Showing Up, with Craig Spencer
If you want to meet Craig Spencer, look for a local watering hole with a decent whiskey selection and some live bluegrass. If he’s not there…suit up and travel to the heart of an infectious disease outbreak in Forécariah. By day, Spencer serves as an Associate Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown, and he approaches all things in life—be it learning the banjo or providing emergency medical care—with curiosity, focus, and a true respect for craft.
The Well (TW): Hi Craig. What’s brought you to Rhode Island?
Craig Spencer (CS): I'm still pretty new here, I moved to Providence with my family just over a year ago. I'm originally from Detroit, a city I absolutely adore, and moved to New York in 2008 to finish medical training—I stayed there for 15 years. During the pandemic, I was doing a bunch of work with health leaders across the country, including a group of folks at Brown. At the end of one long phone call, someone at the public health school said "Hey Craig, you should come work here!” At that point, I don't even think I knew that Brown was in Providence. I’d only been to Providence once, 20 years before, but I remember liking it. So our family came up for a weekend visit, really liked it, and decided to give Lil Rhody a shot. We've really settled in here, and absolutely love it.
TW: We’re considering letting you stay, but first you must be tested. Name ye favorite pubs and houses of entertainment.
CS: I’m always down for a visit to Captain Seaweeds (ig). And as a beer guy, I love Moniker and Long Live in Providence, as well as Tilted Barn down in Exeter. I’ve been really impressed with the great shows I’ve seen at tiny venues like Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket all the way up to bigger productions at PPAC. Most of my favorite shows were upstairs at Columbus Theater, and the closure of that space is a huge loss.
TW: The Clam Council has voted; you may stay. So back to Detroit, the early years. What was that all about? Family, music, life, etc?
CS: As a middle child and a Midwesterner, I spent most of my time watching, reading about, and playing hockey while simultaneously playing a negotiating role between my older brother and younger sister on all family matters. With music, I was in to whatever my older brother was listening to—I remember my first time hearing Eazy-E as if it were yesterday, and knew most of the words to every Beastie Boy album. I think my first cassette was the single of Bad English’s When I See You Smile, picked up from the Sam Goody at the mall. Later I got into Nirvana—who didn’t!?—and still recall my parents making me clean the garage for buying In Utero without their prior knowledge. Pretty standard stuff I guess.
Above: Craig running the Philadelphia Marathon in 2022.
TW: Not too long ago, we spotted you at an Etran de l'air gig at Machines. That’s a departure from Bad English—when’d you discover West African shredders?
CS: I spent most of the 2010s living abroad much of the year, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and was exposed to great music everywhere I went. Early on it was the titans of Ethio-jazz; their smooth soulful mashup of Amharic and ‘Western’ scales that really intrigued me. Later, I became obsessed with the kora, a massive stringed instrument from West Africa that sounds like the marriage of a lute and a harp. I have played banjo for a long time, and I was really intrigued by the history of that instrument and how it ties back to other stringed gourds like the kora.
At the same time, I heard a lot of music from the euphoric era of independence in many West African countries, and was struck by the energy and optimism, akin to what you’d hear in the stellar Bobo Yeye collection from Numero Group. A friend who spent years in Mali introduced me to the music of the Balani Shows and I fell in love with the electronic hyperfast rhythms, and after spending some time working amongst the Tauregs in northern Niger I was introduced to the driving rebel blues of the desert. I’ve just been lucky to end up in a few different places with incredible music and great people to share it with me.
TW: Great stuff! What’s in regular rotation at home in 2024?
CS: Guy Lobe’s Mon Amie A Moi is a fantastic 1986 album from one of Cameroon’s greatest. My 5 year old’s favorite album is Lavender Days from Caamp, I think because it’s pink. Azymuth’s Outubro from 1980 Brazilian boogie vibes with banging bass lines that just makes me smile and groove every time. Bana’s Dor Di Nha Dor is a lively 1983 record from the Cape Verdean balladeer Adriano Gonçalves. [The Well adds: East Providence, take note, as this one’s on Discos Monte Cara, a label out of Portugal]. Lastly, Julie Byrne’s Not Even Happiness—the last track is my favorite thing to spin with my last sips of whiskey before bed.
TW: So you’re teaching the kids about some cool jams—good on you. What are they teaching you?
CS: Honestly, what I take from my kids every day is their intense and insistent wonder and curiosity about the world. Trying to explain to a 3 year old how something works requires you to not only deeply understand it yourself, but in so doing, brings up other questions that maybe you’ve never considered. Just watching two kids talk to each other and see how they interpret the world really gives me perspective for what I see as important, and what is really important to them.
