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

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

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

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

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