Our Work Strategy

It's just like when you plant a tree. You plant the seed, it sprouts, but any small animal that passes by can break it off. Goats can crush it to the ground. It needs to be taken care of, protected against the animals until it matures. This is the same way Limyè Lavi approaches its work in a community. We plant the small seed with the community, help them water it, support them in protecting it until it is mature enough to bear fruit. The first year, for us, is the year to prepare the ground. Prepare the soil, plant the seed. We anticipate that it takes 5 or 6 years to build a community, accompany it, help strengthen it and then remove ourselves. But that does not mean every community will develop at the same rate. Since each community has their own dynamics, it's possible that a community can arrive in 5 years, others may arrive in 7 years, others might take 8 years. We are not slaves to a fixed timeline. The second year the seed starts to grow. The shoot appears. The third, and fourth years are when we will support the young tree, we water it, we irrigate it, give it fertilizer, if it's necessary. If it needs to be staked, we stake it. When we reach the fourth, and fifth years it should begin to be a large tree. Even if you were to tie an animal to it, it wouldn't pull it out. And when we get to the fifth year , in our minds it should begin to be a large tree that starts bearing fruit. When the tree starts bearing fruit, the fruit matures, and ripens, if people can start eating the fruit, then we don't need to be there anymore. As it reaches the level where it begins bear fruit, becomes mature and ripens, then we can begin to gradually reduce our intervention. We ca start pulling out. If we had a presence every week, it can become every 2 weeks, and then once a month, it'll become every three months, and then every 6 months. After that it will be for follow-up, we'll do evaluations, until we've withdrawn ourselves.

People aren't machines. We can't program them. If you program a machine to give you a thousand bags in thirty minutes, it will give you a thousand bags in thirty minutes. You can't schedule a community to where you tell it that within 2 years it'll reach certain organizational level. There are many things you can't control that will have an impact, depending on the people's history, the way they operate, their experiences, influences of other organizations, people have of working in the community. This means that when we work with people we have to be as flexible as possible. Even if we determine the main lines, we will try our best to arrive within them, but we know we're working with people. As people do not function as machines, one might arrive before the others. It's as if there are a group of people in a race. You tell them to go from A to X. Everyone is going to get to X. Some will arrive in 10 minutes, maybe some will arrive in 15, some might arrive in an hour, too. But the goal is for everybody to arrive. We're clear that not everybody has to get there at the same time. It's not a race where we're going to give a prize. Everyone will be first as long as everybody works for their community to succeed.