of cement that was left over when her latrine was built.

But what is more striking than the purchase of two chickens is her excitement about the purchases. I was done interviewing her when she called me back to say that she had one more thing to tell me. And she explained what she had done. It was an encouraging sign of her developing pride.

Louisimène is happy to be in the program. “Nou pa menm jan ankò paske yo ban nou bagay n ap jere,” she explains. “We’re not like the way we were because they’ve given us things to manage.” She’s especially pleased that her daughter is back in school.

Her latrine’s been built, and her husband plans to enclose it with walls so they can start using it within a couple of days. He’s also started collecting the posts they’ll need to build the structure of their new house. She’s concerned about the house’s walls, though. They’ll have to buy the palm wood planks that they need, and Louisimène doesn’t yet see where they’ll find the money.

She’s been taking care of her two goats, but she was discouraged when one of them died while it was giving birth. “I liked the look of the two of them so much that I would sit in their hut just to look at them.” She says that she was devastated because she is the one who really knows what she lost.

But she knew just what to do when it died. She reported the death the neighbor who serves on the CLM Village Assistance Committee. The committee had just been formed a couple of weeks earlier, but Louisimène remembered that they were the ones who had agreed to help when trouble comes when the case manager isn’t around. He told her that he would talk with her case manager with her.

She looks forward to having a new house, and her husband has started collecting the support posts they’ll need, but like many of her fellow members, she doesn’t yet know how she’ll acquire the materials to build its

Rosemitha missed the first day of the workshop. She sent her husband in her place. She was off in Savanèt, at the weekly market. She didn’t want to miss a day selling her merchandise.

She started a small commerce when she joined CLM, and it’s a lot of work but it’s going well. She buys plantains on Wednesdays from women bringing them to the market in Kolonbyè. She lives right next to the main road, so she catches them as they pass by her house. On Saturdays, she brings the week’s purchase to the market in Mibalè for sale. While in Mibalè, she uses the money she’s earned from plantain sales to buy okra to sell in Savanèt. The CLM program started her with 1500 gourds of merchandise, and she’s already increased her investment to 2000 gourds, even though she also uses profits to help feed her family.

But the business is risky. She depends on the trucks that pass by her house on market days to get her plantains to market. If she can’t flag down a truck with space for her plantains, her merchandise could go bad before she can get it to market.

So she’s working to increase her capital until she can change her business model. She wants to sell rice and oil, basic groceries. “Oil doesn’t go bad,” she explains.

She’s happy about the way things are going. She and her husband are working together. He still works in fields, but now she contributes to the household income, too. She doesn’t like her husband’s bad temper. “He gets angry a lot.” He yells at both her and his mother, who lives with the couple. But she lives with it because he’s not violent and he’s a good stepfather to the child she had before they got together. “He treats all our children the same.”

Idalia says that she feels good about being in the pwogram. “M santi m nòmal.” But when she talks in detail about how things are going, she seems mostly frustrated.

One of her two goats already died. “It started yelling all the time, and then it stopped eating. Then it just fell over and died.” The other one is now pregnant, so she has something to work with, but when the goat dies, she says, “It really hurt.”

She’s worried about building her home, too. “They are giving us the tin, but we don’t know where we’re going to get the lumber.” She explains that she isn’t from the area where she now lives. She and her husband have no land there to harvest the posts that she’ll need from. They don’t have any palm trees of their own, either. “We might be able to find what we need in Jinpaye, but it’s a long way, and we’d have to get it here.”

Money is still hard. They haven’t been able to plant this year because they have yet saved up anything they can invest in farming. And her husband’s been sick, unable to move around. Worse still, her teenage boy, her youngest son, is sick too. Doctors who came to offer a mobile clinic told her she should take him to the hospital for a more thorough exam and treatment, but she hasn’t been able to get him there yet. She’ll have to arrange a trip with her case manager.

Miramène missed the first day of the workshop in Koray Grann. She stayed home with her sick child. The baby was feverish and uncomfortable. Miramène knew she had to come on the second day, though, so she left her mother in charge and hiked down from Gwo Labou to Koray Grann.

