Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family

"Mitch Albom has done it again with this moving memoir of
love and loss. You can’t 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
Albom’s most personal story to date: 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.
Chika’s 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 Chika’s 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
formed—a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family,
regardless of how it is made.

Mitch Albom is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, which have collectively sold forty-two million copies in forty-eight languages worldwide. He has written eight number-one New York Times bestsellers—including Tuesdays with Morrie, the bestselling memoir of all time—award-winning television films, stage plays, screenplays, a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and a musical. Through his work at the Detroit Free Press, he was inducted into both the National Sports Media Association and Michigan Sports halls of fame and is the recipient of the 2010 Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. He founded the nonprofit SAY Detroit, which provides pathways to success for Detroiters in need through major health, housing and education initiatives. He also founded a dessert shop and a gourmet popcorn line to help fund it. Albom operates Have Faith Haiti, a home and school for impoverished children and orphans in Port-au-Prince, which he visits monthly. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.