In Camp-Perrin, in the South department, Jean Jeff Guerrier, better known online as “Jeff Peyizan,” is now raising a young goat received through the food security, livelihoods, and water access project implemented by ASB, which distributes a breeding goat to 150 young people in Camp-Perrin and Jérémie. This goat arrived after a journey marked by insecurity.

Trained in mechanics at the Centre Pilotte school in 2019, he was already working in his trade in Port-au-Prince when insecurity forced him to return to his hometown in 2022. Back in Camp-Perrin, with no stable activity, he first turned to farming on his own, with a starting capital that has stayed etched in his memory.

“I was lucky that a cousin of mine gave me a gift of 20 American dollars. It’s with those 20 dollars that I decided to go into farming.”

With that amount, he bought a pound of leeks and set out on his own, growing and selling. Today, he is also pursuing studies in agronomy.

The project fills 20 dollars that couldn’t fund

Paying for his schooling, however, remained a constant struggle. He held onto another project close to his heart: raising goats, a dream he did not yet have the means to pursue.

Before even telling what came next, he wants to say clearly: thank you to ASB. That is where the project stepped in.

“And then I met ASB, who gave me this goat as a gift. As I said before, if I could do all that with 20 dollars, now that I have a goat, I can do so much more.”

Training put into practice, a future counted in kids

He keeps close watch over the goat: every day, morning and afternoon, he moves it to protect it from the sun, finding it shade under the trees when the heat becomes too intense. Without the training he received, he admits he might have left it out too long in the rain or under the full sun.

And the bond he has developed with the animal goes beyond simple economic calculation.

“I consider this goat, how should I put it, like a child of mine.”

Jean Jeff Guerrier is already looking further ahead, and he has done the math: if a goat has two litters a year, he could have five within a year, and up to nine within two years.

“I’m managing it, and I still believe this dream will come true.”

He says it plainly: for him, this goat is only a beginning. Many young people in the region share the same drive but lack the means; he hopes the organization can continue and expand its support if it has the means to do so.

Through Jean Jeff Guerrier’s story, this intervention shows how a modest productive asset, a single goat, can fit into a personal path already underway, here that of a young man forced back to the countryside and determined to become an agronomist. His testimony also points to a broader demand among rural youth for economic support that extends beyond the life of the project.