My apologies, it's been a long day, and that was entirely the wrong flag.
kjotte@luna:~$ dpkg -L asterisk-flite
/.
/usr
/usr/lib
/usr/lib/asterisk
/usr/lib/asterisk/modules
/usr/lib/asterisk/modules/app_flite.so
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/asterisk-flite
/usr/share/doc/asterisk-flite/README
/usr/share/doc/asterisk-flite/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/asterisk-flite/changelog.gz
/usr/share/doc/asterisk-flite/copyright
/usr/share/doc/asterisk-flite/examples
/usr/share/doc/asterisk-flite/examples/flite.conf.sample
The problem, it turns out, is in the new version of Asterisk just
re-introduced the module path is now
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/asterisk/modules .
I was able to symlink the module file to that path after which it loads
and functions correctly.
