BOUCAN CARRE, Haiti The people who live in this part of Haitis Central Plateau need more of pretty much everything that makes life safe, comfortable and predictable.

Three-quarters of families do not have enough food and two-thirds do not have access to clean water. Thirty percent of households are headed by women, and 40 percent of children are not in school. One in four children is unvaccinated, and half are underweight. About 80percent of houses do not have latrines, and 60percent of farmers do not own the land they cultivate, according to a survey of 5,200 families in the commune, or county, of Boucan Carre.

Is it realistic for people to make headway against so many problems on their own? Several centuries of poverty would suggest the answer is no.

Would a personal assistant help? An experiment here may answer that.

Half of the communes 10,000 households are being assigned a household development agent a neighbor who will work as a health educator, vaccinator, epidemiologist, financial analyst, social worker, scheduler and advocate all at the same time. With the agents help, a family will assess its needs and come up with a plan to make things better.

The idea is to forge a relationship from the get-go, said Maryanne Sharp, an official at the World Bank, which is overseeing the $4million project. We want the family to say, Yes, we own the plan and we will work on these objectives on this timetable.

The other 5,000 households will function as a control group, continuing as they have, scrounging out a living in one of Haitis poorest and most isolated places.

In two years, the families will be resurveyed and their children and houses reexamined. If those with agents are doing better, then the strategy of coaching people out of poverty may be expanded to the whole country.

The experiment, aided by Haitis Health Ministry and run by two charities, Zanmi Lasante and World Vision, acknowledges several realities of life here.

One is that fixing just one of a poor familys many problems say, access to medical care or substandard housing may not make much difference. The second is that house calls are the most efficient way to reach people in rural areas. The third is that finding help in a place where more than 900 nongovernmental organizations operate and provide 70percent of the health care can be daunting and confusing.

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Personal coaches help Haitian families try to get out of poverty