The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine WamariyaMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Girl Who Smiled Beads is a memoir by Clemantine Wamariya, who became a refugee in Rwanda as a child and later came to the United States. It's a story both of a child struggling to survive as a refugee, and a young woman struggling to adjust to a new world.
I picked up this book on recommendation from someone who works with refugee children at a nonprofit organization. She recommends it to those of us who volunteer so that we can get a small idea of what some of the kids we work with have gone through. Simply reading about an experience like living as a refugee will always be only a small window into the reality, but even that little gives us a bit more empathy.
The part of the story about Clemantine's days as a refugee described a sad, dangerous, desparate struggle for survival in terrible conditions. I more or less expected that, but expecting it doesn't make it any easier to read about people barely surviving on meager food handouts, children abandoned, unsanitary conditions, and all the other horrors of refugee life. Those of us in the developed world, in our comfort, tend to forget how awful things can be for people who simply had the misfortune to be born in the wrong place. It's good to be reminded occasionally, and hopefully jolted out of our apathy.
I was less prepared for the part of the story about Clemantine coming to the United States. Her life changed for the better, certainly, and there's no doubt she and her family were grateful, but it still was such a difficult experience. I knew in theory that the trauma of war and her refugee experience didn't disappear when she left Africa, but reading through repeated examples of how that trauma kept affecting her for years was still something of a shock. She describes a myriad of personal struggles that are completely foreign to those of us who haven't suffered through the same kinds of trauma.
And while plenty of people here in the United States provided help, there are also many examples of how Americans confused or frightened her with well-meaning gestures of assistance, or how things we take for granted grated against her instincts. Or how our reactions differed from hers - for instance, there's a brief story about 9-11, and how the extreme reaction of everyone around her was confusing. To her, that kind of terrible disaster was just part of life, another in a long line that she had seen, and she couldn't understand why it was such a shock to everyone else. It's a good lesson for those of us wanting to help, that we need to exercise empathy and do our best to understand when our actions or other circumstances cause confusion or misunderstanding.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads isn't an easy book to read, but I think it's an important one. Not just for those already involved with refugee families, but all of us with the good fortune to have avoided such experiences. Understanding their experience, even in a small way, is an important step in finding ways that we can be involved in a solution.
