Yolette lives in Motèl, a neighborhood of Gwo Moulen. She was widowed, raising her first child, and she took up with another man, Polyte. She felt she needed help to take care of her girl. She and Polyte have since had five more children. 

But as they lived together, she had to face his mistreatment of her and of her oldest daughter. At first, he would give Yolette money to buy the clothes the girl needed. But that eventually stopped, and as her girl became a young woman, she took up with a man when she was still too young, and soon she had a child of her own. When the man abandoned her and her child, Yolette was left with the burden. She struggles to provide what her grandchild needs.

She did it all with her own farming. When Polyte gave her something out of his harvest to sell at market, he insisted that she bring him all the proceeds. And that was at the heart of her problems. If she tried to argue, he would yell, he would swear, he would even hit her. 

Despite it all, she managed to acquire two goats and some chickens. She bought them with the little money she could secretly save out of the food money Polyte provided. To keep him from getting mad or from taking the animals away, she lied. She told him that they did not belong to her, that she was taking care of them for someone else.

When she joined the CLM program, she began saving her weekly stipend and investing it. She bought ducks and a turkey. She received 23,000 gourds as funds for business capital, and together with her case manager, Makenson, she planned her purchases. She bought two goats and a pig, and she used the balance to invest in a business selling cooking charcoal. She used her income from the charcoal to feed her family. By this time, Polyte had stopped providing any help at all. He wouldn’t even help her look after her livestock.  

One day, Yolette was sitting with Makenson, talking about her troubles with Polyte. Makenson started looking for chances to talk with him. Polyte seemed to want to avoid him, staying away from home whenever Makenson was scheduled for a visit. So, Makenson made efforts to cross paths with the man when he was out and about in the neighborhood. Their short conversations began to help. Polyte started to change.

She was scheduled to receive 20,000 gourds to repair her home, like all the CLM members in her cohort, but she and her family were living in a small house on Polyte’s family’s land, and it did not really need serious repair. So, she discussed it with Makenson, and she made another plan. 

She had money in a sòl, a sort of savings club common in Haiti. Members make a fixed regular contribution and take turns receiving the whole pot. When it was her turn to receive the money, Yolette added the home repair money, and she bought a horse. Buying a pack animal really set her business in motion. With the money she earned, she soon bought another pig and another goat. She also paid school fees for three of her children and bought shares in her VSLA every week.

When she was scheduled for refresher training, Makenson made sure personally to invite Polyte to an accompanying session for men on positive masculinities. Polyte decided to attend, and since then the improvements in his behavior have just continued. He now helps Yolette consistently with management of her livestock. He has stopped his yelling and his violence, both towards Yolette and towards her oldest daughter.

In July, her VSLA’s one-year cycle closed, and she collected 26,000 gourds in savings plus the interest she earned on it. It wasn’t enough to buy a cow, which was her next objective, but by then she had twelve goats, so she sold three. That gave her the full amount, 45,000 gourds, that she needed to buy a heifer. And she still has nine goats, two pigs, her horse, 15 chickens, and a turkey. 

Now she says she lives well, even if Polyte still isn’t everything she hopes he will be. Her current plan is to buy land. Someone in a neighboring area has offered her a plot for 60,000 gourds, and she is saving in her VSLA and through a sòlso she’ll be able to do it. She’s come to see that she never lacked the will to work for progress, she just needed for someone to give her a hand.

Rose Andre is a CLM member from Hat, an agricultural area between the main road to the Dominican Republic and the Artibonite River, east of downtown Laskawobas. She has four children with three different men, and she lives in a small house with one of the kids. She used to do day labor in the fields along the nearby Artibonit River. Or she would do a day of laundry for someone. She did not have her own business. 

She joined a savings and loan association that called for 1,000-gourd contributions each month, which she made with her laundry money. She took out a 15,000-gourd loan, and she went to the border to buy merchandise so she could go into business. She bought household plastics, like washtubs. She used the income to join a sòl, another type of savings club common in Haiti. She bought a goat. But the business stopped working well for her, so she switched to buying and selling onions.

She bought her onions at the border, but she got caught in heavy rain. The onions were soaked. It was nearly a total loss. She was left with just 4,500 gourds, which she paid to the savings and loan association as a partial reimbursement, then she went back to doing day labor. 

