None of them will get the chance.

Imagine if America was denied to you. The airports closed, the ports closed, the roads and borders all closed. If you tried a secret entry, you would likely be shot.

And none of your family could get out.

War zone? Gangland? The plot of a dystopian movie? Yes. All that. And in a land of freedom like America, the idea seems impossible.

But it is now daily life for Haitians, including the kids from our orphanage, the Have Faith Haiti Mission, many of whom, for the first time in their lives, will not be able to celebrate Christmas with their brothers and sisters. They are locked out.

“I’m really sad,” one of them, a 19-year-old girl, told me last week. “I miss everybody. We’re always together for Christmas. Can’t we find a way to get there?”

‘No Christmas for poor people’

The answer is no. Even though Christmas — and New Year’s — are holidays that in the 15 years I have been operating the orphanage our kids have never not spent together, this year, no less than 24 of them will be absent, college-age kids studying here in the U.S., sick kids we’ve brought up for medical care, and kids who are doing charity work to help others outside of Port-au-Prince.

This year, for the first time, they will all miss our Christmas play, our nativity re-creation, the singing, the dances, the beautiful prayer service, the special meal, the small presents Christmas morning that cause our littlest ones to squeal with delight, because it’s the only time all year they get anything of their own.

“There’s no Christmas for poor people.” That’s not a tragic sentiment. It’s a threat that a Haitian gang leader made recently. It means the misery, mayhem and murder will continue through the holidays.

And it is already unimaginable.

Population equal of Detroit

Haiti, in case you haven’t been keeping up, has fallen so completely into the hands of brutal gangs, that no airline will even fly there. American, Spirit and Jet Blue all discontinued their service after their airplanes were shot at, with one bullet piercing a plane’s exterior and injuring a flight attendant.

No one will ship anything to Port-au-Prince because the ports are controlled by the gangs.

You cannot drive on the roads throughout the country because the gangs will shake you down for money or simply kill you for no reason.

The bandits are literally running out of things to destroy. Last week, gangs threw Molotov cocktails and burned the only neurological trauma hospital in the country. Police stations have been torched. Prisons and government offices destroyed. Entire neighborhoods have been torched, their residents thrown into the streets. More than 700,000 citizens have been displaced, more than half of them children.

That’s the entire population of Detroit. Imagine if every Detroiter, man, woman and child, was literally chased out of his or her house, apartment, or condo and forced to live in the street.

And no one did anything about it.

That’s Haiti today.

Sense of belonging

And so, our kids — from a second-year medical student at Michigan State to a 5-year-old boy who suffers from numerous maladies after being denied food for years and weighing only 10 pounds when he was 3 years old — will all miss Christmas at the orphanage this year.

It breaks my heart. The universal fear of every child who winds up at an orphanage is abandonment, losing what is familiar again. It’s the reason we try so hard to keep traditions intact and make sure our kids, many of whom never knew their mothers or fathers, have a sense of home. Belonging. Being part of a family.

But how can you keep family traditions intact when you can’t get in or out? When the streets are too dangerous to consider shopping? When you take your life in your hands to make a deposit at a bank? When you can’t even land an airplane in your country?

Most of our 60-plus children have not been outside the orphanage gates in four years. Now the ones that have been lucky enough to earn college scholarships, or unfortunate enough to need medical care, can’t get back in.

One Christmas wish

If I could have one Christmas wish, it would be that our country and the rest of the world did something for this beleaguered nation that sits just 700 miles off our shores.

As one businessman who supported the recently destroyed hospital told the Miami Herald, “It’s as if you’re looking at a sinking ship with people on it, and you’re on the ship next to it, and you’re just looking at the people drowning. … You have a ton of life vests on your ship, and all you have to do is toss them out, and you’re not even doing that.”

The life vests my wife and I can offer is our home, where 19 of them will spend the holidays this year. If you would like to help the others in our orphanage, you can do so at havefaithhaiti.org. If you would like to help the country, you could put pressure on your Congressperson or Senator to support intervention in Haiti.

Or you could pray. Which is what our children do every day.

This time of year, I often hear that song by Band Aid recorded during the African food crisis 40 years ago, and the lyric:

“Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?”

