World Stories: Marrying into conflict

First broadcast July 2007

BBC World Service journalists come from every corner of the world. Balanced news reporting is their job - covering the news minute-by-minute is what drives them most of them time.

In this special series of programmes, ten BBC journalists tell stories that have a bigger message about life on our planet: emotive, human stories that humble us.

These world stories offer extraordinary insight across cultures. These are the stories our journalists have always wanted to tell.

Programme Eight: Marrying into Conflict

Two young women were once neighbours and school-mates in the Soviet Union. They expected to grow-up together and live similar lives, but this all changed with the collapse of the USSR in the early '90s.

Instead they were plunged into a long-standing conflict as one made her home in Lebanon, the other in Israel.

Separated by war, a firmly sealed border and ideology, they cook the same food, read the same books and tell the same stories to their children.

They still remember their native city and their old school vividly.

Can the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the two schoolmates, be narrowed by their common past? Or have the more recent memories of shelling, evacuation and suicide bombers erased everything they have in common?

Alexander Koliandre meets these two women and attempts to reignite their childhood memories.

Listen to all of the World Stories programmes

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