Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

And on this episode, we'll be taking a fascinating and moving look behind the headlines.

Think about any major disaster in the world over the past 30 years, and our guest, Robert Jensen,

was probably on the scene and personally involved for days, months, or even years afterward.

Robert is the chairman of the Kenyan International Emergency Services, which provides crisis management response to hundreds of businesses and governments.

Robert has spent most of his adult life responding to major disasters like the 9-11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 Haitian earthquake, and the 2004 South Asian tsunami.

And he's the author of an absolutely gripping new book called Personal Effects. What Recovering the Dead teaches me about

caring for the living. Robert, we thank you so much for joining us. We have really been

looking forward to talking with you. Oh, you're welcome and likewise. Tell us more about how you

got into this line of work and why you decided to write the book. That's a great question.

There wasn't really a plan to fall into this line of work. I had to pay for college. I went to school

in California and Cal State

Fresno and was the deputy sheriff. It's how I paid for school. And so I started a little bit

into the field at that point. That's when there was just starting to be an interest in forensics,

not at all like it was on TV now. And then I went into the Army. It's what I really wanted to do was to be an

active duty army officer. And in the Army, I was eventually assigned to the quartermaster

corps, which had responsibility for what they call mortuary affairs. And it was about the time that

we had our invasion into Haiti and then Oklahoma City and then Bosnia. So I was thrown into some

pretty big operations pretty early on, Oklahoma being my first big mass fatality that I went to.

And so it just kind of stuck. It seemed if there was a problem. Somebody said, let's call Robert.

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