One morning last fall in a rural village in Haiti, a woman who we'll call Esperanta bathed and dressed her five kids, locked them into her tiny house, and then walked away with the intention of ending her life.  Life had not treated Esperanta gently. Her husband routinely got drunk and beat her and their kids. He had recently left her for another woman in the community.  While his departure brought relief from the abuse, he was the family’s only source of income. She was already poor. Now she couldn’t afford to regularly feed her kids, much less pay for their schooling. Her interior life was no easier. Esperanta felt humiliated and helpless, and she blamed herself for everything that had gone wrong. These weren’t new feelings for Esperanta.  When she was a girl, her parents sent Esperanta away to live with another family. Instead of caring for her, though, this family abused and exploited her. They constantly told her that she was worthless and blamed her for everything. Esperanta had become trapped in a modern form of slavery that Haitians call restavèk. Now, many years later, her abusive husband’s departure brought all these emotions back. She felt abandoned, alone, and worthless. Ending her life felt like her only choice. About this same time last year, Beyond Borders decided to expand our work into more than two dozen new communities in rural Haiti. The decision to do this could have seemed pretty ambitious to an outside observer given the expense and the growing complexity, violence, and chaos in much of Haiti.   We were driven to take this leap though, because of people like Esperanta.The approaches we bring to communities like Esperanta’s equips them to systematically bring an end to the restavèk practice, prevent violence against women and children, overcome extreme poverty, and ensure that children have all their basic needs – safety, food, and education –...