Response to Getting Snail Mail in Africa

You have done more than anything else to help me be excited about coming
state side. I got your letters today and it was perfect timing. If I had
read them somewhere in the middle of my stay here I would have been
hopelessly homesick, but now they help me tear myself from this world and
prepare for that one.

I expect I will still need your help. I will probably be talking about this
place and people for months, sorting through impressions and trying to help
myself cope with the drastically different and very similar things between
Africa and the West. I will probably tell you more then you want to know.
You will ask me a simple question and find me rambling to answer it. Just
warning you.

I am thankful I had the chance to be here. I know that many of my posts
don't reflect that fact. I think that has something to do with feeling like
depression is more profound, or at least I think I am more profound when I
am sad. Besides, when I am fully living here, I don't want to write I just
keep moving, laughing, and learning in this world. Its only when the
melancholy sets in that I write. Its my writing mood. I don't think I
would be writing this letter without a tinge of sweet sadness that comes
from realising the love of friends who are unavailable for a midnight
ramble.

At least I know that if we were together we'd stay up late say things worth
saying.

Africa has been good to me and I have a love for it that might bring me
back. I am waiting to see where the wind blows.