When she joined CLM, she started saving up her weekly stipend, first to repay the money she owed to the savings and loan association, then to buy support posts for the home that she built with the program’s assistance. 

Now she is in the savings and loan association that Fonkoze established for her and the other members of her cohort. She’s used credit from the association to buy extra roofing, the palm wood for walls, and the lumber she needed for her doors. She borrowed 25,000 gourds in all. 

She bought goats with most of the investment fund that the program provided. She now has five of them and an adult turkey with five rapidly growing poults. She had already bought a chicken with the stipend she received during the six initial days of training, and that single hen is now eight chickens. 

But she also invested in small commerce. She initially went back to onions and tomatoes. She bought 6,500 gourds’ worth. But she quickly shifted back to plastic housewares. She goes to the market at the border to purchase merchandise, and she sells at large markets near her. She sells in downtown Laskawobas, the market in Kwa Fè, farther east down the main road., and the one in Kolonbyè, to the south in Savanèt commune. She was selling in Mache Kana, a large market in eastern Mibalè, but the gangs took over the area, so she stopped going. This week she plans to explore a large rural market in Waysek, northeast of where she lives, as an alternative to Macha Kana.

The business has been thriving. She now buys merchandise for 25,000 gourds per week, almost four times what she started with. And it has been growing even as she repaid her VSLA loans. The current situation in the region has made things more challenging, however. Increases in her transportation costs have cut the profit that she makes by a half. 

Despite the difficulties, she wants to push her commerce to continue to grow and to eventually buy a cow. She also wants to pour a concrete foundation for her new home and to live a better life. When she thinks of how things were, she thinks about how she used to work very hard just to maintain her misery. She doesn’t do those jobs anymore. She no longer does day labor in the fields nor other peoples’ laundry. 

In a year or two, she hopes to have a much larger business. One worth 50,000 gourds at least. She plans to use regular credit from her new savings and loan association to help her make her business grow. 

Rose André has a few months to go before she graduates, but she’s already thinking about what she would say to a woman just starting the program. “Take good care of your business assets, because they are what helps you move forward and keep all that they teach you at the training workshops in mind.”

Marilia is a CLM member who lives in Gwo Moulen, in a neighborhood called Lagon. She has four children with two different men, but neither of the men does anything for his kids. 

She used to borrow money from Fonkoze to run a business to feed her family and send the children to school. That’s why one of the children made it all the way to eleventh grade. The others did not get as far. 

Marilia’s second husband abused her. Every time she asked him for money to take care of the children or pay for their school, he would hit her. And he was with other women at the same time. 

Marilia decided to leave him. She had been selling oranges and chayote in Laskawobas. She had had a bad day. Sales were poor. She had to find someone to give her a little money so that she could buy food to bring it home for her kids. When she told her husband, he started beating her with a stick. She was afraid for her life. If it wasn’t for neighbors who helped her get away from him, he might have beaten her to death.

She left the second man that very day, but she felt she needed help taking care of her children, so she took up with a third man. She hoped that this time would be different. This third man had no other women, but he had grown children, and his children treated her badly because they said she had no children with their father. They wanted to kick her out of the home she shared with their dad, and only local leaders kept them from doing so. 

She was okay with the way the man himself treated her, but he always repeated that everything he had was for his children. It got to the point that her own children started to leave. One went to the Dominican Republic to work. Another started her own family earlier than she should have. One of her children won’t even look at her because she could not send them to school. 

When she joined CLM, she got to work. She took the stipend the program gave her for food, but she did not buy food. She used it to go back into business because hers had fallen apart. With income from the new business, she started buying poultry to raise in her yard. When she received the money to invest, she added to it by taking a loan from her savings association, and she bought a donkey, which she needed for her business to grow, and a single goat.  

She continued to work, and she was able to buy a pig. She’s now been in the program for 12 months. She has her donkey and four goats, and now her pig is pregnant, almost ready to give birth. She has two ducks and several chickens.

She now has found someone in the nearby community of Lospen willing to rent her a small piece of land “sou pri dacha.” That means that her rent payments will count towards eventual purchase of the land. But the seller encountered financial problems, and Marilia needs to speed up her purchase. She wants to buy the land to build a small house on it. She worries that if her husband were to die, his children would drive her out of her current home. She hopes to sell her pig to pay for the land. She’ll add the money she receives at the end of her savings club’s 12-month cycle. She can buy the land for 125,000 gourds. 

