It is not so much their subjects the great teachers teach
as it is themselves.
—Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life
One of the rewards of showing up is that you meet the most amazing people.
A perfect example of such a person in my own life is Dr. Bill Foege.
He grew up poor in a small farm town in Eastern Washington.
As a young boy, inspired by the writings of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, he dreamed of becoming a doctor who would tend to people in Africa. That dream set him on a path that led to Nigeria, where he worked as a medical missionary and became the now world-famous epidemiologist who helped mastermind the eradication of smallpox.
Bill Foege has shown up as many things for many people.
His adventures around the globe read like a novel. As the former director of the Centers for Disease Control, he focused attention on preventing and treating HIV/AIDS. As the instigator behind the Task Force on Child Survival he helped save the lives of millions of children. Dr. Foege has received some of medicine's highest honors, and was recently named one of “America's Best Leaders” by U.S. News and World Report.
During our foundation's earliest days, Dr. Foege helped us develop a strategy for our global health work, guiding us as we explored the possibility of getting involved with vaccines and immunization. He remains a trusted advisor.
For me personally, however, Bill Foege is, above all, a teacher.
Among other things, he has taught me more about the meaning of the word neighbor.
Our neighbors, he says, include the one million parents who every month lose a child they will grieve forever to a disease that could easily have been prevented. And he suggests that our neighbors include those who will be born two hundred years from now.
The latter notion isn't surprising coming from him because he seems as connected to people who lived two hundred years ago as he is to me when we're talking.
When he tells his stories of those from ages past you can almost feel their presence—the presence of the British scientist Dr. Edward Jenner, who in the late seventeen hundreds drew lymph from a pustule on the hand of a milkmaid who had cowpox and used it to vaccinate a boy against smallpox; the presence of Louis Pasteur, who later suggested that the world honor Dr. Jenner by referring to immunizations thereafter as vaccinations; the presence of Thomas Jefferson, who managed to keep the virus used for the smallpox vaccine alive all the way across the Atlantic so he could vaccinate everyone in his household.
Given his achievements, Dr. Foege could have an ego a mile wide. Instead, a personal exchange with him is a real-life encounter with the virtue of humility.
Despite all the human suffering he's witnessed, he carries with him an optimism that can light up a room. He would say that is because even in the most difficult situations those in his vocation can see how much we can do to make things better.
One lesson I have learned from him is that if you sense that you have a particular mission in life, you probably ought to pursue it. You might not get rich, but you will get to keep your soul and you might even change the world.
Perhaps the most encouraging thing I've learned from knowing Bill Foege is that though it is more often celebrity than heroism that captures the sound bites, there are still real honest-to-goodness heroes in our midst.
Bill Foege taught me that lesson in the best way any teacher can—by being one.