“What we carry defines who we are and the effort we make is our legacy.”
Mitch Albom
Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family by Mitch Albom is an emotional, moving story of love and loss.
Chika Jeune was born three days after Haiti’s devastating earthquake of 2010. Her extremely poor family was dealt another tragedy when Chika’s mother died giving birth to another child. Chika, three, was brought to the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince.
When Chika was five years old, she developed a weakness in one leg and a droopy eyelid that was later diagnosed as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, DIPG, which had already advanced to grade 4. There was no help for her in Haiti. Janine and Mitch Albom, in their late fifties and with no children of their own, brought Chika to their home in Michigan, hoping to find a cure for the little girl. They took her to C. S. MOTT Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they performed surgery on Chika’s brain. They were able to remove only ten percent of the invading tissue because the mass involved too much of the brain. The mass was somewhat diminished by radiation, but subsequent treatments were ineffective. Twice they took her to Cologne, Germany, but the treatment received wasn’t a lasting one. In the meantime, the little girl became a cherished member of the Albom household with her bravery, self-assurance and wonderful sense of humor.
Finding Chika is yet another example of Mitch Albom’s impressive, heartrending work. He tells his story in hindsight, and through imagined conversations with Chika herself. The memoir shows how dedication and love can bring unimagined blessings. This would be a good audio book—it was sometimes hard to read through tears.