Anne-Renee Heningburg - Session 2



CRAWFORD: Today is Monday, August 5, 2019. This is Hana [S.] Crawford for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative [GPEI] History Project with Anne-Reneé Heningburg [MPA]. We are moving into session two. We're in CDC [United States Centers for Disease Control] Studios in Atlanta, Georgia at the U.S. [United States] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Todd [F.] Jordan is our videographer. We're going to pick up, I think, with Uganda, but first, is there anything that stuck in your memory from last time we spoke?

HENINGBURG: There were a lot of things I hadn't thought about in a long time, so it was kind of interesting, and I was thinking, "This is going to be great preparation for my retirement speech," [laughs] so thank you for that.

CRAWFORD: Shake it loose. It's good.

HENINGBURG: No, you know, I think--I was talking about going to the AFRO [African Regional Office for the WHO] TFI, the first Task Force for Immunization, in Lomé [Togo]. When I was originally thinking about doing the interview, I said, "OK, I should sort of summarize: this is how it impacted me. This is how it impacted polio." That first TFI got people rolling, in terms of, OK, we're going to make polio eradication happen now and not wait until routine immunization is perfect, which would have meant we wouldn't be doing polio eradication [laughs] in Africa yet.

For me, it was my first time in Africa, and that was a really significant thing, personally. Even though we weren't conscious of each other, it was the first 2:00time that Jules [Millogo, MD, MSc] and I were in the same place, and that turned out to be significant personally [laughs]. It was the beginning of establishing relationships with people in the AFRO region, and I ended up working quite a bit there afterwards, and that was sort of the first time when I met everybody, so it was significant for me that way.

CRAWFORD: Who were some of the people that you met and continued to work with?

HENINGBURG: Well, first of all there was [Jean-Marie] Okwo-Bele [MD, MPH], Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele. We all call him "Okwo," so I always forget the Jean-Marie part. He was the lead for immunization for the--he was the regional advisor for immunization. Worked with him over time, until his recent retirement, in various 3:00and sundry places, as he went through his career and I went through mine. All the EPI [Expanded Programme on Immunization] managers were there.

All the subject matter--it was like, because it was the first time, everyone who had anything to do with Africa decided they needed to show up [laughs]. I learned, you know, things about how the meetings are run and sort of the public meeting and the side meetings and the importance of the side meetings and how they're, in some ways, more important than the public meeting and all the types of conversations that go on that make the public meeting happen.

I met lots of Rotarians [members of Rotary International]. Somehow, I'd gotten through my life in the U.S. without meeting Rotarians. I discovered the difference, in terms of how people--I discovered that there was a thing that was 4:00Anglophone and Francophone Africa. I didn't know that was a thing. Like lots of people, I didn't know a lot about Africa and sort of thought of it as one big Africa and starting to open my eyes to those kinds of things.

Going to Lomé was good. Of course, I had to look up Lomé on the map to figure out where I was going [laughs]. You know, Togo sounded like a cool name, but I didn't know anything about it. All of those things, I think, for me, were really important.

I think, for polio, it was really the first time that all the partners gathered together, and it was nice to see [Robert A.] Bob [Keegan] in action. As Melinda [M.] Mailhot put it, she said--you know, she was working in the WHO [World Health Organization] environment completely, and she said she was very conscious that she always had to wear her WHO hat, but when Bob started talking and he sort of led the way in making pledges for polio, and he put on the table, you know, "CDC is going to give this much for polio eradication, so that we can move 5:00forward in 1996," Melinda was like, "Secretly inside I was smiling and saying, 'I'm with CDC.'" [Laughs] That was great. I think it was a step in a direction for me and for the program that was important.

CRAWFORD: Could you talk a little bit more about Anglophone and Francophone Africa, and just Africa?

HENINGBURG: Well, my French was not strong enough to talk to Francophones who didn't speak English, and so I spent a lot of time talking to the guys from Gambia, [laughs] who were the ones that were there because it was the West Africa EPI managers and then the bigger TFI. I talked to the Gambia guys and then the Rotarians. It was really from them--I mean, I remember one guy who told 6:00me, "It's really important when you go to the U.S., you have to always make sure your English accent is very heavily French-inflected and say things in French, because they'll treat you completely differently than if they think that you're an African American." He said, "You know, when I need to rent a place or something, I just start speaking in French to them." [Laughs]

It's very different. The French colonized in a completely different way than the English did, and so there are differences in the way things are done as a result. The French tended to be a little worried, and they would stay close to the coast, and then they would have proxies who did things on their behalf in the interior. That was very different from the British, who were all over the place, in the furthest reaches, setting up some little British kind of tea 7:00afternoon thing. [Laughs] It's very different in terms of the way that people do things, the way that people interact. The deliberateness--or not so much--of how things get done.

Just that there were definitely people [who] very clearly identified as, "I'm from Francophone Africa," or "I'm from Anglophone Africa." Even in the voting for the RD [regional director], this bloc of, I think it's fourteen Francophone countries can sway one way or another, and that supposedly is one of the reasons why the regional office is in Brazzaville [Republic of the Congo], because by placing it there in a Francophone country, that sort of helped to cement the bloc, which could carry the regional directory election one way or the other. That's, at least, the rumor. [Laughs]

CRAWFORD: What did it mean for you, though, in your work, and as you were learning that, you know, Francophone Africa did things differently?

HENINGBURG: Well, at that point, not much, because I didn't have enough French to ever work in Francophone Africa, so I just sort of knew from afar and in the meetings when I would talk to people how it was. I only got my big exposure to Francophone Africa later, and it had nothing to do with polio specifically. [Laughs]

CRAWFORD: What happened next? I'm eager to get to 1997--

HENINGBURG: OK.

CRAWFORD: --but--

HENINGBURG: Well, let's get there. The decision was made at the AFRO TFI that the countries would do NIDs, the first national immunization days, in 1996. What they did is they found people who could go to the different countries to help, 9:00and I was assigned to work with the people in Uganda.

None of us knew anything about National Immunization Days [laughs] for polio, but I, fortunately, got to go to Zambia for seven to ten days on the way to Uganda. Zambia was already having their NIDs, so I was sort of there in the middle of the NIDs in Zambia and could see all the things that would be helpful to learn for Uganda [laughs]. When I got to Uganda, I remember sitting the first day in a meeting, and, somehow, I was the de facto person who knew so much about NIDs, because I had at least been through one, and they were asking me all these questions and so that was really interesting.

It was nice because, for me, I got to see--I personally felt that I didn't know 10:00a lot about the environment, about how things worked with immunization, about how things worked in WHO. I was pretty green, but I did have the opportunity, particularly in Uganda, to see what CDC--what I, as CDC, could bring to the table, because I was from CDC. I think that was important, to feel like there was some value added by having me there, even though I wasn't necessarily the biggest technical expert in the world. That was an important thing, I think.

You know, I sort of saw it early. I remember that one of the tall guys who I met in the first meeting was Jon [K.] Andrus [MD], and I remembered him telling me about making the NIDs' book, and, somehow, we figured out a way to download their NIDs' manual and get it to me in Uganda. Then we really used it as a template for making the Uganda one. I'm a big believer in not reinventing the 11:00wheel, [laughs] so it's like, "That was a good wheel right there. We're going to use it. We're going to change it a little bit. We're going to make it fit us, but--" So did a lot of those kinds of things in Uganda.

CRAWFORD: Would you describe that manual a little bit?

HENINGBURG: Well, this was the NIDs' manual, and it was kind of "NIDs, A-to-Z." The target audience was just about everybody. It was not specific--I mean, it was just supposed to be how to do things from beginning to end. There was a little bit that was targeted at donors, at the Ministry of Health [of Uganda], at the central level, at the districts, to the vaccinator level. We sort of figured out afterwards that this was too much and that we needed to have different things for different people, but we were not--I mean, there were no communications people around. This was all us just trying to figure out what to say and how to say it and really refining it in a way so it made sense to us, 12:00and then we could read the manual and then go out and talk about how to do things with other people. [Laughs]

That was an experience, doing the manual. It was long. I mean, I think ours was probably about seventy or eighty pages, and I'm fairly sure that aside from me there probably weren't many people who read it cover to cover; at least, I kind of hope there weren't many people who read it cover to cover.

I was in Uganda for nine months, altogether. I went in the fall, and they decided, in that deliberate way, that there was no way they could do NIDs in 1996. They decided to do them in the spring of 1997, and so I went back again, 13:00and I worked straight through until we got NIDs done.

At that time UNEPI [Uganda National Expanded Programme on Immunization] and the WHO office were both in Entebbe [Uganda], and so I was not in a big city. I was in a little place and got to develop--got to understand the pace of things, not just at work, but in terms of life. Walked around a lot. Met people. Was kind of more blended in than if I had been in a fancy hotel, [laughs] but even in the hotel, I talked to all the people on the front desk, and I talked to all the waiters, and so I learned things about that, and I would go to local restaurants. The EPI manager at that time was a guy named John [F.Z.] Barenzi [UNEPI program manager], and a lot of times John would come and get me for 14:00dinner and take me to a local place to make sure I was taken care of.

One of the things that I had no idea about and that I got an appreciation for is that people were very concerned that I left Uganda in one piece, in the same way that I came to Uganda. To the extent that people were really worried--like someone was going to western Uganda to visit relatives, and I said, "Oh, that would be neat"--on a weekend--and I said, "Can I go with you?" They were like, "No way. If anything happens to you, I'm toast, so you stay right here in Entebbe in this nice hotel. We're not taking you out of here." It was the same thing about the two northern areas that there was a lot of instability in, Gulu [Uganda] and--I forget the other one.

It was funny because when I finally went to South Sudan, those were the two safe places that the South Sudan people worked out of, those ones that in Uganda 15:00there's no way they would let me go there [laughs]. It's one of those, "one's man floor is another man's ceiling."

Uganda, I really got into the--deep into the meat of the logistics and the politics. I mean, it was an incredible learning situation for me, in terms of NIDs, and it was nice because in Uganda we were all learning together. It wasn't like everyone there knew what they were doing, and I was kind of this appendage who had to be tolerated. It was really all of us learning together, [laughs] and that was good. I appreciate that in retrospect more than I did at the time. I mean, now you go to places and people can run around you in circles, but at that time we were all trying to figure things out ourselves, and--

CRAWFORD: Can I ask you a question about the manual?

HENINGBURG: Sure.

CRAWFORD: It was coming from India, is that right?

HENINGBURG: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Did you have to adapt it?

HENINGBURG: Totally. Yes. It was the bones. We used India as the bones, to know what were all the chapters we wanted to have, and sometimes, you know, what were the things that were important to say, or how did you do some things that we hadn't thought of, or--we used it for the bones, but we completely changed the language, and whatever needed to be adapted. India wouldn't have recognized it at the end, except they would say it sort of sounds vaguely familiar, [laughs] and so in that sense, it gave us sort of an outline of how to go, what to put together, what we needed to be sure to include, et cetera. Yes, it was very helpful to have. It would have just taken us so much longer to do it all from 17:00scratch, and so that was really good.

CRAWFORD: Is there anything else to add before we move into Sudan?

HENINGBURG: Well, there are a couple things I would say. One is that I discovered--I had my first real appreciation for the Rotarians, and actually it was interesting, because one weekend they were like, "OK, you've been in Uganda for x amount of time. You haven't been anywhere outside of Entebbe, except for a couple of meetings in Kampala [Uganda], and you have to go out and do something. We have a long weekend. We're sending you out with somebody. We're sending you with a vehicle." I said, "OK, well, I have to pay for things. How do we do that?" We just made this shorthand, and we said, "Just say a Rotarian was in town." [Laughs] I just handed a bunch of money over to somebody, and everything was covered, and we said, "A Rotarian was in town."

I was there through the holidays, and so it was the first time I had spent holidays in Africa and realized that the capital cities just completely become silent. Everyone goes back to their home area. Fortunately, I was adopted by a woman who was an ex-EIS [Epidemic Intelligence Service] officer who lived there, working on STD [sexually transmitted disease] projects, and so I played cricket on her lawn on Christmas Day, a sort of classic British colonial thing, [laughs] and discovered sort of interesting side things.

There was a street market on Tuesdays there, and she had some friends who were from the British Embassy, who were also working in Entebbe doing something, and they would all get together and have "bicycle chicken." They had these chickens that were brought from the village on the back of a bicycle, and then they had grills by the side of the road, and they would grill them up, and they had their favorite guy who they would go have bicycle chicken with. They would go shop in 19:00the market, and then they would come, and they would look over what they bought, and then they would have this bicycle chicken, and this was the Tuesday ritual.

I joined, and I realized that, if you looked, everything--clothes would be in a big pile. Of course, it was Africa, so there were really colorful clothes, and they were all different--and these are the things--you know, like this [points to purple dress]--these are the things people liked [laughs]. Then we would sit down, and they would be pulling out like, you know, "OK, I got this for fifty cents," and, "I got this for a quarter," and it would be these Liz Claiborne little black vest kind of outfit things. They were like, "This is great! I'm stocking my whole wardrobe." I was like, "I didn't see anything like that."

It turns out that it was all the stuff--they would go out and dig to the bottom of the piles for all the stuff that no Africans wanted because it was so bland and dull, and that was exactly what all the European and American people wanted, [laughs] and so it was really cheap because no one wanted it. It was like, "Oh, 20:00you're going to take this off my hands? Great." That was sort of my introduction to the used clothes and what happens to them when they disappear out of our sight.

There were a lot of things like that that I learned, just by kind of being around and being able to see the rhythm of things. We didn't really set up how long I was going to be there from the beginning. It was just kind of, you know, "Just go work and see how to make things work, and get things done." The nine months was coincidental. It wasn't, you know, human pregnancy kind of time.