When you can’t go home, when you can’t go out, when your hospitals and airports are no more and you feel like no one is coming to help you, how do you know it’s Christmas? Or is it just another day you’re trying to stay alive?

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.

“All right, first things first, we gotta have a quarterback,” Lloyd Carr said.

For a man who once led Michigan football to a national championship, this wasn’t going back to basics. This was before basics. This was “You see this thing? It’s called a football.”

Last week, Carr came with me to Haiti, where I have operated the Have Faith Haiti Mission & Orphanage since 2010. He’d heard me share stories over the years whenever we’d get together, and I would jokingly say, “You should come down and teach our kids the game. They would love you.”

Then, a few months ago, after I wrote about how gangs had taken control of the capital city and made daily life a terrifying experience for citizens, I got a text from Carr.

“I would like to speak with you about Haiti when you have time.”

We spoke.

He said he wanted to see things for himself.

And suddenly, here we were, in the heat of early summer, and Carr was out on an unlined field trying to teach a few dozen orphans about the forward pass.

“You throw it, your teammate catches it, and you try to run without getting tackled,” he barked. “You get it?”

The kids nodded.

They had no clue.

One kid threw the ball two-handed from behind his head, the way you throw a soccer ball inbounds. No one was sure who was on whose team. Eventually, one group took off their shirts. Many were barefoot. They lined up for a kickoff.

BOOFF! The ball squibbed and hit a kid in the chest. He dropped it, then picked it up like a woman who’d just had her nails done. He tossed it backwards until it reached the fastest kid on the team, a 14-year-old whose name is Danois.

“RUN, DANOIS!” someone screamed.

Making an impact on a new ‘team’

Now before I tell you how the rest of the game went, let me take a moment to salute Carr for making the trip at all. Haiti can be a dangerous place, and the perception of it is even more terrifying than the reality. Yet here was a man who will soon turn 78, who uses a walking stick at times to get around, and he wanted to see the kids for himself.

So he and a friend, Mike Dubin, make the long flights down with us, got in armored cars from the airport with us, bunked together in a single room that had two simple beds, a lamp and a bathroom. For a coach who has stayed at the best hotels in America, it wasn’t exactly a five-star experience.

Not even a half-star experience.

But Carr never complained. He ate with our kids. He sat through a graduation from our school. He clapped and cheered for the graduates. He made a small speech encouraging them on their futures. He threw a nerf football to one of our kids who’d had a leg operation earlier this month.

And he bounced a little boy named Bradley on his knee every day.

Bradley had arrived at our orphanage at 3 years old, weighing just 10 pounds. He was near death from malnourishment. His legs were sticks, his eyes crossed, his mouth contorted.

Yet here he was now smiling at a former coach who is a household name in Michigan, having no idea who Lloyd Carr is other than someone who cared enough to come and hold him.

At one point, I gathered the kids together and showed them a video about Carr’s 1997 Michigan football season, how it ended in a perfect 12-0 record and a shared national championship. In an effort to try and get the kids to appreciate his presence, I yelled out, “How many of you know who Tom Brady is?”

Not a single hand went up.

Oh, well.

It didn’t deter Carr.

“Listen, you can’t be a great player if you’re selfish,” he said, addressing them as if it were halftime locker room. “And the beautiful thing about this beautiful place is that you’re a team. You care about each other.”

He’s right about that.

‘This is unbelievable’

But back to the game. The two teams lined up for the first play. There were seven or eight boys on each side, depending on who got tired or distracted. The defensive line — none of whom stood taller than 5-foot-3 — had to count “One Port-au-Prince, two Port-au-Prince, three Port-au-Prince” (hey, they have no idea what ‘Mississippi’ is.) For some reason, each team did a double hike, so the ball went from one kid to another and THEN to the person who was actually the quarterback. I’m not sure who started this. But Carr let it slide.

“Good defense!” he yelled when someone broke up a pass.

“Hey where’s the 25-second rule?” he yelled, when the teams were taking a full minute to think of a play.

“Touchdown!” he yelled when a possession was in question, since we have no lines on the field, just a wall around it.

It was about as much fun as a football game came be when you have no idea what the rules are and your players think it’s perfectly fine to run 10 yards and THEN decide they want to throw the ball to someone else, which often turned out to be a member of the other team.

