When she was little she had two great-grandparents who shared a garden. The best time of day was to have coffee. She was served some coffee with milk in a porcelain cup and a piece of cake, then the adults played cards. You had to learn to play cards. Her two great-grandparents taught her to smoke a pipe. She was born in Nürnberg, Germany. When she was five years old, they came to live in Mexico, but after a year they returned because their grandmother had been ill with cancer. When they arrived at the kinder Landen (in which she had been before she left) everything was familiar to her, especially one of the girls who had already been her friend before. She did not understand them, she had forgotten how to speak German. The area of the sandpit that was very large, had been flooded with water and they were playing there. The look of the other children was strange, they knew each other and not. She was there standing with her mother who is Mexican and her brother. The feeling of familiarity and immigration was very strong at that time. Why couldn't she understand what the people she already knew said?
The kinderladen she went to was in the lower level of an old building. So you had to enter the staircase that went to the apartments, cross it, and then you got into the backyard, where the sand pit and the swings were. It was a beautiful place, and the feeling was of familiarity to come back to this place she knew already, to see faces she recognized, but didn't understand. They were talking in German and she had forgotten German, she spoke Spanish. She had the feeling that she would have to protect her little brother "again" in this new environment.
She wanted to be a boy. She liked to be mistaken for a boy. She learned to pee standing. She did not like to wear dresses or skirts.
Her parents used to have meetings in the house. When she walked to kindergarten from the house, she went through a supermarket that had a sign outside with the list of terrorists that were wanted in Germany. She always felt sympathy for the men and women who appeared on the poster because they resembled her parents' friends.
What she remembers most of Mexico at school when returning were the festivals. Whenever there was a festival, they danced a traditional dance. They went to look for outfits at the market and rehearsed the dance for Mothers' Day. The day of the presentation they combed her hair, usually she did not comb her hair.
The objects she remembers are: the porcelain cups, the cards, the pipe, the sand, her pants, the sign or cartel with the most wanted terrorist, the bows and traditional costume.
A Kiderladen is a self-managed alternative kindergarten, mostly run by parents' initiatives, where preschool children are cared for. In the 1960s and early 70s, former storerooms were used because the advent of supermarkets had many smaller shops close and therefore shops were cheap to rent, that's why the name was spread as Kinderladen.
