When Continental Fresh’s managing member, Albert Perez, was in high school, a trip to the Dominican Republic altered the direction of his life, but most importantly, it has improved the lives of thousands of people in that Caribbean country.

“While I was in college I started a foundation to help the people in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “Every year for the past 30 years, we have gone down there and built a project — typically an aqueduct or a school.”

Albert Perez started a charitable foundation almost 30 years ago, and the primary goal has been to bring running water to remote villages in the Dominican Republic.This year in July, the chief executive of this Coconut Grove, FL-based tropical fruit distributor, led 34 volunteers in building an 11-kilometer aqueduct that, for the first time ever, brought running water to a 300-family village in a poor region of the Dominican Republic. “I love the work,” explained Perez. “It’s just a great feeling to bring water to these villages for the first time.”

He and a friend on that first high school trip founded LIFO (Living Instruments For Others) as a non-profit organization based in Miami in 1985. The foundation’s website (www.lifomissions.org) explains the goal is to develop “self-help projects in remote regions of the Dominican Republic. Our mission since 1985 has been to help some of the poorest people improve their living conditions and, consequently, their education, health and future prospects. For more than 25 years LIFO has been coordinating with religious and other non-governmental organizations in the country and has focused on helping small villages in the interior of the country with three basic needs: clean water, education and healthcare.”

Perez will make another trip in late November to find a project for next year. In building an aqueduct, the group looks for a water source that is higher than the town that they can tap into. “We are creating a gravity-driven aqueduct. There are no pumps or other moving parts,” he said.

They also look for help from the village to construct the aqueduct. “We provide the materials and know-how but we need the town to organize and provide the work.”

For the 2013 project, the LIFO group purchased 1,750 PVC pipes, laid them end to end and glued them together. The one end was attached to a spring and the other to a reservoir tank above the village. Perez said the volunteers worked for two weeks and completed the bulk of the work. The villagers completed the task and within a few days the village had running water.

In sharing his work, Perez hopes to encourage others to participate or donate. “What is really great about this for me is that when I share it with my customers so many of them want to help. This year the 16-year-old son of one of my customers came down and worked with us.”

Perez encourages his customers and anyone else interested to check out the foundation website. It has some videos and other information detailing the work as well as information about donating to the cause.

As far as this season’s South American mango crop is concerned, during this conversation in early September, Continental Fresh was a couple of weeks into shipments of Brazilian mangos. Perez said Brazil is the company’s “signature” provider of mangos. Though Continental Fresh was only established seven years ago, Perez has been importing Brazilian mangos into the United States for more than two decades.

“So far this year we have had light volume, but very nice quality and nice prices,” he said.

As September turns into October, he said Brazil should be the dominant marketer of mangos through much of that latter month. He said the fruit is sizing very well and there should be a good volume of large fruit, which there hasn’t been at the tail end of the Mexican season. “We are seeing a lot of 10s and 12s,” he said Sept. 9.

Because of that, he said, many Northeast retailers had already switched to Brazilian mangos and he expected more to follow suit throughout September. By the second half of October, the Continental Fresh executive said, Ecuadorian mangos will join Brazilian fruit in the marketplace and there should be plenty of promotional opportunities. Peru will follow suit in November and December, giving U.S. retailers a steady supply through the fall months and into winter.