Clemantine Wamariya - The girl who smiled beads: a story of war and what comes after

The night before we taped the Oprah show, in 2006, I met my sister Claire at her apartment in a public housing unit in Edgewater, where she lived with the three kids shed had before age twenty-two, thanks to her ex-husband, an aid worker whod pursued her at a refugee camp. A black limo arrived and drove us to downtown Chicago, to the Omni Hotel, near where my sister used to work. I now cant think about that moment without also thinking about my own navet, but at the time all I felt was elated.

I was eighteen, a junior at New Trier High School, living Monday through Friday with the Thomas family in Kenilworth, a fancy suburb. I belonged to the church youth group. I ran track. Id played Fantine in the school production of Les Misrables. I was whoever anybody wanted me to be.

Claire, meanwhile, remained steadfast, herself, a seemingly rougher bargain. Unlike me, she was not a child when we got resettled in the United States, so nobody sent her to school or took her in or filled her up with resourcespiano lessons, speech therapists, cheerleading camp. Claire just kept hustling. For a while she made a living throwing parties, selling drinks and hiring DJs who mixed American hip-hop, the Zairean superstar Papa Wemba, and French rap. But then she learned it was illegal to sell liquor without a license and she started working full-time as a maid, cleaning two hundred hotel rooms a week.

All I knew about the show we were taping was that it was a two-part series: the first segment showed Oprah and Elie Wiesel visiting Auschwitz, God help us; the second featured the fifty winners of Oprahs high school essay contest. Like the other winners, I had written about Wiesels book Night, his gutting story of surviving the Holocaust, and why it was still relevant today. The book disarmed me. I found it thrilling, and it made me ashamed. Wiesel had words that I did not have to describe the experiences of my early life.

Id dictated my essay to Mrs. Thomas, as she sat in her tasteful Midwestern housegracious lawn, mahogany floorsat a huge computer that took up the whole desk. Clemantine, shed said, you have to enter. I just know youll win. Mrs. Thomas had three children of her own, plus me. I called her my American mother and she called me my African daughter. She packed my lunch every day and drove me to school.

In my essay I said that maybe if Rwandans had read Night, they wouldnt have decided to kill one another.

On the way to downtown Chicago, Claire and I had the inevitable conversationis this happening? this is so weirdwhich was as close as my sister and I got to discussing what had happened to our lives. If we absolutely had to name our past in each others presence, wed call it the war. But we tried not to do that, and that day we were both so consumed by all the remembering and willful forgetting that when we arrived at the Omni and the bellhop asked, Do you have any bags? we realized wed left all our clothes at home.

Claire took the L back to her apartment, where a friend was watching her childrenMariette, who was almost ten; Freddy, who was eight; and Michele, who was five. I stayed in the hotel room, lost.

Harpo Studios gave us each a $150 stipend for dinner. It was more than Claires monthly food stamp allowance. When Claire returned we ordered room service. We woke at 4:00 a.m. and spent hours getting dressed.

That day, for the show, the producers directed us to the huge studio. Oprah sat onstage on a white love seat, next to tired old Elie Wiesel in a white overstuffed chair. He was alive, old but alive, which meant the world to me. He kept looking at the audience, like he had a lot to say but there was no time to say it.

In this nice studio, in front of all these well-dressed people, Oprahs team played the video of Oprah and Elie Wiesel walking arm in arm through snow-covered Auschwitz, discussing the Holocaust.

Then the producers gave us a break. We sat in silence. Some of us were horrified and others were crying.

After that, Oprah said glowing things about all the winners of the essay contest except me. I told myself this was fine. Fine. I hadnt really gone to school until age thirteen, and when I was seven Id celebrated Christmas in a refugee camp in Burundi with a shoebox of pencils that Id buried under our tent so that nobody would steal it. Being in the audience was enough, right? Plus, I kept wanting to say to Oprah: