When I was a doctoral student at Stanford, a twenty-six-year-old woman, Amy Biehl, who had graduated with a BA in international relations and had taken a Fulbright scholarship to research women's rights and fight segregation in South Africa, was pulled from her car and stabbed to death by a mob in Guguletu township, near Cape Town. It happened two days before she was coming home to be reunited with her family and her long-time boyfriend in California. She didn't know that he was planning to ask her to marry him. It was a tragedy, one that unnerved several people close to me, especially parents of children just about her age. They tried to put themselves in the heads of her parents, an effort that was agonizing. Two years later, Amy's parents returned to the township where she was killed and met with some of the killer's families to console them.
To console them?
Four young men had been sentenced for eighteen years for Amy's murder. The Biehls came to witness their testimony in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, during which the four men expressed remorse and pleaded for amnesty. The Biehls supported their release. They were able to bury their anger, hurt, and hatred.
Amy's father died shortly after that trip, but Amy's mother returned to South Africa yet again, this time to forgive one of the four killers, a man named Ntobeko Peni. He saw himself as a young freedom fighter, growing up poor and segregated in South Africa's townships, taught from childhood that whites were the enemy. But she didn't just forgive him. She gave him a job, and with a job, a future. He works as a guide and peer educator for HIV / AIDS awareness at the Amy Biehl Foundation, which has programs in townships outside Cape Town. He also travels the world with Amy's mother to tell their story of forgiveness and reconciliation. Amy's mother says that Ntobeko is part of her family now.
This might appear at first glance as an extreme example, and few of us would aspire to hold the reservoir of forgiveness that Amy's mother seems to have. But research suggests that we can learn from her.
Taken from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
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