Her story begins in the town of Cabaret, just north of Haiti’s capital, Port au Prince. She spends the first several years of her life with her mother and her brother, who is just one year older. She attends Grace Emmanuel, a school that educates around 60 students when she starts kindergarten. Her mother works at the school as a cook. Daily she prepares the rice the students eat for lunch. Life is simple, just the three of them, and although her father is not around, Kimberly feels loved.

I can still picture him at the orphanage where he was just one of over 100 kids. He was 2 years old, covered in dirt, wearing a tattered T-shirt too big for his body. He wasn’t wearing a diaper, his nose was running, and no one seemed to care. His mother had brought him and his older brother to live at that orphanage, believing anyone else could give them a better life. It wasn’t because she didn’t love them—she must have felt inadequate to mother them. And so I imagine as she left Johnny and Peterson there, she gave them each a kiss on the cheek and felt both pain and hope in her heart for their future.