I come from a long line of pioneers, builders of bridges between people, and so - privately and professionally, in intercultural communication and change management - this is what I love doing, and what I do best.
My Great-Grandmother built bridges half around the world with courage, my Grandfather survived Siberia building bridges with music and my Mother built bridges between people all her life with human kindness. Let’s start by telling the story of my Great-Grandmother, from whom I got a keepsake, a family heirloom, a coin that you have probably seen me wearing, because I wear it each day every day – for example in this picture.
It shows a fantastic bird on a tree spreading its wings and tail, a bird of paradise native to New Guinea on the other half of the globe, just north of Australia. It’s a Five Deutschmark coin from 1894. Germany, compared to other nations, had relatively few colonies and for a time, half of New Guinea was one of them.
My Great-Grandmother, when she was 22, packed a trunk and a travel-harmonium, boarded a ship and set out to Papua New Guinea to marry her fiancé, my Great-Grandfather, who, I believe, was building bridges – ok, it may have been buildings too – as a construction engineer.
She settled with her newly-wed husband in their home, cultivated the garden “everything was so fertile, you just had to squeeze a tomato to have instant fruits from the vine”, she’d tell us when I was little, and she had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood – a good quota in those days –, and her first-born was my Grandfather. I remember childhood pictures of him, produced on metal plates, riding a huge tortoise in the front yard, which consisted of enormous palm trees and ferns in front of a quaint Victorian house.
Because my Great-Grandmother was a very pious woman, she bonded with the native population by playing them religious songs on her harmonium, which is something that works like an accordion, but the size of a chest of drawers and powered by air pumped through pedals.
A lush life, perhaps, but very different from what she had left behind. After World War I, the German part of the island was given to Australia and she and her family moved back to Germany.
Whenever I think of the life she must have lived I can’t help thinking how courageous and adventurous she was, moving so far away from everything that she knew at a young age, leaving family members and friends behind, at a time where travel – and letters - took weeks on end by boat, no phone connection, without our post-modern conveniences of wifi, mobiles, pads and pods and instant connection.
And maybe part of that is why I relocated to Canada. I’ve come to think that after the fact, really. Sure, the differences between a Canadian and German life may be smaller, but, hey, living in the prairies has its own challenges, some of which you quickly learn when you buy boots and coats that are -40 degrees Celsius proof.
I’ve been here for 10 years now, and over the years, thinking about my Great-Grandmother definitely helped me be stubborn and resilient on one hand and open-minded on the other, and I am proud to be able to bond with people, building bridges on the foundation of courageousness, music and human kindness.