It was [laughs] coincidence, but it established my pattern for the next few years. I was not one of the people who would go for two weeks and come out. I just didn't feel comfortable working that way. I thought it was important to know where the bathroom was, to know how to greet people in the local language. 21:00I can eat in so many languages, even though I can't speak. I can say sort of "hello," "good evening," and "eat," [laughs] and that's it.

I started learning that in Uganda. I learned all about matoke, that--in different countries there's some dish that you have to eat every day, or you're not a citizen of the country; you lose your citizenship. In Uganda, it was matoke. This is a banana-like, but not a banana thing that, to me, was just a big, bland mush of bananas, and you ate it with things that would jazz it up a little bit. I learned from the people in the hotel that there were different kinds of matoke and that their relatives would come, and they would have the wrong matoke, and the relatives would go back to the village, and they would say, "They tried to starve me there. They had this horrible matoke that was nothing."

When it was Christmas, suddenly in front of UNEPI there was this huge truck full 22:00of these bananas, and what it was was that part of what they did is the Ministry of Health provided for everyone going home to the villages matoke to take to the villages, and I wondered if it was the right kind or the wrong kind, [laughs] but they had lots.

There were a couple of people who were affiliated with the ministry who died while I was there, and so I saw how it was very ingrained that the Ministry of Health would help people when there was a funeral, in terms of providing maybe transportation, funds--how all the people from the office would go, even if it was some far village, and just sort of how things were really intertwined in terms of the support for people in a way that we don't find here in the government.

CRAWFORD: Unless you worked with Bob Keegan.

HENINGBURG: OK, well, that's a different story. [Laughs]

CRAWFORD: That's what it's reminding me of.

HENINGBURG: Well, yes. Actually, this is kind of a side thing, but Hamid [S.] Jafari's [MD] going away was last week, and I talked about a couple of things, but we had a gong, and I was worried that it was going to take too long. I didn't say what I really think is the most important thing that relates to that, which is, particularly when we first came in, GID [Global Immunization Division] was very small, and people were working in really tough places.

There was really a very close-knit kind of--we were connected in ways that had more to do than work--were not just work. When I was gone for nine months, people stayed in my condo. I mean, they just--the keys were in the office, and people knew if there was somebody who came who needed to [stay], they could just shoot me an email and then have the person go stay there. People used my car, 24:00and that was just sort of part of what we did. Hamid would come home for the summer, and he'd be staying in Karen [A.] Hennessey's [MD] apartment. He'd be driving Elias Durry's [MD, MPH] car. He'd have so-and-so's phone.

I mean, this was just what we did, and so there was this knitted kind of feeling to us. It was really important, and I think Bob was instrumental in starting us off on that foot, but that sort of became, also, one of my functions in the division, [laughs] which I've kind of kept to this day, to have that sort of underlying cohesiveness, to help with the cohesiveness of the division.

I saw how it was built into the system in Uganda with the Ministry of Health and with the things that happened in a crisis. They had a fund, both at the hotel and at UNEPI, that was an emergency fund, because people didn't make enough 25:00money to really be able to deal with emergencies when they came up, so if there was an emergency there was a fund that could be used to help them out. I contributed to both funds before I left [laughs]. It's the Rotarian contribution. I think that there were a lot of those kinds of things that I would have never picked up on if I had just come in for a meeting, or come in for a couple of weeks and left, that I really appreciated having the opportunity to be able to do.

Then I went home to see what was happening in the U.S., check in, send a few more people overseas, and then onward and upward. Apparently, Bob--there are 26:00several versions of the story, but the one that I know about is that Bob went to a cocktail party, and he met a guy there named Carl Tinstman [MPA, MBA], who was at that time the UNICEF [United Nations Children's Fund] OLS, Operational Lifeline Sudan, lead for the southern part of Sudan.

No doubt after a few beers, Carl and Bob decided that there was--I think Carl decided that there was not a good reason for South Sudan to be left out of the world of polio eradication just because there wasn't the best infrastructure and there was a war going on. These were not reasons that they should be left out. Bob decided, you know, if we're going to eradicate polio in the whole world, we can't leave out South Sudan.

Carl had previously been the UNICEF rep in Yemen, and at that time Elias Durry came to try and make NIDs happen--well, to make NIDs happen in Yemen, and so they met at that point in time. Carl said to Bob, "Send me an Elias Durry so that we can get things going in South Sudan." Bob came back and said, "OK, I need you to go to South Sudan." I said, "OK. Sure. Whatever" [laughs]. He called Carl, and he said, "Well, Elias is busy, but I have somebody else for you." I didn't hear about that until afterwards. I didn't know I was supposed to be the Elias Durry [laughs].

Off I went, and I was supposed to just go and do an assessment. I was going to stay for three weeks, and [Douglas N.] Doug Klaucke [MD], who was our regional person working in the sub-regional office in Kenya, said, "Well, you could come 28:00stay at my house while you're here instead of staying at a hotel." I was like, "Are you sure that's OK with your wife and everything?" He was like, "OK." I said, "Did you really check with her?" [laughs]. He said, "I will," and then he came back and he said, "Yes, yes, it's fine." I went to stay at Doug's house.

Again, I had only been to Togo at that point in time, in Africa. I still sort of had my Africa lack of sophistication. I got to Nairobi [Kenya], and it was cold, [laughs] and I had not planned for that. I remember Doug giving me a flannel shirt to wear, which I still have in my closet.

UNICEF was sort of the center agency of a lot of NGOs, nongovernmental organizations, that were working and delivering services in a very patchwork way 29:00in South Sudan, and they had a consortium. What I did in the beginning is I just went, and I went around to everyone who was in the consortium to talk about polio eradication and to see what they thought we could do, because I thought that's how you do an assessment.

I really have to say that there were two nurses who worked for UNICEF, Violet [W.] Gikonyo [KRPHN, KRM, KRN] and Jennifer--what was Jennifer's last name? I don't remember. Anyway, two Kenyan nurses, and they were the immunization program from UNICEF for South Sudan, and they would just go into South Sudan, different places, and they would do these clinics, and they would check on the little refrigerators, and they were the ones who really were the germ of, you know, we could do this. This could be done. I think they were thinking of it more in the places where they had immunization clinics they could do something, 30:00than we can do something in all of South Sudan. There hadn't really been an all of South Sudan thing.

I said to Bob, "I think we can do something here." He said, "Well, then you can't come home. You have to do something." I said, "OK," [laughs] and so we proceeded to do something. There was a famine, as there often is in South Sudan, and there were people who were for, and people who were against, and it was very fortunate that Carl had had this idea so the rest of UNICEF really kind of had to go along with the program, because if Carl had not been on board--there were a lot of things that I was able to do in UNICEF that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise.

Then there were things that were just fortuitous. There was no WHO relating to 31:00South Sudan. They had WHO in Khartoum [Sudan], and they really related to the north, but there was no South Sudan office or anything like that. The other person I have to mention upfront, who was incredibly instrumental in making this work, was Ross Cox. Ross Cox was working at The Carter Center on Guinea worm [disease], and he was--and he had been at CDC, and then was--I don't know if he was detailed to The Carter Center or whether he had left and started to work for the Carter Center, but he was their lead in Nairobi.

He agreed. Bob called him--he knew him; I didn't know him--and he agreed, "Yes, we'll work together." We decided to do some joint polio/Guinea worm activities. The Guinea worm people were really out into the small places everywhere, because that's where the worm hides, and they had sort of a regular activity going on. 32:00He was someone who was known and respected in this consortium of NGOs, and so he was kind of the first person who was willing to say, once we were trying to really go for it, who was willing to say, "We can do something, and we should do something, and as a consortium we should be supportive." That was incredibly, incredibly helpful, to have a voice--and also to be adopted by his family in addition to Doug's.

Once we decided to do something, then I needed to get some money. It was like, "Hi, Bob, I need some money." He said, "OK, well, go for it." I made a little proposal, and I shopped it around to a few of the embassies, and Carl shopped it around a bit, but WHO needed to put money in.

WHO and UNICEF are both part of the UN [United Nations], but that doesn't 33:00necessarily make them able to work well together, administratively and functionally. It's kind of like the relationship between CDC and USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development]. We're both part of the U.S. government, but we have a very different view of life, and we do things in a very different way.

Well, UNICEF and WHO are like that, too. I'm sitting there in the UNICEF office, plugging away, and trying to figure out, OK, so I get this money. How can I get money from WHO? At that time, Dr. [Mohamed H.] Wahdan [MD] was the regional advisor for EMRO [WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean], and South Sudan was considered part of EMRO. I said, "How can we do this?" He said, "Well, we can't give money to UNICEF. It just doesn't work that way." I said, "OK. You 34:00can give money to WHO?" He said, "Yes." I said, "OK."

WHO Somalia was based in Nairobi, and they had a whole office, and had been pretty well-established there. I went to the WHO Somalia office, and I asked to see the WR [WHO representative]. Much to my surprise and amazement--and, as it turns out, it was another very fortunate thing--there was an American guy who was the WR for WHO Somalia.]

I said, "Hi. I'm from CDC. I'm working in UNICEF. We're trying to do these NIDs in Sudan. I know you're wondering what any of this has to do with you, WHO Somalia, but hear me out" [laughs]. I said, "The regional office wants to put some money in for the NIDs in South Sudan, but they can't give the money to 35:00UNICEF, so can they give the money to you, and then I can come and bring you my bills and you can pay for them?" The guy thought about it, and I said, "You can check with Dr. Wahdan to make sure it's all legitimate." He contacted Dr. Wahdan, and he came back and said, "OK." He told this receptionist in the front, "When she comes, take her things, take her to the financial people, get it straight." That was how I got the WHO money involved in the NIDs in South Sudan. There were so many incredibly fortuitous things like that that happened, in a way that the karma was on our side to make it work.

For me, South Sudan was absolutely lifechanging, professionally and personally, 36:00and I discovered--I think it was the first time that I really had to just get out there, dust off my problem-solving chops, never know when I woke up what I was going to have to do that day, and what I was going to have to make work, and how to do it, and just make it happen. It was amazing. There are a million South Sudan stories. I can't tell them all [laughs]. I can't. There were so many people who were key. We did great recruiting from South Sudan.

After I had been in the UNICEF office probably for about, maybe a month and a half--we had set that we were going to wait until after New Year's do to the NIDs; we were going to do it in the early part of 1997. What year am I in? 37:00[Laughs] In the early part of 1998. That's what we were aiming for, and I knew we needed help, and so Dr. Wahdan sent three consultants to come, and they went into Sudan, and they moved around, and they decided there's no way you can do anything in this broken place, and they came back and made that as their report. I said, "This is not very helpful, and if we're going to do something I don't know if these guys are going to be able to help us do it, since they don't think we can do anything."

Then I didn't have any idea what to do at that point about them, or to get more help, and so I called Harry [F.] Hull [MD], who was the polio guy in Geneva [Switzerland], and I had worked for him when I had my first assignment in Geneva. I said, "Harry, I need you to call Dr. Wahdan. I don't want these guys 38:00here, because they're not being helpful. I need some people who feel like we can do things, not people who don't feel like we can do things. It's going to be hard enough to do without having the underlying attitude that it's not going to work."

Harry called me back, and he said, "Dr. Wahdan said to call him." I was like, "No, Harry, you were supposed to talk to Dr. Wahdan" [laughs] "and get this taken--" He said, "Dr. Wahdan said to call him." I distinctly remember sitting in the UNICEF office. It must have been a Sunday, and EMRO started on Sunday, so--we were in Kenya; we started on Monday, but EMRO started on Sunday. I was sitting in the office all by myself, and calling Dr. Wahdan, and saying, "Hi, Dr. Wahdan. This is Anne-Reneé." He said, "How are you?" Very formal, very, you know--we had our conversation, and he said, "Well, can you work with any of the guys?" I said, "Well, this one might be OK. I think if he was maybe separate 39:00from the other two he might be OK." We made a deal. We agreed that two of the people would leave and that Dr. Wahdan would find some other people to come, and the one guy would stay.

Then I really was back in the situation of needing more help. I knew we needed lots of people to work in Sudan, and one of the things that's really important to UNICEF, in the UN in general, is that you should have host country nationals working in the country. In South Sudan, because the UNICEF office was based in Kenya, a lot of the people who were working were Kenyans, and they would go and work in Sudan. I said, "If we're going to really do this thing in Sudan, and people have to go in, and they have to stay for some months to get everything planned, we need Sudanese."

There were two primary, warring factions, and I'd been introduced to each one, and so I went to the one, the RASS [Relief Association of Southern Sudan] 40:00people, and I said, "I need some people to come and work in South Sudan. Can you find me people, and we'll have UNICEF interview them, and if we think they're qualified then we'll hire them to work on the NIDs?" "Sure."

Then I went to the SPLA [Sudan People's Liberation Army] offices and I said the same thing, and they also sent people. The first person who came, Victoria--[laughs] Victoria was probably in her fifties, maybe early sixties. She had been trained as a nurse in Sudan. She had been living in Sudan. Her area was attacked. She and her kids and her husband, until he was killed, had walked to Ethiopia, and then from there to Kenya, and they were living in Kakuma [Kenya], and then she had managed to get her kids into college, and they were--one of these, you know, usual, incredible stories. She said, "If we're 41:00going to do something in South Sudan and have South Sudan join the rest of the world in a health way, I want to be there." People were really worried. They were like, "She's this old woman," and blah, blah, blah. She came in to UNICEF. She was the first person that the SPLA people sent. I went and got the woman who was the head of HR [human resources] for UNICEF. I said, "Come on, let's interview this woman." She was a Swedish woman whose father was the ambassador, so she had been in Kenya a long time, but she was there, and she was a little skeptical. I said, "Come on, let's just go talk to her. We need to. This is the first person they've sent us." We interviewed Victoria, and then we left, and I said, "OK, Victoria, give me your number and we'll get in touch with you." We came out and she said, "Oh my God." She started crying, and she said, "We have to hire her. She'll be perfect."

