Remembering Our Colleague Paul Ruwoldt
On January 23, 2009, our friend and colleague Paul Ruwoldt passed away following a year-long battle with malignant melanoma. He was 42.
Paul joined TRG as an Organizational Development Consultant in 2006, and immediately took on a full-time position on the USAID-funded Capacity Project. The Capacity Project, in which TRG works as a subcontracting partner to IntraHealth International, is an innovative global effort that supports developing countries in building and sustaining an effective health care workforce. Under the project, Paul provided technical leadership in health worker productivity and managed country-level programs. He served as the point person for Namibia, and also led a health worker productivity study and implementation effort in Zanzibar as part of the project’s capacity building program in Tanzania.
Paul’s work was characterized by his passion for excellence and his amazing ability to form positive and productive working relationships with colleagues, partners, and clients that transcended differences of culture, hierarchy, and experience. He was equally comfortable collaborating with local health workers, ministry officials, and his teammates from the Capacity Project and TRG. He was also incredibly “connected” and was always present virtually, even if he happened to be physically located in Chapel Hill, Arlington, Dar Es Salaam, or Zanzibar.
A man of many worlds, Paul was born and grew up in Australia, where he earned a graduate degree in Human Resources Management from the University of Canberra. Prior to joining TRG, he worked as a consultant for Price Waterhouse in Australia and Washington, DC, and later for IBM Consulting Services also in Washington.
Following Paul’s diagnosis in November of 2007, he engaged in a treatment struggle that demonstrated tremendous courage, perseverance, optimism, and compassion for those who cared for him from near and far.
We will miss his incredible spirit, his good humor, his love of life and adventure, and his deep caring for the world and the people he encountered. Even in his illness, his grace and spirit were an inspiration. We are blessed to have known him, even for much too short a time.
Over the course of his illness, Paul, and his fiancée Natalie Schafer, provided updates on a CaringBridge website for his family and friends throughout the world. The site also includes a guestbook where friends can add their thoughts and messages. In the wake of his passing, many have posted remembrances of Paul. The link is:
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/paulr