Her pig is pregnant, though. She thinks that if she waits for it to have its litter, she can sell both it and some piglets, too. The seller has given her until December to pay. Even if she lives in a house now with her partner, she says that her body is there, but her spirit is already out the door. Her goal is to move into a small house built on her own piece of land.

Guerline is not from Hat. She’s from Kas, an important rural market across the river to the north. She was a single mother of three. The children’s father left her to work in the Dominican Republic. Another man, Lonie, came to Kas to see a friend and he saw Guerline as well. The two have been together on land that belongs to his family ever since, and Guerline now has an additional child with him.

She and Lonie got by before the CLM program on his fishing. He worked the nearby river and the cluster of lagoons formed by the hydroelectric dam. She brought his catch for sale to market. It didn’t give them much, but it kept them and the children mostly fed. They did, however, have to live in a room of his parents’ house.

Much of that has changed since Guerline joined the program. She bought two goats with funds that the program provided. Both have reproduced. She now has four, and one is pregnant again. She also invested in a small business selling kleren, or Haitian rum, and cigarettes. “It makes me enough to buy shares every week in my VSLA.”

She and Lonie were also able to finish their new home. She hopes that when their VSLA’s one-year cycle ends, she will be able to use the payout, together with money from the sale of a goat or two, to buy a small heifer. “A cow gives you something you can turn to if something bad happens.” She also thinks about raising cows so that she can eventually sell them to buy land. “The cow isn’t the real point, the land is.”

But Guerline has problems, too, and the biggest one is Lonie. “When he drinks, he is terrible,” she says. She first decided that she had to move her three older children out of the house. “I didn’t want him around them.” Each child now lives with a different relative. She stays in touch with them, and makes sure they are in school, but they are no longer with her.

Her older children’s father recently called from the Dominican Republic. He was worried about his kids because he heard that Laskawobas was under attack from the gang that overran neighboring Mibalè. Guerline patiently explained that the neighborhood where they live has not yet been threatened. But when she got off the phone, Lonie was furious. He said that the other man had no right to call her and that she had no business talking to him. She tried explaining that she was just letting him know that his children were safe. Even Lonie’s parents took Guerline’s side, but Lonie would not cool down, eventually slapping her with the flat blade of his machete. 

Guerline’s not timid. She picked up a rock and hit him with it. But the fight gave her a lot to think about. She says she told him that, if he doesn’t stop drinking, she will disassemble their house and leave him, taking the house and their child with her.

Rosemarie lives in Kalib, a neighborhood of Gwo Moulen. She has been struggling to support four children. She says her life was hard until she found the opportunity that CLM offered her.

Before the program, the household had a mule. Her partner had purchased it with money he earned as a day laborer in the fields in the Dominican Republic. She had always planned to use the mule to start a business bringing produce to market, but that never happened because she never had the capital she needed to start.

With part of the investment fund that the program provided she bought two goats, a pig, and two turkeys, and used the rest of the money to begin a business selling bread and sugar, which rural Haitians need to enjoy the bread and coffee they enjoy first thing in the morning, and pig feed.  

As a member of her savings and loan association, or VSLA, she was able to borrow an additional 10,000 gourds to invest in the business. With that additional money and the profit that she kept investing, she kept adding different products to the business, like rice and other basic groceries. The business was eventually worth about 55,000 gourds, or nearly $425. And it was growing even as Rosemarie used its profits to buy a second pig, send two of her children to school, and purchase the beans she’d plant as her spring crop.

But because of the gang violence that overwhelmed Mibalè and then threatened Laskawobas, her business fell apart. She was afraid to go to market to sell her merchandise. She used up her stock just feeding her family. She got to the point that she wasn’t sure how she’d repay the balance she still owed on the loan from her VSLA. She had to take the last reimbursement directly from her savings.

But Rosemarie did not get discouraged. She talked with her case manager, and they worked out a plan. Rosemarie decided to sell one of her goats to get a new business started. It was her turn to get the payout from her sòl, a group savings club in which members make a fixed weekly contribution and each week one member gets the whole pot. So, she added the sòl money to the revenue from the sale of the goat, and she invested in cooking charcoal.

The new business is going well. Rosemarie says, “I won’t ever stop struggling forward. I have learned that when you fall, you shouldn’t just stay down. You should make the effort to get back on your feet.”