When the game mercifully ended, all the players got together and did a cheer: “2-4-6-8, who do we appreciate? Coach Carr! Coach Carr!”

I’ve seen Lloyd Carr smile plenty in my life. I’m not sure I ever saw him smile like that.

Or the way he smiled when the kids, Sunday night, for Father’s Day, made a speech thanking him and gave him some cards they drew.

Or the way he choked up when he went outside our gates and saw the ramshackle, tin-roofed shacks that house our neighbors, who live without running water or electricity, as so many Haitians do.

“This is unbelievable,” he muttered many times, sometimes in awe, sometimes in dismay.

Coaches and journalists are supposed to have a wall between them. But Carr is retired and many years have passed, and I’m honored to call him a friend. Even more honored that he braved the perceptions and made a trip that many people half his age wouldn’t have made.

He left a few days before we did, and the kids mobbed him and hugged him farewell. When he got inside the car, I took a last glance at his face. He looked younger.

The old football coach came to teach, but I think he learned a few things, too. Kids will do that to you. Even the ones who double-hike the ball.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.

That’s how I got here, to South America, first time ever in countries such as Ecuador, Peru and Argentina. We have seen things you can only imagine, like the remains of Machu Picchu in the Peruvian mountains, or the gravitational pull of the actual equator line in Quito.

Or the food.

It is, for me, my favorite way to experience a new place: walking the streets, smelling the aromas of things you have never tried.

You can ask them in Ecuador to bring you what the locals eat, and they will plop down a massive plate of llapingachos, patties of fried potatoes and cheese, or pescado encocado, fish cooked in a coconut milk.

You can ask for a great meal in Peru and they will serve up ceviche, raw fish marinated in various flavorings, or beef flame-cooked with chiles, tomatoes and onions, called lomo saltado.

You can ask for a local libation in Santiago and get a piscola brandy drink, or Pisco, which is almost as common as Coke is in the States.

Fly to foreign countries. Book tours. Ask the locals. Use Google translate.

That’s one way to do it.

Or there’s an easier way.

EAT Detroit.

If you’re hungry, take your pick

That’s right. The chance to try foods from 25 different restaurants in a single evening is back again. You can go around the world and never leave Detroit.

On Tuesday, June 27, the third annual EAT Detroit event returns, a dine-and-dash opportunity to try the best restaurants in the city in a four-hour adventure. Each restaurant serves up three signature dishes and a signature drink, which you can sample to your hearts content, then move on to the next.

The limited tickets for the general admission ($150) or a special VIP before and after event ($275) are only available through eatdetroit.info.

Best of all — all the money goes to help needy people, through the charities of SAY Detroit. So you can’t gain weight. No calories in doing good!

Four hours. From 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., with a wristband, maps, and buses (although many restaurants are walking distance from one another). And I’m not kidding about the around the world thing.

Consider the list of restaurants, including the French-inspired fare of Bar Pigalle, just voted the Free Press’ No. 1 best new restaurant in Detroit for 2023, or the Lebanese fare of Leila, voted Detroit’s best restaurant of 2020, or the contemporary Italian of SheWolf Pastificio & Bar, named Restaurant of the Year by Hour Detroit magazine in 2020, or the Irish, Italian, German fare of Cork & Gabel, or the Japanese specialties of Ima Izakaya, the pan-Asian of Pao Detroit, the Havana-inspired fare of Vicente’s Cuban Cuisine, the Thai specialties of Takoi or the good old-fashioned American smoked meats of Slows Bar BQ or the soul food of SavannahBlue.

Honestly, this is as much fun as you can have eating without boarding a plane. 

‘A way to pay back the community’

“It’s a phenomenal event,” said Elias Khalil, who owns the fantastic Spanish restaurant La Feria, which returns again to EAT Detroit. “It’s a way to pay back to the community, that solidarity which is the definition of what it is to be a Detroiter.”

Khalil will be offering up pan-seared garlic shrimp, almond-stuffed, bacon-wrapped dates. and house-toasted baguettes made with garlic sheep cheese.

Hungry yet?

You can go Italian at La Lanterna, with some lasagna Bolognese or some fettuccini with meat sauce, served up by Eddie Barbieri, whose grandfather opened the place in 1956.

