Auf Wiedersehen
by Brooke Burrows, Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program (CBYX)
Elke Oberfrank decided to take a chance on me. I was a 15-year-old American whose dyed red hair was as vivid as her thickly smeared eyeliner was dark. I was an exchange student six weeks into my stay in Germany before needing to switch host families. I was a risk, but as Elke would later tell me over soft cheese and her homemade quince chutney (the thought of which still sends rumbles to my stomach) she knew what it was like to have a daughter living abroad. She knew that sometimes the chemistry just wasn’t right within a family, host or not, and that I had good tastes in books and was from the mountains. She was a librarian living in the Siebengebirge who had a propensity for alliteration: It seemed completely natural to her that “Baby” Brooke Burrows from Brevard would come to live in Brüngsberg with Elke, Eckhard, Eike, and Eva.
That was eight years ago and these days I find myself waking early to make coffee, grounds boiled rich and thick in a metal jazva, for my Armenian hostmother Shushan. We cut thick chunks of salty homemade cheese to lay across our lavash, a traditional flat bread, and I smear it heartily with Shushan’s apricot jam. Different flavors, but the ritual feels familiar and for a few brief moments an intersection of worlds exist inside me. From the balcony, Shushan and I look out at the sharp, rocky faces of the Vayots Dzor mountains that surround us. If I squint just a bit in the morning sun, they transform first into the rounded hills of the Rhine Valley before growing, bristling up into the tall trees of an Appalachian forest. I chart my journey through the lines of these landscapes and through the tastes, smells, and textures that help ground me to a present tense. I am a Peace Corps Community Development Volunteer and every morning I take the same gravelly road up to my office. Another cup of coffee and my day unfolds, always unpredictable: A trip to sell saplings to farmers, an English lesson on media bias, a workshop on conflict transformation, a round of toasts for a colleague’s birthday. I am part of a local Armenian NGO working towards social and economic development in rural communities. I am still curious about the expanses and edges of the world, just as I am determined to help make them a bit softer. I am once again a host daughter, a host sister, and the weird American who likes running in the mornings and drinking water straight from the tap. I am also leaving in three months.
This is when the future tense sneaks up. I will head back to my small town under the Blue Ridge Parkway just in time to see the new fall colors ripple across the trees. I will sit on my grandmother’s screened in porch and she will tell me about how crazy the world has become. I will agree, but not for the reason she thinks. For her, crazy means too big and too full of foreboding strangers. For me, crazy means too small and too full of family and friends tangled together like headphones left overnight in a pocket. I will write graduate school applications in an attempt to figure out another place from which I can continue the ever frustrating, ever growing work of unraveling.
Originally published by CIEE as part of their alumni storytelling contest.
