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On their trips to the developing world, however, the dynamic changes. Talking to women in hovels about condom use, Bill sits with his hands in his lap, nodding robotically, while Melinda leans forward to ask questions and hold babies. On the first day of their trip, after flying all night to Dhaka, Bangladesh, from Seattle, the Gateses visited a place known as the Cholera Hospital, where they are helping fund groundbreaking research on pneumonia. On their tour, they walked into a room full of 30 crying babies and their mothers. All the babies had cholera, and they were lying on gurneys with holes in the center so that diarrhea would land in a bucket below.
Standing before the festering multitudes, a doctor urged them to go ahead and pick out a family to talk to. "Do you want to go first?" Melinda quietly asked Bill. "No," he answered under his breath, his smile frozen on his face. Melinda strode forward, knelt beside one mother and reached out to help give the baby medicine. Then the doctor sprayed her hands with sanitizer, and they moved on to the next encounter.
When I ask whether there is a formal division of labor between the two, Bill demurs. "It's like saying, Who is raising our children?" After Bill speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, they spend an hour dissecting the politics and personalities. When Melinda goes to Africa, she calls Bill to share her stories.
And when they travel together, they make each other laugh. "Take the arrival at the airport in Bangladesh," says Bill. Given that there was a string of terrorist bombings in the days before their arrival, the military was out in force. And the tarmac was festooned in decorations to welcome the Gateses--including, bizarrely, a massive oil portrait of each. "She saw the army," says Bill, laughing. "She said, 'Hey, there's an army out here.' And I said, 'Yeah, wait until you see the picture of you. It's not too good.' It was just gigantic! You know, Mao would have been so jealous!" Some couples have ballroom dancing. The Gateses have saving the world. And they like to do it the uncomfortable way, by looking straight into lives they know nothing about. Paul Farmer, a public-health pioneer, has been host to them both in Haiti. "I think they, unlike many people, have allowed themselves to remain open to the pain that a lot of people experience," he says. "Watching them listen, really listen, and wait for the answers and study people's faces and pay attention, I was very impressed."
Back in Seattle, though, the Gateses show less patience. They run the foundation like a business. They are remarkably fluent in the science of public health ("I suspect Bill Gates knows more about the molecular biology of mosquitoes than 95% of the doctors in the world," says Kim). And both use the language of business to describe the human experience. "There is no better return on investment than saving the life of a newborn," Melinda told reporters at a November press conference.
Melinda is in the foundation office about two days a month. Bill is still busy being chairman of Microsoft, but they are both in regular contact with the staff, and they each spend about 15 hours a week on foundation business.