'To Fool The Rain'

To Fool the Rain by Steven Werlin

To Fool the Rain tells the story of the women who use the Chemen Lavi Miyò (CLM)  program’s help to change their families’ lives. The program lasts for eighteen months, or twenty-one if you count the time it takes to select the families who will participate in it. In a sense, it’s work that can appear to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

You choose a family, help the woman who leads it start a couple of small businesses, and coach her as she makes her way towards graduation. We have a method that addresses extreme poverty, and we have proven that the method almost always works. Over 95% of our families succeed.

The most important lesson that our program has taught us so far is that extremely poor women – women like Rose Marthe and Ytelèt – can improve their lives if they are given a reasonable chance to do so. That lesson directly implies a corollary: Extremely poor families suffer the deprivations of their poverty because those of us who could give them that reasonable chance do not decide to help. Extreme poverty exists because we do not choose to eliminate it.

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"It is a prayer lifted on

their behalf."

 -Garcelle Beauvais, Actress, Author and Talk Show Host.

BBC Interviews Steven Werlin Listen Now!

"Werlin takes us on a riveting journey down narrow dirt paths...to introduce us to some of the courageous women of Haiti's Central Plateau."

 -Gerald Oriol, Jr., Haiti's Secretary of State for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities

"To Fool the Rain should be required reading for anyone who has either dreamed or doubted that a poverty-free world is achievable..."

 -Alex Counts, Founder, Grameen Foundation

Steven Werlin was a faculty member at Shimer College, in Chicago, from 1996 to 2017. He taught widely through the curriculum and served as Dean of the College there from 2001 through 2004. In 1996, he also began traveling to Haiti, where he was invited to observe literacy classes and to talk with the people organizing them about ways to involve students in classroom discussions.

He has now been living in Haiti since January 2005, dividing his time between a room in a house in Kaglo, a village in mountains above Port au Prince, and three to four other residences. He’s taught classes for high school students, literacy center participants, primary school teachers, and groups as different as teenage boys from Port au Prince’s largest slum and women from a network of rape victims.

He started working with Fonkoze, Haiti's largest microfinance institution, as an advisor to its literacy and education department in early 2005 and continued to help with various projects for its communications, grant writing, and education teams until March 2009, when he became the manager of its branch office in the southeastern town of Marigo. Since 2010, he has been working for Chemen Lavi Miyò, or CLM, Fonkoze’s program for the extreme poor. He started as a regional director, but is now the communications and learning officer.