That was the beginning of our recruiting, and it was amazing. There was someone 42:00in personnel, in HR, named Rose, and I said, "Rose, we need to hire like thirty or forty people." She said, "OK, that'll take us six months." I said, "No, we need to do it in the next two weeks." She said, "UNICEF can't do that." I said, "Rose, UNICEF can do that. UNICEF can do that."

We were churning people through there, and they were interviewing them, and we had like thirty people hired. We had four Kenyans and the rest were Sudanese, and most of them were young Sudanese who had never lived in Sudan, but they were Sudanese, at least, and they were the people I could reach, and they could speak the local language, and they knew where they were from, and we could put them in the areas that they were from. It was really something, and it was one of those, you know, sort of early examples of how UNICEF could do things that they didn't know they could do, and we did that over and over again in UNICEF, and it was great.

Then, the woman who was the administrative officer said, "Well, I have to go on home leave." I was like, "No, you can't go on home leave. I need you." She said, "Don't worry. They're going to send somebody in to take my place." OK. They sent this guy, and his name was Reza Hossaini [MD], and it was his first international assignment for UNICEF. He was from Iran, and he was going to come, and he was going to take her place and stay for four or five weeks while she was out.

He went around the offices to meet everybody, and so I was sitting in my little office in the back, and he came in, and he was like, "Oh, yes, polio. I was involved in polio in Iran, and we did this, and on the border," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, "Nice to meet you" [laughs]. Then I went to Carl and I said, "I need him." He did his little time, and I said, "No, no, no, I need him to stay, and I need him to completely be on board."

Carl was busy, and so the way that I talked to Carl is I would go to his house for dinner, and then I could get his attention. I went to his house and I said, "I need that Reza guy." Carl said, "Well, OK, come to my office. We'll make a meeting. I want to know exactly what it is you need to make this thing happen. I feel like you're stuck. You've got agreement from everybody. You've got money. You've made arrangements for the vaccine. We've done all that stuff, but I want to know what's going on." I said, "I need somebody based in Lokichogio [Kenya] who can move things forward there. We've hired the people."

I mean, we had done all the infrastructure things, but there just wasn't enough of me to go around to be there as much as we needed somebody there, and to be in Nairobi as much as we needed somebody in Nairobi. We had gotten Muireann [B.] Brennan [MPH, MD, MB] at that time, and she came from CDC to help and to be out there, and so we were sort of building our team, but we just needed some bigger impact, and so we got it. We got Reza, and that was the beginning of Reza's 45:00international polio career. It didn't end there. That was really fortunate.

One of the NGOs that I went to--I can't even remember the name of it now. I can picture the house, but they didn't have an office; they had this house that they lived in. There was this guy, [Jeffrey M.] Jeff Partridge [PhD, MPH, MS], and he was the person who was leading their activities in Upper Nile [South Sudan]. I remember going to the house and talking to Jeff Partridge, and in what turned out to be my polio recruiting--he was another person who was recruited into polio. Then, of course, Carl Tinstman, who was happily being a UNICEF rep [representative] everywhere, was recruited into polio. I felt like from a recruiting standpoint that South Sudan actually was quite beneficial to the polio program, and that was one of those many just little side things that had a 46:00big impact. South Sudan was just an amazing place in that kind of way.

We almost scuttled the NIDs. I mentioned there was a famine, and people started pushing back and saying, you know, "We can't do polio when there's a famine. That's much more important, and we have to do polio." I didn't really know how to deal with this sentiment. I felt like we should try and do polio, that it didn't diminish the famine at all. Someone made an appointment for me to go to--the SPLA people said, you know--when I was trying to gather support for doing polio, even with the famine, I had to go around and talk to people again. Of course, I had to go to Ross, and Ross said--Ross was on the fence. He could 47:00have gone either way. I said, "Well, let me go talk to the Sudanese and see what they think." Somehow, I ended up at John Garang's [de Mabior, PhD] house on Christmas Eve. John Garang wasn't there, but the other bigwig-y people were there from the SPLA.

I said, "OK, people are really backing off, and they're saying that they don't want to do polio, that they think they should concentrate on the famine and that they shouldn't do polio eradication." They said, "Why shouldn't we have the famine and polio eradication both taken care of? Why should we have to give up one in order to deal with the other? We want it to go ahead." I said, "OK, well, we have to really get a good picture of what's going on on the ground. We have to figure out how we can do this, but if you really feel strongly about this then I'll go out and advocate it. It's your country" [laughs]. They said, "We 48:00want to do polio eradication." I said, "OK."

I went to UNICEF, and we had a meeting late at night. It was Ross and Carl and me in the room. I said, "Well, this is what the Sudanese say, and so if the Sudanese feel this way then I think we should try to do it." That turned out to sway us to keep going forward, even with the famine going on. We had lots of things like that that just came up. Of course, I got reamed for going to John Garang's house [laughs]. I said, you know, "I didn't set up the meeting place. That was where they said we could meet, and so I just went." They were like, "Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah." "OK, OK, OK, I got it, I got it, I got it."

CRAWFORD: Can you talk a little bit more about John Garang's house, and also the SPLA's offices?

HENINGBURG: Well, John Garang's house--so I was staying--Doug Klaucke stayed in a part of town that was pretty far away from the [UN] Gigiri complex [Kenya]. It was a long haul every morning, and the driver would drop off the kids at school, at the international school, and then drop me off at UNICEF. Then I would just kind of get home from UNICEF whatever way I could figure out to do that. Somehow [laughs]. Sometimes taxis, sometimes rides with people; it just depended on what was going on. John Garang's house was in the same neighborhood where Doug Klaucke's house was, and so that's kind of how I ended up not having anybody from UNICEF with me, which was good, because they wouldn't have been able to go into that situation, and because I was this quasi--you know, everybody knew I 50:00wasn't really UNICEF; I was just kind of UNICEF--I was looked at differently.

I was there from CDC. At that time, there were not a lot of black U.S. government people wandering around. I think that that was helpful for me, in some ways, that people were somehow a little more comfortable. I mean, there was no mistaking me for being an African--that was never an issue--but I still think that there was a different level of comfort, or of at least maybe a little less wariness would be the way to put it, and being willing to hear from me and have me listen in a way that maybe wouldn't have been the case for everyone else.

Yes, I mean, John Garang had a very nice house, and as far as--his kids were out of the country somewhere, going to school. I mean, one of the things I learned 51:00in South Sudan is that there are not only losers in war; there are winners in war, and there are people--I'm not saying John Garang, but it was clear that there were people who were benefitting from the war, and that there were people who wanted--who had an interest in having it continue, rather than having it end. That was one of many lessons for me that I hadn't necessarily been conscious of before.

As it turned out, I think the John Garang visit did one other thing for me within UNICEF. The person who really laid into me was Carl's deputy. Eventually, 52:00he said to me one night, "I need you to go to a meeting at this place." He lived very near Doug's house, and so I said, "Oh, are you going to come pick me up?" He was like, "No, no, no, I'm not going with you." I said, "Oh?" He said, "Yes, just go meet with these people. This is the guy. This is his name. There's another place that we want to see if we can do the polio activities while we're at it."

It turned out that these were people who were affiliated with the Nuba Valley [Sudan], which was completely off-limits for everyone to do work in, in Sudan. This same guy who had sort of reamed me for going to John Garang's house then sent me to the Nuba Mountain people, [laughs] and he said, "Well, somehow you pulled that one off, and so let's see what you can do with this one."

I would say that all around people just sort of got used to seeing me there, and 53:00I fit in in a way that made them feel comfortable to use me in ways that they couldn't do themselves, but that it was a way to get things done that maybe we couldn't do otherwise. There were lots of those kinds of flashpoints, in terms of the political will to go forward, and then, of course, there were logistics ones. I mean, there were money ones--I mean, there were all other kinds. We got Reza on the ground. There was a guy named Keith Hackett [MS, PhD], who was the Guinea worm person who was assigned to Lokichogio and who worked out of there. We had UNICEF people on the ground. We were all living in the Lokichogio camp, and we set up our NIDs office, and we had the place for the RASS people, and the 54:00place for the SPLA people, because they couldn't be together, and we did our training out under the trees, and we had our tukuls that we lived in and that we--you know, it was something.

Something that I learned in Uganda. In Uganda, the minister of health came--not in Uganda, sorry; when I was in Zambia the minister of health came. He hadn't been there during the whole preparation for the NIDs, but the day--the first day of the NIDs the minister of health came. I actually was being helpful in the best way I could think of, and so I was actually making tea for everybody and bringing it and delivering it. Then, when they got around to introducing everyone in the room they said, "This is our colleague from CDC." The minister of health was like, "Where?" [Laughs] I was like, "It's me." He said, "I thought 55:00you were from somewhere in western Uganda and you were just serving us tea. I had no idea. What are you doing serving us tea?" I was like, "It was the helpful thing to do. It's OK. It's fine. I volunteered and no one made me--" That was, you know, sort of my, "Oh, OK, you must be from western Uganda." When I was in Sudan, people would look at me and assume I was from either Ethiopia or Sudan. I had that kind of ease of blending in.

I shared my office in UNICEF with a woman named Kate Spring [MPH], and everybody would come in and start talking to me about things, and I was like, "I'm not Kate" [laughs]. We had a resemblance. After a certain amount of time you've got to find a hairdresser. I was like, "Kate, where's the hairdresser?" I went to the hairdresser. The hairdresser said, "Oh, your sister was here." I was like, "Oh, yes, my sister Kate." I mean, it was this kind of thing. I really felt like--that's why I feel like it was an advantage for me that I really blended 56:00in, in a way, that I didn't make people uncomfortable, that they--I sort of became part of the population.

The only place where I really had difficulty were situations--like one of the drivers told me, Kennedy, he told me when I was getting ready to leave, he said, "It took me six months to understand anything you were saying. You speak fast. It's like you have marbles in your mouth. You have a funny accent. You have a deep voice. You would be talking to me, and you would say things, and I could tell from your tone of voice that you wondered why you were having to repeat it, and I had no clue what you were saying," [laughs] "for months." I was like, "Why didn't you tell me?" He said, "Because I didn't know you, and when you have someone who's one of the big people in the car, you can't tell them this kind of 57:00thing." I was like, "Well, OK, life could have been a lot easier if somebody had told me that from the beginning." It was, you know, South Sudan, but--

CRAWFORD: You mentioned something about what UNICEF didn't know, and so I was wondering if you could talk about the cultures of CDC and UNICEF.

HENINGBURG: Well, let me talk about the three agencies. I think something that happened--less so for CDC, because we were kind of removed--and at first, I used to feel like, "Wow, things go so smoothly at CDC." Over time, CDC has evolved to be much more complicated, and things go much less smoothly at CDC than they did at that time, but we were small. We were new. We had Bob.

When Bob hired me he said, "OK, we have to get things done. That's the primary thing. Your job is to try and make sure that we do things and we don't break the rules, but you don't stop us from doing anything. You need to know the rules, you need to tell us when we're getting too close, and you need to figure out a way within the rules for us to get things done." I was like, "OK."

That was kind of my job at CDC, but in some ways we had a lot more flexibility. There was no Center for Global Health. We were kind of this renegade little activity, sitting in NIP [National Immunization Program], functioning completely differently because we were the overseas people and the rest of it was a domestic program, and so we could do lots of things. I felt like CDC was sort of lean, mean, and fast.

WHO was an incredible bureaucracy, and on the ground UNICEF was really much more of an implementing agency. They really did logistics, moving vaccine, 59:00interacting with people. WHO was much more consultative, naturally. Polio eradication broke WHO. I mean, it had to break and be put back together to do things that WHO--were not even a dream. Maybe they did them during smallpox eradication but that was long ago, and at this point the amount of money that was coming in, pushing it out, the number of people who were working, the need to do things quickly, all of these things were not in the nature of WHO. In that sense, I felt like polio really broke and remade WHO to be able to do things and to be implementing in a way that it hadn't been before.

UNICEF was very much an implementing agency, very much used to working on its 60:00own, not really in collaboration with WHO. You know, WHO would sort of think, "OK, we're the brains in this operation, and UNICEF is the brawn." UNICEF was like, "We're the people who do things, and WHO talks." There were sort of these sibling differences, but that were really true in terms of what they did.

WHO, people would do things like--they would write guidelines, and they would hold trainings, and they would have meetings, and they would go--as Jules put it, he said, "The WHO people were the people whose shoes never got dirty." You know, they came in their grand boubou and their beautiful shoes, and they sat at the table, and they said what everybody else should do, and they didn't get their shoes dirty [laughs]. The UNICEF people were the ones who were on the ground. They had offices all over the country. WHO had their nice office in the capital city. UNICEF had places all over the place. It was just very different organizations.

I think I was really fortunate, because my first assignment--long assignment--was in WHO, in Geneva. My second long assignment was really in the Ministry of Health in UNEPI. That's where I went every day. That's where I sat. I didn't go to the WHO offices, except to visit. I went to the UNICEF office two or three times. I was really embedded in UNEPI in that situation, and the Ministry of Health. Then I went to South Sudan, and there I was embedded in UNICEF, so very early in my polio career I was embedded in the different agencies in a way that I could learn how they worked and where the interfaces were and where the tension points were. I was very fortunate in that sense, but they were really different animals from each other. Very different. Very, very 62:00different [laughs].

CRAWFORD: I think you mentioned something about you needed to get funding from WHO, and then UNICEF didn't know that it could do--

HENINGBURG: No, WHO couldn't give money to UNICEF.

CRAWFORD: Because they're both UN agencies.

