There are a few ways to get to the Have Faith Haiti Mission's orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. You can walk, though the city's heat, steep hills, and lack of sidewalks might deter you. You can pay a dollar or so to ride in a "tap tap," Haiti's de facto public transportation system, which are pickup trucks outfitted with open-air benches and a roof stuffed with 10, 12, or more people. Or you can hire someone to take you on a moped or in a private car, with a driver who zooms through the narrow streets, barely avoiding hitting people at every turn. I take a car. It's a hot and sticky Sunday in early November, market day, so the city is clogged with people selling fruits and vegetables, toys, car mats, paintings, soda. Men walk by carrying large plastic containers filled with patties on their heads. There are few stoplights or even stop signs; many of the side streets are not paved.
When we get to the orphanage, a guard with a rifle slung across his chest peeks out from a window in the steel gate and lets us in after checking to make sure that we're expected. I walk into a small compound with a few buildings, including a chapel, and see Mitch Albom — the Detroit-based author of inspirational best-sellers including Tuesdays With Morrie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and a new novel, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto — in a gazebo in the middle of the compound surrounded by around 20 excited children. He's playing them the Mary Poppins song "Spoonful of Sugar" on a laptop. They act like they've never heard it before.
A little girl asks him, in perfect English, "Mr. Mitch. What goes up and never goes down?" He thinks for a moment, and responds, "A balloon?" She smiles triumphantly and says, "Your age!"
"They're such good kids," Albom, 57, tells me later. Today he is dressed in a purple Under Armour T-shirt, gray cargo shorts, and Nikes; his thick, dark brown hair is, as ever, perfectly coiffed, and carefully hides the top half of each ear. He is a small, handsome, smooth-skinned man, with the air of a teacher who considers class participation just as important as your grade on the final exam.
"I mean, what they come from and where they come from, to be this happy and peaceful," he continues. "They don't have very much in the way of possessions and we keep it that way. I give them a toy every time I come down. One toy. And then at the end of the year they have to give them away to charity or the outside. An 11-year-old kid will come over and put his arm around you because he hasn't been taught that it's not cool to do that. It's a great privilege here to see real childhood. Pure, unfiltered childhood, untouched by ads and music — the wrong kind of music — and attitude, and TV shows where the parents are all stupid and the kids are all smart. They respect older people because they've not been told that there's the dundering dad or the overbearing mom. The movies that we show them are very carefully chosen. No internet. So it's a great experiment."
It's a little jarring to hear him refer to 40 people's childhoods as a "great experiment," but also not surprising. Because in addition to the standard Albomisms in his work — that we should keep our loved ones close, and live a charitable life, and that time is worth more than money in the great ledger of your life — is the running theme that the modern world, and particularly the media and the internet, has caused irreparable harm to society. In Albom's books and his work for the Detroit Free-Press, where he's been a columnist for 30 years, there's a longing for a simpler time, a world where internet commenters don't exist, where children respect their elders, where everything is slower, more thoughtful. It's not surprising that he has a flip phone.
Bahare Khodabande for BuzzFeed News
You see it in his newspaper columns; in one about the incompetence and short attention spans of service workers, he writes, "I blame TV. I blame video games. I blame the mindless blare that our kids have been weaned on, noise, explosions, blasting music, 100 images a minute. No wonder we can't stay focused long enough to remember soup or salad." On people sending Christmas greetings via text message: "Yes, there are still people who put great effort into Christmas greetings. But there's a growing trend toward, like everything else, making the whole thing easier, faster and more efficient, presumably to give us time to do really important stuff, like check out Kim Kardashian's behind."
It's in his books, too: "Yet despite all they accomplished, they were never at peace," Albom writes in his 2012 novel The Time Keeper. "They constantly checked their devices to see what time it was."
It may seem retrograde, but his message has long resonated with audiences. His publisher claims his books have sold over 35 million copies worldwide; all of his books from Morrie onward have been No. 1 best-sellers. (Presto entered the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list this week at No. 4.) The Oprah Winfrey–produced made-for-TV movie of Morrie had an audience of 25 million when it aired on ABC in 1999, and won three Emmys; in 2004, the adaptation of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, again on ABC, was the most watched TV movie of the year.
