A long table loaded with dishes from every corner of the world. Three grills going full blast. In one of them, a big pot of Tajik rice sits there and bubbles like it has all the time in the world. Falafel hisses in hot oil. Live music. Neighbors, friends, a few familiar faces from Alpen, all mixed in with people from everywhere—just scattered around the big garden like someone shook a box of bright confetti and let it land where it wanted.

Kids are shrieking with happiness on a giant trampoline.

It’s a special kind of party when Judy Bailey and Patrick Depuhl invite people over. Patrick turns 55 this year. Their youngest has just come back from Brazil, and the middle one is already buzzing about his upcoming year abroad in Ghana. Judy is interested in the IMMIGRANTS project from the very start—her story is coming soon.

We show up at the summer party with our granddaughter Amelia in tow. She doesn’t know anyone here yet, so she clings to us a little. Njeudah—almost always called Fanny in Germany—spots the situation right away and comes over, just like that, with her daughter Emily. Emily takes Amelia under her wing as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. The two of them wander off together, and Amelia’s shyness is gone in a heartbeat.

Of course I take the chance to bring up my project and ask Njeudah to be part of it.

Njeudah is twenty years old when she comes to Germany in 2000 on a student visa. Her sister is already living in Bonn with her husband.

There’s paperwork. A lot of it. And before she can even start studying, she has to do a six-month language course in Germany. After the one she already completes back in Cameroon at the Goethe-Institut.

So here she is: a freshly graduated high-school student from a small place in faraway Cameroon, with not much in her luggage except big plans.

She tells me about her first steps in Germany, laughing. About her math professor—this serious university guy—whom she suddenly runs into at the train station in “completely normal clothes.” He always rides his bike to the university.

“What? A math professor? On a bicycle? Is he crazy?”

Back home, she says, that math professor would be more likely to have a chauffeur and sit in the back. This new kind of normal? Njeudah likes it. It clicks.

In Africa, people often move with a certain dignity and inner calm. But her sister’s husband in Bonn gives her one piece of advice right away:

“If you ever want to take the subway, you have to run. Run!”

Even with her sister helping in the beginning—taking her in for a while—Njeudah has to work hard from day one. There is no BAföG for her, no German federal student aid. To pay rent and cover living expenses, she works up to four jobs: gastronomy, fast-food places, hotel business.

Then tuition fees are introduced in North Rhine–Westphalia, and suddenly she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to keep going. She asks around where in Germany there are still no tuition fees—and she moves to Berlin.

That’s where she meets her husband, a real Berliner. It feels right again. Together they start a family. They have a daughter. Today they live in a small town on the Lower Rhine.

Alongside her studies, she trains as a specialist in confectionery technology at a Berlin marzipan manufacturer. It’s a well-thought-out decision. She doesn’t know if—and when—Berlin might also introduce tuition fees.

She does an internship in Solingen. She and her husband agree quickly that they can look for work far away from Berlin, too—and she has his full support.

Today she works in a renowned laboratory on the Lower Rhine. She runs microbiological tests, produces contaminant analyses for different foods and drinking water, and helps make sure the things we eat and drink every day are safe.

Njeudah is a very humorous person. She likes to laugh, and loudly. She loves the unfiltered Berlin manner of her husband—though with his directness, he needs some time to find his footing on the Lower Rhine.

They both laugh hard when he gets called Weißbrot, their joking name for the white guy, back in Cameroon.

For Njeudah, racism begins where one side starts to feel bad—where you’re no longer laughing together, but only laughing about each other. In everyday life, she sometimes senses an unnecessary distance. She thinks some people should talk more directly with one another, instead of about one another.

When I ask whether she feels at home in Germany, she says she feels comfortable—but she misses her parents and siblings, the culture, the food, the weather. Asked about the future, both of them can imagine moving to Cameroon later on. Just not now. And always depending on how Emily, their daughter, feels about it.