HENINGBURG: I don't know why; I just know they couldn't. I mean, I just thought, "OK, Dr. Wahdan, transfer it to UNICEF OLS," and he was like, "No, that doesn't work. We don't have a mechanism for doing that." That's why I had to go to WHO Somalia, because WHO could send money to WHO, but they could not send money to UNICEF, and vice versa. I mean, UNICEF couldn't give money to WHO, either. Those were sort of the--who knew? I mean, I was just like, "OK, great. The regional office is going to put in this much money. Who needs to sign to receive the check?" Everyone was like, "Not us" [laughs].

CRAWFORD: In terms of problem-solving up to this point in our conversation today, is there anything you'd want to point out, lessons learned-wise, lessons learned about problem-solving?

HENINGBURG: Oh my gosh. That if you keep trying to figure out a way--you can't be discouraged because you don't solve the problem the first time in the first way, and that you have to keep thinking of different angles to use to try and solve the problem. For me, one of the things that was really helpful--and that I really learned in Geneva but it was reinforced and reinforced--for me it's really important to understand how the system operates, and not just to hand something off to somebody and then hope for the best, because it's by 64:00understanding how the system operates that you can figure out how you might be able to do something a little differently in order to get something done.

One of the things that I do when I go into an office, whether it's a WHO office or a UNICEF office, I mean, I really do make rounds, and I really do try to figure out what everybody does, and who works with whom, and it wasn't a deliberate thing that I did in the UNICEF office, but I talked to everybody, and I wasn't--there weren't enough vehicles, and so a lot of times you would book for a vehicle but then you'd have to go wait. I wouldn't run back to my office; I would just hang out with the drivers and wait. I would talk to them. This is just what I did; it wasn't anything--but then if I needed something--or I'd go hang out in the radio room, and I would listen to them talking to everyone all over the place.

I got to know the people in a way that I wasn't coming to them as a stranger and 65:00asking for something when I needed something, or I could get them to sort of tell me like, "I don't really understand why I'm having such a difficulty with this. What's the story?" Then I could find out what the story was. It was just kind of a combination of my natural way of interacting with people--pretty much learned from STD--and being able to talk to anyone in any situation about anything, that really helped me in terms of learning the different systems well enough that I could figure out how to get things done when I was blocked initially from doing something. That's what I did [laughs].

CRAWFORD: Other lessons? Could you talk about maybe Jeff Partridge a little bit more?

HENINGBURG: Jeff Partridge. Jeff Partridge was this guy--I don't know to this 66:00day how Jeff Partridge ended up in South Sudan. You know, if you look at Jeff, he's sort of this white bread-looking guy, and I didn't even have an appreciation at the time when I talked to him when he said, "Well, I just came back from three weeks in Upper Nile"--I didn't really know what "Upper Nile" meant, but at that point, in the south, Upper Nile was the least-developed area, and it was really something that this white bread guy from the U.S. was out there working with everybody. He seemed to have a real easy relationship with the Africans. He spoke a fair amount of the local language. I mean, he wasn't an expat [expatriate] kind of person at all; he just went to fit in. Bright, smart guy. You could tell. Willing to try things. I mean, that was amazing. Fun. You 67:00know, fun to work with, and fun to be with.

I think in these situations you really have to be easygoing to a certain extent, because things are not necessarily going to go smoothly, and if that's going to make your hair stand up you're just not going to last very long, or you're going to stroke out or have high blood pressure [laughs] or something, and he was one of those people who could really, you know, just sort of lay back, roll with the punches, but still get things done. That was Jeff, and, you know, somewhere along the line we started talking about working at CDC, and it happened.

CRAWFORD: Did you think about burnout as you were recruiting people?

HENINGBURG: No, because we weren't going to be doing something for so long. It 68:00was a time-limited, finite, "We're going to do the NIDs; we need X amount of time to plan; we need X amount of time to execute; we need a little time on the backend to close up shop," and it wasn't going to be that long, and I really didn't--we did set up a schedule for people who went into Sudan to come out periodically.

We had a couple people, like Victoria, refuse to come out. Once she got in, she refused to come out. She finally did come out once, because her glasses broke and she had to come and get the glasses replaced in Nairobi, but, you know, people told us about this woman, this older woman who came walking up to their--I mean, you had to walk miles and miles and miles in Sudan, and she would be there with her pack, and she would come walking up and say, "We need to do polio eradication," and the people would just be like--and they would do it. We 69:00couldn't get her out. I kept calling her on the--everything was by radio. There were no cellphones. We had one sat [satellite] phone, and then everything else was by radio. I was Alpha Romeo, and that was where I learned the international code for all the letters, and I would call her periodically, and she would say, "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine." "OK, just checking. Let me know if you need to come out." "No, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine."

It was very clear that people, especially after the first round--basically, they went in, they stayed for that period of time, of planning time, and then we did the first round. Then after the first round, before the second round, we had a lot of people who asked to come out, and then I realized that they really needed to--I mean, they had never been in these conditions before. These were people who had grown up in Kenya. They had never been in South Sudan, living there and working there.

On our end, I mean, the first sort of management team, after the three guys were moved out, then Reza became the lead on the ground in Lokichogio, and he was the lead for NIDs. It was important to have somebody at UNICEF who was the lead for NIDs, so Reza became the first lead for NIDs. He was working with everyone on the ground.

They would call me, and Waren told me afterwards, years afterwards, she said--it was kind of amazing. It's like we would call on the radio, and we would say, "We need this," and they would be calling me, and I was very far away, and the radio room would call on the radio and say, "You have a call. You have to come." I was like, "OK, I'm on the way." The phrase that they use [laughs] in Kenya is they say "I'm coming running," and so I would say, "I'm coming running." "Alpha Romeo, where are you really?" "I'm coming running. I'm coming running" [laughs]. 71:00You just, you know, figured out how to make things happen.

I think after a certain amount of time people really got into it. I mean, there was not anything where--that wasn't the way that people usually worked. You know, usually they were in for the long haul, incremental change was great, and they were very worried about the politics of all the NGOs and all these things. I didn't live there. I didn't have to worry about any of that stuff. It was fine if everyone hated me. I was going home. They could all be mad at me. When there was something bad that needed to be done I was happy to do it. You just can function in a different way when you're in that environment. Jeff had clearly learned how to operate in the environment, and he was able to get things done. I have no idea--his NGO that he worked--I can't even remember the name of the NGO, but it was some religious NGO. I have no idea how he ended up in there [laughs].

You know, you found people, and most of the people who were there--we spent a lot of time in Lokichogio. In the evenings there was nothing to do, and people just hung out with each other and talked to each other, unless you wanted to go sit in your tukul by yourself. There were no cellphones, you know, the computer--there was no internet. You just interacted with people.

We used to do a radio--we would do a radio call every day, going up to the NIDs, and everyone in Sudan knew we were doing the radio call then, and they also knew if they wanted to talk to each other that would be the time to do it, at the end of our radio call. Our radio person in Loki [Lokichogio] was Papa Whiskey, and so Papa Whiskey was the person who ran the radio room, and I would go sit down with Papa Whiskey, and I would have my little script, and I would say, "Hi, this is Alpha Romeo from NID Central."

One of the things that I did is I was obviously also having to report out what was happening in terms of the preparations and the NIDs and everything, and I would take some of the messages, and I would read them, and I would say, "I just want you to know I got a message from the regional office in Cairo [Egypt] today, and they're really pleased at the way the preparations are going, and they're really encouraging us." I would try to bring those kinds of things in, in addition to, you know, "The vaccine's going to arrive at this time. Everybody needs to be ready. Do you have your--?" It was a combination of those things.

It was just so many things that I had never done before. I had never used a radio. I had never learned the international call signs. I had never done any of these things. For me, it was incredible that way. I think that part of what helped me--I mean, it was a lot of stress. It was a lot of long, long hours.

Part of what helped me to survive is that I was going back to a home every 74:00night, where everything was set. I mean, there would be dinner in the refrigerator for me to heat up, and my room was sparkling clean, and clothes were washed, and--I mean, everything was there, so I had just--the family was there, and the kids were excited, and they wanted to know what happened, and all the kids--we all started calling each other by our radio names, and so Karen was Kilo Kilo, and Doug was Delta Kilo, and we all called each other by our radio names.

I became integrated into the household, too. It was my--I shouldn't say "job," but I made the lunches with the kids every night, to make sure they had their lunches ready to go in the morning, and we would stop at the corner, and we would buy the newspaper, and we would read the newspaper in the car while we were driving to school, so I had this very warm and welcoming infrastructure to help me at home, and a place where I could decompress without being solitary, and without being on my own, and people who were sort of worried about me and 75:00paying attention to what happened to me.

It all fit together in a way that was incredible. In that sense, that whole GID spirit of just being together, it was amazing. I went to [Mary] Louise's [Martin, DVM, MS] house for three weeks, and I ended up staying in South Sudan for nine and a half months, and that's a long time. Someone went after I was there and asked Louise--they said, "How could you stand having this woman in your house for nine months, just here all the time?" She said, "She was like a member of the family."

When I got ready to leave we went to the airport, and I had so much junk, and so Rusty, Doug's oldest son, went with me up to the door of the airport, and the guy was like, "Well, who are you? You can't come in." "What do you mean?" "She can only come in with a ticket." He was like, "No, no, no, she's my sister. I 76:00have to go and help her bring the luggage in." The guy just looked at the two of us and was like, "OK--" [laughs]. That was kind of our--you know, I was the older sister, and then there were our parents, and there were--and the kids. It was just a really--all of these things contributed.

One of the things that was really amazing for me is that we were on too short of a timeline to get everything done. For instance, UNICEF couldn't get the vaccine to us in time to do the NIDs, so what I did is I got the order placed with Copenhagen. I got them to confirm that they had received the money, and they were getting the order, and then Doug took me to KEPI [Kenya Expanded Programme on Immunization], to the immunization program in Kenya.

I said, "Look, I really need this much vaccine from you, and it will be replaced as soon as the vaccine comes in," because they had plenty, and they weren't 77:00doing NIDs then. They agreed. There's actually a photo in Lokichogio at the airstrip, and there's--I probably shouldn't say this because it's probably totally illegal, [laughs] but there's these boxes that are addressed to Kenya with vaccine in them, which were the vaccine that we used in the first round of NIDs, because there's no way we could get the other vaccine in time. There was that level of cooperation.

In Gulu and the other place--I went to Uganda. The TFI that year was in Kampala, and Bob said, "Come out. You need to come out, so come to Kampala for a couple of days." I met the people from Uganda who I had worked with, and I was like, "Guys, I need your help. We don't have enough cold chain equipment. We don't have enough vaccine car--we'll be OK on vaccine carriers, but we don't have enough cold boxes and icepacks and things, and how to do them." They brought stuff up to northern Uganda, and we used it in the NIDs.

I mean, it was amazing how the past things contributed to being able to do them. I think everyone was so initially skeptical that we could do anything, and then kind of tickled--wasn't really the right word, but just sort of was like, "Well, wow. If they're going to actually do this, we'll help." People from all over were throwing in to help and make it really happen. It was amazing. I mean, it was a village that made those NIDs happen [laughs]. It was a village.

CRAWFORD: One thing I've been wondering about, actually, was Carl Tinstman told me in his interview that polio is one among many priorities in UNICEF. I wondered how you met that, or if you noticed that at all in your work.

HENINGBURG: Well, of course, and not high on most people's radar screen. It was 79:00not in the top ten. That was where Carl's role was really important, in keeping us--you know, that was one of the advantages, is that this is just for a short period of time. They're not going to be here taking over the place forever. We really had to have everyone at UNICEF--at certain times, we needed everyone at UNICEF on board. We needed everyone's help. Sometimes I could function by myself, sometimes with a little group of people, but sometimes we had to have everyone really helping out.

People were very gracious about it, but I'm sure it's only because we came with money, we had someone there--it's not the kind of thing that would have worked if I had just come periodically and said, "Oh, how's that NIDs project going?" It would never have happened that way. Having somebody on the ground who was completely dedicated to that, and who could keep things going, was critical. I 80:00look at the way some people practice public health overseas, and taking something that's not necessarily the priority of the people who are there and trying to make it happen remotely, it's very difficult. It's just really hard to do that. It's fortunate that I was flexible enough in my life that I could just go stay there indefinitely [laughs] until we got the thing done, and so that was really very helpful [laughs].

Yes, there were lots of priorities, and the famine thing--what we ended up doing, relative to the famine, is I had to hire planes to take the vaccine and the cold boxes and the icepacks and everything into Sudan, because there was nothing there to do any of that stuff. Whatever weight we had leftover on the plane we took famine supplies. It was very helpful, because they didn't 81:00necessarily have the money to be able to hire planes to bring all these things in, and they weren't--the penetration was completely different for the NIDs than it was for anything else. I mean, I used to go talk to the security guys, and they'd be like, "OK, where are you trying to go now?" There were some places that nobody from OLS had been in a long time, and they would go in, and they would check the places out. I mean, probably the biggest--[laughs] some things are so ridiculous.

There was a place that we need to go in, and we went in and did the first round of NIDs, but then they were worried that it was insecure, and so when it was time to do the second round what the security guy said is he said, "OK, I'll go and I'll do a flyover and see how it looks, and look around, and see what kind of shape the runway is in, etc., and then I'll decide if it looks like it's OK, and if so then you can have permission to go to that area." He couldn't grant it 82:00from there; it had to be--you know, they had to go check it out.

I don't even know what happened, but somehow Carl got wind of this, and he was like, "No, we're not going there. We're not doing it." I was like, "Everything is planned. We've trained the people. They're on the ground. They're waiting for their vaccine. The security guy says it's OK." He was like, "No. We're not going to take that risk." I was so upset, and I remember calling them on the radio and saying, "OK, well, we're going to have to stop the NIDs there because we can't get in for this," and the people were so--they were like, "Well, we're all ready, and we're--" I was like, "OK." I went to Carl's tukul, and he was in the shower, and I waited for him to come out of the shower, [laughs] and somebody was there, and he said, "I don't think you should ask him about this again." I 83:00said, "I have to ask him about this again." He came out of the shower, and he was wrapped in a towel, and I said, "Carl," and he was like, "No!" [laughs] I was like, "OK," and so I left.