Above: Craig in China, mid 2000s. On the left, he’s at the mini Mao museum in Moxi.
TW: In Africa, when not looking for Mdou Moctar concerts and the like, you were practicing emergency medicine and related field work. Why this particular focus?
CS: When I was around 10 years old, I realized I couldn't be a sharkologist. It was a pretty disappointing revelation. I was informed that I'd have to study things like plankton and algae, which was not at all interesting to a kid obsessed with learning everything about sharks. So in social studies class, I was looking under a microfiche and saw that a cardiothoracic surgeon [content warning, images of surgery] made more money than everything else. So I decided I was going to do that. That's the reason I went to med school. That was the goal, to make Scrooge McDuck money. But during med school, I went on a trip to the Dominican Republic to see how hospitals worked there, and came back convinced that the world probably needs fewer hyper-specialized heart surgeons and way more people that feel comfortable providing medical care in nearly any circumstance for anyone. That's when I shifted to emergency medicine, and I committed to spending as much time working abroad, helping to build capacity in places around the world.
TW: And before Africa, you spent some time in China—way back in the Hu Jintao era What was it like over there?
CS: It was absolutely wonderful and wild. I went there because I knew absolutely nothing about the country; this was in 2006 right before the Olympics in Beijing. I took a year off of med school and ostensibly went to do public health work with a team in Henan province. But when I got there, all the research team really wanted to do was hang out, drink, and go to the night market with their strange international guest. It took a while to learn enough Mandarin to have a conversation, but once I did, the conversations I had were absolutely fascinating. Taking long train rides and just chatting with people, or meeting people at the markets or outside of the Forbidden City and just spending hours hearing what their life is like was one of the coolest experiences I could've had at that point in my life. I also met my now wife on my first day in China. She was an American from Cincinnati, and we got to spend a lot of time traveling from one end of China to the other, seeing a country in transition, just as we were in our early 20s and learning a lot about the world.
TW: Note to self: hang with researchers in Henan. OK so back to Africa—you were just in South Sudan with Doctors Without Borders. Give us a snapshot—what it’s like on the ground.
CS: The reality is that the need is pretty limitless. As an organization, Doctors Without Borders is in dozens of countries and works with tens of thousands of local staff, helping provide really crucial medical care in humanitarian crises. Given the state of the world, including the numerous big and small conflicts all over, there are still and will always be people who need access to medical care. Thankfully, we've had a massive outpouring of support, the majority of it from individual donors, and that has allowed Doctors Without Borders to dramatically expand its operations in recent years. But any cataclysmic event—bigger conflict, huge outbreak of a deadly infectious disease, and climate-related crises—bring more and more needs. In South Sudan, a few of our projects were frustrating because of the desire to do more, but it was also really heartening to see all the incredible work our teams can do in really tough circumstances all around the world. Really incredible.
TW: This is a well covered story elsewhere, but while working with Doctors Without Borders you contracted Ebola and unknowingly brought it back to New York City. Ten years later, how do you reflect on that moment?
CS: A decade ago there were numerous ‘Fearbola’ stories all over the news. Can You Get Ebola from a Bowling Ball was the hard-hitting byline from the New York Times. Despite all the hoopla, rarely was it pointed out that getting Ebola is actually pretty damn hard. At its most basic, it's a disease of caregivers. It really mostly impacts people who try to take care of others, risking their lives by providing close contact in a loved ones last moments or after their death. This is why you saw big outbreaks in healthcare facilities where providers often didn't have enough of the equipment needed to keep them safe. But even if they did, just providing that care and being present in Ebola treatment centers remained a risky proposition. I still don't know exactly when I was infected, but it was undoubtedly sometime in the process of taking care of dozens and dozens of Ebola patients. I was lucky enough to survive. But so many of the providers in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone who were also infected didn’t survive, a horribly cruel indictment of the quality of care we were able to provide to the providers themselves.
Above: Craig with some of his Guinean colleagues in Gueckedou, 2014.
TW: In these environments where transmission rates and risks are so high, how do you keep cool and focused?
CS: Honestly, there is no trick here. There is absolutely no way to keep cool and focused. But there is a way to contain it so that you can continue and struggle on. After a decade, I still find it impossible to truly explain to folks what it was like working inside a place of such sadness and death. Yes, there were definitely uplifting moments, like the day we were able to discharge one of the first pregnant women to ever survive Ebola. But most of the time, it was just tough. But I think everyone who was there, working in those treatment centers, knew that if they didn’t help out and show up, things would’ve been even worse. It’s strange what drives us, but I was really inspired by all the amazing Guinean providers I worked with that showed up day after day, even as they watched their own families and communities fall ill. Incredible people.