Imanie lives in Woudobay, on the ridge between Laskawobas and Savanèt, just outside the larger mountaintop community of Gran Platon. Like many of her neighbors, she uses the market in Kolonbyè, a town in Savanèt, just as she uses the larger regional market in downtown Laskawobas. 

She is originally from the Savanèt side of the ridge, and she was living around Fon Desanm with her first husband and their five children when the CLM team was working there about ten years ago. At the time, the family did not qualify for CLM. When that husband passed away, however, things took a turn for the worse for her. She eventually moved to Woudobay to live with her current partner, Osnel, with whom she has three additional children.

At first they lived well enough together, but she started to dislike the way that he treated those of her children who are not his. “I think his family put ideas into his head.” The three oldest decided to leave home, and they now live with their late father’s family. Three of the five who are still with her are school age, and she managed to send them this year, though she still owes the school money.

Before she joined the program, Imanie had a very small business. “I carried a washbasin [of products] on my head, selling whenever there was an event.” She sold tobacco, cigarettes, and local rum at events like wakes, cockfights, and parties. It is a business that requires a lot of hiking in a very rural area like the one where she lives. She would try to sell at home to save herself the effort, but that doesn’t work. “When you sell at home, people always want credit, so I would rather go to events.” The business does not take much capital. Imanie would borrow from friends to keep it going, and if she couldn’t do that, she’d turn to loan sharks. 

Since she joined the program, however, she has started to turn her life in another direction. She found a neighbor willing to rent her a small plot of land “sou pri dacha.” That means that the rent she pays will count towards an eventual purchase. She made a 5,000-gourd payment towards the first year’s 17,500-gourd rent. She knows that she’ll have to pay 35,000 gourds for the first two years, but she’s not sure what the final purchase price will be. She’s already installed her CLM-supported latrine on the new plot. She wants to leave Osnel and move into her own home. She even thinks that her older children will want to return to join her.

Imanie has begun taking care of the goats that she bought with CLM funds. She has two mature females and a healthy kid. She does not yet have a clear idea what she wants to do with livestock. She simply explains that she wants to keep them “for graduation.”

She has begun saving in her VSLA, though she still depends mainly on her CLM stipend to do so. She hopes that, by the end of the year’s cycle, she’ll have enough between her savings and her livestock to buy a donkey. Having a pack animal would make a big difference for her. She could buy loads of produce at the rural markets that farmers use and bring them for sale to downtown Laskaswobas, where produce is more expensive.

Anaphterline lives on the other side of a small mountaintop hill from Imanie with her husband Louiess and their two kids. She grew up nearby, just below Gwo Moulen, the next large-ish community to the east, and moved to Gran Platon when she moved in with Louiess. 

Louiess has been the family’s main earner up to now. He works as a day laborer in local fields. The couple also has a small garden of their own, where they plant beans, pigeon peas, corn, millet, and what Anaphterline calls “lòt detay,” or other minor items, by which she means mainly plantains and meliton, or chayote, a squash-like vegetable common in Haiti. But it was not enough to keep them fed. “We sometimes went a day without food.”

Not that they had been helpless. Even before they joined CLM, they had purchased a house to set up on their land. They paid 25,000 gourds, and it involved selling multiple bean crops. Anaphterline adds that “the seller was really patient with us.”

But even after buying the house, they could not use it. It had to be disassembled where it stood on the seller’s land and then moved to where they live. “We bought the house, but we didn’t have the money to make food for the people who would help us move it.” Thanks to their CLM stipend, they finally had enough cash. It took four Sundays of work from four to eight movers, but the parts now sit, waiting to be assembled, where they live. “Louiess torn down our old house and put it back up in the corner of the yard so that we’d be able to put up the new house in the best spot.”

Anaphterline bought two goats with the first transfer of cash that the program provided. She had some money left over and plans to use it to buy a turkey. She expects to get the second transfer of the balance of her investment fund soon, and she will use it to start a small grocery business. “Louiess said he would build me a shack on the path that people use to hike to market, and I will run my business from that shack.”

She hopes that, between her livestock and her commerce, she’ll be able to earn enough to buy a cow. “If you have a cow, you can buy land. When they see you have a cow, they know you can pay, so people who want to sell land will offer it to you.”

Dinah lives closer to the center of Gran Platon than the other two women. She lives with two small children in her mother’s house. The children’s father lives nearby, but he plays no role in their lives. She has an older brother working in the D.R. who sends their mother money as often as he can. Those transfers have been the household’s main source of income.

