Citizens of the World

A 50-year friendship starts behind the Iron Curtain

I’ve had a friend in Germany since I was 15 years old. She was looking for an American pen pal, so she writes a letter in English and puts on the envelope: To A School, New Orleans, USA. This letter ends up in the main post office of New Orleans. They open it and when they see that it’s this young foreigner looking for a pen pal, they send it to the Times-Picayune newspaper. There’s a page for young people where they advertise the letter. I find it and I’m studying German, so I think, “This is so exciting!”

The return address is Deutsche Demokratische Republik. I show it to my German teacher and she asks, “Where did you get this from?” And I said, “It was in the newspaper, she’s from West Germany.” She said, “No she’s not. That’s East Germany.”

We wrote to each other for years and became friends. When I was on my exchange in Berlin, I visited her in the east. The law was that you had to cross back to the west by midnight, so I used to take an S-Bahn to the checkpoint the night before at 12:15 a.m. so we’d have 24 hours together before I had to return.  

I remember telling her at the time, “It’s so nice that you have people over to your home to party.” And she said, “That’s because you can’t do it out of the house.” The Stasi (East German secret police) had people sitting in cafes and bars listening, so a lot of the social life took place in people’s homes for fear of being spied upon.  

Years later, about two weeks after the wall fell, the doorbell rings and it’s her. I had tears in my eyes. I was speechless – and I’m very rarely speechless. We had always talked about how amazing it would be if she could come visit. But of course, she couldn’t. To have her standing in my apartment in West Berlin was phenomenal.  

We’ve been in touch for 52 years.

I come from an immigrant background. My parents are Ghanaian. I was born in Italy and then moved to the U.S. when I was 4. I was in first grade when 9/11 happened and I witnessed a lot of Islamophobia in New York City. I grew up around Muslim family and friends, but I didn’t know much about Arab Muslims and Islam itself. I chose to study in Dubai because I wanted to study Arabic and learn more about Islam and Middle Eastern history.

“That’s just what happens when you fall in love with someone from a different country.”

I met my husband about a week after I got here, and we’ve been together ever since. I had no intention of starting a relationship. I was there to better myself – study, make some friends, graduate and maybe come back to live and work if I really liked the experience. But when we saw each other in the club, it was like a spark. Time stopped and I couldn’t breathe. And we just hit it off. We kept talking the whole night, we didn’t leave each other’s side. After I went home, he messaged me to make sure I was safe. We went on our first actual date the next day.  

The language barrier was rough. We used Google Translate for the longest time because I was still studying and learning the language. But now I’ve exceeded him in language abilities, so we just always speak in Korean.

The dating culture here is that you are with your significant other all the time. And there’s this thing called skinship where you’re always in physical contact with your partner – always holding hands for example – just trying to make each other feel connected, and loved I suppose. So for him, when I had to come back to the States for eight months, that made it very difficult.  

It’s a double-edged sword marrying someone from another country because one partner is always going to have to make a sacrifice to be away from their network of friends and family. We started his green card process because he wants to come to the U.S. to live for a couple of years. We’re going to end up going back and forth, which is also difficult. But we’ll be OK.

“We were young and free and looking to experience new things.”

I formed some of my closest relationships while I was in Spain. I studied abroad in 2006 and I just got a text from a buddy of mine from the program asking if I can make it to his son’s 3rd birthday. There are six or seven of us from all different walks of life, and we’re still connected 17 years later now. Every time we get together there’s this magical energy of that six-month experience, like we’re kids again in those moments.