Listen to the music and dance.

I can't actually remember when I wrote last.  But it's been awhile.  I am in a routine here at Baylor now.  My days usually go like this:

6 AM: awaken by my alarm.  Get up out of bed.  Make coffee.  Pour bowl of cereal and drink said coffee.  If its a Monday or Thursday, wonder if the cleaning lady will come before I leave and hopefully I have remembered to do dishes so I don't appear as a lazy American.

6:30 AM: walk to work, admiring the flowers and the huge mansions - I appear to live in the consulate laden and rich part of town.

6:38 AM: ask the kind front desk person to let me upstairs, because although I have been fingerprinted twice the fancy green fingerprint reader does not let me go anywhere in the building.  Get to the office and call Jimmy on FaceTime.  Smiles.  Talk and check email.

8 AM: ask someone to let me downstairs (again, the fingerprint reader) and see patients in clinic.  This can run anywhere until noon or 3 pm.  See lots of patients.  Communicate well with some of them, others go and beg for a translator.

After Clinic: eat lunch, usually this is around 2pm.  Work on piling together research to help with a study they are trying to get published here.  Talk with the volunteer staff (which includes Botswanans, Canadians, Americans, and a German) and listen to Botswana office drama.

5pm: Home.

After 5 pm, I do a variety of very normal American things: eat dinner, watch TV, go to movies.  Last Friday, I went to a Botswana concert with two of the PAC doctors.  One of their spouses is a very good saxophonist and plays in a local jazz band.  He is also a physician and I cannot but wonder how he has kept up his musical abilities while studying medicine.  Leah says its because he doesn't sleep.

Anyway the concert was good.  And there was dancing.  And there was a Botswana star, Eugene Jackson grabbing Leah, one of the PAC doctors, and serenading her on one knee.  I think the local ladies were jealous and Leah was embarrassed.   And then there was Ringo, a South African artist who sings in Zulu, and hence is not understood by people here, but whom the crowd was crazy for.  They were screaming, singing every word, and dancing up a storm.  It was quite fun.

This weekend got me thinking.  I think I like traveling because I lose any ounce of self-consciousness (well maybe not all of it) and do things that I keep myself from doing back home.  Like dancing.