RUHENGERI, Rwanda -- In another era, say only a decade or so earlier, Alice Nikuze and Eugene Shyaka would have made an utterly unremarkable couple.

But this was the end of 1997, and they were proposing to their families that they get married, which most certainly proved they were fools in love.

In a union rare since the genocide, Tutsi Eugene Shyaka married Hutu Alice Nikuze. The birth of the first of their three children helped ease family dissent.

Rare is the Tutsi who marries a Hutu these days, as a union across the lines has become a social and psychological obstacle in a country struggling to recover from its apocalypse. The wounds still fester from the genocide of 1994.

The betrayal that the genocide represented was deep and all-encompassing, to the point where husband killed wife. And so, only three years after the country's decimation, the announcement from Nikuze, -- she is Hutu -- and Shyaka -- he is Tutsi -- of their plans for marriage was not exactly well received. Some relatives were indignant -- his more than hers. Friends were almost uniformly appalled, some of them attributing the announcement to temporary insanity and threatening to put a stop to such foolishness.

"My uncle asked me, 'In this entire district, can't you find someone else?' says Shyaka, 42. "He did not raise ethnicity directly, only in a roundabout way. But everyone understood what he meant."

Like millions of other Hutu who feared Tutsi reprisals after the defeat of the genocidal regime, most members of Nikuze's extended family had fled to the Congo, and only her immediate family and a few uncles and aunts were around for the announcement. This helped reduce the strength of the opposition which, she says, did not include her parents.

"My immediate family had no problems with it at all," Nikuze, 32, says. "If they'd expressed any reservations -- I respect my mother very much -- then I wouldn't have gone ahead with it. But some older relatives, their minds were closed against it. When you asked for a reason, they offered none by way of explanation."

In volume and intensity, the objections raised by Shyaka's friends and family were more significant. His mother was silent, offering neither support nor opposition. But it was his father, who had fled Rwanda with his family after the first anti-Tutsi pogrom of 1959, who eventually saved the day.

"Luckily I have a very understanding father who is very open-minded," says Shyaka, who grew up a refugee in neighboring Uganda. "He said if there was genuine love between us, he saw no reason to stop it."

Throughout Rwanda's history, intermarriage was common between Hutu and Tutsi, so that today it often is difficult to tell one group from another. Typically the Tutsi are characterized by more than average height, slender build and aquiline features common to groups sprinkled throughout East and West Africa. The Hutu tend to be shorter and broad-featured, also typical of groups throughout Africa. The commingling over time produced a substantial number of Rwandans who could "pass" either way, and errors in classification led to many unintended killings -- and lucky escapes -- during the genocide.

The suspicion that forms a by-product of the genocide has made intermarriages today extremely rare. Even the brave few who have scaled the social barrier are loath to draw attention to themselves, particularly in an environment where trumpeting one's ethnic identity is seen as an assault on the country's very existence. The government's mantra, in reaction to the genocide, is: Everyone's a Rwandan, neither Hutu nor Tutsi.

But group identity cannot be so easily wished away by official proclamation. "Government says you must be Rwandan first, after which you can be anything else," says Florien Ukizemwabo of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights. "But this is not in everyone's hearts."

A shopkeeper in this town at the foot of the Virunga range, home of mountain gorillas, Nikuze met her future husband in 1997 at the provisions store she runs. He kept coming back, and it soon became clear that he was hanging around not just so he could buy canned milk.

Negotiations with family and friends led to moments of indecision.

"Sometimes I thought I might be making a big mistake," Shyaka readily admits. "And when my uncle objected, it also created doubts in me."

As for Nikuze, she was more afraid than reticent -- scared of potential attack by Hutu extremists who were still launching cross-border raids at the time, and who might regard her as consorting with the enemy. This was not mere paranoia: while attending high school in the early 1990s, her name appeared on a school list of collaborators simply, she says, because she had lots of Tutsi friends.

But all anxiety and fear eventually gave way by the wedding date, Jan. 17, 1998, and friends and family, including most of the objectors, were in attendance. The birth shortly thereafter of Mariella Uwicyeza, the first of their three children, won over any holdouts. Such occasions are a time of great feasting and gift giving in Rwanda, and old animosities and resentments tend to be set aside.

The children, finally, are the only hope of this damaged country, Nikuze says.

"I have hope that our children will live in harmony with other children, that they will be brought up in ways that children before them were not," she says. "In the past the children were taught in school to hate. That is no longer the case."