31 years ago I landed in Germany for the first time. Little did I know that it will lead me to a world of opportunities and life changing experiences. I had the coincidental luck to actually end up studying behind the Berlin wall as you would call it in nineteen eighty-eight and eighty-nine that means as an American with an American citizenship I actually went to an East German University for an entire year. I even went to Marxism Leninism classes it’s almost beyond belief that, that opportunity was there.

I automatically got connected with several different groups of people. First of all, I got connected to the academic world including the amazing students who had, had amazing opportunities in life already. One day I was singing in a bar and somebody spotted me and asked me to come to East Berlin and to try out to be in a band.I said yes and became a part of the alternative music world in East Berlin.

Every weekend I was actually getting to interact in East Germany on amazing different levels, I was singing in three different bands and two of them were bands that actually lost their authorization to seeing right before the wall came down. They became gardeners officially by the East German state and so I had this six degrees of separation where suddenly I was interacting on lots of different interesting levels. When the Berlin wall came down I ended up feeling the repatriation symptoms giving me a deep impression of the situation to be realized for the next years to come.

Now, I am living very successfully in Germany, I speak fluent German and I’m working as an intercultural consultant where I absolutely get to use all of that amazing background with my reconciled experiences & making the pain to pave a way for the happiness. So I am lucky, I get to use something that’s personally important for me in my work every day. That’s kind of an added bonus I think because people who work with me are like – “she had that experience, she brings it with her and she made it work.”