One priority for Dinah since she joined the program has been to get herself and her children into their own house, and she has gotten to work. She paid laborers to clean a flat spot on her family’s land for her to build a home on. She hopes to start building soon. She has already installed her new latrine there.

In the meantime, she has started her own grocery business on the main path using the stipend she received from the program. She sells a few basics and some fried snacks. She likes selling along the path because it means that she sees people as they come and go.

She also bought two goats with money from the program. Like Anaphterline, she hopes that the goats can someday enable her to buy a cow.

We met Wideline in August. At the time, she had been part of the CLM program for about two months. (See here.)

She and her husband were living in a rented house in Hat, a neighborhood just east of downtown Laskawobas, though neither of them is really from the area. And not being from the area means that neither has family land where they would be able to build a new house. They installed a latrine with the program’s help, but they had to do it where they have been renting. Wideline hopes for a more permanent home, but she’ll need to buy a plot of land to build one.

In the meantime, she has been working at developing income. Before she was part of the program, she had been running a small grocery business by buying merchandise on credit. The unrelenting expenses of running her household eventually made things harder and harder to pay the wholesalers whom she owed. She and her partner had lost access to the land they hand been farming, so they were reduced to working in their neighbors’ fields.

When she was ready to receive the transfer that Fonkoze would provide for her to invest in business, she decided to return to small commerce. She bought groceries, but did it with her own money rather than on credit. “When it’s your own money, you buy what you want when you want. You don’t have to worry about paying it back right away.” She works at three different markets: Kwafè to the east, Mache Kana to the west, and downtown Laskawobas. The last of them is open two days a week, so she can sell on four days in all. It keeps her business moving, and she’s now got over 20,000 gourds invested.

When we first spoke to her, she had been excited about the chance to buy livestock, and so she also purchased two female goats with her investment fund. Both goats are now pregnant.

Wideline says that she doesn’t have a clear plan for them, but she knows what she wants. Her highest priority is to buy land, and the best route to buying land is to own a cow or two. So she hopes that the goats can enable her to buy one. She has been saving 500 gourds every week in her savings and loan association, and if she can keep it up, she’ll have at least 26,000 gourds at the end of the 52-week cycle. Between that money and the sale of a goat or two, buy a cow should not be a problem.

Gerbelin Brevil has long been a leader in Do Bwa Wouj, a market community near the ridge that separates Laskawobas and Savanèt, two communes in central Haiti. He’s a farmer, but people in the community look to him for leadership generally. “Someone who wants to try something up here probably needs to contact me.”

The CLM team was working in Pouli, a populous area at the base of the hill below Do Bwa Wouj. One of its staff members was a local man, and he made sure that the team was aware of the community up the mountain from the area where they were working at the time. He also gave them Brevil’s name as a contact for when they began to look at the area. “When the CLM team first came up the mountain, folks here didn’t even want to talk to them until they could say that they had spoken with me. I organized the first meetings. I even found them a house to rent so they had a place to stay.

Since Fonkoze first piloted the CLM program in 2007, it has been organizing committees of local leaders to support the work. Members of these committees are, in a way, selected by the program members. When women are first invited to join CLM, the same person asking them to join the program also asks them who there is in the community whom they can turn to when they have a problem. Some will tell you that they have no one, but many will cite a name or two. The team compiles lists of the names that come up most, and it invites them to serve on a committee that will support the program’s work.

Brevil was named by many of the members, and he was happy to serve, especially when he heard what the program would offer. “It seemed like the kind of thing that I would have wanted to do myself if I had had the means.”

CLM seemed different to him from other programs that he’s heard of. “It’s just different. First of all, they took the time to find the people who really need it. Second, they do everything they say they are going to do. Third, they don’t just give people stuff. They accompany them.”

He likes being part of a committee. “It teaches us things, and it becomes a source of motivation.” He is especially pleased with the savings and loan associations that he and his fellow committee members have helped the team establish for program members. “We need to keep the associations going even after the CLM team is gone.”

His committee has already accomplished important things for the program members, beyond helping them establish their associations. The committee kept one member from selling a pig at the local market without having discussed it with the team. He also talks of members who need lumber as support posts for the hut that encloses their latrine or for their new home and about how the committee has helped them get hold of such posts and of palm trees that can be made into planks to use as their homes’ walls.

