Written By: Michael D. McClellan |
The Sahara has changed, but it remains a desert without compromise, the largest and most oppressive on earth. There is no place as dry and hot and hostile. There are few places as huge and as wild. It is roughly the size of the United States, 3.6 million square miles filling the northern third of Africa, an area so vast that it spans 11 countries. It’s so arid that most bacteria cannot survive there; its loneliness is so extreme it is said that migratory birds will land beside travelers, just for the company.
Doc Hendley knows a thing or two about the Sahara.
The North Carolina native has spent plenty of time in the region as part of his Wine To Water non-profit, helping to provide clean water to victims of Sudan’s government-supported genocide. The award-winning humanitarian has not only been baked by the Sahara’s intense heat, he’s been shot at, ambushed, and extorted by its people. He’s had to talk his way through roadblocks set up by SLA rebels and Janjaweed fighters alike, dropping the names of local commanders and tribal leaders in order to be allowed to pass. Just a fifth of the Sahara’s vastness is sand of popular imagination, formed into the great dune seas called ergs in Arabic; the rest is rock and gravel plain, and high rugged mountain. Hendley knows this well. In 2005, he navigated the volcanic mountain range known as Jebel Marra, only to be stopped by young boys in filthy camouflage – SLA soldiers – who fired warning shots from their AK-47s, and who morphed back into children only after learning that Mohamed Isa, then one of SLA’s top commanders, had requested a meeting with Hendley and his team. In places like South Darfur, one of the 18 conflict-ridden states of Sudan, clean moya – the Sudanese Arabic word for water – is more valuable than guns. Scores have died from drinking contaminated water fetched from dirty pools. Children are most at risk, the cholera causing severe diarrhea and dehydration, their mothers powerless to stop the bacteria’s deadly rampage. Cholera can kill within hours. Survivors suffer the losses long after. To those born by chance in a hard land, Doc Hendley is nothing short of a messiah.
Photo courtesy Wine to Water
It’s unsurprising that the humble North Carolinian sees himself as anything but a savior, even though his work with wells, filters and water bladders provides clean drinking water to thousands in places like South Darfur. Friendly and plainspoken, Doc Hendley is as ordinary as they come, the kind of guy who might serve your beer during happy hour at the local pub – which is something he did plenty of during the early 2000s, while bartending and playing music in nightclubs around Raleigh, NC.
“The things I learned as a bartender were incredibly valuable when I traveled to western Sudan,” Hendley says. “When you’re starting out, it’s not so much about how good and fast you are at mixing drinks, it’s about how quickly you can build a relationship with the people sitting in front of you at the bar. Those skills not only helped me get things accomplished in Darfur, there were times when they also saved my life.”
In 2009, CNN held its third annual global search for everyday individuals changing the world. The Top 10 CNN Heroes were chosen from more than 9,000 nominations submitted by viewers in 100 countries. A panel composed of luminaries recognized for their own dedication to public service made the selections, a blue-ribbon panel that included humanitarians such as four-star general Colin Powell, philanthropist Wallis Annenberg, and Sir Elton John. Hendley’s story stood out. On Thanksgiving night, 2009, he was honored during CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute, which aired from the famed Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. That he was even on the stage that night, introduced to the world by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is no small miracle – and not just because Hendley had managed to survive nearly a year in one of the most dangerous places on earth.
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“Let’s just say I wasn’t the most focused kid growing up,” he says with a wry smile. “It took me a while to figure things out and find my purpose.”
A preacher’s son, Hendley was cut from a different cloth than his sister and three brothers. While they all shared their parent’s passion for church, it was clear from an early age that their brother was different. He wasn’t a bad kid; he just wasn’t someone who followed the crowd.
“I went to church,” Hendley says. “I believed in God. I just wasn’t always on the same page with the rest of my siblings. I had a restless streak.”
Nicknamed “Doc” because his baby sister couldn’t pronounce his name, Dickson Hendley was also born with a naturally rebellious nature. He was twelve-years-old when a biker rumbled to stop beside the family’s Chevy Suburban during a Myrtle Beach trip. Hendley was mesmerized by the imposing figure at the light beside them. Everything about him – his cowboy boots, his riding leathers, the fierce independence he projected sitting on that deep-throated Harley-Davidson – seemed larger than life. The connection was instantaneous.
