17 Jan 2022

With its expansion drive blazing on like a house on fire, the Dingwetsi Association of Botswana is ever so determined to reach every nook and cranny of Botswana, in pursuit of restoring  the dignity of  marriage institution.

Perturbed by the instability and the generally unhealthy environment that continues to prevail in most marriages, the association, a brainchild of one Ms Grace Silver came into being in 2012 and got legally registered three years later in 2015.

The diminishing dignity of the institution of marriage over the course of years, as evidenced by among others the ever-rising divorce statistics, forced the newly-founded institution to immediately get to work and contribute towards efforts to stem the tide of the dwindling fortunes of marriage. 

Herself a daughter-in-law in Tamasane, the Serowe-born Ms Silver had sounded a clarion call and rallied fellow daughters-in-law in the small village in the Tswapong area to form the Dingwetsi Association’s maiden branch.

With only five members at inception, the hard work of the founding members saw their numbers grow to 20 in the space of a couple of months, and the speedy growth of the organisation emboldened them to add pace to efforts to draw in more members.

Wives in Mookane, Mmanoko, Mogapinyana and Ratholo soon thereafter embraced the gospel as preached by the Tamasane branch and registered the second to the fifth branches, respectively.

That paved way for the association’s astronomical growth that followed in the subsequent years, and to date the Dingwetsi Association boasts of 58 branches  across the the country.

Whereas the responsibility of sustaining a healthy marriage does not lie with the wife alone, Ms Silver said  that wives had a critical role to play in ensuring that their marriages thrive and become the healthy environments that they ideally should be.

“We acknowledge women’s innate strength and we thus strongly believe that wives are capable of playing an instrumental role in diffusing instability and restoring sanity in their marriages,” she notes.

That notwithstanding, the association has over the years seen the marriages of some of its members suffer immense stress and some at times tottering right on the brink of divorce.

Indeed a few did end in divorce, she admits, but overall the intervention by the association has many a time assisted couples to turn their hopeless marital situations to happily-ever-afters.

“We shun divorce; hence our membership is not open to divorced individuals. And we teach our members that they should not be the ones initiating divorce since that is contrary to what we stand for. However, if a spouse divorces our member, we retain that member since the divorce would not have been at their behest,” Ms Silver explains.

Due to the complexity and diversity of the issues that its members often have to wade through in their marital journeys, the Dingwetsi Association draws its strength to help members sift through their problems from the fact that its membership comprises people from different professions and from varying walks of life.

It is these professionals on whose expertise the association counts when the need arises, and the outcome has in countless occasions been pleasing.

“We have social workers and trained counselors amongst us. The contribution of these people to restoring the marriages of fellow members over the years has been  invaluable,” she elaborates.

Ms Silver also cited several occasions in which the life experiences of members had helped salvage marriages of others within the association, cementing the adage that experience is indeed the best teacher.

Dingwetsi Association maintains a thriving and vibrant relationship with other stakeholders among them dikgosi and religious leaders, whose nature of work entails mediation.

Ms Silver reckons that with pastors carrying the responsibility to teach about the sanctity of marriage as espoused in  the Bible, their importance to the work of Dingwetsi Association cannot be over-emphasised.

Being also alive to women being more hard-hit by poverty compared to their male counterparts, plans are afoot in the association to crowd-fund so as to enable branches to embark on some income-generating ventures for the benefit of members.

Once established, members will have shares in the projects and will earn an income through the payment of dividends from the businesses.

Over the weekend in Moiyabana, members of the village’s year-old branch of the Dingwetsi Association converged to celebrate their first anniversary.

At the ocaasion, Kgosi Gosotwamang Keatshotse of Moiyabana hailed the noble intentions of the association and opined that its work would help lower the high rate of divorce; an ill that he said had become a pandemic in its own right.

To Serowe South Member of Parliament Mr Leepetswe Lesedi, the association is a source of hope for the institution of marriage.

His wish therefore is for the Dingwetsi Association to remain resolute in the quest to achieve its objectives and to remain unflinching in the face of whatever challenges it may encounter along the way. ENDS