Berlin Wall

Twenty years ago my German Grandma was down by the Berlin Wall chipping away a piece for us to remember something that was disappearing. In 2000, Roman and I were in Berlin running across the erased border, fresh in our relationship we weren’t even considering much the ease with which we could explore that amazing city. We were constantly reminded of the new world we lived in though. First, except for the truth that no matter the impossibilities, soul mates are always destine to meet, our relationship would have been logically impossible just 10 years before we met.

Roman and I also spent that summer in Cottbus. Cottbus is a city about 2 hours by train south of Berlin in what was Eastern Germany. We spent an amazing summer there helping out a community youth center for kids. Its basic premise was to provide a place for youth to have freedom to create and meet that was their own—not on the street. We worked in the camp helping build rabbit pins and anything else they needed while we explored the city. My German family has roots from Cottbus—they helped build and acted in the Staatstheater in the very early 1900’s.

An amazing thing from that international camp was that every participant went through some major revolution or war in their country-except me. We had Russian, Chechen, Slovak, Czech and Kurdish participants. In the picture below we are standing around the statue of Karl Marx and Fredrik Engles. That camp would have been surly impossible even to imagine 10 years earlier. Even the impossible can happen. It really is an interesting world.

There is a lot I still need to think about if you ask me what I think about the collapse of the Soviet Union. The impact it has had on my family is huge but at the same time distant for me. I only experience it through the piece of wall I can hold in my hand or the stories from Roman. But, I know it was major. It happened 20 years ago yesterday. Wow.