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“I was always a loner. Bikers were solitary figures who lived for the open road, who didn’t conform to what others expected of them, and who made up their own rules. I saw a lot of myself in them.”
Growing up, Hendley had few friends. He preferred hanging out in the woods by himself, his BB gun in tow, exploring the world around him. As he got a little older, he’d hunt squirrels and rabbits, camping out under the stars. He was on his own time, making his own rules, doing his own thing. In school, he had trouble finding his footing, both socially and in the classroom.
“I was never a very good student growing up, was never a great athlete, and I was awful at following the rules, so I guess it’s no surprise that I was in trouble a lot. I always had a lot of energy. Unfortunately, I chose to use that energy for some pretty negative things.”
Hendley didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, but that didn’t concern him in the least. Sure, he was aware of the obligatory middle school cliques – the jocks, the popular kids, the artsy types – but he didn’t lose any sleep over being labeled an outcast. As an eighth-grader, he tasted whiskey for the first time – on a school choir field trip, no less. He continued to drink beer and whiskey through high school, usually out camping where he wouldn’t get caught. He started riding at 15, bought his first bike two years later, and continued to cultivate his James Dean image. By then the girls had started to take notice. After graduation he found a seedy biker bar on the outskirts of Sanford, North Carolina, where he spent long hours and eventually ended up working, serving beer and liquor to the local clientele while finishing up a semester at Central Carolina Community College.
“My second home,” Hendley says of the 19th Hole. “People there didn’t put on airs. They were real people who liked to talk and tell you their stories. I got to hear it all – stories about marriages, divorces, milestones, missed opportunities, you name it. If I wasn’t a good listener before I began working there, I was definitely one when I left.”
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Later that summer, Hendley bought a Harley from a friend who had moved to New Zealand. The bike was shipped to Los Angeles; Hendley bought a Greyhound ticket, bussed across country, and then rode the bike home. The trip back took nearly three months.
“I took advantage of my summer and went everywhere,” he says. “I just went where I felt like going, wherever the open road would take me – to Vegas, to Tahoe, to Reno. I went into Canada. I saw the redwoods in Northern California. I did Mount Rushmore, Wyoming, the Badlands of South Dakota. There was no real plan, other than to see as much of the world as I could. I’d wake up, hop on my bike, and go.”
Hendley eventually made his way back to Raleigh, just in time for the fall semester. There was a new college bar in town, and he quickly landed a job serving drinks to the students who packed the place. He also made a new friend, Tasha Craft. She worked at a bar across the street, and the two of them hit it off from the jump. She was unafraid to call him out on his carefree lifestyle and lack of focus, unflinching in her assessment of Hendley as an underachiever. He was barely attending class, blowing off assignments, and setting himself up for a life spent slinging drinks, one happy hour at a time. Tasha let him know about it. Her words hit hard. Hendley decided to take a break from bartending between semesters, head to his parent’s house in Boone, North Carolina, and get his act together.
Little did he know at the time, but his life – and the lives of countless others around the world – were about to change in beautiful, profound, and unimaginable ways.
There are myriad reasons given for the current crisis in Darfur, including one that traces back to the mid-1980s. As drought gripped the region, sand blew into fertile land and the rare rain washed away alluvial soil. Suddenly, the land could no longer support both herder and farmer. Many tribesmen had lost their stock and scratched at millet farming on marginal plots. In 2003, another scourge, now infamous, swept across Darfur. Janjaweed fighters in military uniforms, mounted on camels and horses, laid waste to the region. In a campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting Darfur’s blacks, the armed militiamen raped women, burned houses, and tortured and killed men of fighting age. Through whole swaths of Darfur, they left only smoke curling into the sky.
Doc Hendley knew none of this as he traveled home between semesters. He only knew that something was eating at him, and that his future was as formless as the gray winter sky overhead. Then, running an errand for his mother, he learned about Samaritan’s Purse, a humanitarian organization headquartered in Boone. Its focus was providing aid to victims of war, poverty, natural disasters, disease, and famine. By the time the conversation with his mother’s friend wound down, Hendley’s mind was in overdrive, so much so that he found sleep impossible. The phrase came to him sometime in the middle of the night, unexpectedly, hitting like a bolt of lightning. He snapped straight up in bed.
