“Sir?”

  “A nerve doctor.”

  “I will find one.”

  I remember hanging up and feeling unsettled, as if something ominous was coming, like the rolling thunder on Haitian afternoons before the heavy rains fall. We never needed a neurologist before, Chika. A skin doctor, yes. A dentist, sure. Cough medicine, diarrhea medicine, children’s Tylenol. But a neurologist?

  How serious is this? I wondered.

  * * *

  When we finally found that neurologist, he noted the droop of your mouth and your left eye, and how your gait was slightly off. He ordered an MRI. At the time, there was only one MRI machine in Haiti, and it cost $750 cash for an appointment.

  Mr. Alain took you there. You left before sunrise. Six hours later, a nurse finally called your name. She made you drink a syrup that put you to sleep. You were placed inside a large cylinder, where radio waves and a magnetic field were generated around your head. The results were images that showed you from the inside.

  And while I would have told people that on the inside, Chika, you were warm and curious and confident and funny, the MRI analysis was more clinical:

  “The child has a mass on her brain. We don’t know what it is. But whatever it is, there is no one in Haiti who can help her.”

  I read that.

  And everything I knew about protection changed.

  Us

  “Mister Mitch?”

  Yes?

  “The drink was sweet.”

  What drink?

  “The drink the nurse gave me. It made me sleepy.”

  That’s why you drank it.

  “But I woke up.”

  In the machine?

  “Yeah. I started crying.”

  You woke up inside the MRI machine? Then what happened?

  “They made me drink more. And I fell asleep again.”

  I shake my head. It is folly to compare America’s medical care system to Haiti’s. The challenges for doctors and nurses are almost unimaginable, the poverty, the malnutrition, patients’ lack of access to health care or education. Still, I recall being struck by the bluntness of Chika’s MRI report: Whatever it is, there is no one in Haiti who can help her. It seemed less a diagnosis than a surrender.

  “Mister Mitch?”

  Yes?

  She leans against my leg. I instinctively reach to hold her shoulders, but my fingers pass right through. The rules of engagement. I keep forgetting.

  “Tell me about when I came to America,” she says.

  You

  All right. Here is what I recall. You were the first child we ever brought to this country, and the day of your departure, the other kids at the mission lined up to hug you. They waved goodbye as the car left the gates. I imagine some thought they would never see you again.

  Accompanied by Mr. Alain, you flew to Miami and on to Detroit, wearing a white sweater, even though it was June. In your first American bathroom, you turned the faucet and jerked your hands back, because you had never felt hot water from a sink before. So before you even slept a night here, this country was a wonder to you.

  Miss Janine and I were waiting at the house, and Miss Janine had arranged some colorful blankets and dolls to make you feel welcome. At the time, we hoped the doctors would diagnose the problem and treat it quickly, and you would heal under our watch. Then you could return to Haiti. We thought this would take a few months. Looking back now, we really knew so little.

  I should say you did not seem scared when you got here, Chika, but you did not speak much, either. Or show much emotion. Mostly you looked around. Who could blame you? Virtually everything you saw was new: traffic lights, highways, houses with yards, mailboxes, televisions in different rooms. The input had to be overwhelming. I often wondered, when you went to sleep that first night, how far you imagined yourself from the mission.

  The day after your arrival, we went for tests at Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, part of the University of Michigan, a great school that I’d dreamed you and the other children might one day attend. It was the tallest building you had ever seen, and you gazed up as we walked inside. We approached the front desk. A man said hello. He gave you a wristband, which you admired like a bracelet.

  Then the man turned to me and asked, “What is your relationship to the patient?”

  For a moment, I hesitated. All around were mothers and fathers, many looking similar to their children, same hair, same skin color, same facial features. I felt as if I’d been caught trying to fool someone. I answered by saying “legal guardian,” because those are technically the correct words, and the man wrote something down and asked me to stand before a camera.

  “Mister Mitch!” you suddenly yelled. “Look!” You pointed to a large Superman figure in the lobby. I released your hand and you ran to it, just as the man handed me a sticker with a grainy photo of my face.

  Above the photo was one word: Parent.

  I stuck it to my shirt.

  It is the fall of 2013, and Chika Jeune has been at our orphanage for a few months. As the smallest and youngest, she goes first in line for the bathrooms, or for school. She seems to enjoy the other kids marching behind her. Still, I often see her playing by herself, preferring to take a toy to a private corner. New children are frequently quiet, finding a coloring book or a doll to cling to, perhaps because there’s nothing to cling to from their past. I wonder how long it will take Chika to move from outsider to insider.

  One evening, we are doing our nightly devotions, a tradition of prayers and effusive gospel singing, punctuated by bongo drums and energized by the sheer volume of high-pitched voices. The kids will yell out a song and launch into it, some in Creole, some in English, from “Shout to the Lord” and “I Give Myself Away” to “Jeriko Miray-La Kraze” and “Mwen se Solda Jezi.” Sometimes, it sounds like screaming in a sports rally. But it remains a sight to behold, young ones with so little, singing their thanks to the Lord.

  On this night I am sitting by a wall, with several kids leaning against me. In the middle of an upbeat song, Janine catches my attention.

