There’s the retired schoolteacher who spent four years, or two stints, in the Peace Corps in southern Ethiopia. He remembers the people. The food. The peace.

The young woman who traveled overland from Kenya and to the Red Sea, across the contested boarder in the back of jeep, just to see if she could. She wants to know how to buy coffee directly from the source. She cannot seem to shake the taste of the thick Ethiopian brew.

The Ethiopian man from Wollo. He’s been here in the US longer than he was in Ethiopia. He says his children are American, he is not.

The 18-year old boy, a ski bum for the winter with hopes of African intrigue with a woman who called him from Egypt. They’re meeting in Addis.

The consummate traveler whose never tried to climb but grasps my book with both hands and asks if I know how she could start.

They all turn the pages of my book and stop on different images and stories so that the entire sea of my life and work for the past year is laid out before me. I had not understood how my extroversion could work as a writer. Maybe it’s like this.