Photo courtesy Wine to Water
Wine to water.
Hendley spent the rest of the night on his parent’s computer, discovering the world’s water crisis for the first time. He emerged the next day transformed.
“Everything crystalized,” he says. “I suddenly saw a way to not only make up for lost time, but to also make a difference.”
He called Tasha the next morning and hatched his plan for the first Wine To Water fundraising event. That it was held at a bar was not only apropos, it leveraged Hendley’s network of patrons. The fundraiser was a rousing success.
“More people showed up than we thought, and we raised a lot more money than we expected. It was a great way to start.”
Hendley soon had a meeting with Ken Isaacs, the director of Samaritan Purse’s international projects. Isaacs offered him the chance to get involved with his nonprofit, and Hendley jumped at the opportunity. Locales were discussed. Hendley asked to be dropped into the worst place in the world.
He spent the next year in Darfur.
“That trip changed my life,” Hendley says. “It was hot and it was dangerous, but it was also one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life. Darfur really set the stage for everything else.”
In 2007, Hendley launched Wine To Water. Since then, he’s smuggled water filters into Haiti and sneaked into war-torn Syria. He’s been honored as a CNN Hero, spoken to packed houses, and taken the stage for two Tedx events. There have been successful water projects in the Amazon and Tanzania. The one millionth person has been reached with clean water. And then, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Hendley turned his attention closer to home, with Wine To Water’s Box Program providing more than 150,000 quality meals to those in need right here in the United States.
“If you find something that motivates you that much, it doesn’t matter who you are, then you can have a huge impact on the world around you.”
No, Doc Hendley isn’t a messiah.
He’s just an ordinary guy doing extraordinary things.
The world’s a better place because of it, that’s for damn sure.
COVID changed everything as we’ve just seen, including Wine to Water.
A lot has changed for us. I’m very thankful to say that, as an organization, our team is strong and capable. When something like a pandemic hits, you really have two choices; you can be fearful and freeze, and say to yourself, “Oh my gosh, everything’s gonna change, nothing’s ever going to be the same.” Because, in that moment, it’s only human instinct to freeze and hope for everything to blow over. Or, you can choose to react to the situation that’s presented, adapt, and take action. We’re an organization that doesn’t freeze very well. We adapt and react very well. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, we immediately began to pivot and shift to the changing environment.
Please give me an example.
Water and sanitation are our mission. That’s what we have done for years. It’s in a sector in the humanitarian world called WASH – water, sanitation, and hygiene. We’d never really gotten too deep into hand washing before – if we found a school that was really bad, sanitation-wise, and they needed hand-washing stations, we would install one for the school, but it wasn’t something that we were doing on a massive scale. When the pandemic hit, we knew hand washing was going to be vitally important for communities in the developing world. A lot of these small villages barely have water, much less the hand-washing supplies for people to practice safe hand hygiene.
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How did you work to solve this problem?
We have water-filter factories based in various locations around the world that make water filters out of local materials. Those factories immediately pivoted and also began to make handwashing stations. They had welding machines, so they began to put them together with buckets, soap kits and all that kind of stuff. Since then, we’ve produced thousands of handwashing stations that have gone all over the world – throughout the Amazon jungle, Nepal, and East Africa. We’ve literally reached tens of thousands of people in recent months.
How has your organization been able to help frontline workers in the developing world?
PPE is something that frontline workers in the United States had a hard time accessing during the first few weeks of the pandemic. Now, for the most part, we’re able to get masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, and things like, and we can get these things anywhere and anytime we want. In the developing world – such as in some of the really remote villages near Maasai Mara, or in the Serengeti, or in some isolated regions of the Himalayan mountains – PPE is not so easy to access. Our teams are now distributing PPE for essential health care workers in those communities. Sometimes that means delivering to actual healthcare facilities or small clinics. Sometimes it’s just a local midwife, or a village elder who deals with everyone’s health. We’ve been able to get out PPE and kits to these individuals. That’s something that we’ve never done before.
