Family devotion are the first words I think of: to Dotty, and all the Fosters of which Stan was justly proud and rhapsodized over in the annual holiday letter; to the smallpox eradicators, among which he was a giant, a great leader and mentor-always out front, acting with brilliant public health insight and instincts, courage, and principle; and…to the human family, be it in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Guatemala, at Emory and points beyond. Generosity is the second quality, of which Vicki and I benefitted, along with multitudes. Stan and Dottie always had bedrooms filled with friends from near and far, food and drink aplenty, and everyone better have a good story to tell after grace.
In 2002, while doing polio work,I visited Rahima Banu on Bhola Island, Bangladesh, in the Bay of Bengal. Rahima, at age 3 in 1975, was the last patient with severe smallpox and Stan was WHO country leader of the program. I asked Rahima, now with her own baby in arms, if there was anyone she wanted me to greet when I returned to the U.S. “Yes,” she said. “Tell Dr. Foster that the land he arranged for the government to give me for farming was now under water due to periodic flooding. Can he get me more land?” Stan will not be forgotten!
Stan was a giant in the field of global public health in so many different ways — as a field-based practitioner and program manager for public health efforts that saved innumerable lives, as a leader-servant, and as a teacher. I have been most grateful for Stan’s later-in-life passion for community empowerment.
I asked Stan one time if there was anything in his life that he wished he could have done differently. His immediate response was, “I wish I had met David Hilton earlier.” David was a former medical missionary who became a dynamic spokesperson for community empowerment and engaging communities to improve their own health (https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/atlanta/obituary.aspx?n=david-hilton&pid=114705766) and who taught at Emory two decades ago.
Stan picked up David’s torch in so many way. Here are only a few: through teaching David’s course on empowerment after David died in 2008; through his passionate support of the CORE Group (https://coregroup.org/), an association of NGOs working with communities to improve maternal and child health; through his support to individual international NGOs and evaluations of their child survival programs, through his support to the American Public Health Association’s Community-Based Primary Health Care Working Group, for which he was a keynote speaker several times; and through his friendship to me as a fellow laborer in the vineyard.
Stan, we will miss you — your voice, your example, and your message will reverberate throughout the world.
Henry Perry
Senior Associate, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health