Then, he had come up, because it was actually the time that we were doing the NIDs, and he went out somewhere. I think he went to somewhere in Bahr el Ghazal [South Sudan]. He was on the ground, and he saw everyone coming to pick up the vaccine carriers, and he saw the guys with their maps saying, you know, "This--" The second round, we were able to go everywhere that we wanted to go [laughs].

The thing was every day you didn't know what the difficulty was going to be. There was a guy who scheduled the flights. His name was Howard, and he was the first person who told me that every game of FreeCell can be won. He was famous 84:00for being a difficult person to work with, and he was the flight scheduler. When he would call he would sound so mad every time he got on the radio, and he would be like, "Alpha Romeo, come to the Flight Office now!" [Laughs] I knew I was going to be yelled at about something. In time, we made our peace, and sometimes it was problems with him, or the way the flights were, and so I just learned that I had to go to him and say, "OK, we need to go to these fifteen places. We need to figure out how to go and drop, and what to do." He would help me to make the flight plan, rather than me bringing the flight plan to him and then reacting against it. Figuring out some of those kinds of things really helped a lot. I learned almost everything the hard way [laughs].

CRAWFORD: Are there any other gaps or holes or links that come to mind, in terms of problem-solving that you had to do?

HENINGBURG: Well, I have to tell you about my Hercules.

CRAWFORD: Yes! There's a photo of your Buffalo, also.

HENINGBURG: Of my Buffalo. Well, we had different planes in South Sudan. We had big planes, and small planes, and--but everything had to be brought in by plane. This was also true in Somalia. The relief activities for Somalia were being run out of Nairobi, also, and then out of Garissa [Kenya], up in the northern part of Kenya. Most of the planes--well, these Buffalos are actually Vietnam-era 86:00planes, and they were used for hauling things. I believe the number was seventeen, or something like that, that there were seventeen of them around Africa that were still flying.

We made a contract, got our Buffalo, had it all lined up, and then a couple of days before it was supposed to come the company called and said it was broken, and it wasn't coming. Our whole plan depended on loading lots of stuff onto the Buffalo, and then bringing it into a point, and then having the small planes go out from there, and then having people meet us at the spots, and then start walking from there. That was basically our logistics plan for getting the vaccine out to everywhere. Not having the Buffalo was a disaster. It was my disaster of the day, so I had to figure out how to go fix it.

I had met, socially, through Boy Scouts [of America]--Louise, Doug's wife, was 87:00the Boy Scout troop leader, and there was a guy at the World Food Programme, and he had a kid in the Boy Scouts, and so I had met him socially through the Boy Scouts a few times. I went over and I told him--I said, "By any chance, do you have a Buffalo you can lend me?" He was like, "No, we're delivering food to Somalia, and it's flooding, and blah, blah, blah."

I must have looked so pitiful that he said, "Well, I know where there's a Buffalo and the contract just ended, and if you get to the people really fast you might be able to get that Buffalo." I contacted the people, and they were a bit noncommittal, but they said, "OK, if we get a contract quickly, then we can do this." I went to UNICEF and I said, "OK, the Buffalo's dead--that Buffalo is dead--but we need a new Buffalo, and I need a contract in three days." They were like, "No, the contract review group doesn't meet for two weeks, and blah, blah, blah." I was like, "You can do this, and we have to do this or we're going to 88:00scuttle the whole NID. We have to do this." They got it done.

When the Buffalo came to Lokichogio and landed, people sort of knew that this had been a really hit-or-miss thing, and so they took a picture of my Buffalo, and they sent it to me so that I would have my Buffalo, and my Buffalo is sitting on my desk [laughs]. It was another one of these things where there was sort of this whole web of things that led up to it that were so fortuitous to make it happen. There was no connection between the World Food Programme in Somalia and the UNICEF Lifeline Sudan in South Sudan, so it was just really fortuitous that I knew where the guy worked, I had walked around Gigiri, I had seen him a couple times, had lunch with him once or twice maybe, and I could go find his office and have him take pity on me [laughs]. You know, everyone in the 89:00environment knew more about how it worked than I did, and I just really had to be open to listening and figuring out--you know, just asking them, "What can I do? How can you help me?" I did that a lot.

CRAWFORD: The example that you gave of Carl Tinstman coming out of the shower when you're like, "Can we please?" and he says, "No," is one of the few "no" stories that I've heard from you. When else has there been an absolute no, hard stop?

HENINGBURG: Not many. Not many, because I'm just disgustingly, doggedly persistent [laughs]. I don't take no very well. It's like, I'll back off, but 90:00then I'll look for some other way to do something. There really weren't many. Everyone brings their own thing to a huge activity like this, and I think that was probably one of the things that I brought that people--

There was a guy who did cold chain for UNICEF, Moses, and I remember Moses telling me one morning--I came out and I was like, "Hi, Moses. How are you? Good morning." We were talking, and he said, "I'm so relieved." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because it's hard to read you. You smile when you're not happy and you smile when you're happy, and so we always have to see the smile and then figure out, OK, is she mad at us today or is she happy with us today?" [laughs]. That 91:00was really an interesting observation.

I think, for everybody, this was something on a scope that hadn't been done in South Sudan during the war. This had nothing to do with me, and I don't know whether UNICEF people or other people were doing negotiations that I didn't know about--the John Garang people I had mentioned it to--but they actually had a little ceasefire during the NIDs, and promised that they would back off from the places until people got the NIDs done, and then go back to whatever they were doing before.

It was a very complex environment, and I think I was just scratching the surface in a lot of ways, but I think people were really excited by the idea that they could do something to a scope that just hadn't been done in their immediate 92:00memory, looking at all of South Sudan as one versus just doing little bits of things here and there. I think that really jazzed people up, and there was just an underlying feeling of, "Wow, we're--" I mean, it was history. It was really history. It was public health history; there's no question about it.

Our whole team turned over after the first round. Reza left. I mean, by that time he had been gone four times as long as he was supposed to. The last of the guys left, and I ended up with a whole new team for the second round, and that was hard. A new guy had come in as the health officer at UNICEF, Tony Naleo, and he actually went in and took over the Reza role as the UNICEF person who was the lead on the NIDs.

In terms of the burnout question, I meant to say that, people really did, but I think one of the things that helped with the team is that they saw me there from the beginning, and I wasn't leaving, and so they felt like, "OK, this is a serious thing, and someone is going to last until the end." I think just that sort of really annoying personality trait that I have, that I don't let go of things, [laughs] I think it helped in many ways in that particular situation. I think.

CRAWFORD: I have a couple of follow-up questions, and--when you mentioned famine, it made me think of UNICEF, and polio being only one of many priorities. I wonder if you ever heard from the Sudanese about polio's position within their priorities.

HENINGBURG: Not in that sense, but I think for the Sudanese it was also a benefit in the sense that they had identified the people to work on the NIDs. There were people on the ground all over the country. Even for them, they hadn't necessarily had that kind of penetration for a health thing and that kind of unified effort.

One of the things that happened--so many things happened--one of the things that happened, just before the first round the person who was Garang's deputy, kind of the vice president, I guess, of South Sudan, and someone else--they had been flying in Upper Nile, and their plane went down, and, of course, everyone died. 95:00It turned out that the guy--that one of the women who we had hired who was working in Upper Nile, this was her uncle or some family--anyway, the person who had been raising her, she had been living with in Kenya was on the plane.

There were two things that happened as a result of that plane crash. One is her relatives on the ground in Sudan didn't tell her about the plane crash, because they knew she was there, and her thing was these NIDs, and they wanted her to get it done, and they didn't want to disrupt her, so nobody--between them all, they had a thing where they didn't say anything about it until after the NIDs. Then they told her, and we brought her out for the funeral, and it was just amazing.

The other thing that happened is the way I found out about the plane crash is that I went to the NIDs' office the first thing in the morning, and the SPLA people and the RASS people were in there together, and they never were together. They were all greeting each other with this way they greet each other. It turned out that it was one of those things--you know, they're like the Palestinians and the Israelis. I mean, they're all connected, and separated, and connected, and separated, and everyone was connected to this person, these people who went down on the plane somehow. They were all expressing their sympathy to each other, and kind of the neutral place to do this was the NIDs' office [laughs]. This kind of thing never happened in the NIDs in Uganda. This never happened when we did NIDs anywhere else. I mean, this was South Sudan. It was real.

You sort of knew on some level that the people that you were interacting with on a daily basis, and the people you were working with were not angels. I mean, these were people who had been involved in a war for a long time with other people, and you really did not want to look too wide in terms of thinking about everyone's role. That said, everyone really wanted to kind of show that South Sudan could do this. I think that was the underlying thing. There may have been all kinds of other currents going on, but I really felt like that was one of the things that made it work, because the UNICEF people, the Sudanese--it was just different than the way anything had been done before, and everyone just wanted 98:00to make it work to show that South Sudan, too, could do something that people wouldn't necessarily expect.

CRAWFORD: Are there comparisons to be made between South Sudan and like Afghanistan, Pakistan?

HENINGBURG: It's really hard to do that. I mean, one thing is in South Sudan they were professionals at war. I mean, when there was going to be some kind of an attack or something, the people on the ground would come and warn the UN people and say, "There's going to be some fighting here tomorrow. You need to get out today. Call the planes." Very rarely did UN people get caught on the ground in South Sudan, because this was part of what they did to protect the NGOs that were delivering services. I mean, there was no functional government 99:00with money to deliver services, and so in order to protect them they would try to make sure they got out before whatever happened. Those kinds of things you would never find in another conflict area.

I think, also, it was 1997 and 1998. I mean, we were just younger and more innocent then. I mean, I went back to South Sudan later, in more recent years, into Juba [South Sudan], and a lot of the guys who worked on the NIDs were now people with titles in the Ministry of Health and things. I would say to them, "We pulled that off in the most difficult circumstances. Now things are so much better, and there's peace, and we can do so much." They said, "But the spirit is 100:00not there. It's not the same, and it's not so easy now." I think that was just--it was the first time. I mean, there's something to that.

Another thing that came out of the South Sudan NIDs, which is one of those sort of peripheral things, is that the WHO South Sudan office--by the time I went back, WHO had a whole office that covered South Sudan. I'm sure at some point that would have happened, but it basically happened because of the NIDs. There were lots of things like that that were just amazing.

I should say something about the Nuba Mountains [Sudan] before I leave Sudan. They sent me to this meeting, and it turned out that there was an American guy who had a plane, and he had been, for a number of years, working with Sudanese 101:00people from the Nuba Mountains. The Nuba Mountains was completely shut off. Khartoum would not allow anything to go into the Nuba Mountains. No NGOs were there. No one was allowed to go there. We talked about how to do NIDs in the Nuba Mountains, and this guy said that he would fly his plane to the Nuba Mountains if we would get supplies and we would teach them how to teach the people to do it, and like, "OK," you know. I went and talked to my friend Ted [laughs]. I said, "Ted." He was like, "We're having deniability here. Only you went." I was like, "Yes, OK, thank you, Ted."

We set up a whole thing, and what we did is we went into the UNICEF--[laughs] I'll never forget it; I can picture the guy now--we went into the UNICEF warehouses, and they had all this stuff--you know, if you have a warehouse, if you're the--what do you call it--the person who's in charge of a warehouse, you 102:00feel comfortable when the warehouse has a lot of stuff in it, but the stuff that was in the warehouse in Lokichogio was not meant for sitting in Lokichogio. It was meant to benefit people in South Sudan.

We went in at night into the warehouse, and we took as much stuff as we could that could possibly be beneficial and loaded it on this guy's plane to go to the Nuba Mountains, because we knew this was one shot. The guys filed their flight plan with Howard, and they were going to somewhere, and then when they got to somewhere they went to the Nuba Mountains, and bringing all of the supplies and things that we had. They taught the guys how to do it, and they went walking off with their cold boxes. It was very quiet. It could not be discussed. It could not be happening. I mean, it was completely quiet.

On the way back to the plane, to bring the equipment back, one of the vaccinators stepped on a landmine and lost his leg up to his knee. They knew if they left him there he would die, and so they put him on the plane, and they brought him back to Kenya, and they took him to the [International Committee of the] Red Cross hospital in Kenya. This was probably worse than the vaccine going from Kenya into South Sudan [laughs].

This was really something. Of course, I didn't fully understand all of those geopolitical things, and I did what we all do when we were in an interesting situation, and I called Bob. I said, "Bob, this is what happened. It was really terrible, and I don't know what to do." Bob, of course, had a much broader view 104:00of the world than I did, and he said, "We have to get some money for the family of this guy." He said, "I have to think about this."

He called me back two days later and he said, "OK, the Rotarians gave fifteen hundred dollars, so now I have to get it to you, and you have to get it to the guy." I was like, "I do?" [laughs]. He said, "Yes, you have to get it to the guy." I went to the Red Cross hospital to see this guy, and I was just really not prepared for, first of all, the Red Cross hospital, but the Red Cross hospital with the guy who had stepped on a landmine and had his leg blown off when he was doing polio eradication activities.

I went in, and I had people with me, of course, and I had somebody to translate, et cetera. I was really not looking forward to this. We came, and we found the 105:00guy, and he had his pallet, and he was kind of lying there, and they said, "Oh, this is so-and-so from--" Then they had to go through a long explanation to figure out what CDC was. Then he said I was polio. The guy jumped up, and he proceeded to demonstrate to me how he had carried the cold box, and how he had vaccinated the kids, and how he had gotten his job done before he stepped on the landmine. I was just like [laughs], "Oh my gosh."