COVID has been devastating here in the United States, not only in terms of lives lost, but also when it comes to people trying to feed their families and take care of their loved ones.
The service industry is what has really allowed us to be where we are today. In those early days, it was the servers, bartenders, and restaurant owners in the service industry that really believed in and supported our mission. Then, in 2020, the Governor of North Carolina shut down all restaurants for in-person seating. My brother owns and operates a restaurant here in my local community, and he had to lay off 50 people. He was in tears. He was one of tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of restaurant owners who had to do the same thing. We knew we had to do something to help.
How did Wine To Water step up?
We’ve got this great team, but we’d never responded to anything quite like this on a local level before. We had to ask ourselves, “What are they going to need?” Rent was an obvious thing, but a lot of these people – whether it’s a single mom coming in to grab a shift in the evening, or a college student who’s in debt – are living paycheck to paycheck. When faced with a pandemic, not only are they going to have a hard time with rent, but you have to wonder how they’re going to eat good food. So, we decided that we’d start by feeding some of our own staff before gradually expanding it to see what happened.
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It sounds like your Box Program has been a huge success.
That first week in our region in western North Carolina, we announced that we were gonna open it up to anyone that was having a hard time finding something to eat. All they had to do was come to us and we’d make sure they got a meal. We worked with a local bakery to provide baked bread. We were able to get local pastas and pasta sauces. We got frozen chicken that they could cook. We packed it all into boxes, 40 meals per box, and we said weren’t turning anyone away. We gave away 16,000 meals that first week. That was in the spring. By the end of February, we were approaching 200,000 meals.
If you would have said to me at the beginning of 2020, “Wine To Water is a water sanitation organization. Do you think that you’re ever going to feed people?” I would have been like, “No, I don’t think that’s in the cards for us.” But we do now, and I’m glad that we do it. It’s added such a really cool element for us, just being able to turn around and give back to the people that gave to us for so long. Now we’re there in a time of need for them.
Which gets back to your organization being agile and able to adapt.
A lot changed in those first six or seven short months. As I said, when something bad like a pandemic happens, the natural response is to freeze. When you’re afraid, a lot of times you don’t move. One of the things I’m so proud of about our team is they froze for maybe a second, and then they said, “What are we gonna do?” And then they began to pivot and run. It’s scary when you make a leap like that. You think, “Is it okay for a water organization to feed people?” We didn’t know, but we just knew that we loved our community and that we wanted to help them. So, the Wine to Water Box Program was born out of that.
We now have a vaccine and hopefully an end to the pandemic. What’s next for the Box Program?
Now that people are starting to get their jobs back, we’re in the process of evolving it into a disaster response program. When a hurricane hits the Gulf, for example, we’re gonna be able to ship these boxes to those who need them most. The boxes will morph a little. There’ll still be a few days’ worth of good food, but we plan to include some other things – maybe some hand sanitizer to help with hygiene, maybe a headlamp to help deal with the power outages – so that the boxes become more like emergency response kits. Basically, we’re gonna take something that was a really great service to people during the pandemic, and mold it into a long-term benefit for our own people right here in the United States.
Let’s go back in time. Where did you grow up?
My family is originally from Greenville, South Carolina, which is where home base was for me as a younger person. We weren’t there long; my dad was a preacher man, so we had a hard time staying in one spot. He worked at a church in Georgia, and then he worked at another church outside of Chicago. Then we moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where my dad took a job in the family business that my granddaddy started, which was the first time that we really stayed in one spot for a while. That’s where I went to high school.
Staying in one place during my high school years was great, but I guess I’d gotten bitten by the bug with all of that moving around. I tried college for a couple months, but that didn’t really work out well for me, so I moved to Montana in the late ‘90s and worked on a horse ranch. Then I spent a year in New Zealand before moving back in 2000 and getting into bartending. I took some classes at a community college, got accepted into North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and continued to bartend. I didn’t realize it then, but that really set the stage for what I’d later do with Wine to Water.
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It sounds like the service industry is in your DNA.
