Paper short abstract:

Exploring healing experience in post-genocide Rwanda, the research observed a mutual-saving group and reported that local healing experience was oriented toward a future, which took place as members recovered and integrated different social times through materialistic, bodily, linguistic activities.

Paper long abstract:

'Time' is an important notion in discussing human suffering and healing. In the field of war-related mental health, some medical anthropologists reported that healing experience is oriented toward a future in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is divergent from Western trauma psychotherapy that focuses on the past memory and its influence on the present. Why is their healing experience future oriented? How do material and linguistic activities relate to it? With these questions, this paper discusses findings from ethnographic observation of a mutual-saving group, ikibina, in post-genocide Rwanda. The findings noted that ikibina facilitated trust and reconciliation through mutually saving money and helping with everyday-life matters. Members created social time through counting saved money and days for the next meeting, which lead them to leave the wounded past and go forward toward a future. Their future-oriented healing then continued to the following generations in the cyclical views of life and death. One female Hutu ex-prisoner gave a material gift to a male Tutsi member, imagining that his offspring would remember her with it, which healed her profound isolation. Meanwhile, he also experienced healing since she invited him to her family's wedding ceremony, gusaba, through which he remembered when he had invited her to his own gusaba before the war and sealed his wounded war time. The paper highlights that their future-oriented healing took place by recovering and integrating different social times through materialistic, bodily and linguistic activities.