“I really think this is a great opportunity to showcase all the restaurants in the city,” Barbieri said. “We treasured the two times we’ve done it and are very happy to go back-to-back.”

That vibe is shared throughout the 25 participating eateries, especially given the challenges that faced the industry during COVID-19. EAT Detroit is a great way to put yourself inside these trendy, often hard-to-get-into places, see the interior, taste the fare and make a mental note about coming back. 

How it all started

And of course, there’s the charity element, which is the entre reason for doing it. So many people in our city can’t even afford daily nutrition for their kids. Why not partner with those who can to make life better for kids, seniors, veterans, medically challenged and homeless Detroiters, on a night that could not be more enjoyable?

We started this event in 2019, with the help of Jack Aronson, the creator of Garden Fresh and one of the most giving people I’ve ever met. Jack passed away two years ago, but his spirit still infuses EAT Detroit and motivates the participants.

“Jack was a huge supporter of local chefs,” recalled SheWolf chef and co-owner Anthony Lombardo. “There are countless stories of him walking into the kitchens and handing out hundred-dollar bills to the cooks. He knew the hard work that went into the restaurant business and had tremendous respect for the world of hospitality.”

So there you go. You can do it the hard way, as I’m doing, take years, spend a small fortune, sleep on airplanes.

Or you can try the easier way, on Tuesday, June 27: Eat the world in four hours, sleep in your own bed and help others sleep more soundly.

Your stomach — and countless needy Detroiters — will thank you. 

For tickets and a full list of participating restaurants go to eatdetroit.info.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.

Which brings us to Matthew Stafford, the ex-Detroit Lions quarterback, the current LA Rams quarterback and the defending Super Bowl winner, who in the past year saw his trajectory soar into the clouds. After 12 years with no liftoff in Detroit, he went straight to 30,000 feet in California.

Yet here he was, Friday, back on the runway where it started.

Steady as always.

“I wake up in the morning and I feel like I’m the same person,” Stafford admitted, sitting in a room inside the SAY Detroit Play Center at Lipke Park off of Van Dyke. “Do I get a couple more ‘Congratulations, Champ’ than I used to? Yeah, absolutely. And that’s fun. But I don’t see myself any different. I just try going about being the best husband and father and teammate I can be.”

Stafford and his wife, Kelly, had returned to this challenged section of the city to keep a promise. Last winter, just after Matthew was traded to the Rams, the couple pledged $1 million to build a new education center onto the SAY Play Center, home to hundreds of Detroit after-school kids.

It was a bit like leaving a suitcase in the old house before moving out. Gives you reason to come back. Friday, there were shovels in the dirt, symbols of the pending new construction, a nearly 20,000-square-foot facility that will create education, performance and job training opportunities. Stafford had already given $1 million to create a first-rate football field. His latest investment inspired partners to join in, reflected in its name: The Kelly and Matthew Stafford & Friends Education Center.

“This is where it kind of all started for us,” Stafford said. “I feel like the people here in Detroit know us. Know Kelly. Know myself. Know my family. Just by virtue of time. It’s a big city that has a small town feel. And the fans are incredible. Just went out to lunch before coming here to do this — and seeing people that I hadn’t seen in a long time and the congratulations we get is a lot of fun.

“Los Angeles is an amazing place. It’s such a cool city to be a part of. But it’s different. And we haven’t been there that long. And so the people just naturally don’t know us as well. Hopefully, I’ll play there for a long time and have success and people will get to know us more and more. But as we currently stand, it’s 12 years here and one year there. We just have more roots here, so it’s really fun to be able to come back and share that.

“And we’re proud of what this place (the SAY Play Center) has become.”

A ‘genuine’ homecoming

Interestingly, Detroit seems proud of what Stafford has become. That is not often the case with an athlete who goes elsewhere, especially one who asked for his walking papers. Stafford encouraged the trade after seeing his former coach and GM, Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn, fired and yet another pair, Dan Campbell and Brad Holmes, take their place last January.

They would be Stafford’s fourth GM and fifth coach in Detroit. A long rebuild was looming. The quarterback was almost 32 years old. it was a launch-or-be-forever-grounded moment.

He flew away.

But based on the reception at the sizable gathering Friday, few people begrudge him. Matthew and Kelly received a standing ovation when they rose to speak. The kids couldn’t wait to meet them. The adults crowded, shook hands, slapped backs. None of which was wasted on the couple.