TW: We read you also spent time on a MSF medical search and rescue boat.
CS: I worked as part of a team helping provide search and rescue and medical care to migrants crossing the Mediterranean, and the experience truly changed my life and how I sympathize with the struggles of others. Basically we would leave Sicily onboard a marine vessel—”Call it a ship, but never call it a boat,” I was told over and over—and head south to the Libyan coast. En route we would often find a completely unworthy boat overloaded with people from all around the world trying to safely cross the Mediterranean sea, with almost no realistic chance of survival or getting to the other side. We would then spend hours doing a really careful rescue, something that I learned from some of the only people in the world that can tell you how to get 150 people off a sinking vessel, and then we would go through all the people we brought on board to try to find the most urgent medical issues. It was always chaos.
TW: What were the most urgent needs?
CS: People with gunshot wounds. People with nervous breakdowns. We even delivered a few babies, including one on a tiny little wooden boat right in the middle of the Mediterranean. And in our little clinic on board, we got to speak with people and hear about their journeys. It was absolutely incredible to hear what so many people had been through and the resolve and determination they carried to seek safety and a better life. There’s no way I could’ve done what so many of them had. I learned a lot from many of the folks I met onboard.
TW: Perhaps unexpectedly, your work’s led to you having an Emmy.
CS: Well, the first thing to know is that on the bottom of every Emmy, it says that “This is only being loaned out to you and remains the property in perpetuity of the Emmy Gods,” but I’m glad my home can serve as a temporary way station for one little statuette. Frankly, I only got that Emmy because an incredible team of people at AJ+ did an enormous amount of work to take some things I wrote on social media and turn them into a really compelling, powerful video.
TW: What’d you post, exactly?
CS: During the early days of Covid, I was working as an emergency physician in New York City. At the end of every shift, I would pour a glass of whiskey and take to Twitter to share my experiences of what it was like inside the ER. I honestly didn't think anyone would read it or care, but it was cathartic for myself and other providers that were going through that. Then one day something I wrote was shared by President Obama, and AJ+ reached out about trying to help people better understand what it was actually like inside hospitals. They took a few things that I wrote, spliced them together, and over the span of a month or so we made an animation depicting what it was like in the emergency room when Covid was at its worst. Their team did all the lifting, I just drank whiskey and ranted on Twitter. That’s how you get an Emmy.
TW: Give us an update on where we’re at right now with COVID? On a global scale.
CS: Obviously we're past the worst, especially when you think about it like a lot of epidemiologists do in terms of excess mortality or how many more people are dying than should be. But there's still a lot that we don't understand about Covid, even though all of our attention was on this for such a long time. We still don't know why some people can get long-term and really debilitating symptoms after an infection. And although we should've learned in the past couple years about how inequitable access to certain treatments and vaccines can be, and how dramatic that impact is around the world, we've already forgotten that lesson and are setting ourselves up for failure in the future when the next Covid-like pandemic hits.
TW: From all this, do you have any big picture takeaways about public health; something you’d like everyone to understand?
CS: We continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. For most of us, we didn't see how our failures to statically prepare for scary disease outbreaks left us remarkably flat footed in 2020, but we all felt the impact of it once COVID hit. And now, in a period of pretty intense pandemic revisionism, we're seeing a pretty dramatic pushback against public health. That is despite the fact that the field is responsible for doubling life expectancy in the past century, probably one of the most incredible things we've done as a species. At the same time, and especially in the humanitarian health sector, some of this “forgetfulness” may even be intentional, allowing leaders and organizations to evade responsibility and accountability.
TW: How can we combat this kind of revisionist history?
CS: The fundamentals of how we keep ourselves safe haven't really changed. Understanding those foundations is critical to preventing the same mistakes again…again.
TW: What do you think motivates you to run towards crisis; to engage so directly with unknowns and—what’s gained in return?
CS: I'll be honest, I don't consider myself a big ideas person. I think what drives me is a big chunk of curiosity combined with an emergency physician’s commitment to efficiency. I really like doing new things, taking new routes, and meeting new people—but I also like to hone in on details and particulars, especially as a way to challenge myself. I love learning languages because it allows you to connect with different people in a different way, and I’ve seen what knowing even a little can do in communities in terms of building trust. And really at my core, I’m a middle-child from the Midwest—I aim to please, and in my efforts to make sure everyone feels comfortable and included, I hitch myself on to different ideas and projects, and learn an incredible amount in the process.
