Prologue: Everything Went Dark
It was 2012, and I was driving to work. My daughter, Christelle, and my son, Ralph, were in the car with me.
I had come a long way to be behind that wheel. I was a banker at Bank of America. I owned a home in Florida. I held three bachelor's degrees, and I was one class away from an MBA. For a boy who grew up reading by kerosene lamp in a village without electricity, it was a good life, and I was proud of it.
Then everything went dark.
I had blacked out behind the wheel.
My children were not hurt physically. I thank God for that every day. But what they saw stayed with them, and what stays with your children stays with you.
I spent the next seven days in the hospital while the doctors ran their tests. At the end of that week, they gave me their answer. I had a brain tumor, and they wanted to operate as soon as possible.
I asked the doctor a question I am sure he did not expect: What happens if I wait until I finish my class?
To understand why a man with a tumor in his head would ask that question, you have to understand where he came from. You have to meet a woman who never went beyond the eighth grade, and hear the one sentence she repeated so often that I can still hear it today. You have to go back to a small village in the Northwest of Haiti called Gaspard.
So let us go back.
