Jana:
Pretty much the last plane takes us out of Colombia. Corona has a firm grip on the world and with it our newly formed plans.
Our world at home was shaped, as in all families, between daily reorientation, adjusting to the new life situation, with simultaneous processing of the global situation. At the same time, we try to accompany the children safely through everyday life. As for many families, an absolute challenge. In the evening we think about our plans for our center. Colombia seems in the long run, no longer in the realm of possibility. We spend time in front of the computer, searching via the Internet for possible properties in Spain, Mallorca, Germany. As we search and talk, it becomes clearer and clearer. Finding this place from the home computer will not work. We cannot see it, feel it, smell it, hear it. One evening, we were once again sitting in front of the computer and looking at objects, it suddenly became clear to both of us.
We have to look for our new place. Search in the world. We need to “experience” our place in order to find it. Immediately we are both ablaze for this topic. We start spinning ideas. We would be to use the search for the place already as a project. What could be the theme for this? The ideas just flowed out of us. That was the birth of our bus idea.
Jana
It was to be an American school bus. Because it was a great fit for our idea. Hartmut managed to find a company that had already brought some buses from America to Germany and also found our bus and brought it to us. It became more and more concrete. The company began to convert the bus so that we could travel with it as self-sufficiently as possible and we planned the interior of the bus. But life had other plans for us along the way.
On a Friday in September 2021, my phone rang and a somewhat breathless foster care worker was on the line… “We have an emergency”… “Could you also take in Victoria’s twin sister Patricia?”
Hartmut:
What had happened? The universe has a plan! Suddenly it was clear that before the start of our journey, another child would find its way to us. The twin sister, sorely missed by Victoria for years. For us it was already clear with the first call that Patricia would find a forever home with us in the future. However, to give her back a bit of self-determination and an idea of creator of her life, we let her or the two girls set the pace. A few weeks later Patricia said “Yes!” to us and moved in with what little she had with her.
This was an extraordinary experience for me personally. For the first time I experienced myself, in which desolate condition a child finds itself, which just from one moment to the next had lost everything it knew so far…home gone…parents…siblings gone, toys, nursery, familiar routines…A child which due to its history hardly knows emotions and feelings, which had stopped growing and was simply in survival mode. You can’t expect gratitude or affection, we were strangers for her to deal with all at once.
Through our experience with the other two, we knew by now what we could do to help her regain her strength.
