Patrick
Diary entry from January 20th, 2019 on the way from Bobo-Dioulasso to Ouagadougou:
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An Asian film is shown in French in an air-conditioned, classy coach, the windows are covered with black curtains. It's cool and the chairs are comfortable. I dream about home, family and friends. Four days and a week until I get back, I think ...
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A little disinterestedly, I follow the film on TV and, lost in thought, push the curtain aside. I see people working. How they scrape clay at the water-filled depressions in the terrain, form building blocks out of it, and transport them with donkeys. People lying in the shade of the trees, resting. Mud huts with inner courtyards. Clothes hanging up, buckets standing around and motorcycles - images that are unlikely to be found anywhere else in the world.
I'm uncomfortable. Even though I'm in the thick of it, the distance feels too to the people and the landscape as far as the story that flickers on the bus television. I hear what is happening, but I am not very impressed.
I travel so that I get to know the lives of others. That it inspires me and broadened my horizons. I want to defy the sun, rain, heat and cold, walk barefoot on sand, lawn and asphalt, hear different languages, talk even if I don't understand them. Take in every meter, every moment with all your senses and feel how big,
how diverse this world is.
Miriam
Markus Werner was my first big love. I got to know him as a pubescent wearer of braces, who heard ska and dared to take the first steps into nightlife. He was introduced to me by my German teacher. He put "the cold shoulder" on the table for the class. I began to read suspiciously. A book by an author who comes from the same small town as me; it sounded like boredom to me. A few pages later, however, my suspicion turned to interest. And then I fell in love.
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I owe Werner that it's okay to leave a store head over heels without buying anything, because me the Excess supply kills. It comes to him that I am at peace with myself, to be a misanthropist from time to time. Thanks to Werner, I no longer find myself strange when I cry for joy over a snail shell found in the forest. Or see death as a companion in life.
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Werner taught me to fear societies that crave the whip. And although its protagonists look more like antiheroes than revolutionaries, they subtly defy any restrictions on personal freedom. That But most elementary, the He taught me: Men who live the way they pee - safe, sharp, and determined - not to be envied. The current crisis, which Werner no longer has to experience himself, shows why: security is the Mark of Boobies.
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Source: Bollinger Mirjam: Personal. In: bz - newspaper for the Basel region, March 31, 2020, p. 6.