Hello All,
In this update we are focusing on one of favorite JRF families, pictured below. The mother’s name is Jeantilia and her daughters are Felina (16), Yanirisa (14) and Milka (12). They are absolutely one of our biggest success stories. Her girls have been in the JRF since it opened and are all on track to go to college. Jeanti was one of the first four women that I employed through Good Threads, and has managed to take her family from lower to middle class.
From left, Yanirisa, Milka, Jeantilia, and Felina pose at the JRF, 2017.
Milka and Yanirisa have been with the JRF since we opened our doors back in the fall of 2010. When we first opened the JRF, we only had enough money to allow 43 children to enter. We had about 150 children that wanted to get in so we didn’t allow most families to send more than two children, which is why the oldest, Felina, was originally left out. She joined the JRF a few months after it opened. I have a super vivid memory of visiting Jeanti’s house on a Saturday or Sunday in those first months. When I got there Milka was crying and I asked why she was crying. Jeanti got an embarrassed smile and wouldn’t answer, but after I pushed a bit, she told me that Milka was hungry and wasn’t strong enough to deal with stomach pangs without crying yet. At the time, I was fully aware that many of our children weren’t eating much, if at all, on the weekends, when the JRF was closed, but I was still in the process of fully internalized that fact. Seeing 6 year old Milka crying from hunger because her mom didn’t have a job or money and the JRF was closed helped me internalize that our otherwise seemingly happy and normal kids were, in fact, starving just about every weekend.
Jeanti is a hard-working, light hearted, and trustworthy woman. She is an excellent and loving mother. One decision she made that exemplifies this is her decision to stay single until her girls are out of the house. Step-fathers or live-in boyfriends molesting their partner’s daughters is a significant problem. Some women send their teenage daughters to a grandparent when they have a man move in, others accept the risk. Jeanti has never entertained either idea and is very up front about not wanting a man in her house, because she doesn’t trust any man to be in the same house as her girls.
Jeantilia poses with her girls in front of their house in Jacmel, 2016.
Her girls are all amazing, and we are incredibly optimistic about their future. Felina, the oldest, is the smartest of the three. She is super responsible, kind, hard-working and a bit shy. Barring some catastrophe she will be one of the first JRF girls to attend college in 3 years. Yanirisa is not quite the stud that Felina is in the classroom, but has thrived in dance class and is very outgoing. She is one of the most popular girls at the JRF and is one of the stars of dance class. She and three other girls are in the “Dance Company” and will be going to the Dominican Republic for some training in April. Milka, the youngest, is a total princess and sweetheart. She is finally starting to catch up in school and is very social. In her 6 ½ years at the JRF she has basically never gotten in trouble.
When I started the Good Threads saving program, Jeantilia was by far the most active saver. Every time she turned in a belt she would put about 20% of her earnings into her savings. She was able to save up a thousand dollars in that first year and a half. I convinced her to start loaning her money out to her closest friends and family at half the rate the local loan shark charged, and she was able to start making interest for the first time in her life. She continued to save on her own once we got to Jacmel. She recently used her savings to buy a piece of land and house in her hometown in Northern Haiti. She plans on renting it for now and possibly retiring to it once her daughters finish high school. She also started a small business in her house, where she sells drinking water to the local community.
This family really exemplifies what we have accomplished and continue to work towards. Since Jeanti started with Good Threads in 2013, she hasn’t needed the Joan Rose Foundation to feed her daughters lunch. However, if she had to buy them lunch daily, she would not have been able to save money. The Joan Rose Foundation’s help has given her enough breathing room financially to start saving money and creating wealth for her family. The superior school that we have enrolled her daughters in will ensure that they can not only go to, but thrive in, college. Jeanti may be our best example of a woman who has fully taken advantage of the services we provide to improve her family’s place in the world. With us, she has already risen from lower class to middle class and with her daughters trajectory we are confident that her family has truly broken free of the cycle of poverty that they were stuck in.
