I think it is okay if everything will be awful for a long time and then get better. It's just scary if everything will be awful and it won't get better.

Lots of things have gotten better! We have vaccines and libraries and spaceships and ice cream and radios now!

None of those things sound like they could possibly be as good as living in this place is bad.

Well, it used to be worse, and now it's better.

That's good.

I can't believe your parents didn't tell you about libraries or planes. I think lots of kids don't know about smallpox, but libraries and planes are important.

I think we don't have those. 

That sounds pretty bad.

Well, somehow everything is way better for everyone than here. I don't know that the libraries are the problem though.

I think it's that everybody you know is a rich person even if they don't technically have any money. But if they don't have libraries then they can't all read books and learn anything whenever they want. And that sounds sad.

Well, they can't read books because they can't read. I think the lack of libraries is because people can't read instead of the other way around, you need some people who can read to write books or you can't have enough books to really count as a library.

I think most people are not sad about not knowing how to read yet because they are learning other interesting things.

They could learn a LOT more if they could read, though.

They could learn a lot faster but not everyone is in a hurry to learn everything as fast as possible.

But you can't do anything interesting until you know lots of stuff!

You can get really really good at woodworking before you learn anything that isn't woodworking, or memorize an epic poem that takes a week to sing before you learn writing and get worse at memorizing epic poems, or you can adventure and explore the whole world, or try to figure out what conditions flowers grow best in and do all the flowers in the city that way, or produce a play, or a dance, or tame horses or dogs or dinosaurs or dolphins, or you can go pray a lot, or you can have children and raise them, or you can get married and spend all your time doing married people things, or you can design beautiful clothing, or pottery, or glasswork...

I bet you'd be way better at most of those things if you could read about them. 

Well, only if someone else had already learned how to do them and wrote about it, but most of those things no one's learned how to do yet. 

Well in AMERICA people have already done all of that stuff. Except the dinosaurs because there aren't any dinosaurs anymore.

Yes, so it makes sense for you to have libraries.

People wherever you're from sound like they don't know how to do very many things.

Not yet! We just got started at doing things. 

I think I like it better here, where we know how to do lots of things and someday I can probably go to space. Although dinosaurs would be pretty awesome.

I am pretty sure we will also go to space someday, but it might be a farther-away day.

Well, I hope you figure it out, I guess.

When do you have to go home?

I would like to go home right now but Karen thought it would be complicated.