Previous
Claire
Rob is Claire’s husband and Mariette, Freddy, and Michele’s father. He’s an aid worker at the refugee camp in Burundi where Clemantine and Claire first stay after leaving Rwanda. He is young, handsome and well-dressed. He takes a liking to Claire and starts following her around, asking her to marry him. Although Claire doesn’t want to get married and have children at 16, she sees marrying Rob as a way out of poverty, and so she accepts his offer. After Claire marries Rob, she and Clemantine move to Zaire to live with his family. At first, Rob is a hard-working and devoted husband. But when the conflict escalates in Zaire and he becomes a refugee with Clemantine and Claire, he becomes surly and violent. He starts bossing Claire around and beating her. When he finds out Claire is pregnant with their second child, he sends her and Clemantine back to Rwanda alone to find their parents. He reconnects with them later in South Africa, but he continues to beat Claire and openly have extramarital affairs. When Claire hears of the opportunity for the family to immigrate to the United States, she signs Rob up too, hoping he’ll be better when times aren’t so hard. However, Rob continues to mistreat Claire in the United States until she finally leaves him.
Rob Quotes in The Girl Who Smiled Beads
The The Girl Who Smiled Beads quotes below are all either spoken by Rob or refer to Rob. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
That’s life in a refugee camp: You’re not moving toward anything. You’re just in a horrible groove. You learn skills that you wish you did not know: how to make a fire, how to cook maize, how to do laundry in the river and burn the lice on rocks. You wait, […]
But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close.
Get the entire The Girl Who Smiled Beads LitChart as a printable PDF.
Rob Quotes in The Girl Who Smiled Beads
The The Girl Who Smiled Beads quotes below are all either spoken by Rob or refer to Rob. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
That’s life in a refugee camp: You’re not moving toward anything. You’re just in a horrible groove. You learn skills that you wish you did not know: how to make a fire, how to cook maize, how to do laundry in the river and burn the lice on rocks. You wait, […]
But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close.