Among other things, in addition to giving the money for the guy's family, that was the beginning of [the Bob Keegan] Polio [Eradication] Heroes Fund. Bob said, "This is not the last time this is going to happen, and we have these people who are truly volunteers, who are not working for anyone, who have no one supporting them, and if things happen to them it's going to be a disaster." That was how 106:00the Polio Heroes Fund began from that incident in South Sudan. I don't know how they got the guy back to the Nuba Mountains. I didn't want to know anything. I was just like, you know--[laughs].

CRAWFORD: I was wondering about that, too, yes [laughs].

HENINGBURG: He may not be in the Nuba Mountains yet--I don't know--but he's--[laughs] South Sudan was really on so many levels. I mean, it was emotional. It was stressful. It was invigorating. It was challenging. It wore me out, that's for sure. I finally left at the end of May, so maybe about the middle of May my father and my niece came. Louise planned an entire--like safaris and all these things for them. It was after the second round. It was 107:00when we were doing wrap-up stuff, and so I told them it was OK to come then.

My father was like, "This is fantastic. I love this vacation. Just tell me what time to be at the door with my little suitcase, and should it be little or big, and where are we going, and I'll find out when we get in the car." I mean, it was amazing. Louise and Doug were incredible hosts anyway, and they had lots of room, and they always made room for more people. I mean, poor Rusty gave up his bedroom to me the whole time I was there, and he was sleeping with one of his siblings [laughs]. It was really--there were lots of things that happened that were highs and lows, but we pulled it off.

I went to Khartoum three times during the time that I was there. I went initially to Khartoum to meet everyone there before I went into South Sudan. 108:00What had happened was Dr. Hashem, who works here now--at that time Dr. Hashem was the EPI manager for Sudan, for--well, they would say for Sudan [laughs]. In thinking about how to implement this thing that Bob and Carl had decided in this cocktail party, they thought, "OK, we have to get the Sudanese on board, the North Sudanese on board." Somehow, they got Hashem here for a meeting. I don't even remember what the meeting was about; it was some technical meeting about something, and I don't know how they got him here. I mean, at that time I didn't know how those things were done; they just--somebody did them. The real reason for getting Hashem here was to talk to him about doing NIDs in South Sudan. Hashem agreed to help, and he actually got me a letter of, I don't know, passage 109:00or introduction or something, and arranged for me to come to Khartoum and meet with people.

The first time I went to Khartoum, it was kind of--you know, I went to meet the WR, and I met the UNICEF OLS North people--OLN people, I guess they are--and just the introduction kind of things. Then, when we were doing the planning, there were so many places in South Sudan--we had these incredible maps, and what they told us is that there was some guy who had come there for an NGO, and he had decided they really needed maps in order to be able to work well there. He had walked South Sudan making these maps, and these were the maps that everybody was using.

I had these maps, and so I got my little maps together, and we figured out where--the south was not all rebel-held. Parts of it were government-held, and they had what they called garrison cities. In the garrison cities, it was the 110:00government that was there. I went to meet with Hashem, and we spread our maps out on the floor, and it was like, "OK, you got this part. I got this part. You got this part. I got this part" [laughs]. We literally sat with the maps spread out on his desk in his office, figuring out who was going to cover which parts. We did that twice before the rounds to make sure that we weren't leaving anything uncovered.

The way it worked out on the ground, at least in some places, is that the teams would say that they saw the teams from the other side, and they would sort of agree that the river was the borderline, and the teams from each side would see each other, but they would just kind of wave and then go do their thing. It was amazing. That was another thing that was very unique about those first NIDs in South Sudan, that there were simultaneously things going on in the government-held places, as well as in the rebel places.

I ended up going to Khartoum for that, and then we went, at the end, to do a 111:00presentation, and to show the data, and how many people we had covered, et cetera, et cetera, to all the people in the north on my way out of the country. It was another one of those amazing things.

I had this visa for Sudan, and I had my letter from the Sudanese government, and I couldn't put any of my South Sudan things in the same passport. Then I had my South Sudan things in my personal passport and my North Sudan things in my official passport, and I had my Kenya visas, which were one visa, then another visa, then another. I had three weeks, and then I was like, "OK, it looks like I'm going to stay another month," and I went to the UNICEF visa guy, and he was like, "OK." Then I said, "I think I'm going to stay another month." He said, "I'm not going to keep going back. This time you're getting a visa for a year. Is that long enough? Are you going to get out of here after a year?" I was like, 112:00"That's long enough." He said, "OK" [laughs]. I had all these visas.

That cooperation through the backdoor between the North and the South, and how it was going to work, and how we were going to work together--I mean, that was another aspect that was pretty amazing, and that we did. Then I didn't know where Hashem went, and it turned out he went into a big WHO career, and he was a WR in a few places, and then he started working with us, and now he's here. It was great. It's like, "Dr. Hashem!" "Anne-Reneé!" [laughs].

I told him, I said the thing I remember most about his offices, besides that they were incredibly hot--it was so hot in Khartoum [laughs]. It was so hot. I must have looked totally worn out, and so one day they said, "OK, we're going to 113:00get you a cold drink." I was like, "OK." He comes with a Coca-Cola, and I was like, "OK, I'm convinced. Coca-Cola is everywhere in the world." I said, "This warms my heart so much as a citizen of Atlanta to see that here in Khartoum you're drinking Coca-Colas" [laughs].

When I went the last time, actually, the last day that I was supposed to be in Kenya I told the UNICEF people--I went around. I said all my goodbyes. I said, "I'm not going to be here tomorrow." It turns out that they didn't believe me, so they had a whole party for me, but I never showed up [laughs]. My going away party I missed. That was on the last day. Tony, who was going with me to do this presentation in Khartoum, came with my gifts from my party. I had a mask, and they had gotten me a bottle of Kahlua, and this beautiful book of photographs of 114:00Sudan, and all these things. At the airport we're meeting, and I'm figuring out how to shove these things in.

In those days, you know, you had these ancient computers, and we would send as many as we could out to the field, and when they just wouldn't work anymore they would come back. Doug had given me like four computers to bring back to Atlanta, because there was no way to get rid of them on the ground, and so I had all these computers, and I had the Kahlua, and I had all these things. When we got to the airport in Khartoum, Tony went in. He was in front of me, and he went through immigration and customs and went through.

Then I got there, and they were like, "OK," and they started asking me questions. Then they decided they had to inspect everything I had. The first thing they found were the computers, and they said, "Oh, we have to go test these. We have to take them away and make sure that they're really computers." I don't know what they were doing. Maybe they put bugs in them; I have no idea. 115:00Anyway, they took them away to another room, and then I was just standing there. Meanwhile, everybody who came on the plane was gone, and I was just there with the customs people.

The guy said, "Well, let me look through your bag and see what's in here." The first thing he found was the bottle of Kahlua, and I was like--no alcohol in Sudan. I was like, "I'm really sorry. I didn't think. They handed it to me in the airport. Just take it away." He was like, "No, I have to see what it is." He gets a little cup, and he pours some in, and he's tasting it, and he's like, "What is this? Is this alcohol?" [laughs]. OK, well, anyway, no more Kahlua for me. Whatever happens to it, happens to it.

Then he keeps digging and he finds a box of tampons, and he's like, "What's this?" I said, "Hmm. You know, your wife, every month she has--" He's like--I 116:00said, "Well, you use this, and you just kind of put it in there so that it doesn't go like this." He said, "Can I take this to show my wife?" I was like, "Yes, here." I had the little, you know--in the package, still, the little thing, demonstration of how you do it. I was like, "Here, take this, and then she'll be able to see how it works."

We're having this conversation, and then another guy comes, and he says, "OK, you are definitely Sudanese." I was like, "What?" He said, "You are definitely Sudanese. Your father's from Sudan, right?" I said, "No." He said, "Your grandfather's from Sudan, right?" I said, "OK, I can only go back as far as my great-grandfather. He was from Germany [laughs]. Since then, everybody's from Alabama [U.S.], so I don't have anybody from Sudan." He said, "You're definitely Sudanese. I think what you should do is we should give you a Sudanese passport. 117:00You just give us that one and we'll give you a Sudanese one, and you'll just live here, because you're Sudanese." I said, "That's OK." I mean, I was there for an hour, maybe an hour and ten or fifteen minutes.

Meanwhile, Tony is outside, and he's like, "What happened? Oh my God, they're going to take her away," and I'm going, "Get my--" [laughs]. Eventually I got out, but it was just one of those, you know, OK, I'm almost at the end, I'm coming to do my final presentation, and still I may not ever leave Sudan. You had these things happen, but I think everything that had happened before just was like, OK, let's see how we're going to deal with this. Sudan.

CRAWFORD: Where were you in 2000, when the first target date came along?

HENINGBURG: I was probably in Harari [Ethiopia]. I had given up on the target date quite a while before that. First, it was by the year 2000, and then it was by the year 2000 or shortly thereafter. That was the exact wording that was being used. For the most part, everybody got along very well, but every now and then--it made anything that was sort of an argument really stand out.

I had two real disagreements with [Stephen L.] Steve Cochi [MD, MPH] during my career in GID, and one of them was about the year 2000. I came back from--I don't know if it was from Sudan or if it was from Uganda. It was not Uganda, so it was probably after Sudan. I said, "Polio is not going to be eradicated by the 119:00year 2000." He said, "No, we've met about it, and we this and that." I said, "Yes, you're sitting in a bunch of meetings in capital cities and you have no clue what it's like on the ground. Polio is not going to be eradicated by the year 2000." "Why are you being so negative?" I mean, we had this whole little blowout thing in our little, tiny offices. Everybody's ears are perked up, and they're like, "Wow, what's going on in there?" [laughs].

That date, I think, was set based on the experience of PAHO [Pan-American Health Organization] and, to some extent, WPRO [WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific]. They turned out not to be so representative of the rest of the world. There was some tension about whether the strategy should be to really try and get rid of polio everywhere else and then concentrate on Africa, because we knew it was going to be the most difficult, or whether we should really try to do everywhere at the same time. I remember having a number of quite heated 120:00conversations about that.

CRAWFORD: What did you think?

HENINGBURG: I thought we needed to do everywhere, because I thought that we were going to find different issues and challenges in different places, and that we needed to be working towards getting over those, and not trying to save--I didn't think we were going to be in a position where saving something until the end made sense, and I also, like the Sudanese, felt like if the rest of the world is eradicating polio, why shouldn't we be eradicating polio also? Forward, onward, and upward we went, and Steve Cochi and I made our peace and we're OK now.

CRAWFORD: How do you think about target dates now?

HENINGBURG: I think that you need something to aspire to, but you have to really understand that they're aspirational, and you have to be very careful about how 121:00you convey them. Trying to make a realistic target date--for me, the way that I summarize it is I think we completely underestimated the poliovirus. It turned out to want to live a lot more than we gave it credit for.

All these variations with vaccine-derived polio, and this and that, and this and that, I mean, that was not heard of when I started. I remember sitting at a table with the guys, and they were talking about this and saying, you know, "What are we going to do?" and, "What does this mean?" The lab guys had found it, and they were talking about the implications and trying to figure out what to name it. I'll never forget: [Walter R.] Walt Dowdle [PhD, MS] said, "We should name it feral poliovirus." Everybody was kind of like--he said, "Well, that's what it is" [laughs]. Instead, they decided on vaccine-derived 122:00poliovirus, but I always thought--I loved Walt's name. I was like, feral virus; I love that name.

Anyway, in South Sudan--

[INTERRUPTION]

CRAWFORD: OK, we were just talking, while Todd changed the video card, about security, and the history of security awareness and issues in polio eradication. I was wondering about security in AFRO.

HENINGBURG: Security has been an issue in polio eradication in every region, from what I know, and AFRO is no different in that sense. Even in the Americas there were places--you know, Colombia, there were security issues. For me, Somalia is the place that was the scariest, and the ways that they figured out 123:00to try and deal--I mean, in the end, you can either decide that we're going to have a black hole in that place and we're not going to do anything and hope for the best--what they did, for instance, in some parts of Pakistan is they're always poised for people to come out, and they vaccinate when they come out, so they can't go into the security places but they get people who are moving in and out, or what they did in Somalia is they would find a neutral place to bring people from the clans that lived in a particular area that people couldn't go into, and they would train them and have them do the things in their area. Those are primarily the ways that we did polio eradication in spite of security issues. You can't do it if you have these spots where you don't do anything.

I think some of the challenges that we have now have to do with those kinds of things. You know, northern Nigeria keeps blowing up one way or another, and seeding other places around, because you just can't get in there to do anything. I think that the security issues have been big. I've been in a few places--I mean, whenever you're out, whenever you're working in any of the countries, you have to have security clearance to go anywhere, and they have maps, and there are hardly any countries where there aren't any red places in the map that the UN security or the U.S. security doesn't allow you to go to.

Now, there are different versions of red. Like I said, with the Gulu, it was very red for Uganda but it was completely green for Sudan, [laughs] so it varies depending on your own relative situation, but I think that it is an issue. It's 125:00getting to be more and more of an issue, and creating a huge difficulty, again, in ways that none of those particular issues--you had your regular kind of war, and you had to get out of the way of the combatants, but that's a different thing than targeted at people, and targeted things, where the issue is that we're not just fighting each other but we're after people who have nothing to do with the fight, in a way.

In the same way that doing polio eradication in South Sudan is different now than it was then, I think the security issues are very different now than they were when we started. In that sense, it's really a shame that we didn't get the thing done in the beginning, because I think we would have avoided a lot of difficulties if we had really been able to get done in the early 2000s, instead 126:00of getting caught up in the geopolitical issues that have led to a lot of the security problems in places. I mean, we were doing Afghanistan before there was a war in Afghanistan. Anyway.