But now he’s working on a more serious situation. One of the members in his neighborhood doesn’t have land to build a house on. She’s been living on a parcel that belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, and Brevil has taken on the job of negotiating with the sacristan, the chapel’s main authority, for the member to be able to build her new home on church land.

“We are the program’s eyes. Case managers see members once a week, but we are with them all the time. We keep track of what they do. We help them keep from wasting what they’ve been given.”

Back when Elsie was in the CLM program in 2013 and 2014, the staff discovered she had a problem. She was explaining to a manager why she could not send her second son, Kervenson, to school. She said he couldn’t ever sit on the benches because of back pain. Sitting down, he would support his weight on his hands as he slumped forward, lowering his head.

Back pain in a a boy just four or five years old didn’t make sense to the CLM team. So they looked for someone who knew more than they did. At the time, the new Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante University Hospital in Mibalè was establishing a physical therapy clinic. CLM staff called the physical therapist who was working to organize it. He suggested the team bring Kervenson to the emergency room right away. The problem probably was nothing serious, but it could be Pott Disease, tuberculosis of the spine. Better to be certain.

When the team got Kervenson to the emergency room, things became much clearer, but in a surprising way. At least they did as soon as the medical staff there took Kervenson’s vital signs. Elsie’s belief that he had backpain was mistaken. Kervenson had never been able to make his mother understand what was really wrong with him. He was not old enough to know how to explain. And she had been taking him to various clinics for years without ever finding a solution.

Kervenson’s problem was not pain, it was severe shortness of breath. This was caused, it turned out, by a congenital deformation of his heart. He wasn’t getting oxygen. That showed up immediately when the university hospital nurses checked his vitals. Kervenson would need surgery.

Haiti could not offer pediatric heart surgery. But Partners in Health had an answer. They were partnering with an American organization, the Haiti Cardiac Alliance. HCA would find a hospital in the States willing to organize the operation free of charge. The CLM team would only need to help Elsie and Kervenson get the passports and visas their trip would require. That took a number of trips from Mibalè to Pòtoprens. CLM hired agents to help with the Haitian passports, and they took the pair to Haiti’s immigration office. CLM staff then went to the American consulate with Elsie and Kervenson as well.

Kervenson and Elsie went to New Orleans. They were hosted by a Haitian-American family, and Kervenson got the medical care he needed. The photo is from their time in New Orleans.

When Kervenson returned to Haiti, his life was different. He had become healthy and playful. Previously, he had been badly behaved. Elsie had always been afraid to discipline him. But she cleared up his behavioral issues in just a few months after his return.

Ten years later, he lives along the road from Mibalè to Laskawobas with Elsie and her three other boys. He’s been seeing cardiologists in Haiti every couple of years since the operation. The team from the Haiti Cardiac Alliance had always said that he might eventually need a second operation.

In the last year or so, however, it has been harder and harder to get him seen. HCA first stopped working out of the hospital in Mibalè, and Elsie would have to take him to a children’s hospital near the new American embassy in Taba instead. But the deteriorating situation in Taba had already made the trip to the hospital there seem risky even before the gang control of the route between Pòtoprens and Mibalè became dangerous. 

Eventually, the CLM team contacted the Haiti Cardiac Alliance. They learned that HCA had a second partnership with a hospital in far northern Haiti. The team would just have to help Elsie make an appointment, then help with transportation. She, Kervenson, a CLM driver, and a member of the staff would spend a night at a hotel in Okap. They’d be able to return to Mibalè the next day.

Kervenson saw the cardiologist on April 2nd. By the end of the week, the HCA team had shared what seems like the best possible news. Kervenson’s heart functions normally. The lead doctor in Okap prescribed medications for intestinal parasites, but she said that the cardiologist’s report on the heart exams was good.  

CLM is a graduation program. That means that it is supposed to work in a manner that enables program members to function independently after 18 months. Though the team maintains friendly relations with former members, and though many of them will continue to call their case managers occasionally for advice, the main accompaniment that Fonkoze offers ends with graduation.

But there are exceptional cases, and Fonkoze is committed to staying with members for as long as it needs to. In Elsie’s case, that meant helping her get her son to a hospital in the States and then to another, ten years later, in Milo, in northern Haiti. For others, it has meant arranging cancer treatment in the Dominican Republic or facilitating access to adaptive materials, like wheelchairs or crutches. The CLM team is ready to help its members and its former members in whatever way they need it.

