num_pages: 256
description:  Mitch Albom has done it again with this moving memoir of love and loss. You cant help but fall for Chika. A page-turner that will no doubt become a classic. --Mary Karr author of The Liars Club and The Art of Memoir From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tuesdays With Morrie comes Mitch Alboms most personal story to an intimate and heartwarming memoir about what it means to be a family and the young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart. Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince.With no children of their own the forty-plus children who live play and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife Janine. Chikas arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured even as a three-year-old she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says No one in Haiti can help you with.Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead Chika becomes a permanent part of their household and their lives as they embark on a two-year around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chikas boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child he learns that a relationship built on love no matter what blows it takes can never be lost.Told in hindsight and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl her adoptive guardians and the incredible bond they formeda devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family regardless of how it is made.
language: English
title: Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
publisher: Harper