CRAWFORD: When you think about the challenges of the remaining endemic countries, do you make any connections between your work in the African region and the challenges that they're facing now? Are there lessons learned in the AFRO region that could be applied?

HENINGBURG: Well, always, and I think people do that. I mean, I think that there is enough mixing in the polio world that I think we do learn things from each other. I had my Africa phase, but then I had--I spent--in and out, but--a lot of 127:00two years in India, and the issues were different but, at the same time, not different. One of the things that's really nice for me personally is that I get to see the parallels as well as the differences, and that's really nice.

South Sudan, there were a couple of lessons. Of course, for me, it was incredibly--I learned so much in South Sudan, and I was exposed to so much in South Sudan: about myself, my own abilities, other people, what the world was like. I mean, it was just an incredible assignment from the area of personal development. I developed relationships which have lasted through the years from that. I mean, people who were in the fire together, we just had relationships 128:00that lasted.

Professionally, I think that it taught us. It was a New York [U.S.] kind of place: if you can do this in South Sudan, you can do this anywhere. Whatever you've got, we've got it in spades [laughs]. I think that was a really important thing, and it really put South Sudan on the map. There has not been a time since then that there have not been polio people assigned to work in South Sudan. That was really the beginning.

We seconded Jeff, so even from the CDC side for a long time we had people covering South Sudan and Somalia that grew out of that first NIDs and the engagement of WHO and the starting of their role in that area. I think that that's really a legacy of those first NIDs. It was just amazing. In the middle 129:00of just incredible angst--I guess is the word to use--I can think of these little anecdotal kind of things that happened.

The Sudanese are very tall, and the UNICEF Supply Division, they were not always very helpful, and at some point it came into my radar screen--it was not there in the beginning, I have to admit--that people needed tents, that everywhere that they were going in Sudan they didn't have some kind of facility that they could go stay at, and so they needed tents. The UNICEF Supply Division, "Yes, we know exactly what's needed," and they ordered these tents, and they brought the tent, and we set up this little pup tent inside the NID's tukul in Loki, and I'm 130:00looking at this tent, and I'm looking at the Sudanese, and I was like, "OK, I don't know how this is going to work."

There was a guy there who I ran into when I went back to Sudan years later, when I went to Juba [South Sudan], and he had been trained as a lawyer but didn't have anything, and so was one of our regional people working in South Sudan. He was in Loki, and there's a picture of the two of us in this tent. I'm inside the tent, and his legs are sticking out of the tent, [laughs] because the tent was not anywhere near the size it needed to be to fit a Sudanese. People seemed to crawl up somehow inside their tents and work.

Even on other levels--I mean, there was a woman from Kenya who was not far from the Kenya border, in the southern part of South Sudan, and she said that they 131:00went out one day and it got later than they realized, and they were coming back at sort of dusk and getting a little bit into dark. She said she noticed that the Sudanese that she was with were in front of her, and on the sides of her, and in the back, and she really didn't know why. That wasn't normally--I mean, a lot of times with the Sudanese--first of all, everywhere is just over there, and they're slowing down to walk with us [laughs]. They're going in this really--so they would be already there, and we're still dragging along in the back somewhere, so they would change and walk slowly with us.

She said after they got home they told her that they were being stalked, that there was a panther, and that it was staying back but it was there, and it had followed them for a distance. She was like, "These are the kind of things that 132:00you don't want to know about [laughs] until after the fact." It wasn't even just the war. It wasn't just the--I mean, and so these are not the problems we ran into in Lucknow [India]. That's why I say South Sudan, it had everything, so, you could do it in South Sudan, you could do it anywhere.

CRAWFORD: This is a really different kind of question, since we're starting to wind down, but it's really more for the archivist, Laura [L. Frizzell, MSIS]. Could you comb your memory for visual images that represent the work to you?

HENINGBURG: Well, OK, this is not my strength, but, I mean, for me, I have certain images. I have my pictures. I mean, I have my Buffalo. I have sort of a classic picture of my consultant.

One of the things that happened in Lokichogio particularly is that I saw insects that I had never seen before in my life, and I have a picture of my consultant. 133:00I have my laptop open, and there's this big grasshopper-y thing--it was definitely not a grasshopper, but it's big and green--and it just sort of settled itself on my laptop screen, and it stayed there, and when I would use the laptop in the front it would go in the back, and I was like, OK, as long as you don't fly in my face, you don't come and touch me, we know the boundary between man and insect, it's OK. I have a great picture of my consultant, the grasshopper-y thing.

I can picture myself sitting with Papa Whiskey in the radio room. You know, there are certain things. We always have t-shirts. We always have those kinds of things. The Guinea worm people had beautiful conga material made, and I have a 134:00Guinea worm conga at home. I was really reluctant most of the time to take any of the swag, because a lot of times what would happen is the people in the central area would take the swag and there wouldn't be enough for the vaccinators, and it was for them in the first place. Most of the time, if I got swag it was after everything was over. I have a "Kick Polio out of Sudan" t-shirt. I do have one of those, because everybody had those, with the soccer, the football.

It was hot, really hot, in Loki. I only actually went into Sudan twice, if you can believe it, and both times by air. They didn't want me going into Sudan. They were like, "You've got to go home in one piece" [laughs]. Many other people went into Sudan, and if I was there now I'm sure I would go in more, but then I 135:00had so much going on that it was like, "OK, I don't need to do this. Where I need to be is here, not there." The Loki airport, it was sort of a dusty--it grew while I was there. They added a new runway--and the runways in Sudan, and just the picture of Sudan is so vast, and so un-densely populated, and the distances that you could see from the air that people had to go, I mean, it was just amazing. The Sudanese were tall, tall, tall. I'm not tall in the U.S.; I was definitely not tall among the Sudanese [laughs].

For me, the graciousness of the Sudanese, the graciousness of the Kenyans--I mean, everyone I worked with in Africa, they were just welcoming. Even when we 136:00did not agree with what we were talking about, and we were on opposite sides of an issue, there was an underlying, "OK." In Uganda they used to say, "Well, OK, it's time for us to have tea." We had to have morning tea. We had to have afternoon tea. They were really shocked because I drank my tea with no sugar and no milk. This was unheard of. It was gross. There was always that underlying--in places that were so tough, there was that underlying, we can stop, under the right circumstances, and be people.

The other thing that I have to mention about South Sudan is I spent my last day in South Sudan, the day that I didn't go to work--Louise and I had all these things that we wanted to do, and so we went--one of the people who was working in UNICEF OLS was the granddaughter of [Louis S.B.] Leakey [PhD], the 137:00anthropologist or whatever he was who did Olduvai Gorge [Tanzania] and stuff. She had decided that she wanted to build a traditional house to live in on her parents' compound. She had been building this mud house, and she'd been talking about it, and she said, "Go see it." Louise and I got in the car, and we went and found her mother and went to see her mud house.

There was art that was done by street kids. An NGO would take the street kids, and they would have them make these things, and they'd sell them. I wanted to get some things from them. We went to find them, and they weren't where they were supposed to be, and so we had only pictures, and I picked things in the pictures, and Louise said she would make sure that my things I bought got into Ross Cox's shipment, because he was getting ready to move back to the U.S. [laughs]. We went to the street art, and we just had these--

Then we stopped. Louise was a veterinarian by training, and she had been working 138:00at the animal orphanage, and they had a baby rhino that ran away, and they didn't see it for a while, and then it came back, and when it came back it was pregnant. We stopped to see how the rhino was doing, because she was thinking it was going to deliver soon, and so she said, "Do you know anything about how to tell if a rhino's going to deliver?" I was like, "Louise, I know so many things, but that is not one of the things I know." While she examined the rhino to try and figure that out I stood next to the rhino, and she said, "Feel behind the ears." It turns out that the part behind the rhino's ears is so soft compared to all the other skin [laughs]. I stood there with the rhino while she examined the rhino to see if it was pregnant. Then, as it turned out, when I landed she said, "The baby was born!"

We did our whole day of things, and then we all--she and the kids, we all went to the airport together for them to put me on the plane. I have a photo of us at the airport. I can picture myself in the photo because I was wearing this UNICEF 139:00shirt that I had bought, because Ted, my friend Ted, after I was there for about six weeks, he said, "We're really tired of seeing these same clothes over and over again. Do you think you could get some more clothes?" [laughs]. I went out and increased my collection of t-shirts so that I would have more clothes, so that the UNICEF people would not be bored with my clothes. I can picture my little group of t-shirts.

In Doug's house there was Ms. Susan, who was the housekeeper, and she took such good care of me, and we would come home and kvetch at night before she went home, and there was Mr. Kennedy who came and cooked. Oh, and the driver, we went everywhere, and then at Christmas he went on leave, and Doug was like, "I'm not 140:00driving you to work every day" [laughs]. I said, "OK."

What happened was just before Christmas there was some kind of an outbreak in northern Kenya, and it involved animals as well as people, and they couldn't figure out what was going on, and they needed someone to go up there. The WR had already left for the holidays, and Doug was the acting WR, and Doug was casting about, trying to find somebody who could go up and investigate this thing and see what was going on. Louise said, "Me, me, me, me, me! Remember? In my other life, I was a trained epidemiologist. I know how to do this stuff, and I'm a veterinarian. I'm your perfect person. There's nowhere more perfect--"

Louise got on the plane and went to northern Kenya, and she was supposed to be gone for a couple of days, and then it turned out that no, that was not going to be the case, and she stayed up there for three and a half weeks, over the 141:00Christmas holidays. I'm at her house, with her three little kids, and her husband, and she's calling--she can only get a phone at eight o'clock every night. We can get a phone call. She's calling with the instructions: "OK, look in this place; that's where these gifts are. Look in this place; these still need to be wrapped. Don't forget, Christmas Eve night you have to put a bowl of sugar and put red food coloring to show where Rudolph's nose went." I was like, "I cannot believe this is happening!"

Then Doug said he was going up there to find out what was going on, and I was like, "I'm going to kill you" [laughs]. "Don't." I didn't know if he went or not. He just said, "I'm thinking about going. I think I need to go up there and see what's happening." Then I called his office and they said, "He's not here," and I said, "It's going to be me and the kids for Christmas." Then I got home and he had gone home early to take a nap. I was so relieved. It had sort of been 142:00so ingrained in the family--I made the kids save presents for Louise to open when Louise got back, and we had our Christmas, no Louise.

The driver went on vacation, back to his home. Louise was up in northern Kenya. Doug was the acting WR, so he had to be at work in downtown Nairobi, nowhere near Gigiri, where my office was, and he said, "You're going to have to drive." He had this little, tiny--I don't even remember what kind of car it was, but the steering wheel was on the wrong side for Kenya, which was such a relief for me, [laughs] because then I could be close to the curb and seeing where all the people and the goats and the edge of the thing were, and I was like, whatever's happening in the middle of the road, I'm not going to worry about.

I left at the end of May, and in August is when the embassy in Kenya was bombed. Louise had gone to the embassy. She was working at that time. She had just 143:00started working. She was so excited. The Carter Center had a thing to do Malarone testing, and Malarone was a third-level malaria drug, and they were just starting to use it. They had hired Louise to run this program with the Malarone testing.

One morning she decided to go to the embassy on her way in to pick up the mail and cash a check. The driver was--summer vacation at this point in time, it was in August--and he was in the village. She went down to the embassy, and she went to get the check, and that's when the embassy was bombed, and she was killed in the embassy bombing. Then Doug and the kids came home, and they had a number of things here, and Doug was thinking that they weren't going to go back, and the kids said, "All our friends, our school, our home, everything," and so they decided to go back.

I went back with them, and stayed for several months while I waited to get 144:00permission to go to Nigeria, which is where I was supposed to go next. [Samuel O.] Sam Okiror was there at that time as the WHO immunization guy, and I was waiting, and he kept saying, "OK, I'm just trying to get clearance. I'm trying to get clearance," and "Not yet," and I stayed like three weeks, hanging, waiting to see when I was going to go to Nigeria, ready with my plane ticket and everything.

Anyway, that was an incredibly painful, moving, unbelievable way to sort of end my South Sudan time, with Louise's death, but I was very happy that I had been ingrained in the family in such a way that it actually made sense for me to go and help them to get back on their feet in Kenya.

CRAWFORD: How did the death impact you, having spent so much time and become part of their family?

HENINGBURG: I was slow to react, and I remember when I really melted down. Louise had a small, brown, leather shoulder bag, and for some reason--I don't know where it was, but it was like two months after she died--we probably went back after about three or four weeks in time for school to start, and it was probably a couple of months after that that they found this bag, and Doug brought it home. It smelled like the bomb, and everything in the bag was 146:00perfectly intact. The bag didn't have a scratch. The contents of the bag were perfectly fine. I just said, "How can this be that Louise is dead, she's wearing this bag, and everything in the bag is completely intact?" For some reason, that was the thing that pushed me over the edge. I just had a meltdown. For the most part, I was trying to keep everyone else moving. This is probably a very sexist thing to say, but nonetheless it's my observation: in households there's the secret life of the house, all the things that happen by magic. You come home and everything is in its place, and the clothes are washed, and the food is there. Louise was not working full-time until the very end of the time she was in 147:00Kenya, and so she had made the secret life of the household work, and Doug had no idea how the secret life of the household worked. When we came back, they kind of turned to me and said, you know, "OK, we have to keep the household going." I had all these things that I was doing, [laughs] just trying to--between keeping the kids up, and it was really hard to get Doug to go back to work, and to get him to engage again, and I had all these things going on, so I didn't--

Actually, some friends came, Elvin Hilyer and his wife Nancy [Hilyer]. He's another CDC guy. He was working on Guinea worm in north Sudan, in Khartoum. Elvin and Nancy were old friends of Doug and Louise, and they came to Nairobi, and Doug agreed for them to come to the house, and we had a dinner, and they were the first ones to say to me, "What are you doing to take care of yourself 148:00in the middle of all this?" I said, "Nothing." They said, "At some point you're going to have to do something about that, too" [laughs]. Eventually I did, but I think it's like any situation where you lose someone: you have sort of all this activity that happens immediately afterwards and it distracts you, and at some point you have to face the music, but you can go for a long time before you do that, and I did.

