Fritz Louis is KANPE’s man in Haiti. As director of our programs, he joined us in 2010, at the very beginning of the foundation’s establishment in Haiti. He is at the helm of KANPE’s many activities in the six pillars to support the community of Baille Tourible towards autonomy.

He still remembers his first day in Baille Tourible- February 11, 2011- accompanied by, among others, Cate Oswald and Dr. Jean Alexandre Rigaud from Zanmi Lasante/Partners in Health, our local health partner. It was with them that KANPE set up a facility to fight cholera, which was seriously affecting the community at the time. Today, that facility has grown into a medical clinic serving more than 20,000 residents of Baille Tourible and the surrounding area.

For Fritz, his work at KANPE is very important. “KANPE is in solidarity with the most disadvantaged. I am an actor in this solidarity for a more just and fraternal society,” he says. “The most beautiful fight in life in my opinion is the one for social justice. KANPE allows me to be at the heart of this fight”.

 It’s a fight that he leads alongside a community motivated to take off and emerge from the clutches of vulnerability. For him, the strengths of the community of Baille Tourible are the perseverance of the young people in school and their involvement in the development of their community. He also emphasizes the resilience of the local population who do not stop working despite adverse conditions such as political crises, global warming, natural disasters and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current accompaniment work in the community is important because it is a place, he says, that had been abandoned for too long. “They couldn’t cope without the kind of support that is being provided through the KANPE Foundation’s programs. It will be a long road, but change will come from the younger generation who recognize that education, both formal and informal, is the key to improving their lives,” says Fritz.

A native of St. Jean du Sud, a town in the southern peninsula that was hit by an earthquake last summer, Fritz already had a long career in rural and community development when he joined KANPE.  He served in displaced persons’ camps in Rwanda in 1993, before the genocide that broke out in that beautiful Central African country in 1994. Between 1998 and 2006, he worked in several rural communities in Grand’Anse. It was in this region that he founded a school called Collège Saint-Thomas Apôtre in Duchity, in the commune of Pestel.

A Catholic priest, Fritz also holds university degrees in philosophy (Gregorian University of Rome), French literature (University of Notre Dame, Indiana) and Italian language (University of Perugia, Italy). He is fluent in Haitian Creole, French, English and Italian. In his spare time he hikes, reads Haitian authors such as Jacques Roumain, Frédéric Marcelin, Justin Lhérisson, and Jean Price Mars; novels by authors such as Marcel Proust, Andréï Makine, and Amélie Nothomb; or listens to kompa, roots, reggae, or classical music.

More than 10 years after joining KANPE and working with the community of Baille Tourible, Fritz says he is very encouraged by the path taken by the local population. He says he is privileged to have witnessed firsthand the progress that has been made. He remains confident that the people of Baille Tourible are firmly on the path to autonomy.