“We might reside in California, but this is where we grew up,” Kelly said. “As we were flying in Thursday night, I kind of nudged Matthew. You see the city lights, you get this warm feeling.”

Friday morning, they felt it on the ground. They found a coffee shop in downtown Birmingham and took a seat. “People stopped by, they honked their horns at Matthew,” Kelly said. “You knew it was genuine.”

Maybe because most people, when they leave a city, don’t decide to make a million-dollar investment in it, as the Staffords did.

As part of the team that put the project together (I founded SAY Detroit in 2006), I believe they were not only looking for a way to honor the place where they worked, lived, bought their first house, got married and started their family, they were also looking for a way to keep it in their lives. They didn’t want a permanent goodbye. Football fortunes beckoned on the West Coast. But they weren’t seeking to yank their roots out of the ground.

So they left some here.

And they are growing.

‘I’m still the same guy’

The last time I saw Matthew Stafford, it was impossible to talk. He had just won the Super Bowl, it was pandemonium in SoFi Stadium, media, fans, friends and family were mobbing him.

Friday afternoon, sitting in a folding chair in the dance studio room at the SAY Play Center, Stafford was able to reflect. He looks the same. Maybe his hair and beard are a bit more professionally coiffed, and he seems a tad thinner. But conversation-wise, it’s as if he never left.

“I learned a lot about myself this past year,” he said. “It was a heckuva move for our family, and for me professionally. There was a lot of moving parts. And still, being able to attack the season the way I wanted to attack the season — go out there and play at a high level and ultimately win a world championship — was something that changed my life, probably in the eyes of other people more so than my own. 

“I’m still the same guy. But it is awesome to be part of a group of guys that accomplished something so special. That’s my favorite part about the whole thing — just being a part of that group and being able to have that forever.”

I asked how he climbed the steps from having never won a playoff game, never been to a conference championship and never sniffed a Super Bowl, to winning all three.

“I never really thought about it that way, to be honest,” he said. “I bet if you ask Kelly how I was the week of the Super Bowl she’d say I was just, ‘It’s another football game. I’ve played a million football games. Gotta go play four good quarters — there’s gonna be good parts and bad parts — and gotta find a way to win the game.’ 

“And that’s kind of how I attacked all of ’em, all season long. There were good games and there were bad games, and I think that’s the only way I know how to go about it. 

“If I had sat there at the beginning of the season and said, ‘If we don’t win the Super Bowl, this thing is a failure.’ Well, I can’t live that way. I couldn’t play that way.”

‘The kind of life I want to live’

Stafford has always been a master of talking calmly and congenially, while rarely revealing anything personal. Once in a while, he’ll give you a wink, or follow what you say with “Yeah, right?” But from his earliest days, he knew what cards to show and what cards to hold, and he is only more so that way, at age 34.

Still, having known him for more than a dozen years, I will say there was a noticeable ease and confidence to him Friday that likely comes from winning the ultimate prize and proving all those doubters wrong. He never obsessed over that. Now he doesn’t have to.

The perks of being a champion have come Stafford’s way. He signed a new four-year, $160 million contract with the Rams. He has purchased several homes in the LA area. He even has a national AT&T commercial where he talks about never forgetting his old phone that he’s had for 12 years (wink, wink, Detroit) while still enjoying his new one.

But Los Angeles is Los Angeles and Detroit is Detroit. Here he sits in a coffee shop and people honk their horns. “In LA, you go to dinner,” he said, “and you’re sitting next to a bunch of A-list celebrities and nobody cares (about you). And frankly, that’s great. That’s the kind of life I want to live.”

That sentence says it all. Stafford, after the season of his dreams, is living the life he wants to live: a champion who doesn’t have to flaunt it, a former Detroiter who doesn’t have to forget it, an athlete who believes in his talent and no longer has to prove it.

He is that plane that has reached the clouds and just has to keep it nice and steady and enjoy the view over his old hometown, right?

“I told Matthew this morning,” Kelly said, “wouldn’t it be great if in the last year of your career, you come back here to Detroit, win a Super Bowl, and then retire?”

Well, there’s a little turbulence.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him on Twitter @malbom

Appearing as a speaker at the April 13, 2019 dinner, Mitch Albom was presented with the Founders Award for his visionary advocacy and support of the brain injury rehabilitation industry. This is only the  third time the Founders Award has been presented in the 21-year history of the event: Gov. William Milliken was the first, for his creation of the No Fault system; Charles Reeder, founder of the BIA of Michigan, was the second. Erica Coulston present Mitch with the award.

It was great to meet @MitchAlbom tonight at the Brain Injury Association of Michigan’s Legacy gala event. #biami #legacy2019 #thelibrarylife #IngramReads Finally a time when my job at Ingram overlaps a little with Nichole’s job at BIAMI. @thelibrarylife @biaofmi pic.twitter.com/owq4ZTfkCL

— Eric Shotwell (@Shotwell) April 14, 2019

“The thing that strikes me the most is the continued kindness that surrounds this effort from the people who let us use Somerset, to the volunteers who work the phone banks, to all the celebrities, sports figures and entertainers who agree year after year to come on, to all the people who continue to donate,” said Albom, who founded SAY Detroit in 2006. “As a result, we’ve been able to do some amazing things at SAY Detroit. We took a quantum leap this past year, with a deep and experienced new board of directors with a vision towards cementing the efforts that we do in the city right now and securing their future long term.

This year’s list of guests included Hugh Jackman, JK Simmons, Jane Pauley, Anderson Cooper, Dr. Phil, Hank Azaria, Paul Stanley, Lily Tomlin, Will Arnett, John Pizzarelli, Grant Hill, Senator Debbie Stabenow, Bradley Whitford, Sawyer Fredericks, Billy Bob Thornton, Tim Allen, Dave Barry, Adam Schefter, KEM, and Howard Schultz.

Closer to home, Mike Duggan, Tigers Manager Ron Gardenhire, Pistons Coach Dwane Casey, Matthew Stafford, Kirk Gibson, Tom Izzo, Jim Harbaugh, Dave Bing, Blake Griffin, and many local news personalities including Roop Raj, Amy Lange, Brad Galli, Carman Harlan, and Bernie Smilovitz.

Hourly sponsors included The Suburban Collection, General Motors, Ilitch Holdings, Inc., Michigan Center for Fertility & Women’s Health, Ford Motor Company Fund and Community Services, Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Cooper Standard, Michigan Masonic, Charitable Foundation, Art Van Furniture, St. Nicholas Troy Ladies Philoptochos, Artichoke Garlic Foundation, Emagine Entertainment, Somerset Collection, Health Partners Inc., and the Singing for Change Foundation. Additonal sponsors include Diamabrush, Toyota, W.K. Kellogg, and Trinity Health.

For those who missed the opportunity to donate, bid on auctions, or buy incentive premiums during the broadcast have the opportunity to make donations and purchases through the weekend at www.mitchalbomradiothon.com.

D.R.Y. (Donated Reading for Youth) Libraries is a joint effort between National Book Store and A Hole in the Roof Foundation to rebuild or refurbish and restock school libraries in the areas hardest hit by super typhoon Haiyan (locally named Yolanda). Five two-dome libraries completed or under construction are located in Pawing Elementary School (Palo, Leyte), National Agricultural School (Leyte), Palanog Elementary School (Leyte), Valencia Elementary School (Ormoc, Leyte) and San Jose Elementary School (Ormoc, Leyte).

A Hole in the Roof Foundation founder Mitch Albom looks forward to visiting the new libraries on his next visit to the Tacloban area.

A night of conversation, laughter and music, 100% of the profits from the evening will go to medical costs for orphans in Haiti through Have Faith Haiti Mission and reading programs for children in Detroit through SAY Detroit Play Center at Lipke Park.

Beloved sports and media favorites including Anderson Cooper, Jane Pauley, Bob Costas, KEM, Joe Dumars, and Jim Harbaugh will join Mitch on stage to discuss their childhood influences who helped them become who they are today. Children from Haiti will read small sections from the book, and surprise musical performers will give the night a special beat.

If you’d like to attend the VIP reception held before the event, don’t wait on getting your tickets! They are more than halfway sold out. Admission to the reception, and a signed copy of the book, are included in the ticket price. Regular admission tickets start at $50.00.

GET YOUR TICKETS NOW

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