Bartending was my passion. The last bar I worked at was an Irish pub, and I loved being there at happy hour and seeing all these different walks of life – company CEOs sitting next to school teachers, stay-at-home moms sitting next to construction workers – which made for all these great conversations. I think I fell in love with the service industry because every time I tried to plug myself in somewhere, I never felt like I fit. I didn’t quite fit into the church world I grew up in, and I never perfectly fit into the academic world for sure. It was in the service industry that I got to be myself for the first time in my life.
Wine To Water was born in December, 2003. Where did the idea come from?
My whole life I never really excelled at much of anything. Growing up, I’d never really excelled at school or sports. As a bartender, I loved people but I wasn’t really the best at making drinks. I failed at a lot of stuff. I messed up in a lot of stuff. Especially at that time in my life – it just seemed that I was making mistakes back-to-back-to-back, and it was a bit overwhelming for me to try to work through all the mess. So, I was on Christmas break before my last semester of school, and asked for a couple of weeks off from my job at that Irish pub in Raleigh. My parents had just semi-retired to the mountain community of Boone, near the Tennessee border, so I went there to take a break from everything.
I remember it was the middle of the night, and I was tossing and turning in my bed and couldn’t sleep. The phrase ‘wine to water’ kept running through my head, over and over, which was backwards from the miracle story I’d learned about growing up. My dad had delivered many sermons based on Jesus turning water into wine. I just couldn’t figure out why the phrase itself was suddenly stuck in my head, playing backwards.
I ended up going downstairs to my parent’s computer and researching water, and I was blown away by the stuff I learned. I had no idea that there was a water crisis. No clue. I’d never learned about it in school. I’d traveled a lot, but I’d never traveled to the developing world. So, I didn’t know that a water crisis existed. I stayed up all night. I learned that there were young mommas walking with their kids, some of them up to four-or-five hours before the sun would come up, trying to get something that I have come out of my tap every day. And then, I learned that when they get that water, it looks more like chocolate milk or coffee. And that water, unfortunately, is the number one reason why a child isn’t going to see its fifth birthday, and why a lot of these mommas are going to bury one or more of their children, because of diarrheal disease they get through the dirty water they’re drinking. So, that night was the beginning. I jotted down all these notes on how I could maybe help the people that I was reading about. It took me six weeks to pull together the first Wine To Water event. That was February, 2004. By August, I’d quit my job and moved to Sudan.
How did bartending help prepare you to lead Wine To Water?
I think it was the most important decision I could have made, as far as to prepare myself for starting and running an international nonprofit. College played a role, but it was a very minor role in comparison to the skillset I learned through bartending. The ability to build a relationship with somebody who is completely different than me, the ability to make a connection with someone with a vastly different background, some of that comes naturally. But, bartending really helped me learn how to talk to anybody, from that white-collar CEO to a blue-collar construction worker, and everyone in-between.
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Give me an example.
In Sudan, I might be in a situation where I have to make a connection with a rebel leader. For me, I didn’t say to myself, “Gosh, here’s a scary rebel leader that’s controlling an area with guns.” I immediately knew that the first thing I had to do was make a connection, and the best way to do that was over a meal. If you’re sitting and sharing a meal with someone, everyone becomes human. We all need to eat, we all love good food, and we all like to have good conversation. So, my first goal, whenever I’d meet a rebel leader or a village sheikh, was to ask if I could come and spend a few days with them and just hang out. I’d tell them that I didn’t have anywhere to be. My job was to get to know them and their communities, to see how I could serve their communities by providing them with water. In most cases, the response was overwhelmingly positive. The first meeting would usually start off with tea or coffee, and then you would eventually share a meal. It wasn’t like I had to hurry, because I didn’t have to be anywhere. So, those relationships were so easy to build because it was so natural. I don’t think I would have had that kind of success, had I not had that kind of experience in the service industry.
It sounds like people in developing countries are basically the same as people back home.