  “Look,” she says, pointing.

  There, a few feet away, is Chika Jeune, in a white nightshirt, clapping and swaying her head to the beat. Her eyes are closed, and she is punching the air and laughing between the lyrics. When the song ends, she throws an arm over her braided hair and gives the sweetest openmouthed smile, as if to say, “That was fun. Can we do it again?”

  I make a mental note. The praying did it. She’s in.

  Me

  I guess I should explain, Chika, what I was doing in Haiti when you came to us, and how I wound up in charge of an orphanage seventeen hundred miles from home.

  It began, as many good things do, with a coincidence.

  A few days after the earthquake, a local pastor named John Hearn Jr. came on a radio show I host in Detroit. He was worried that a Port-au-Prince mission he was associated with had been destroyed, and that the children there might have died. He could not get a phone call through (few people could at the time) and he was seeking help.

  His story moved me greatly. I’m not sure why. In my role as a journalist, I have interviewed many people after natural disasters. And while I have always encouraged assistance, I’ve rarely provided it personally.

  This was different. Something about not knowing the fate of children seemed terrifying. I tried to organize a trip for the pastor, but there were still, at that time, no commercial flights going into Haiti. I was finally able to charter a small plane and found two pilots willing to fly it. The plane held six passengers, so Hearn brought along his father, John, who had helped start the mission, and an elderly woman named Florence “Mommy” Moffett, a quiet, lovely missionary who had lived and worked at the orphanage for years. I recruited two colleagues who filled the other seats.

  And with the help of a U.S. senator named Carl Levin, we were granted—by the American military, which was controlling air traffic into Haiti after the earthquake—a ten-minute window to land. We took off from the snow in Pontiac, Michigan.

  Nearly five hours later, we descended into the heat-baked runways of the Port-au-Prince airport, or what was left of it.

  When the engines shut off, I left my winter coat on the seat and stepped outside. The sun was intense. The air was still. In the distance were mountains and more mountains (“land of high mountains” is the aboriginal meaning of the word Haiti). Mostly it was quiet. Eerily quiet, as if the country were mired in a stunned aftershock. I studied the facade of the sand-colored terminal. It read: AEROPORT INTERNATIONAL TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE, named for the leader of the Haitian revolution more than two centuries ago.

  Thanks to the earthquake, there was now a large crack over the word Toussaint.

  We unloaded the cargo with no officials, and no security. The only nod to a functioning airport was in a terminal hallway, where a fold-up table had several women sitting behind it, beneath a piece of white paper taped to the wall. It read:

  “STOP!!! HAITI IMMIGRATION.”

  We passed through in a minute.

  The ride to the orphanage, in a wobbly blue van missing its door panel, was only twenty minutes, but it will be etched in my mind forever: street after street of what used to be buildings, now flattened, their insides spilled out in mountains of gray rubble, as if fed through a blender. The chunky piles were spiked by the occasional leg of a desk, or a mattress. Crushed cars were abandoned under debris. People wandered the streets like zombies. Grim-faced street vendors squatted near piles of clothing, and women hovered over rotted fruits and vegetables. Kids stood in line to gather water from street puddles.

  Everyone appeared to be outside. I saw nobody in a window or coming out a door. I would later learn that many Haitians refused to enter buildings for months, fearful that the remaining structures would collapse on top of them. The choked air smelled of diesel and burning trash, and my eyes were stinging before we even reached our destination.

  The orphanage itself was, thankfully, spared. But it was overrun with outsiders, who mixed with children in makeshift tents. In Haiti, after natural disasters, people often flock to orphanages and hospitals, believing relief agencies will bring food there first. But I saw little in the way of relief or food, outside of some rice and beans cooked over charcoal by women I presumed to be orphanage staff.

  It was impossible to tell who belonged there and who had wandered in. Laundry lines crisscrossed the yard, old foam mattresses were scattered on the dirt. There were many weary-looking people, leaning against the walls, squinting into the sun. They asked for food. When we opened the boxes that we’d crammed on the plane—bottled water, Sani-Cloth Wipes, jars of aspirin, cans of Coke—we were mobbed.

  At one point, I became dazed by all that I was seeing. It was steamy hot and my shirt was soaked and I was foolishly wearing black jeans, which imprisoned the heat against my legs. I exhaled hard.

  And suddenly, with my arms by my side, I felt two little hands slip into my fingers. I glanced down to see a little boy and girl, one on each side. I can’t tell you who they were, Chika, or even if they belonged at the orphanage. But they smiled and led me forward, and I realize now they were walking me into their world and, in time, into yours.

  But all right. I haven’t explained how a trip turned into a commitment. Upon returning to Detroit, I wrote about what I’d seen and asked for help. We quickly organized a team of volunteers: roofers, plumbers, electricians, contractors. There were twenty-three of them in all, and they dubbed themselves The Detroit Muscle Crew. With airplanes donated by Roger Penske, the former race car driver turned successful businessman, and Art Van Elslander, owner of the Art Van furniture chain, we packed up with supplies, tools, and small machinery and headed back to Port-au-Prince.

  Then we went again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Over nine separate trips, alongside Haitian laborers, we built toilets, a kitchen, a dining room, and a laundry area. We laid tile. We assembled bunk beds. We painted filthy walls with bright sherbet colors. We eventually constructed a three-room school.

  We also built the orphanage’s first showers, jerry-rigged with white PVC pipe that ran down from a rooftop water tank. To that point, the kids’ bathing had been limited to soapy water dumped from a large red bucket.

  When time came to test those showers, the youngest children crowded inside. Wearing shorts or underwear, they stared curiously at the knobs and the faucet. We counted “one, two, three” and opened the pressure. The water sprayed down and they howled in delight, as if experiencing the Lord’s first rainstorm. They splashed and laughed and sang and did a dance. They were so joyous, doing something I all but sleepwalked through every morning of my life, that my heart shifted. I could physically feel it, an epiphany maybe, because that word means the manifestation of something divine, and that is how it felt, and how the following days there felt. I was exhausted yet elevated in an almost unearthly way. I found myself laughing more freely than I did in the States, and sleeping better. Each day I felt less encumbered, despite a workload that began at sunrise and ended in mosquito-swarmed darkness.

  “I think we can make a difference here,” I told Miss Janine.

  “Then we should keep going,” she said.

  And we did. I flew down every month. In America, my daily life was a good deal about thinking—creating stories, making decisions, adjusting my schedule, juggling phone calls. In Haiti, there were just things to do, and what we did allowed children to eat, to sleep, to have shelter; things so primary, there was no debating their importance. With each visit my connection to the kids grew stronger. I learned their names and personalities. I was greeted by their leaping embraces. It was adults who brought me to Haiti, Chika, but it was children that brought me back.

  In Detroit, I met again with the senior John Hearn, who was in his mid-eighties. He explained his history with the place. Over time, he said, the burden had increased. He thanked me for all the physical improvements our Muscle Crew was making. But he admitted he didn’t have the money to operate the orphanage, and hadn’t in some time. He himself was only able to go down there periodically.

  Which is when, in a rush of something I cannot to this day explain, I referenced other charities I had created in Detroit and blurted out, “If you want, I could take over running the orphanage. I can find the money. And the people. I think.”

  He clasped his hands together and grinned.

  We signed papers.

  And I have been there ever s—

  Us

  —“OK, OK, OK,” Chika interrupts, sighing.

  OK what?

  She lifts one of my coffee cups.

  “Too much talking about you!”

  She plops the cup down.

  “I wanna hear about ME!”

  My instinct is to remind her about manners, but I don’t. I have always found something forgivable about children seeking attention and the lengths they will go to get it. Chika liked center court. If Janine and I would speak too long, she’d yell, “Hey, what are you guys talking about?” If we sat to play a board game, she’d grab the pieces and instruct, “You are the green. I am the red. Red is the boss!”

  Of course, when she first arrived, her English was more limited, so we navigated through sentences like “Help, I not can open” when she was holding a banana, or, “There is him!” if she spotted a lost toy. Pronouns took a long time.

  But as the weeks passed, and Chika added sentence after sentence, we witnessed an exceptional development, and a boundless curiosity about her past and future.

  “When will I fall in love?” she asked us one night.

  Janine and I just looked at each other.

  “Well, when you’re older,” Janine finally said. “And you meet the right person.”

  “But when will that be?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Why do you want to fall in love, Chika?” I asked.

  She made a face. “Because you fell in love”—she crossed her arms—“and I wanna fall in love!”

  She said it so emphatically, I half expected the Lord to produce someone for her right then and there.

  “And who do you want to fall in love with?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I want to fall in love with someone I never met before!”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s how you did it. You fell in love with Miss Janine. And you haven’t met her before!”

  I was left speechless at how her mind worked. But my heart was full. In a way, she was saying she wanted a love like ours. It made us feel like we were doing something right.

  “Mister Mitch?” Chika says now.

  Hmm?

  She puts back the coffee cup and pushes two hands against my knee. Then she looks me in the eye. And the one thing she’s never asked me before, she finally asks.

  “How did I get sick?”

  You

  Well.

  How do I explain this?

  The Creole word for “head” is tèt. You know that, of course. Haitians use it in many expressions. Like tèt vire (a spinning head), which means “dizzy,” or tèt ansanm (heads together), which means “unity,” or tèt frèt (cold head), which means “calm.”

  Or tèt chaje (loaded head), which means “trouble.”

  You might never have learned that last one, Chika, but it fits your story, because most every part of you was perfect when you came to us, your lungs, your tummy, your heart, but just above your neck, in the part of the brain they call the pons, you were tèt chaje, a head loaded with something. And that something would indeed prove troubling.

  That first day in Ann Arbor, they took another MRI. This time there was no syrup or long wait time. We rode an elevator down to a brightly lit, antiseptic room, and they slid you inside a giant cylinder and played music through speakers. We were home in time for supper.

  But when the results came back, the doctors saw the same thing as the Haitian neurologist: an invader had squatted in your brain, a spot on the scan that was sizeable, if diffused. It was something that was not supposed to be there, on that they agreed, and the idea was to take it out. But they debated as to whether it was worth the risk.