Posted November 11, 2022
Diary thoughts, halfway through Germany during my CBYX year abroad
Positive Host Mom and Covid Lockdowns
“I’m pregnant” is the text I received from my host mom on my train ride home from Austria. The message included a photo of her test, a stick with two positive blue lines on it. My host mom, Julia, is single and has never mentioned anything about seeing anyone. Making me confused where this came from since we’re close enough to talk about these things. I was mainly worried for her sake of dealing with another kid. Being in the house with a 9 year old, got exhausting at times. But I took a closer look and read what was printed at the beginning of the stick, being, “COVID ANTIGEN TEST”. I sighed in relief and texted back “Thank god, lol, I thought you were actually pregnant”. I put my phone down and looked out the window. I thought to myself a few moments later and realized…the test is still positive. “YOU HAVE COVID??”
The house is huge. Four stories high, filled with art, collections and is incredibly orderly. Her host mom is the director of the entire waste management in the city and lives alone as her husband passed and her two kids moved out of the house. My room upstairs was next to the other guest room where her friend Victoria was staying. Victoria is a costume designer for theater and was visiting Nora’s host mom for a week as they were heading out to hike around a beautiful rock formation called, Bastei. Victoria was awesome. She was incredibly funny, so sweet, and showed us the music of her son who was a musician and had a voice like Sam Smith. The two of them were gone for the majority of the time so we had the house to ourselves.
One evening, Nora and I invited a couple people over from our program, some who were living in our city, others who were visiting. We all got the news that morning that our state in Germany was entering another lockdown. Meaning gyms were shut, restaurants and bars were closing at 8 pm and any events regarding gathering were prohibited. It was news we heard before and knew was coming but with the added tense feeling of us not having an internship ready for our next phase of the program, it made us all feel simply jaded.
Thanksgiving in Germany
Being in Germany on a scholarship during the pandemic means that you have to learn to cope with loneliness of being in another country as a foreigner while also fulfilling scholarship duties. Both require creativity to keep you happy, busy, and out of your room as much as possible.
We started by ensuring that the first American holiday fast approaching was celebrated as well as possible. This was Thanksgiving. My host mom loves a party, even after recovering from Covid the day before, she accepted our 14 person guest list. This included our friends from our program dispersed all over Germany, a cohort’s German roommate, my program mentor in the city, and his 9 year old daughter who kept my little host sister very happy. The food distribution was settled on a potluck-based system. While one showed up with four beers only for themselves and another brought their appetite, the rest cooked fully in Nora’s kitchen and pilgrimaged their way onto a bus and then an 8-minute walk, food in hand, to my house.
The spread was laid on two tables. There was a casserole, mashed potatoes, salad, rotisserie chicken (since they don’t really eat turkey here), sweet potato with marshmallows, green beans, desserts, and a crowd screaming mac and cheese. The night ended in rounds of eirliquor the German equivalent to eggnog with alcohol and everyone spent the night bellies full and happy to be in everyone’s company.
Volunteer Hours from a Dating App
Next on our list came finding 40 volunteer hours under covid lockdowns. I was ready to be the photographer and run the social media of my host sister’s choir concerts but all were canceled with the lockdown. I needed something else.
One late night curious brows on a dating app, had me come across a 7-foot-tall basketball player in a city about three hours away from me. He was half Cameroonian and half German and since I’ve never seen 7 Feet in real life, I swiped on him, we both matched and started talking. Dating apps are based on location and mainly only show you people in your area. The guy told me we matched because he was in town visiting his grandma. His grandma is a German lady in her 80’s, her husband from Cameroon died and when she was about to follow her son’s move to go back and live in Cameroon, he passed suddenly, forcing her to return to Leipzig. Every month her grandson, Ian, takes a trip to Leipzig and spends a weekend with her but the majority of the time she’s alone in her apartment. I knew this could be the volunteering I needed. I offered to be the person who could just hang out with her twice a week, cooking her food, playing cards and to ease some of that loneliness. And for the past two months, that’s what I’ve been doing.
