A School-Teacher and Principal for 72 years! Madame Marie Marthe Balin Franck Paul turns 89 in Port-au-Prince.
Mme. Franck Paul founded College Canapé Vert as its Principal in 1974. CCV teaches students aged 6 to 18. Despite desperate shortages and conflicts in Port-au-Prince, CCV retains over 490 students.
April 19, 2025
The individual accomplishments of Madame Franck Paul—apart from her service of seven decades as an educator—are a pleasure to behold.
She’s a songwriter.
She’s author of the Madame Roger series of short books for children. Madame Roger, you can see, is never one to be daunted and ever one for fun and down-to-earth advice and judicious mediation!
She’s subject of a very fine Documentary directed by Claude Bernard Serant and viewed by 11,000+ since last year.
She was Mayor of Port-au-Prince for two years immediately following ouster of the “Baby Doc” Duvalier regime in 1986. She simultaneously worked as Haiti’s Minister of Education.
Her 243-page Textbook, Mon Livre Unique, was distributed in editions of 110,000 copies across Haiti.
Mon Livre Unique is the basis for fulfilling Madame Franck Paul’s seven-decades dream of providing all Haitians with the means of learning to read and write. Voila, Lèkol Toupatou! Lèkol Toupatou in Haitian Kréyol translates to School Everywhere. Over a four years’ span, 2019 to 2023, Madame Franck Paul and her Team of seven, including Claude Bernard Serant, at College Canapé Vert recorded and edited a total of 148 Video-Lessons, each about a half-hour in length.
She and main collaborator Raphael Lijensky kept at their work despite ‘Manifestations” and Blockades and COVID-19 compelling them to work in Madame Franck Paul’s house.
She continues to accumulate Awards.
May we dare to say which achievements and attributes of Madame Marie Marthe Balin Franck Paul—my wife Maryse’s aunt, known to Maryse as the pronouceable “Amine” since Maryse was age 3—the Amine who turns 89 this day of 2025, most ring home for admiration? From personal experience, I find that Amine’s laugh and smile of absolutely unshakeable equanimity and perseverance—the bell of her laugh and the light of her smile—are most marvelous and affecting.
Below we see Amine at a Party for graduates within Ecole Foyer Espoir in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince, June of 2018. She stands between Madame Marie Jo Poux, founder of the Foyer Espoir Pour les Enfants orphanage and a student of Madame Franck Paul’s in the early 1960s, and her main aide at College Canapé Vert, Madame Mireille Chéry Antoine.
JOYEUX ANNIVERSAIRE! BON FET!RELATED
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Let’s turn from such such crazy and iniquitous realities as ‘Bail-Outs’ for Banks worth of Trillions of Ill-Gotten Dollars … to selflessly uplifting people and institutions.