Nehaveigur

One of my daughters, when she was around four years old and wanted to show off to strangers, liked to inform them, “I have a lot of cousins.” She’s right, and the reason is that her dad has a lot of siblings. I have two brothers and three sisters. Two of the sisters I haven’t talked to for a few years now, but the third one I’m close to. I’ve always looked up to her, not only because she’s my big sister, but she’s also because she’s an adventurer in the best sense of the word.

Last summer, I visited her in Berlin where she lives with her family, an a few weeks later, they came to California and stayed with us for a few weeks. They had planned to visit the previous year, but they had to delay their travel plans because she was denied a U.S. visa. The reason: She had recently been to black-listed countries like Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. She had to go to the American embassy in Berlin and explain in person why she had traveled there, and since the embassy didn’t have any appointments before she and her family’s planned vacation, they had to postpone their trip by a year.

The reason for my sister’s extensive travels is her work for the German Academic Exchange Service, an organization that entertains links with many international universities all over the globe. They are active globally but my sister prefers the Middle East. She has told me about how she handles being the only woman in a room full of Arab men, how she makes sure she’s taken seriously, and how she enjoys having earned their respect. The German diplomatic corps sometimes calls her after she returns to ask about the parts of Iraq that they don’t go to themselves because they consider it too dangerous.

She’s always been like that. As a teenager, she went on an extended motorcycle trip through the Balkans a with her boyfriend, greatly worrying our parents. Of course, nothing bad happened. Fresh out of high school, she traveled through Africa by herself for half a year, camping and hitchhiking. Her leaving home at the earliest opportunity and traveling was one inspiration for me to do the same. In the 1990s she moved to Berlin shortly after the wall came down, studying and later becoming a startup founder years before this became a the thing to do. One of her businesses involved running an underground nightclub and casino, which I sometimes worked at as a roulette croupier. I don’t think she ever made much money from it, but that wasn’t the point. The maximum bet was 100 Euros to keep it light-hearted, but even so I remember one man loosing thousands of Euros in one night. I’d like to say that I learned important life lessons from working in an underground casino, but I can’t think of any, except maybe that that sort of thing is no big deal.

My sister is now a professor at a prestigious German university. Every year, she takes her middle-class students to a country that they’d not normally visit, like Morocco or Israel. The students love the trips and admire her, as do I.