She feels good about how the program is working for her so far. Her goats are healthy. She works hard to keep them that way, making sure they’re tied up where they can get food but don’t have to stand in the direct sun. Her father helps her, but she is mainly on her own since her husband is in the Dominican Republic.

She still lives in her parents’ lakou, the yard with their house and also houses for her sister and brother. Her sister-in-law is also a CLM member, but her mother and sister are somewhat wealthier, so they didn’t qualify.

She and her sister-in-law decided to make one shared latrine for the whole lakou, and it has already been installed none of the households has had one until now. It will be ready to use in a couple of days. Right now it has no walls. But Miramène’s father has promised to add the walls in the next days, and the entire family will benefit.

Her new focus is on the new home she plans to build. CLM requires members and their families to contribute a lot towards the home, and Miramène is clear about her own contribution. Her father has been collecting the posts she will need for the house’s structure, and she’s already begun buying the palm trees she’ll need to build its walls. She told her husband about her place in the program, and he has been sending money to buy the lumber. He’ll come visit in December. “He’s really happy about the program, and agrees with everything I tell him we need.”

Laumène wasn’t feeling well on the first day of the three-day workshop. She’s been having headaches and hot flashes. But she came anyway, and she seems happy to be there.

She’s certainly happy to be in the program. “I’m happy about the way I’m managing [what I have]. They’ve given me things so I can hope.”

She talks about the water filter she’s received, about her new goats, and about the cash stipend she’s getting every week. “M ap vi alèz.” “I live comfortably.” Her goats, she says, are her path to a better life, and having her own water filter means she’s no longer crouching down to drink any water she comes across.

Her children are happy about the program, too. She says that they’re the reason that she can come to meetings whenever we invite her to one. “They see what I’m doing.”

She knows that the CLM team will only have 18 months with her, but she doesn’t seem worried. “They’ll leave me with principles that I can stick with.” Her goats will provide young, and she’ll have a new home so that she won’t be living “under a tree.”

Her plan is to stick with her livestock. She is afraid to invest in small commerce. “It’s too easy for the money to fritter away. The kids would yell for this or that, and it would eat up the money.”

Juslène still seems lost.

She sits cheerfully in the classroom as a case manager opens the workshop. She and her fellow CLM members from the area around Koray Grann will spend three days together, going over the way they manage their new assets – almost all livestock – and how they have set out on the other aspects of the program, like home repair. She looks around as members talk or shout or sing. She never seems to focus for long on anything in particular. Others learn quickly to applaud in rhythm to offer encouragement. It’s a CLM custom: clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap, clap. But Juslène can’t pick up the beat.

She’s been in the program for three months, but can’t remember that. She can’t say when she started. But she sits smiling as we chat, looking left, right, always away but always cheerful. She’s happy in the program. “They gave me goats. They’re going to give me a house.”

But we talk about the house. The program provides roofing material and money to pay builders, but members have to provide the structural lumber and the material for walls. Around Gwa Labou, where Juslène lives, they use palm wood planks. It’s a lot to manage. She answers me quickly when I ask her whether she’ll be able to organize her part of the work. “I can.” But when I ask her how she will get the work done, she says she doesn’t know. Her husband will find the support posts, but she’ll need to buy the planks, and she has no idea where the money will come from.

But it is important to her. She’s been living in his sister’s house ever since her own was destroyed by a storm. She doesn’t like it. Her sister-in-law treats her well, but she says, “M pa renmen rèt kay moun.” That looks easy to translate. It looks like it means, “I don’t like living in someone [else’s] home.” But the Creole is stronger than that because “ret kay moun” carries a sense of homelessness, a sense of the status of restavek, the Haitian children who live as domestic servants.

When it came time to think about where to build her new house, her father decided to rent a plot well downhill of the place she’s been living. Her husband has begun to assemble the support posts her house will need. “My life will change when I’m in my own house, but it hasn’t changed yet,” she says. The house, which is the part of the program most important to Juslène, will depend entirely on the two men.