Perfect pairs: friendship

How would any one of us cope without the love, warmth and support of close chums and confidantes? Josephine Brouard meets three pairs of very special friends.

Lily Nyamwasa, 34, and Robyn Bird, 40
It was the Rwandan genocide of the mid 1990s that brought Lily and Robyn together. Both now live in Australia and, despite the horror experienced at the time, they couldn’t be happier that they met.

Shortly after the mass killings took place in her home country, Lily was working as a translator for a United Nations envoy based in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Sharing an office with her was Robyn, an Australian Army photographer documenting the horrors of the genocide for the UN. Although they worked side by side, neither woman divulged how traumatised she was by what they were experiencing. The sharing came later, they admit today.

“Robyn’s mum would send her parcels from Australia and Robyn would share her TimTams with me,” Lily recalls. “The first thing I noticed about Robyn was her generosity. If she went on holiday she’d bring me back a beautiful scarf, even though we barely knew each other.”

Robyn remembers Lily as being graceful and elegant, but quite shy. “She’d lost both parents when she was young, and was the one that now held the family together; you got a sense she was used to coping on her own,” Robyn says.

The pair worked together for some months before Lily moved to Australia with an Aussie boyfriend. Before Lily left Rwanda, Robyn made her promise to get in touch when she herself returned to Australia. “Who could have known how much I would need her,” Lily muses. Just a few weeks after she arrived here, Lily and her boyfriend split up and she found herself stranded in Townsville, Queensland, with no money, job or friends. She was frighteningly alone.

Although many kind Australian families helped her in various ways, it was very tough. “I cried every single night of my first six months here,” remembers Lily. “Australia seemed a fantastic place, but I wanted a job. It was terrible to have to rely on charity all the time.”

A few months later, Lily called Robyn, who invited her to spend Christmas with her family in Brisbane. “When Lily told us what she’d been through since arriving in Australia, we invited her to live with us,” Robyn recalls, “Lily was too uncomfortable to take up our offer; it was only when my three-year-old niece begged her that she finally acquiesced.”

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