Social Gaborone

I have been taking Friday afternoons off, and after consulting on another patient with peripartum cardiomyopathy in the morning, got in the pool for a brief swim after lunch. We were invited to a dinner at the home of the President and Vice Chancellor of the brand-new Botswana Institute of Science and Technology, K.K. Bento. We had met at the Wildebeest roast 2 weeks ago, and developed a cordial relationship. He was from Florida, had a doctorate in civil engineering, and had been engaged by the new university to help build the campus in a town 1/2 way to Francistown, the original home of the current national president. The administration is only now being assembled, before hiring a faculty. The dinner was in honor of the new CFO, who was a woman from Canada who had been in Qatar for the past decade, working for a branch of a college from Newfoundland. Parenthetically, there appears to be a trend in American universities establishing foreign outposts...Cornell Weill has a medical college in Dubai! We were struck by the willingness of expatriots to spend years, sometimes decades, in foreign lands where they represent a distinct minority. They form a social life there that is heavily, but not exclusively, foreign-born. This goes for people from elsewhere in Africa, also. While there are many people in need who are economic refugees and who come to Botswana from deprived locales like Zimbabwe, many come for other opportunities, mostly professional like the two faculty members profiled above. Today, in an open market, we met a young woman from Kenya selling west-African fabrics and wooden carvings; she said that people expect her to be able to communicate in Setswana, where the only common language they really share is English!