Lonise joined the CLM program in August 2022. She and her partner, Wilfrid, were sharing a rented room in Gwayav, one of the many small, rural neighborhoods of eastern Laskawobas. Her four children lived with them as well. The two younger ones are Wilfrid’s kids, but the two older ones are from a prior relationship. Louise feels lucky. Her older children’s father helps with their expenses, and Wilfrid treats those kids well too.

Before CLM, Wilfrid couldn’t be around very much. Lonise had never been able to earn money herself, and while she was nursing their baby, it would have been even more difficult to do so. Wilfrid supported the couple with frequent trips to the Dominican Republic. The border is nearby. He would work as a farm laborer, and then bring his earnings home.

When they joined the program, things began to change. The small weekly stipend that Lonise received gave them some cash to work with. She would use some to invest every week in the savings and loan association that the program established for her and the other CLM members in her area. Some of it could help with household expenses.

She asked the CLM team to give her goats, and they gave her two, and one had its first kid. “I never had goats before, and now I have three.” She hopes that, if she takes good care of the goats, they will continue to multiply, and she will always have animals she can sell when she needs to send her children to school.

Sending them to school this year was not a problem. When the CLM team established the savings and loan association, they planned for its cycle to end just before the beginning of school. These associations pay out everything that members have saved and all the interest that’s been earned on loans at the end of each cycle, so Lonise collected more than 10,000 gourds. It was enough to buy her children the things they needed to start the year.

She and Wilfrid have made good use of the program’s support for home construction. Their new home is nearly ready. It lacks only doors. They’ll soon be able to move from the rented room, and then they will be finished with paying rent. They have also installed a latrine, something they have never had before.

She and Wilfrid both wanted him to stop spending most of his time in the DR. He was willing to help her with her livestock and to earn what he could farming locally. But Lonise felt she needed a way to bring money into the household, too. She felt limited, however, because she was still nursing their child.

She wanted to establish a small commerce, but she had to stay around the home because she had no-one to look after her younger kids. So she thought about the kinds of things rural Haitian business people generally sell out of their homes, and she settled on two products to start with: sugar and ground, roasted coffee. She prepares the coffee herself, and sells it to neighbors who want to make their morning coffee.

She started the business with a 5,000-gourd loan from her savings and loan association, and it has taken off. She had no trouble repaying her loan. And she’s been able to invest some of her earnings back into the business, even as she’s used most of what she earns for household expenses. The business, she says, is now worth about 7,500 gourds. She’s added some products, and plans to add more. She wants to add rice and oil and a full range of basic groceries.

Rosemirline is just 18. She and her toddler live with her in-laws, the boy’s father’s parents, in Wòch Pab. Her sister-in-law, Rosemitha, a sixteen-year-old who also has a child, lives in the home too. Both Rosemirline and Rosemitha are program members. The heads of the household are not.

Rosemirline’s partner is a mason, but work for masons, especially young masons, can be hard to find in the best of times in Haiti, and these have not been the best of times. So he went to the Dominican Republic to seek farm work. He has been sending money to Rosemirline and their boy, but he cannot do so regularly. “He works way out in the countryside. He can’t always find someone to bring what he wants to send.” She thinks he’ll return soon, at least for a visit, because she needs his help to build their new home. They plan to put it on a small plot next to the house she is in right now. Her new latrine is already in place there.

With an infant in her hands, Rosemirline didn’t initially see how to start a commerce, so she asked the program just to give her goats. Her case manager Titon was able to buy three for her. Unfortunately two of them died shortly after she got them.

When livestock dies shortly after transfer, the team generally tries to replace it on the assumption that it may not have been as healthy as it appeared at purchase. Asset replacement has not yet started for the HTF cohort, however, and we do not yet know exactly what Rosemirline will receive to replace her goats. She and Titon will begin discussing it when he knows how much money is available for all the replacements needed.

In the meantime, Rosemirline would like to start a small commerce. It will be difficult for her to do so because she has no one to watch her boy, Jeanlixon. He is not yet two. What’s more difficult: Rosemitha counts on her to watch her boy, Odeson, too. He too is under two years old. Rosemitha found work as a maid in downtown Laskawobas.