Would I say it’s as cute as it sounds – no. She’s very depressed and lonely and cries a lot. She can’t move without a walker so she never goes outside especially during this winter season. She lives in a semi-independent nursing home and while home nurses check-in and help with basic cleaning. That and a few friends is about all the human interaction she gets. She always tells me ‘Paige,’ but pronouncing my name as peach, “du freust mich” meaning, you make me so happy. I have been reading this book called, “Tuesdays with Morrie” where a former student of a professor named Morrie was pronounced with ALS and is slowly dying from the disease. The story was captured from the student’s point of view, where every Tuesday he would visit Morrie and Morrie would in his last days give his final lessons as a teacher but surrounding the topic of life and accepting death. As part of the book, Morrie said that he doesn’t know if he could’ve been as accepting and unspiteful of his future if it wasn’t for his family and the people he had around him. And I think that’s what Oma (German for Grandma) is missing. A family by her side. I understood this and I really felt how sad this could be. So if I can be there to redirect the conversation to something that isn’t about her saying how lonely she is and I leave with her in a better mood, I’m happy to spend my time doing so.
Side note – me and her grandson aren’t together for reasons based on an unexciting personality but he’s still a nice friend.
Christmas Time
As the Christmas count down began, I was gifted a Chocolate Advent Calendar and my friend Nora was gifted a new place to live – our living room couch. A couple days after Thanksgiving, she had a falling out with her host mom. As I mentioned earlier about how orderly the house was, her personality was a direct reflection of this. But to the 10th degree. To give an example, when loading her dishwasher, it must be forks, spoons, and knives in that order all facing open-faced towards you, and if it wasn’t like that you would get scolded. Nora adapted her footsteps to be in line with this lady and to meet all her standards, but after two months it was nearly impossible to please her. She came home to yet another hostile encounter concerning something that was out of place and the next morning Nora gathered her things and left a note saying she could no longer live with her. My host mom Julia generously took in Nora until she could find her own student dorm in the city but most openings weren’t until the new year so she stayed on the couch and part of our family until then.
Nora became my host sister’s best friend, we studied for our classes together and took turns cooking dinners. As Christmas rolled around, the four of us went to Julia’s parent’s house in Brandenburg, a city about two hours from Leipzig. In Germany, they celebrate Christmas on the 24th so we opened all our presents and had a traditional German dinner of wurst (sausage) and potato salad. They included a lot more sides of salads and pasta and falafel so the dinner was really delicious. The whole weekend was filled with honestly great food, desserts, walks around the neighborhood, and board games. For a trip where Julia told us to brace ourselves for possible drama, everyone was very pleasant and I had a great time.
My 82 Year old Running Partner
My gym has been closed for the past three months. So I’ve been forcing myself to run outside and now I have an 82 year old running buddy I met at the park. It has been a very nice relationship. We began this routine of meeting about twice a week and it was the start of a really nice friendship. We exchanged stories about each of our lives, and each run took me to a new part of the city I never explored before. Then things got a little rocky. In one of our email exchanges, he was telling me about something and then ended his email by saying, “I’m glad to have met you, you are just my type.” I was confused by what this meant because my first interpretation was this was a flirtatious remark. However, it didn’t make sense for Horst as he has been nothing but pleasant and respectful towards me. He was always safe and kind. But when I turned to my friends for a second opinion, they were more skeptical and were convinced that this was not an error in translation, but rather an unwanted approach. The next morning we staged an intervention to end our friendship.
At 9:30 am I had a team of two friends: one for translation and the other for back up incase things got worse. And I was the bait. We jogged the 12 minutes to the park where we meet for training, and in the foggy grass field I saw Horst making his way to greet me with his normal big smile. We all said hi and I stood back and waited for them to introduce themselves under aliases. My friend later explained she felt disarmed by his kind soul, went off script and told Horst everything about herself. He walked with us as we headed to my designated spot at the park where I performed circuit workouts on the park bench. He was keeping us laughing and making conversation with the three of us when my friend, who was fluent in German, separated him from the group. She tells him that the last email was inappropriate and that he must leave me alone and to not bother me anymore when he sees me. Horst got very confused and embarrassed about the confrontation and simply says, “I wish you well Paige” in the saddest way possible and walks away in the same manner. An excerpt from my journal wrote,
Like the sitcom my life is, before I was able to say anything back to him, two blind people walk in the gap left between him leaving and where we were standing. They were asking for help to get back to the walking trail. I helped redirect them while the ache in my heart hurt for Horst.
