In 1994, Clemantine Wamariya and her 15-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety. They did not know if their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was 12, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Claire, who for so long had protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased.