Gidette lives in Hat, a community along the Artibonite River, just east of downtown Laskawobas. It is where she was born and raised, and she lives there with four of her five children. Her older lives off on her own now, but the younger woman’s daughter lives with Gidette so she can attend the school nearby.

Gidette and her husband have always worked together to earn the income they need. He fishes, and she takes the fish to market for sale as long as the catch is good enough to make the trip to downtown Laskawobas worthwhile. If it is not enough, he just sells it to the buyers who go to the river to meet fishermen there. “It’s best when I can go to the market. I can buy what we need while I’m there. It’s cheaper than buying from neighbors.”

The family was getting by. Gidette made weekly contributions to her sòl, a savings club common in Haiti. She used the sòl to save the money for the children’s school fees.

But her husband’s catches were getting small while prices were getting higher. So, the family was struggling. 

After eighteen months in the CLM program, some things are the same for the family, but much has changed as well. Their main source of income for daily expenses is still his fishing. Gidette has not chosen to invest in other commerce.

She decided, however, to invest in livestock. She bought two goats with funds that the program provided, and now she has four. She also bought two turkeys, which have begun laying eggs, and a pair of ducks. “Animals are hope. You can sell them when you need the money, and when people see you have livestock, they will lend you money, too.” 

She hopes that the goats will continue producing and that someday she will be able to buy a cow. It will be her second because since she joined the program, a cow she was keeping for a neighbor had a calf, which she received as payment.

But for Gidette, the most important change has been her home. She was living in her mother-in-law’s old house, and it was falling apart. She watched her fellow CLM members finish home repair one after another, but hers was going slowly. “Some built two-room houses. Some built three rooms. I wanted a home with four rooms.”

She says that as graduation began to approach and she wasn’t finished, her case manager started to really push. “I told her not to worry. I had the posts and the palm trees for the walls. I told her that one day she come by and ‘pop’ it would be finished. I had given my word.”

And now, in fact, she has the four-room home she hoped for. And she already has plans for further improvements. She is saving in the second cycle of the savings and loan association the CLM set up for her and her fellow members, and when the 12-month saving cycle ends, she will buy cement and put down a floor.

Ifonia lives in Provo, a mountainous area of eastern Gwomòn. The region is split into multiple small neighborhoods, most of which are along the steep, rocky slopes that rise up from of the area’s many streams. 

She’s from another rural part of Gwomòn, but as a young woman she was living in downtown Gwomòn, going to school there. “I would come home on Fridays and then go back downtown on Sundays with provisions. I wouldn’t carry a week’s worth, so one of my parents would visit during the week to check things out and bring more stuff.”

She was in the eleventh grade when she met Kenson. He liked her enough that he went to her parents to ask for her hand. “He gave me a ring and a set of earrings.” 

Her parents agreed, but that was the end of her education. She moved in with Kenson, in his mother’s house, where they still live with their three boys. Kenson would support the household with farming, though he could occasionally get construction work with a brother-in-law, who is a construction foreman in Sen Mak. She reports that she has a good relationship with Kenson, though she cheerfully volunteers a series of platitudes about “how men are” as a note about her confidence in his fidelity.

Ifonia’s job was mainly to manage whatever money that Kenson brought it. “I couldn’t do commerce in the market because of the children, but if my husband gave me 50 gourds, I would spend 25 and then take the other 25 and turn it back into 50.” That means she’d make a small amount of money through trading despite the kids. She would occasionally leave them with her mother-in-law to go buy basic groceries at the market, which she’d then sell out of her home. It was nothing big, but it helped.

Joining the CLM program has opened Ifonia’s eyes to new possibilities. She started using the stipend that Fonkoze provides each week much as she uses the money her partner has always provided. She spends some of it on household expenses, and she adds some to her business. She might buy a small bag of cookies or crackers or candy that she then sells by the piece. 

She also uses it to help manage a new weekly expense. The program offered her a chance to participate as a member of a savings and loan association, and she puts 250 gourds out of her 600-gourd stipend into savings.

The program provides funds for a business investment, and she chose to invest hers into livestock. She’s now raising goats. She bought two, and one is pregnant. She is hoping that they will reproduce and increase in value until she can sell some to buy a cow. She thinks it’s important to have animals of different sizes and, in particular, of different values. “There are problems you can solve by selling a chicken. You wouldn’t sell a goat to solve a chicken-size problem. You wouldn’t sell a cow to sell a goat-size problem. And there are cow-size problems, too.”

She is now getting ready to work on building a new house. She thinks she’s been living in her mother-in-law’s house too long already. She thought about building the new one on her father-in-law’s land, but people told her that the plot of land she was looking at is cursed, and she was reluctant to move onto cursed land with three small boys. So, she’ll stay on her mother-in-law’s land, but she’ll have her own separate house. 

Chalesia lives high on another one of the area’s steep slopes. Her mother, she says, chose her husband for her when she was a 16-year-old 5th-grader. She and Nerveus have had eight children together, though they lost one.

Chalesia was angry with her mother when the older woman forced into the relationship with her husband. She thought she was too young to move in with a man. But she reports that it has worked out well for her. They now have a dependent grandchild, so Chalesia says that they have eight children once again. Five of the children still live with them in their home, including their grandchild.

The couple has always struggled, taking care of their children by working as day laborers in their neighbors’ fields. “If your husband goes out to work, you have to go as well.” Despite their small income, they always managed to send their children to at least a minimum of school. “They might not be advanced, but the can all read and write their names.”

When their first two children were born, they still lived with Chalesia’s mother. They moved into their own home just before Chalesia had their third child. By her reckoning, that was about 28 years ago. They have not be able to keep the home in goodrepair. “We never had the means.” By the time they joined CLM this year, the house was leaking so badly that it barely seemed livable. Chalesia used plastic bags underneath the tarp lining the ceiling of the hut, but they would fill with water in the rain, and everything inside the home would get soaked.

Normally, CLM families would have to do a lot before the team would be ready to help them with home repair. Installation of a latrine in every family’s yard usually comes first. That involves distributing Fonkoze’s contribution of the materials the families will need to install their latrines, and then hiring and paying the skill workers that perform the installation.

But in cases where a families is in bad straights and appears ready to make use of support early, the team can provide home repair materials together with the materials for latrine construction in a single transfer, and that’s what we did for Chalesia. She lost no time in marshaling the resources and the labor she’d need for her family to have a new home. She couldn’t afford all the lumber she needed, but because of her connection to the program, she was able to get the rest of the lumber on credit. Her home has been finished for a while now. The photo shows her new home next to her old one.

She chose to have the walls made with the corrugated metal that would ordinarily be used just for roofing. It was the easiest way to get things done quickly. But, as the photo below shows, all that rushing did not lead her to forego detail work cut into the lumber that is designed just to make her home pretty.

Whereas Ifonia used her weekly stipend much as she had always used the cash that Kenson brought into the home, Chalesia had to do some different things. She did buy a couple of chickens, but she also bought the sand she needed for her home’s construction.

Without other important things to do with the stipend, she had to think about how to ensure that she’d be able to make the weekly contribution to her savings group, and instead of simply taking 250 hours out each week’s stipend, she used a lump sum to by laundry products — mainly soap and detergent — which she sells out of her home.

She has a plan for her savings. When she receives her pay-out from the group at the end of 12 months, she wants to invest more in her business. But she doesn’t want to buy more laundry products. There’s only so much detergent she can sell. Instead, she will add a separate business, buying loads of local produce and bringing it to market for sale.

In the meantime, she’s used the money that Fonkoze provided as a business investment to buy livestock. She initially bought a goat and a pig, but she is ready to sell her pig already. She’s seen several of her neighbors’ pigs die in the last week. Pig rearing can enable someone to earn a lot of money fast, but it is risking because pigs’ health is fragile. Rather than continuing to take the risk, she plans now to sell her pig and use the proceeds to buy another goat or two. Raising goats is important, she says, because they provide a way to pay for school each year.

Chalina is another member who needed help with home repair right away. In her case, it was not only about a leaky roof. Her home appears ready to collapse. The leaning doorframe is a clear sign.

Her current boyfriend is helping her build her new home, but he’s not the father of any of her children. She thinks of him as a seriously improvement over the men she’s had children with, who haven’t treated her well.

She has six children and three grandchildren living with her. Those six children have three different fathers, but the three men have always left the responsibility for the children with her. And it’s been a struggle. Several of the kids have spent time living with other families over the years. Chalina just couldn’t take care of them. But even though the children’s host families would send them to school, the kids would always choose to return to their mother. “People treated them badly.” So, Chalina fought to send them to school, counting on her fields, mostly planted with pigeon peas, for the money she’d need to do it.

