Love's the Only House

If you want to hear a modern Romeo-Juliet, insert a post war atmosphere, and inter-ethnic love story, let me tell you one I heard today. As always the best stories (or most tragic, heartbreaking, eye opening…insert your choice word) come from the mental health office. And again, I tell them publicly because no one cares about confidentiality here, and I doubt you could come to my village and pin point these individuals. Today was one of those rare moments in the Rwandan mental health office when honest-to-God therapy takes place (look at past entries for my frustration about overmedicating and lack of rapport). Christine was holding separate interviews with a husband and wife.

I've become quite the expert on body language due to my poor language skills. So before I got the full, translated scoop this is what I noticed. The father was irate, at the end of his rope and throwing his hands up in the air. The mother was desperate, torn, hiding something, frightened.

This couple has two daughters. The younger of the two is being treated as a mental patient, which is how the family was introduced to our office. The daughter has no diagnosable problem aside from severe stress from familial conflicts.

It turns out the first daughter is involved with a boy. In the words of my coworkers, they are illegally married. This actually means they are not at all married but rather living together in SIN, hence the illegal part. The parents are furious. Not only are they 'playing house', but the daughter is pregnant.

The issue overshadowing all of that is the history of the families. The two families have been neighbors for generations. The real/imaginary ethnic lines in Rwanda divided them. Tension erupted and in 1994, some of the boy's family members killed some of the girl's relatives. As a result, the parents refuse to allow their daughter to enter into his family. They won't hold an introduction, another title for a dowry ceremony, completely stagnating the wedding process. On top of that, the father forbids his wife and second daughter to associate with the first born. They aren't even allowed to greet her on the street. (Here is a good time to remind you how small my village is.) The wife has felt threatened by the level of rage the father feels. Sometimes she refuses to sleep in the house out of fear. The wife wants to be there for her daughter, yet her husband may kill her if she disobeys him.

This story just amazes me. Even if these two young people do not remember the atrocities that occurred when they were small, they were combating the animosity between their families that they were raised with. It reminds me of a speech I heard during genocide memorial ceremonies last year. The speaker was stressing how the hatred had to be stopped. It mustn't be passed along to the children. The history had to have an end point. And then here are these two young people who were raised to hate each other, and yet they didn't. Somewhere in their hearts they couldn't taint the imagine of each other because of what their families told them or what the country had believed. They recognized that that was another person's baggage, another person's views, another person's issue to forgive. They didn't make it a part of their present.

After dwelling on all this, two questions came into my mind (and yes, this is where I wouldn't mind you commenting some of your own thoughts, hint, hint):
1. When does a country stop being post-conflict? Clearly 16 years isn't enough. Is it a generation span? Is the US successfully beyond post-conflict status? What about people who continue to fly the Confederate flag and those that reenact Civil War scenes?
2. How much of an amazing impact do your neighbors have on you? Don't underestimate the immediate environment you have your children grow up in or the boy next door.