Chika’s story

How a little angel from Haiti — with an incurable disease — captured hearts, changed lives and made us a family

She was born three days before Haiti’s massive earthquake in 2010. Her mother’s house collapsed around her. She slept that night on a bed of leaves in a sugar cane field.

But life would throw even bigger challenges at the brave and upbeat Medjerda “Chika” Jeune. Her mother would die giving birth to a baby brother. Her family was scattered. Her godmother took her in but gave her to an orphanage less than a year later.

Then, two years ago this month, Chika’s mouth and eye drooped, and a Haitian neurologist, upon examining a brain scan, concluded, “Whatever this is, there is no one in Haiti who can help her.”

Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom, who operates the Have Faith Haiti orphanage where Chika lived, brought her to America thinking an operation and brief treatment would allow to her return to life among her fellow children.

But when University of Michigan doctors diagnosed her with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a rare and always fatal brain tumor, the world shifted for Chika, Albom and his wife, Janine. They became a medical combat unit, traveling the world in search of a cure for the incurable.

And in doing so, they became a family.

Albom has chronicled their challenging, loving and ultimately heartbreaking two-year journey for the Detroit Free

Press. It is an inspiring story of how a courageous little girl and two accidental parents — who didn’t look alike, talk alike or come from the same world — created the most special of bonds in fighting the fight of their lives.

JENNIFER HAMBRICK Medjerda “Chika” Jeune was born three days before the Haitian earthquake in 2010 and at age 5 was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, an incurable brain cancer. She died on April 7.