There were things--I mean, it was very moving for me. I was in Kenya last year, and I didn't realize until I got there that that was the twentieth anniversary of the bombing, 1998. It was 2018. I had never seen the memorial that they put at the embassy, and I went out and saw, and they actually had each person's name in a stone on the side of the building, and then they had kind of a monolith 149:00thing that also had the names inscribed on it. I touched Louise's, and it was very moving. There were a number of her friends who I've run into in random places. I went to a course at the State Department and one of her friends did a panel at the end, and I went up afterwards, and I was like, "Hi." She said, "Who are you? You look so familiar." I said, "Louise's friend." [Makes excited noise] There were a lot of those things.

In some ways, Louise continues to be a presence in my life. She pops in periodically. I still am in touch with the kids, and we have a webpage on Facebook, and so--but it was something. Of course, there's Louise Martin Drive in front of CDC, and that was named after Louise, because she was not working at CDC at the time she died, and so she didn't meet the criteria for being recognized in the CDC memorial place, but they wanted to do something and so 150:00they named the street after her. It's Louise Martin Drive. I walk by it every day, and sometimes I stop and look for a minute, and keep going.

CRAWFORD: What haven't we covered today?

HENINGBURG: Oh my goodness. Well, there's lots of things we haven't covered, but South Sudan--this is probably, proportionately, the impact that South Sudan had on my life [laughs]. Everything was downhill from there. No, I shouldn't say that at all, but it was really something. It was really something. When I came back, I did a presentation. I don't usually do that, but Bob said, "You have to do a presentation." There were a number of people there, and we had sort of different reactions. Walt Dowdle, who I didn't know well at that time at all, but Walt said, "You have to write this up somehow. You have to have something. 151:00This is an incredible story, and you need to have something about it." Bob said, "Too many slides" [laughs]. Everybody else was very enthralled.

CRAWFORD: That's another person I wanted to ask you about is Bob Keegan. You've mentioned him, and I know you worked--

HENINGBURG: Just like everybody does, yes.

CRAWFORD: Yes, yes, but could you talk about Bob Keegan a little bit?

HENINGBURG: Oh my goodness.

[INTERRUPTION]

CRAWFORD: Could you talk about Bob Keegan a little bit?

HENINGBURG: Well, sure. Bob Keegan. I met Bob Keegan when I first became an STD trainer, and Bob was the trainer who was supposed to train me how to do things. I met Bob. We spent sort of a very intense two weeks. I was trying to download everything he knew into my brain, and the way that he managed things into my brain, and the way that he stood in front of the room and engaged people into my brain. I was very attentive to Bob. Then I didn't see him for years, and then I ran into him in the hall somewhere at CDC when he came back from Thailand.

Then he called me the week that I was graduating from the [John F.] Kennedy School [of Government], and he said, "We have a position. I know you don't want to come to Atlanta, but hear me out. We want you to come to Atlanta for an interview." I said, "That's graduation week. I'm not coming to Atlanta, but I'm happy to have a phone interview with you." I had a phone interview with him and Cochi.

It was interesting because Bob--I didn't know him well, but I began to see how he worked. I say Bob has a bullet brain, and he's able to distill things down to the main points and make his list of bullets. It was interesting working with him, and it was great working with him, because it was like everyone aspired to 153:00do things the way Bob did them [laughs]. He was really--a lot of times he was probably the best at doing things, but he was really good about building up other people, and about encouraging, and those kinds of things. He was funny, and he thought way outside the box. The thing that was nicest about his bullet brain is that he could cut through the crap. Bob was always the person who you wanted--any time we had a GID retreat, Bob was the person to summarize the action points, and he was really big on action points. He didn't want to just have information; he wanted to have action points.

There are so many things that Bob's hand was in starting, like the Polio Heroes, and Moe's. I mean, there are just so many things. Using the Foundation to try 154:00and do things that we couldn't do very easily through CDC or the other bureaucracies, and the relationship with Rotary [International], and massaging that, and the bike trip, and it involved so many people, and he was just a magnet and a force, and functioned in a way--I mean, Bob and Cochi, it was a marriage. That was like each of their other marriage was to the other one, and you always thought about them together. Steve and Bob, Bob and Steve, Steve and Bob, Bob and Steve. They picked this thing up and ran with it in a way that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for the two of them being there at the helm of it. I am really convinced about that. They sort of made decisions, and they made them clearly, and then we went forward. One of the things that drove Bob crazy is people who couldn't make decisions. We would definitely not be 155:00where we are today if it wasn't for Bob. There's no question about that.

Moe's, I'm sure people have talked about, so I won't say a lot about Moe's, except to say that it's our opportunity--it was set up as an opportunity for us to have personal interaction with our partners in the lab, because the collaboration between the lab and the program doesn't always work well, but had to work well in order for polio to work. Bob recognized that.

He went to meet with the lab people, which was Mark [A. Pallansch, PhD] and Olen [M. Kew, PhD], another couple, [laughs] and they said everything was fine. Then finally they started talking, and they alternated. Bob said they alternated. As 156:00soon as Mark stopped talking Olin would chime in, and as soon as Olin stopped talking Mark would chime in, and they had a million complaints. Bob was sinking into his chair and thinking, "We're really in trouble here." One time they both took a breath, and he said, "Do you guys drink beer?" They were like, "We went to graduate school in Wisconsin [U.S.]. Of course we drink beer." "Let's go get a beer." They went and had a beer, and that was the beginning of Moe's. They worked everything out over beer, and then after that Moe's has continued. Now for twenty-five-plus years we've been going to Moe's every Friday, just about.

Bob's absence was really felt at Moe's. Bob traveled a lot, I mean, so there were always times when he wasn't there, so it wasn't like Bob was so associated with Moe's that it wouldn't happen if he didn't come, but he was definitely a force at Moe's also. There was certain food, and if we got some other food Bob would be going like this, skeptically.

One day after he died we were sitting on the patio at Moe's, and Sylvia, who is another force to be reckoned with in polio and a Moe's regular, was explaining how she had lost her earring at work, and someone found it. Being Costa Rican, she was very into demonstrating the story physically, not just--she couldn't just tell us about this; she had to have the earring in her hand, and pull it out and show it to us, and then suddenly she let go of the earring and it went down in the slats below the patio. Of course, because we're a bunch of anal personalities we could not go home without finding that earring, so all of us are on the ground, doing different things, trying to find the earring. I've got my chopsticks out of my hair. They're trying to see if they can find it and pull it. Little kids who we didn't even know came and they're like, "What are you looking for?" They started helping us.

Eric [E.] Mast [MPH, MD] had his iPhone light thing, and he was shining the light down, and all of a sudden he says, "You've got to come here and see this." I was like, "What?" He had just found, facing up like this, Bob's ID [identification] card. Mark [A.] Pallansch [PhD], who remembers everything, said, "I remember exactly when that happened. I remember we got out to the car and Bob was like, 'Oh, shit, I lost my ID card, and now it's going to be such a hassle to get another one, and they're going to ask me what happened to it, and I'm not going to have any idea.'" That day, we found out where Bob's ID card--and Bob was sitting there, under the patio at Moe's, with everybody drinking, so he's still there. Gloria [J. Keegan] was there that day, his wife, and they said, "Do you want us to get it?" She said, "No. It goes right there." That was, in so many ways, Bob, and the way he worked, and the way he thought.

Bob was the first person in GID who died, after--well, Louise first, and then Bob. We've been incredibly fortunate because we haven't had many deaths. We just had our fourth death, and considering where we work and what we do, and how long we've been at this, it's really amazing. Bob's death moved people all over the world. He had had an influence on people all over the world, and hearing from people, and the Bob stories, and all the things, it was pretty amazing. It was pretty amazing. Bob, he was a force.

I definitely would not be here if it wasn't for Bob. That's for sure. Because one of the old PHI [Public Health Institute] guys, Jerry Nehr--Bob was like, "I need a PHA [public health advisor]," and Jerry's like, "OK, I got one for you." 160:00I was coming out of the Kennedy School and they had to find a job for me, so I was on this rehire list thing. I assumed I was going back to STD, and they didn't have anything very interesting, so Bob was like--with his famous phone call, "Hi. I know you don't want to come to Atlanta, but I got something you've got to hear about. I think you might like this." I was like, "OK."

We sort of started early with the glue between the personal and the professional. I arrived in Atlanta permanently eleven months before the Olympics, and I started looking for places to rent, because I was a happy tenant. People would say things like, "We're not going to paint because we're going to lose money during the Olympics, and we're not going to clean the place, and you have to move out for two months." After I looked at about twenty places I was like, OK, later for this. I guess this means I have to buy someplace.

I never bought anyplace in my life. I had no idea how you go about this. I 161:00looked at a whole bunch of--I actually looked at fifty-two places. I had to keep track of them because CDC, when I was on temporary quarters, made me show that I was looking for someplace to live [laughs]. My fifty-second place, I went, and the people weren't showing it, and I convinced them to let me see it. They said it wasn't ready yet but they said they would let me see it. They had three people who came in, and I said, "OK, this is my place. Two miles from work. Great layout. Exactly what I wanted. This is my place. Bob, you've got to go see the place because I don't know anything about it. Go look at it from the right eyes." Bob went there in the night. Then I went back in the night. Then the next day my father was like, "You've got to make an offer on it. Give them a thousand dollars more than they're asking for." I was like, "No! Don't I bargain?" I did. They got three offers. The other two were lowballs, and I bought it.

It was like from the beginning Bob was there, you know [laughs]. It wasn't just 162:00work. I mean, our lives were intertwined. That's how we worked. That's how we did things.

CRAWFORD: Do you know anything about his biography, like his early life, or the normal things that I ask in these interviews--

HENINGBURG: Yes, he had a whole bunch of brothers and sisters [laughs].

CRAWFORD: Where was he from?

HENINGBURG: I can't figure out the order of things. I mean, for some time they lived in New Orleans [Louisiana]. Another time--they lived in different places. I don't understand the order of things. They're amazing--Bob was in the middle. He wasn't the youngest or the oldest; he was somewhere in that middle group. I've met probably most, if not all, of his siblings over the years, but it's really amazing how they have similar mannerisms. His brother George [Keegan], if you close your eyes, it's Bob. He tells stories the same way as Bob. He sounds 163:00like Bob. I mean, it's startling. There were lots of them, and I think Bob probably developed his personality trying to figure out how to stand out in this crowd.

Bob thought out of the box. I mean, he and Gloria met in the STD clinic in Newark [New Jersey], and they were both working there, [laughs] and she had a young son, and they got married. They lived in a complete dive in Jersey City, New Jersey--I mean, a complete and total dump--and he had Lauren [A. Keegan]. There's this classic picture of him knocked out on a bed in this dumpy place with Lauren on his chest.

He became a trainer. That's where I met him the first time, when he started doing--when he was doing training stuff. I remember when they licensed the HTLV 164:00[human T-lymphotropic virus] test, which was the first test for blood only of HIV, which at that time was called HTLV. They did this massive--we all had to fan out over the country to do training about this HTLV test, and how to talk to patients about it.

Bob was livid, because he didn't feel like people were getting to the real issues, and they weren't talking to people about partners, and they were just doing it as if it was a blood test. He was just livid. It was his job to teach all of us how to teach about the HTLV test, and we had a script, and we were supposed to stick to the script, and it was very political, and we were going around. I mean, I did like five cities in two weeks or something, and it was crazy. I saw him then, and I could see how he would be chafing about things that he didn't think were being done right, or when he thought that we weren't 165:00getting to the real point of something, with no premonition at all that eventually I would be in Bob's world.

There's a very classic picture. When he was training me as an STD trainer, we did it at Fulton County Health Department [Fulton County Board of Health], in one of these rooms that has an auditorium-style thing with the seats, but on a very steep angle. Bob's standing at the bottom, talking up to everybody, and I'm standing next to Bob, and I look like this little ant, [laughs] so tiny next to Bob. It was like my classic--I said, "Here I am, my first time that I was Bob's shadow, and that's where I continued. He would tell me what I needed to do, and I would say, 'OK, Bob,' and then I would go do it." He sent me to Sudan, and I was like, "OK, Bob." Then the message got passed along, and I remember the first time Roland [W. Sutter, MD, MPH&TM] sent me somewhere, and I was like, "OK, Roland" [laughs]. Bob.

I think he really got a little money, analyzed the best way to use it, how to make it grow, how to pull in people who were good. I mean, his mind was so broad. How to build two habitat houses. I mean, The Watsonian Society was just a society of public health advisors that had a pig roast and a banquet, and met and drank beer, and that's what we did. Bob said--you know, he was so frustrated, and he was happy that everybody had a society, and that we were trying to do something together. He said, "We can build a habitat house. We only need to raise $60,000." It was like, Really? [Laughs] In the end, we built two habitat houses. That was the kind of thing that Bob could, first of all, think about, but then galvanize everybody to do it when people didn't feel like it was even possible. That's what Bob was about.

CRAWFORD: We need another interview with you. [Laughter] I'm just going to say that the pickup point will be January of 2005, with a short-term consultancy to Nigeria.

HENINGBURG: OK.

CRAWFORD: My date could be wrong.

HENINGBURG: It could be.

CRAWFORD: Yes, thank you so much, so, so much.

HENINGBURG: Thank you. You guys, I mean, this is like torture for you [laughter].

CRAWFORD: I can't speak for Todd, but I love this.