Juslène Vixama

Working with Juslène may prove to be challenging. She seems to have some sort of learning disability. She’s a young woman with two children. Only one lives with her and her partner, who is an older man.

She grew up in her mother’s home. Her mother had five children, but lost three. Her mother farmed and raised livestock. She also had a small commerce, buying rum, tobacco, and basic groceries at the markets down the mountain and selling them out of her home. Justine says that, as a child, she never knew hunger.

When she became pregnant, she left her mother’s home and moved in with her current partner, her children’s father. It was with him that she first experience life with hunger.

He built a small shack on a plot of his farmland, but they no longer live in that home. They had to leave it when it was destroyed by a storm. They moved into a small room in his sister’s home in Gran Labou. Juslène is always there, and he is with her most of the time. He has, however, been married since before they got together, and he still spends some of his time with his wife and their kids.

Juslène doesn’t know her colors. Each time Titon, her case manager, asks her the color of something he points to, Juslène says that the object is green. She can’t copy the first letter of her name. As Titon tries to work with her, you sense that her attention is constantly wandering. She repeatedly tells him that she doesn’t remember what they talked about during his previous visit. She won’t even admit to being able to repeat things he tells her during this one. She looks at him when he asks her to do so, but her eyes gradually drift away as he speaks.