In Sudan, I was in as opposite a place as a guy like me could have ever imagined. I’m a Southern, white guy who grew up in a Christian home, and now I’m living in a 95% Islamic, tribal, Black, African community. I thought “Gosh, I don’t know if this is going to work out,” because I’m about as opposite of a person as anyone in these communities could imagine. I quickly felt ashamed that I allowed myself to think that, because the people in those villages overwhelmingly embraced me and my team. They welcomed us into their homes despite the differences. They loved us and made us feel a part of their community. These people would have given you the shirts off their backs. There might be this old lady living in a mud hut, and she might only have one chicken and one goat, and if I was a guest in her home she would gladly say, “Let’s eat this together.” I felt a sense of shame, because I’d allowed myself to believe the lie that the world tries to tell us about people that may be different from us. If bartending taught me anything, it’s that everyone has the same basic wants and needs, regardless of wealth and social status. Everybody wants to be happy, to be healthy, to be reasonably prosperous, and to be secure. They want friends, peace of mind, good family relationships, and hope that tomorrow is going to be even better than today. I was reminded of that when I met the people in Sudan.
I’m not sure that same level of generosity is universally displayed here in the U.S.
I come from a small-town community in the South, and the thing that I wrestled with after my year in Sudan was, “I wonder if people in our own community back home would treat them the same way that I was treated?” I still wrestle with it now because, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of embracing and loving people that are very different from us.
There are cynics in the world who think that one person can’t make a difference. You’re living proof that that’s not the case.
I think that there are a lot of lies that we get told, just like the lie that I believed about not being welcomed into the communities of these developing countries. Another lie that we’re told, very indiscreetly, by what we see on the news – whether that’s on TV or something we read online – is that it’s only people like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie that can make a difference. That only Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world can make a difference. Not only do I not agree with that thought process, I believe that normal, regular, everyday people have the ability to profoundly change the world. It’s imperative that the world stops believing that lie, because the world needs us right now. We don’t need any more movie stars, or big politicians, or CEOs of big companies to tell us what the world needs. We need the school teachers, and the construction workers, and the stay-at-home mommas who are at the bar on a Friday for happy hour. We need those folks right now. I wish they were the ones calling the shots. We need them to stand up and realize that they have the ability to make a massive impact – and not just on a global level, but in our own communities. We need that now more than ever.
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You’ve traveled to some dangerous places – countries with unstable governments, threats of violence, things like that. How do you navigate that?
I don’t really know much about politics, and I don’t really understand a lot of it, but I think the government was created to give people a voice. The idea was that the government would represent the people, because people want to be heard. The more I traveled, the more I learned that that wasn’t happening. What I’m learning more and more as I travel to places like Darfur in Sudan, is that as much as I would love for the people to have a voice, there are just so many things that are corrupt and rigged. I can spend all of my energy wishing it wasn’t that way, but I’d never get anything done. So, I have to recognize it for what it is, and not let that stop me and just keep moving. At the end of the day, I have to be able to navigate the cultures in the world.
There were times when your relationship-building skills meant the difference between life and death.
In the early days, a mentor of mine said that when you start doing this work, you’ll be going into some areas that aren’t safe or secure, and that you will need to make friends with the guys that have the most guns. That’s just what you’ve got to do. It started out literally that simple. In Sudan, I learned that the rebel groups were trying to protect their people, because the government was coming in and dropping bombs and committing genocide. So, I had to go to the different rebel leaders and communicate with them and build that relationship.
It sounds like government corruption can make it both difficult and dangerous to fulfill your mission.
Take Haiti, for example. I’d been trying to get supplies and water filters into the country. We’d even constructed a factory in Haiti, run by Haitians, to build water filters there. Haiti’s government collapsed when the earthquake hit. For the first time in modern Haitian history, there was a year where humanitarian groups were able to operate without having to deal with corruption. These groups came in droves, and they were able to serve and help and love many people – but the second the government offices started being rebuilt and the politicians started retaking their seats, then the corruption started all over again.
Within a year, the trucks that I had going across the border from the Dominican Republic to Haiti were being stopped. We’d never been stopped up to that point; we were just bringing in supplies to help people. Suddenly, we’re being stopped and told that we need to pay thousands of dollars to get through the border. Maybe I wasn’t as diplomatic as I could have been, but I told them that we weren’t paying that money. It just didn’t make sense to me. I even went down there myself and tried to get it across by driving straight through the border. That didn’t work out so well – we almost got into some trouble with that. I ended up driving this truck to the south of the island, where we hired someone with a massive, wooden fishing boat that looked like it was from 2000 years ago. We loaded all of the supplies onto it and sailed the ocean through the night. I had my team meet us on the beach, where we secretly unloaded everything and got the job done.
