Fieldwork in a Grand'Anse commune, conducted as part of a multi-site study of what survives after foreign aid projects end, follows a road-building effort from a blocked entry road through four working parties. Residents ranked a passable road as their leading need, citing women who died in labour and a man who bled to death on the way to hospital. When the local representative of a foreign donor handed the project to a peasant association, villagers overrode the donor's rules. They refused to cap each work party at twenty-five, insisted the food be cooked and eaten together at day's end, and argued over whether each locality should clear only its own stretch. Dubuisson reads those decisions as citizenship claimed from below, with konbit and roadblock protest working as one form of public action. Collaborative labour and donor-run participatory development are incompatible, she argues, because the first redistributes power and the second manages a target population.