If Rosemirline does start a business, it will have to be out of her home. She would like to sell rice, sugar, flour, oil: groceries in general. She thinks that she’d have customers. Her home is a little out of the way, but not too far. She knows such businesses are challenging. Neighbors will try to buy on credit, and it can be hard to get them to pay. But Rosemirline thinks she can manage.

She would be ready to start right now, but she doesn’t have the money. “Recently, things have been bad.” Ever since her weekly stipend ended, she’s been short on cash. She has had trouble making the weekly deposits she is supposed to make in her savings and loan association.

She could borrow it from the association anyway. She’s saved more than enough to qualify for a small loan, but she took out a first loan of almost 10,000 gourds to help her partner go to the DR. He sent the money for the first reimbursement, but she cannot borrow again until she has repaid the entire loan.

Edner Louis is a single father. He lives with his four children in a beat-up shack in Pouli. It is a single room, about ten feet by five or six, with walls of rotting palm wood planks and, in places where the palm wood has rotted away entirely, sheets of tach, the large, fibrous seedpods of palm trees which serve as a poor-quality but flexible building material for the poorest of Haiti’s rural poor.

They have only been living there a couple of months. Remarkably, their previous home was, in some ways, worse. Edner and his family joined the CLM program in 2022. He and his partner Merline were living with four children in an ajoupa in Pouli, an agricultural area just southeast of downtown Laskawobas. 

Ajoupa are tent-like structures, shaped like prisms, with a central beam usually held up by posts that angle up to them, forming a triangle with the ground. In the Central Plateau, they are generally covered with tach. They tend towards the ramshackle, but that wouldn’t generally matter very much because they are usually just temporary dwellings. A farmer will throw one up in a field they are working in if the field is inconveniently far from home. It gives them a place to stay when there are large tasks to accomplish in the field.

But especially poor families can find themselves making an ajoupa a permanent home, and that is what happened to Edner and Merline. They had no place of their own, but Edner worked as a field hand for a wealthier neighbor. He watched some of the man’s animals, and he did chores in the man’s fields. The neighbor allowed the family to live in his garden shed. “It wasn’t a good house, but it was what we had,” Edner explains.

Edner tried to start small businesses several times while he lived in the ajoupa. He would sell kerosene or rum and cigarettes or gasoline. But Merline couldn’t stay at home all the time, and neither could he. If the kids wandered off while their parents were out and about, his merchandise would disappear. Their ajoupa had no secure door and no place to hide anything.

And that wasn’t all they would lose. 

The tach covering their home couldn’t stand up to serious rain. The whole family would be drenched by each downpour, as would all that they had. The couple owned a bed, but rains gradually rotted out the wood. They had important papers, like birth certificates, but no place dry to store them. Edner lost his certificate to rain, but he also lost the one for one of his kids. The other were reduced to barely-legible pieces.

One day, for reasons he still cannot explain, he saw that his home’s owner was starting to hire other men to do the work Edner would normally do. The man never said anything to Edner, but Edner knew that he needed to look for another place to live.

Edner talked with a friend he often worked fields with, and the friend was willing to have Edner and his family move into the shack that sits on his land. At the time, the CLM team was in the process of distributing the materials that members would need to install a latrine, which included four sheets of roofing tin. Edner borrowed the roofing intended for his latrine to cover his new house. Now at least some of it is rain-proof.

This is where Edner’s story gets complicated. Around this time, Merline started working as a maid. It gave her a small, steady income, and soon she had left her family and moved in with another man. Shortly after that, she disappeared. We do not know why. Rumors say that she moved to the Dominican Republic, but Edner and the children have had no word of her. Without steady work from his landlord he can count on, Edner has been hustling, getting day-labor in local fields to keep the children fed and in school. He and the kids take good care of their goats, but they still have just the two that the program gave them.

He would like to open a small commerce. He has experience. And normally he would be able to take a small loan from the couple’s savings and loan association to get started. But Merline took out a loan before she left him, and she moved away without paying it back. Unless he can pay it back, he won’t be able to get a loan himself. So for the time being, he is reduced to farm labor. Fortunately, there is a lot of work available this time of year.

And he has begun to talk with his friend about the land the shack is on. The man is willing to lease it for three years initially. That’s enough time to make it worth Ender’s while to build his CLM-supported house in the space. They have agreed to postpone talk of Edner’s eventually buying the parcel, but the friend has said he might eventually be open to that, too.