Later that night I felt incredibly bad about the whole thing. I have never felt unsafe around Horst and I still felt his comments were not intended to be harmful. I thought our friendship was worth saving and I needed to explain why I felt the need to confront him. I sent him an email that night explaining how I felt his words were flirtatious and how my friends were just looking out for me. I told him I’m sorry if he felt embarrassed and it wasn’t my intent to hurt him. I said meet me at the park tomorrow morning to talk. The next day, he greeted me with a hug and a long breath of fast apologies and explanations that he never meant for his words to come across that way. He explained he felt terrible when my friends called him weird, and hopes I will never see him in this light. He helped me understand the misunderstanding by saying “Paige I am 82 years old, I am from a different generation than you and when I say you are just my type, I mean your character. You are the kind of person I want to have in my life because of the person you are.” From there on we have continued our friendship of staying as running buddies and just today I had coffee and cake with him and his Hungarian wife as she told me what to see in my upcoming trip to Budapest.
Upcoming Internship Phase
The most important phase of this scholarship starts next month – the five month internship phase. The internship search was much more challenging than I expected. On my part, I had to do some reflecting on how I wanted to best use my time in Germany as a means of advancing my career. I come with a couple different skill sets in regard to journalism and film and I thought it would be best to settle on the internship that was similar to my last job because it would allow me to utilize all of my skill sets once again. So I decided to focus my time in finding an internship in the media department of an immigration nonprofit.
I felt that I had to be strategic at this point and put my efforts towards an organization that was relatively close to me, interesting and I believed in their work. And for me, that was an organization called, Mission Lifeline, a search and rescue ship that helps migrants crossing the Mediterranean ocean in search of refuge. My Betreuer (mentor in my city) is a documentary filmmaker and part-time reggae band member, who has many connections from his work. He told me that his band once performed and the fundraiser for Mission Lifeline and he gave me the email of the Executive Director. From there I was passed through a couple email chains that ultimately allowed me to have a coffee meet up with a person from their communications department. One Saturday morning in December, I got the call that they would love to have me on their team! Starting in February, I will be documenting the work of Mission Lifeline in the form of videos, graphic designs, and post writing that will be uplifted across their social media platforms. As rescue missions are very dangerous, the team doesn’t want to put me in harms way during the time of the mission. Instead, I will be documenting their work at the refugee camp in Lesvos, an Island in Greece, where many of the migrants are ported once saved from sea.
You Never Know Who You're Talking To
These last five months have taught me that it’s important to be open to new experiences and new people. You can never be sure of where that perfect place or perfect moment is or will come, so it’s best to seek out what you have around you and to shape it into what you want. With this, I’ve met a lot of strangers in my travels who always just seem to be good connections in some kind of way. Sometimes it’s as simple as the girl I met on a train in Berlin who knew of a great hair braider. Or maybe it’s the American guy I met at the bar of my Vienna hostel, who told me he would buy me as many drinks as I’d like since he was traveling around Europe from the money he made off suing his tech company after his co-worker punched him in the face. We get to talking and I tell him my dream job is to work at VICE news. He tells me his good friend is a producer there, gives me his number and a few weeks later I give her a call and it goes so well she tells me to reach out anytime for guidance or help in this career field. Basically, be open, because you never know who you’re talking to.
I’m in the process of creating my own youtube channel, documenting my experiences abroad, the people in my journey and any events I thought of as impactful. I wish I could’ve known what would come based off the directions I have taken in my life and I think sharing that is important to someone. In countless ways, watching the lives of others has been the inspiration for myself.
I’m still figuring out my next move after this program is over and I’m taking it one day at a time to figure that out. I was invited to the reunion of my dad’s Peace Corps group and hearing the words said about him makes me want to visit those who were part of his life. Once I return to the US I will be taking two weeks to spend traveling to see his friends and family and another two weeks to see my mom’s side of the family. Updates will come closer to departure!