Juliane Beckmann warmly welcomes us to her house in Pretoria, leads us onto the terrace and disappears into the kitchen again. Our eyes wander through her small garden, where flowers and palm trees grow in front of a wall lined with barbed wire. The sky is light blue, a few white clouds pass by, and a few days before Christmas Eve temperatures are around 30 degrees. Juliane Beckmann steps outside with water, coffee and mint biscuits and tears us out of our thoughts. Her German does not suggest that she has been living in Africa since 1999. Every word fits. And so she starts chatting, reminiscing.

Published in PEAK Magazine, Issue 2, January 2014