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.”

Lily says she can never, ever repay the kindness, compassion and helping hand that she received, courtesy of Robyn and her family. “Robyn and her mother are beautiful, beautiful people,” says Lily simply. She says Robyn is more like a sister than a friend and she now calls Robyn’s mother, Irene, ‘Mum’.

Lily moved into Irene’s home in Bomaderry on the south coast of New South Wales and began travelling to Sydney for job interviews. After a while, she and Robyn started to talk about their experience in Rwanda. Robyn also spent a lot of time trying to set Lily up with friends, a job and a life. It took time, but eventually Lily got refugee status, financial help and work. By 2001, she had also met recruitment specialist Matthew Meszaros, whom she married four years later. “It was love at first sight,” says Lily. The couple now has a five-month-old son, James.

No-one could be happier for Lily than her true-blue friend, Robyn, who was discharged from the Army in 1999 with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of her time in Rwanda. Today Robyn lives in Rutherglen, Victoria, and is a happy stay-at-home mum to Chelsea, eight, and Jackson, four. “Lily and I are more than friends; we’re family,” says Robyn. “Lily is also the only person from another culture that I really know. I was her support in the beginning, but now we support each other. She’s the only one, for example, who understands my nightmares about Rwanda. I still have awful dreams in which I’m an African woman with a child, running to escape. Lily’s the only one who truly understands.”

Friendship Day

International Friendship Day is celebrated annually in several countries across the world, on the first Sunday of August. The next International Friendship Day will take place on 5 August 2007. The Friendship Page (www.friendship.com.au) has several suggestions for ways to celebrate this day, but why not take the opportunity to show your friends they’re special any day of the year?

• Write a card telling your friend how much you appreciate their friendship.
• Buy or make them a small present such as flowers and chocolates.
• Call friends you haven’t spoken to in ages.
• Make your friend a mixed CD of songs that define your friendship, or just those that you both like.
• Buy your friend a ticket to the theatre so you can enjoy a great show together.
• Host a dinner party for your closest friends. 
• Plan a special day with your friend – enjoy a picnic, go to the beach together or try a fun activity outdoors.

 

Words: Josephine Brouard. Photography: Andrew Lehmann. Hair & make-up: Ruth Sebire.