Albom has no children of his own and visits the orphanage — one of 10 charities that he runs; the rest are in Detroit — one weekend a month, sleeping in one of the bare-bones guest rooms. This weekend, his wife of 20 years, Janine, is home with Chika, a 5-year-old girl from the orphanage with a brain tumor for whom the couple have been caring, with their access to American medicine, for the last six months. Albom first came to Haiti in 2010, right after the earthquake that devastated the country and left the orphanage in disarray. He got a team of friends from Detroit to help him rebuild it, constructing a three-room schoolhouse and installing bathrooms and a working kitchen. Then he set out to retool the way the orphanage operated. There are now 40 children, boys and girls ranging in age from 3 to 13, who live there. The kids had never been to school — there's no free public education in Haiti — so Albom installed his sister Cara Nesser, a psychologist and educator, as the school director. She designed a bilingual French and English curriculum and hired Haitian teachers.
"Mitch is definitely a godsend from the way this place was," says the orphanage's head teacher, a 25-year-old Haitian-American woman named Anachemy Middleton. "They didn't have beds; they weren't eating three times a day."
Now, they seem transfixed by the simplest things — jumping on a trampoline, singing, playing for hours with a game that involves moving colored squares on a grid to make a pattern. No one's whining, no one is fighting over an iPad, no one is even listening to music with headphones. A group of boys have brought a container full of squishy little balls that grow when you put them in water to the table where we're sitting. "They'll stare at those things for like an hour," he tells me, "just watching them grow."
Bahare Khodabande for BuzzFeed News
I ask Albom if he's worried that the children are going to be too sheltered, growing up in this kibbutz-like utopia that has allowed them to flourish but is also wildly divergent from the way people live outside the steel gates.
"I think that's a worry of anybody who operates an orphanage," he says. "On the other hand, it's dangerous out there." He tells me that they take the kids on field trips, that they do charity runs at Christmas and Easter, that they have summer programs with other kids. "It's really important to get them socialized, because otherwise they're only going to have crushes on their brothers and sisters. So we're going to evolve and we're going to have to deal with puberty as an issue." He pauses to have a brief conversation with a visiting teenage girl whose family Albom helps support; she's having trouble in school.
"It's a balance between the real world," he says, watching the kids put their hands into the box of balls, "and keeping them as beautiful as they are and as untouched as they are."
Bahare Khodabande for BuzzFeed News
Albom, who was born in 1958, grew up in South Jersey and Philadelphia, the second of three children of an interior decorator mother and business executive father. (His mother, Rhoda, died in January.) He went to a Jewish day school and was active at his synagogue, Temple Beth Shalom, in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, where he was the frontman for what one classmate recalled as a "50s-style band called Lucky Tiger Grease Stick Band. ... For Jewish girls from South Jersey in the 1970s, Albom was our Mick Jagger."
After college at Brandeis University, Albom moved to New York and worked nights as a musician, volunteering at the Queens Tribune during the day. He eventually realized that he wasn't going to make it as a musician and enrolled in Columbia Journalism School. After a short-lived stint as a features writer and columnist at the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel, he took a job at the Free Press in 1985, at age 27 — and hasn't worked anywhere else full-time since.
Lucky Tiger Grease Stick Band
Courtesy Mitch Albom
"I was offered to work at the New York papers and the L.A. papers, I was offered to work for the national things when they started, I was offered to work for ESPN, I was offered to work for some of the networks," he says. "I kept saying, No, I'm happy here, I like where I am, I like where I live, and eventually they stop asking because they say, he's not going anywhere, and they're right, I'm not."
But it's his books that have made him truly famous, to the point where everyone feels like they've read a Mitch Albom book — everyone has an idea about him, whether or not they've actually read his work. It all started with 1997's Tuesdays With Morrie, which his publisher says is the best-selling memoir of all time. It's the story of Albom reconnecting with his college professor Morrie Schwartz in the 14 weeks before Schwartz died, and how Albom — then, at age 37, obsessed with work, money, and material things — learned that there was more to life than the big house on the hill, to cherish our loved ones, to be charitable and good, to try to leave this life with no regrets. In addition to the TV movie, it's also been made into a Broadway play and has been translated into 42 languages.
Albom and Oprah in 2007.
George Burns
When Morrie came out, Albom had already been a sports columnist at the Detroit Free-Press for 12 years and had written two popular sports books — a biography of legendary University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler and The Fab Five, about the Michigan basketball team. But Morrie put him on another level. Suddenly he was a true star, appearing on Oprah, being played by Hank Azaria in the TV movie adaptation, traveling the world promoting the book. And it made him wealthy, in a long-struggling city and a restive newsroom that had just endured a brutal strike.
Schwartz, says Albom, told him he had an obligation to use his platform for good. "He said, 'You've been given a voice that you need to use for more than just aggrandizing yourself,'" says Albom. Thus his 10 charities and his five No. 1 best-sellers since Morrie, all concerned with similar Big Life Questions. (The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto, his sixth post-Morrie book, came out Nov. 10.)
Tuesdays With Morrie with Hank Azaria and Jack Lemmon.
Everett
In the novel Five People You Meet in Heaven, an everyman named Eddie dies in a freak accident at the carnival where he's worked for decades, and when he goes up to heaven, he meets five people whose lives he affected in ways he never realized. In For One More Day, a washed-up ex–baseball player decides he's going to kill himself, but then he encounters his dead mother and gets to spend one more day on earth with her. In The First Phone Call From Heaven, residents of a small town in Michigan start receiving calls from their dead friends and relatives.
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto is about a now-dead musician in the vein of Frankie Avalon meets Elvis Presley, whose fable-like life story is told through the omniscient narrator named...Music. It's probably his most ambitious book — for one thing, it's more than twice the length of most of them, clocking in at 489 pages, and for another, it features a wide-ranging cast of characters, including oral histories about the made-up Presto from real musicians like Wynton Marsalis, Mat Kearney, Darlene Love, John Pizzarelli, and Ingrid Michaelson, all of whom worked with him on an accompanying soundtrack of covers and original songs in the style of the fictional Presto. "I really love the whole 'Is he real, is he not real' thing, like intertwining him into these true stories," says Michaelson, who recorded a song called "Our Secret" for the album. "It's like Forrest Gump but with music. That's kind of how Mitch explained it to me in the beginning."
With Wynton Marsalis and wife Janine
Courtesy Mitch Albom
Albom's books bring to mind the 1974 Harry Chapin song "Cat's in the Cradle," the song about a father who is too busy with work to spend time with his son, and so his son grows up and in turn starts to ignore his father, and his father realizes, too late, that this is learned behavior, and that you can't get back that time you spent in the office when you should have been spending time with your loved ones.
That theme is present in all of his books; take this exchange between the baseball player and his mother in For One More Day: "I wish we'd done this before, Mom, you know?" "You mean before I died?" My voice went timid. "Yeah." "I was here." "I know." "You were busy."
Or this exchange from The Time Keeper: "There is a reason God limits our days." "Why?" "To make each one precious."
Simple messages, simply delivered: "I don't think character first or plot point first," Albom tells me. "I tend to think big theme." For Five People You Meet in Heaven, he says, "I just kind of concocted this whole world out of the theme that everybody affects somebody." For Frankie Presto, Albom says, he was influenced by his time playing music starting in high school. "It was in my head, that the relationships you have in a band are paralleled by the relationships you have in your life. And somewhere in my head popped this sentence: 'Everybody joins a band in this life.' And that became a theme."
Everybody affects somebody. Everybody joins a band in this life. These are not complicated themes — they're basically just infinite variations on It's a Wonderful Life — and so it's not surprising that in certain circles Albom has become a cultural touchstone himself, shorthand for a book or movie that is sentimental, possibly emotionally manipulative, and definitely oversimplified if not cliché.
Posts
Mitch Albom's Great Experiment