It has some religious stuff in it. Just putting that disclaimer here in case it'll aggravate anyone and they want to skip it. I also want to add I'm neither praising nor looking down on that aspect; I'm just sharing stories.
I also don't have specific details of exact places, times, or dates since I'm just relaying stories she told to me, or which other people told to me about her.
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My friend who I'll call A, a lady in her late 60s from Germany. She was a nurse, then a missionary in Ghana (inland, not coastline), then came to the U.S. to become a teacher.
Her early life was spent living on a . . . canal boat? Some sort of boat which her parents lived on full-time, traveling through Germany on waterways. She told me her earliest memories were of fishing toys out of the water, and her papa holding her on his shoulders so she could watch the houses on land slowly drift by while whistling tunes from sailor shanties. (She's always loved whistling since then -- every time she whistles or hears one, she remembers her father.) She never really went ashore even when temporarily stopping at docks (her mother kept her on the boat, afraid she'd get lost on docks), so the 'land world' was odd to her as a kid.
That all crumbled when her dad fell overboard somehow while docked, stuck between the boat and the dock, and he drowned. Her mother had a mental breakdown, sent her to an aunt, the aunt didn't want her, so she was put in a home for children. A couldn't process that her mother would just give her up, so she convinced herself that her mom was dead (found out later that her grief-stricken mother did try to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, but failed). When her mom turned up to take her from the children's home, A looked at her and said "You're not my mother, my mother is dead." It took a long time -- months, maybe a year, A couldn't quite remember when relaying the story to me -- before her mom could convince her she was really her mother.
Now back with her mother, she grew up near the Berlin Wall on the West side. She didn't say much about what it was like, though she mentioned there were American soldiers there and her mother married one (I'll come back to this later). She said that something media doesn't talk about is that in certain areas, on both sides of the wall religious Germans would gather to pray together and sing worship songs. I'm not sure how that was dealt with on the East Berlin side, since I've heard they tried to squash / prevent things like that. She made sure to be there when the Berlin Wall was being torn down; she took a small piece of the rubble home with her.
While a child, since her stepfather was a U.S. soldier (unfortunately I don't remember of which branch), they'd travel to different bases -- including in the U.S.A. She didn't speak any English, which made it hard for her to make friends with other soldiers' kids there. She remembered one day seeing a bunch of other girls on base approach her, shouting at her; she was frightened because she didn't understand what they were saying or why they were being mean. They started to attack her, punching and kicking her and spitting on her; the only word she could understand them saying was 'Nazi,' which they called her over and over. All she could do was huddle on the ground curled up in a ball, but she said she suddenly saw an arm thrust through the group as another girl shoved some of her attackers aside. It was a black girl, the only PoC child on the base. She grabbed A and pulled her up, dragged her out of the group to safety, then checked her over to make sure she was all right. A never said if they hung out after that, but it was assumed that the other girl knew what it was like to be singled out and mistreated due to being 'different.'
When A was an adult, she converted to Christianity (she'd been an atheist prior; she'd only known about the prayer meetings at the Berlin Wall due to seeing them) and she decided she wanted to be a missionary. She didn't have any official training, she just . . . studied the Bible on her own, and somehow got into Ghana. I really don't have any details on how she did that; I suppose she just had contacts there already, maybe through a church which didn't care about qualifications? Anyway, she was in Ghana where she chose to go inland to a very poor place, rather than remain in scenic spots where the other missionaries kept choosing to go as a sort of vacationland.
She didn't separate herself from the locals like the others did. She decided to live in places like they did, wear what they wore, eat what they ate, and adapt to their standards and expectations. There's been an issue with a lot of missionaries seeing themselves as 'better' than the people they go to, and trying to conform locals to their standards (in appearance, behavior, cuisine, etc.) but A did none of that. She treated everyone equally, and didn't ignore non-converts like some others did. She didn't try to push anyone to convert, either. I was told a lot of stories (from her, and friends of hers who'd either visited her there or were from Ghana themselves and came to the U.S. later).
They were very sweet and friendly toward her, but there were three times that there were problems. Once when a man busted down her door and came in with a machete; she'd been holding a laptop on her lap, and he held it to her throat, demanding the laptop. She handed it over and he left her unharmed. Another when she and a friend of hers were on a beach, and they were attacked by a group of men -- though they came out with no injuries, the men just wanted their cell phones and money. The third time, a man walked into her home (the door was open) with a gun in his hands and acting threatening; he didn't speak English and she didn't understand what he was saying, but she welcomed him and gave him a bunch of food plus a huge soda. He stood there and silently stared at her with his arms full of food and the gun, before he turned around and walked out; he didn't come back, and no one attacked her again after that.
She later came to the U.S., where she worked as a nurse (she'd been a nurse prior to leaving Germany); she didn't tell me many stories about it, so I don't know if she had to deal with severe things or not. She did work for a time at an adult psych ward (which she helped me get a job at later, though I don't work there anymore). She met a man in her church, a cop, and they married -- but he was a corrupt cop, which she didn't know at the time. I won't share stories about what he did because he was busted for illegal activities, and it was all over the news while they were still married -- so for the sake of her privacy (while everything else looks non-private, none of it was published online or on media, whereas his was) I'm not going to say what it was he'd done. But it was a disaster, and she had to remain upright and strong while dealing with all of that.
In her early 60s, she decided she wanted to become a teacher -- so she enrolled at a college to begin earning a degree. That's actually how I met her -- she was in her final two years of earning her master's at the college I attended, and she was teaching some of the classes I was in. Admittedly I didn't interact with her much the first year, but she'd zeroed in on me somehow, and she went out of her way to try to befriend me. I remember she once approached my desk and, making eye contact with me, she broke into a dance she learned while in Ghana because she wanted to make me smile (as she'd never seen me smile, I always looked very sad). It worked; I smiled and laughed, and that's how our friendship began.
Unfortunately, I've fallen out of touch with her -- which was my own fault. But the last I heard, she's back in Ghana as a missionary again . . . and as a teacher too.
So she's had an eventful life, and she's an incredible person. Humble, courageous, and kind. She's seen and done a lot throughout her life and she seems to still be going strong.