What Reconciliation Actually Looks Like in a Divided Village
It rarely looks like a ceremony. More often it looks like two men agreeing to walk the same path to the same water point, and keeping to it.
The dispute had been running for eleven years. It began, as these things often do, over something small and legible — a boundary, a few metres of ground between two family plots — and then it accumulated. Insults. A damaged fence. A wedding nobody from the other side attended. By the time our partner church asked whether we could help, the original argument was almost beside the point.
What made it more than a private quarrel was the water. The village's only functioning borehole sat on one side of the divide. Families from the other side were walking forty minutes to a seasonal stream instead, and in the dry months that stream was not safe.
Nobody wanted a ceremony
There is a version of reconciliation work that is mostly theatre: a public gathering, speeches, a handshake, photographs. It can be genuinely meaningful. It can also be a performance that everybody agrees to for an afternoon and then abandons on the walk home.
Our partners here had learned to be suspicious of it. So the first six months involved no gathering at all. Two trained mediators — both from the village, both trusted by one side and tolerated by the other — simply had conversations. Separately. Repeatedly. Mostly listening.
“We did not start by asking them to forgive. We started by asking each of them to tell us what happened, and then we asked again the next month, because the story changes when someone believes you are actually going to listen to it.”
The first agreement was very small
When the two families eventually met, they did not resolve the boundary. They agreed on something far more modest: that children from either side could use the borehole, accompanied, on alternate mornings.
It sounds like almost nothing. It was the first thing either family had agreed to in over a decade, and it held. Four months later they extended it to adults. A year later the two eldest sons repaired the fence together — not as a symbolic act, but because it needed repairing and it was easier with two people.
What we have learned to expect
- Progress arrives in disproportionately small units. A shared task matters more than a stated apology.
- Local mediators succeed where outsiders cannot, because they will still be there when it goes wrong.
- Material stakes — water, land, a market stall — are usually the lever. Address them and the relationship follows.
- Some processes do not resolve. We plan for that honestly rather than pretending otherwise.
Why this is programme work, not a side activity
It would have been possible to solve the water problem by drilling a second borehole. It would have been faster, more fundable, and easy to photograph. It would also have entrenched the division permanently in infrastructure, and left the village with two things to maintain instead of one.
This is the argument for taking reconciliation seriously as development practice rather than as pastoral garnish. A broken relationship is a material problem. It determines who can use what, who trades with whom, whose children go to school. Repairing it is not a supplement to the practical work. Very often it is the practical work.
Written by
Field Programmes Team
Ministry of Reconciliation
Reports and reflections written by the programme staff who work most closely with our partner churches and communities.
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