PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI —This month, Playboy’s, Miss May 1983, Susie Scott Krabacher, has released a memoir wherein she discusses her mission to save unwanted Haitian children. In Angels Of A Lower Flight: One Woman’s Mission To Save A Country…One Child At A Time, Krabacher tells of her journey, starting with her poor childhood in Alabama, going on to her time as a Playboy centerfold, and ending in the present. Krabacher is founder of the Mercy and Sharing Foundation — an organization that provides food, shelter, education, and health care to thousands of children in Haiti’s slums. Krabacher also set up the nation’s first hospital ward for abandoned infants.

“There were rats the size of Chihuahuas,” Krabacher told the Associated Press of her first trip to the hospital ward. “They would run all over the place and bite the children. It was horrible.”

For her work, Krabacher has been made an honorary Haitian citizen and she is a 2004 recipient of the Rose Award from the late Princess Diana’s organization, which supports work helping the world’s poor.

For more on Krabacher’s work, visit HaitiChildren.com.