She used her investment fund to buy livestock, but the investment has not borne much fruit so far. She bought a goat and a pig. Her goat died, and her pig became sick, so she is getting ready to sell it so she can invest in goats instead.

She has been saving in her savings group, and that is where she’s really placed her hopes. After a year, she will receive a pay out of all her savings along with her share of whatever interest the group has earned through loans, and Chalina wants to invest her payout into commerce.

She foresees a problem with commerce, but she thinks she has figured out what might be a solution. Commerce is hard to sustain, she says, where she lives, because some of her neighbors are jealous of CLM members and don’t want to buy from them. And even if they do buy from them, they can want to buy on credit and then use the fact that the seller has received grants from Fonkoze as an excuse for not paying. So, rather than attempting one of the standard forms of day-to-day commerce, she plans to buy up beans and peanuts at harvest and then store them in her new, dry home until the next planting season season, when the prices will be higher because people need the seeds.

It won’t give her a constant flow of income, but she could make several lump sums a year, and since she has always depended on her own harvest, this form of income is not new to her. “If you don’t know how to manage your money, it will just disappear.”

Franceline lives in Zetrèn, a community just off the main road that winds from downtown Bonbadopolis back north through the commune’s second rural section. She lives there in a room with her four children and one grandson.

Up until a couple of years ago, her husband lived with them too. They all shared shack down the hill, behind her current place. Her husband earned the income that the family depended on, cutting trees for charcoal makers or doing day labor for local farmers in their fields. It wasn’t much, but it meant that the family had something to eat and that the children could go to school.

Even then, it was hard for Franceline. She didn’t earn income herself. “You just sit around waiting for someone to put something into your hand.” But her husband died, and then Franceline had to fend for the kids and for herself.

Without capital to invest or any experience at business, she ended up just doing laundry for neighbors. They generally paid her in food, rather than cash, so she no longer had a way to pay the children’s school fees, and she had no way to set anything aside to create a better way to earn. Her children were often hungry. “It was so hard when they would cry.”

Franceline joined the CLM program, but she felt from the start that raising animals, which most members take on as their first CLM-financed business, would be challenging. “I didn’t want to start with a lot of goats because I don’t have anyone to help me look after them.”

Despite her reservations, she decided to buy a single billy goat with 7,500 gourds of the investment funds that the program provided. Buying a male is very unusual for CLM members. Almost all choose females, banking on their producing offspring. Franceline, however, had thought it through. “The females they were selling at the time were from Bòdmè. They are used to being kept tied up.”

Bòdmè is another neighborhood of Bonbadopolis, along the sea shore. Folks who keep goats in that part of the commune don’t keep them tied. They let them wander to find their own food, and what they find along the shore is different from what goats eat around Zetrèn. Franceline decided that, rather than taking a risk with a poorly adapted female, she’d raise a billygoat until it was valuable enough for her to sell it for enough to buy a better female. She does want a female eventually, because she thinks that having a small number of goats is the best way for her to make sure that she has money every year to send her kids to school.

The first payment of her investment fund was 15,000 gourds, so buying the goat used just half of it. She used the rest to start a business. She bought snacks — cookies, crackers, etc. — and began to sell them in front of a large school nearby. She managed her profits carefully. “If I have 100 gourds, I try to eat just 25.” Though she immediately admits the spending just 25% of her profit is an exaggeration, she sticks to her point. “I keep saving something to add to the business.”

With her house falling apart, she wasn’t sure where she was going to live, even with the support that the program promised her. But her grandmother’s house was empty, and she had a talk with her aunt. The house could never become hers. Her grandmother had several children. But her aunt agreed that she could use the materials that CLM would provide to repair one of the house’s larger rooms. That’s where she and the kids live now. She’s thinks of building her own house on her father’s land, where she and her husband had their shack, as a project, but it doesn’t seem close just yet.

When it was time for her to receive the rest of her investment capital, she knew that she wanted to grow her business. Since she was selling right in front of a school, she stocked up on school supplies: pens, pencils, notebooks, etc. Sales are down right now, because summer vacation is not over yet. But when her savings group ended its 12-month cycle, she took the payout and bought some larger items, like school bags. She is already displaying them in front of her home. She’ll move them to the front of the school, with the rest of her business, soon. Eventually, she would like to be able to sell a full range of groceries.

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.