Meeting Sarah

Sarah literally travels the world. Lately, she has been to Syria, Sarajevo, Istanbul, and Budapest and hitchhiked from Kiew to Kenia. Now she has just come from New York to stay a week with us. Her passport is a book of one hundred pages and her bible is a novel full of flowers, postcards and beautiful garbage. She travels alone or with her sister and always takes her boyfriend that came with the wallet. She never takes pictures, but she has a hell of a lot of stories to tell. From watching the most beautiful Watertunnel in Burundi while sitting in a car being shot at by rebels, to teaching laoen arka tribal women how to knit with chopsticks after secretly being fed with opium. Anja was allowed to take a look at her treasures.

Why do you travel?
I have wanderlust. There is a great big world out there and life is really short and you never know when you might get hit by a bus. So I never wanted to look back when I am fifty, – which I am close to being-, and say ‘I wish I could have’. I am not really a big future planer, I worry about the day I am in, that’s the most important day in my life, the day that I am living in. People ask me ‘do you want to have children’, I say not today. Today I travel.

Which place did you like most, where did you go twice or more?
Christians and Jews like to go to Jerusalem and Hindus want to go to Varanasi, Muslems go to Mekka. But if you have some bizarre delusion of faith and humanity, like all the beautiful and tragic things that people can do to each other, then Africa would be kind of your holy land, especially central Africa, the raff valley, because that’s what men came from, humanity. If you open yourself up to it, it could be the most warm and welcoming place that you ever go to. For me the word civilisation really can be boiled down to the word ‘welcome’. And Central Africa is a place where there are no hotels, guesthouses or restaurants and everyone is offering me a roof over my head for the night. I am granted I have blue eyes and a vagina, so everyone wants to be nice to me, no one is threatened by my presence. I am not perceived as a missionary or a smuggler, I am little, I am like Paris Hiltons vanity pet.

What do you think all people have in common?
In general people are the same everywhere, especially in more provincial settings. The more I travel, whether it would be New York, Nairobi, the village in the bush in the sahara desert, minnesota,- the everyday person you meet in a village small town setting wants the same thing like everyone else, they want their kids to have a better future.

Where is ‘home’ for you?
Home is wherever my folks are. Wherever my parents are. My parents are born and bread New Yorkers. My Father is from Queens, my mother is from Brooklyn. They are ..‘avantgarde’ is putting it mildly. They are very very strange people. We are like a gang, a very small gang. My Mum, my Dad and me, my sister, my brother and his family live close by. It’s like a commune and whoever has money is the one who is paying at the time. My parents are the funniest people I know, and they are also the most successful people I know. If you judge a success by how much you love and are loved, how much of lust for a life a person has and how happy they are, my parents are by far the most successful people I have ever met. If you judge a success by a material wealth and accumulation, then there are other failures. But they rocked the 70ies and they partied through the 80ies, they clawed they way out of the 90ies and here they are in the 2000s, still happy and in love.