An uneasy feeling.

Holiday has been fun. It's nice for things to quiet down after a few weeks of very busy travel plans including a wedding and Christmas. It gives me a little bit of time to actually think about everything and take it in rather than sprinting around just trying to keep up. Seeing friends and family is great and I'm enjoying getting back together with everyone. Erin is bursting at the seams to get up to Montana and hang with her "ladies".

But it is very strange to come back to the states. After being in Africa, we got used to the laid back attitude. We've talked about the term T.I.A., as in "This Is Africa", which explains nothing but is used to convey the idea that anything goes. We would drive around and see a Land Rover with the parents inside and the kids sitting on top of the luggage rack. We stopped even being surprised at things like that. It became normal. We bought a bike without having a license to drive one. It's a liberating feeling to know that you can pretty much do anything you like. It's also a bit frightening because anyone else can as well. The laws of the land are more like suggestions than rules. This attitude is one of the reasons that I found Africa so engaging and am having difficulty feeling at home here.

It's very difficult to put into words. It's almost sterile. The level of order and cleanliness is astounding. There's soap in the bathroom and people clean up after themselves. Nobody throws trash out the windows. If you have some business with the government, it takes hours instead of weeks. Cars provide huge amounts of space between themselves and the next car. You can get a good cup of coffee almost anywhere. People expect you to change clothes daily and be stylish. These seem like random observations and they are, but I can't help feeling that they for some reason point toward the heart of the matter. Grocery stores have amazing selections of everything. These are things that I forget to appreciate when I'm here.

I guess I have to leave in order to remember that the US provides a ridiculously nice life for it's people. There is always room for improvement, certainly, but when you compare our lives to the rest of the world, it's not a comparison. There are explanations that people throw out about history and conflict, natural resources and cultural biases. These are true in various forms, but they create a barrier between the emotional understanding of our high standard of living and their low. Maybe that's part of the reason I have an uneasy feeling, because I don't feel that people know enough to appreciate it. And that's okay, but I guess it's important for me to say that in this time of doom and gloom with things tanking, this is still a really good place to be.