We first crossed paths in 2007. I was in 8th grade at a Jewish Day School in Chicago; Clemantine was a student at New Trier High School, located in a Chicago suburb. She had won Oprah's Elie Wiesel essay writing contest a year earlier, and I had watched on TV as Oprah reunited Clemantine with her family. Seventeen months later, I saw her in person.
I was with my family at a luncheon for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I don't remember much about the event, but I will never forget the moment Clemantine got up in front of that room of over 2,000 people and spoke about her life as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Her voice was slow and smooth; you could tell that she was thinking about the right way to enunciate each syllable. Moved by her speech, I decided to contact Clemantine. "You carried yourself with such confidence and poise. I will always think of you whenever I give a speech," I wrote. "I wish to one day hear your story."
She came to speak at my school a few weeks later.
I have heard Clemantine's story in many iterations, so reading the piece she recently wrote for Matter felt familiar. It also made me reflect on my relationship with Clemantine and prompted me to reach out to her. When I talked to her last week, she said that she wrote about her life for Matter in order to universalize her experience, so that everyone -- anyone -- would be able to cry or laugh or be shocked by her words. "It's about humans and the struggle of having broken families and...being misunderstood," she told me.
As we talked about her writing and her life in San Francisco and how we haven't seen each other in forever, I began thinking about why Clemantine and I have remained friends over the years. She has this ability to tell her story without guilting those who have not experienced the same struggle. "We're all trying," she said, hinting at the reality that life is hard for everyone, just in different ways.
We are friends, yet there are few similarities between Clemantine's story and my own. She has "lived many lives," from wandering in and out of refugee camps around Africa to sitting on the U.S. Holocaust Museum's board. I have no such range of experiences. I grew up coming home each night from school or tennis practice or ballet lessons to a home-cooked family dinner. I have never gone hungry or had to sleep outside or found myself without a pair of shoes. I have lived a life full of privilege. But Clemantine brushes our differences aside and says, "I did not grow to be the person that I am alone. It's been about people like you...reaching out to me." Her humility reminds me that growth is a process that demands support from others.
Clemantine's capacity to empathize with the human heart is mind-boggling. She remains present in conversations about genocide even when people don't understand her pain. She models the way human beings should treat each other and asks the questions our leaders need to be answering.
Clemantine is inspiring, yet if there's one thing I've learned from her, it's that she wants her story to transform rather than touch. In Clemantine's words, "My hope in doing what I do every single day -- in a speech, on stage, in writing -- is to give people an opportunity to really investigate the way they're living their lives."
The thing that always surprises me most when I talk to Clemantine is her human-centric outlook on life. She lived through one of humanity's darkest moments and still believes that people possess the power to better the world. Take this question she posed when I spoke with her last week: "Those who are living in refugee camps, in slums, in mansions in corners of the world, is the way they're living their lives welcoming of others?"
I paused to think about what my own answer would be. Am I living in a way that's welcoming of others?
Are you?