“Michaela DePrince was little more than a toddler when she saw her first ballerina – an image in a magazine page blown against the gate of the orphanage where she ended up during Sierra Leone’s civil war. It showed an American ballet dancer posed on tip toe. … She wished “to become this exact person. … I saw hope in it. And I ripped the page out and I stuck it in my underwear because I didn’t have any place to put it.”