I’m sure that Haiti is hardly the exception.
The reality is that you have to deal with a lot of these countries where the government wasn’t created to be a voice of the people. Instead, you have dictatorships that only meet the needs of the elite. We recognize that. Does it suck? Yeah, it sucks. Is it going to stop us from doing our work? No, it’s not going to stop us. Because we’re a small, grassroots organization, we can fly under the radar a lot better than these massive, multibillion-dollar organizations that have to ask permission for everything. When it comes to corrupt governments, we’re not really good at asking permission [laughs].
What you do can be very dangerous. How has having children changed your perspective?
That’s a great question. When things first got going in those early years, back in 2003 and 2004, I wasn’t married and I didn’t have kids. I’ve been married for almost 15 years now and have three kids. I’d like to say that I wasn’t afraid when I first started traveling, but that isn’t the truth. I was afraid to go to a place like Darfur, but it was really the fear of the unknown. It wasn’t, “My gosh, I might not come back.” It was a fear of not having been there before.
I had two kids when I sneaked inside Syria after the war broke out. Generally, there’s a lot of anxiety in the days and weeks leading up to a trip like that. There are a lot of questions running through my head. But then you become a father and you think about other things. What if I don’t come back? What if my kids don’t get to have their father around? I never had those questions before. So, having kids definitely changed my thought process. it. However, once you’re on the ground, the job at hand helps to keep your mind occupied and the fear just goes away. In Syria, we were able to get 1,500 water filters to the families we were trying to help.
You hear of actors being nervous before they take the stage, and then everything changes when the curtain opens. Is it like that?
It’s hard to explain, but a calm comes over you. Whatever happens is gonna happen. On that December night in 2003, I don’t think I came up with this idea on my own. I really believe that this is a gift that was given to me. In doing this, I don’t always get it right. I fail a lot. But, by doing this, that, I’m being obedient to this gift that I’ve been given. I’m trying to follow what is meant for my life. So, the second I get on the ground in Syria or wherever, it’s just like, “This is where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing. Whatever happens, happens.”
The same thing happens when I get an opportunity to be on the stage and talk and speak. People ask me if I get nervous and I do get nervous speaking in front of large groups of people. I don’t know how many I’ve done, but I get terrified every time. Sometimes I have so much anxiety that I almost pass out. But the second I step foot on that stage and start sharing my story, the fear just goes away.
at the 2009 CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute
Do you see yourself as a leader?
That’s a tough question. My thoughts on leadership have evolved a lot since I started Wine To Water. In the early years, I thought I’d love to lead people and be considered a great leader. I think a lot of people think that way. As the years went on, the glimmering light of leadership faded quickly for me. I was like, “I don’t really know if this is something that I want so much.”
What part of leadership don’t you like?
It was very tangible for me to see this organization that I love so much begin to grow – we gained so much exposure from CNN and having the book come out – and then, for some crazy reason, we started to plateau. About 10 years in, we kind of started dying off and that’s when I realized that I couldn’t keep the wheels on this thing. I wasn’t great at hiring and firing, and I wasn’t great at having the hard conversations with staff members when they weren’t doing the best job. To me, the relational confrontation really was more terrifying to me than a physical confrontation. I realized then that I wasn’t cut out for this, that my lack of leadership was choking the organization, and that Wine To Water was struggling because of me. The buck stops here. So, I began a search. I found somebody, David Cuthbert, who came onboard and agreed to be our CEO. He brought a lot of great experience – 10 years of leadership in military special operations, and 10 years of leadership in the private sector – and he helped to build a highly functioning team. In five years as Wine To Water’s CEO, he helped grow our organization from four people to a team of over 50 today. We have international headquarters in Nepal, East Africa, Colombia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
Then, after five years as our CEO, he decided that it was time to step down and serve on the board. We had a discussion, and he was like, “Do you want to step back into this role?” I had learned a lot from him, so I felt like I was ready this time around. I’ve been in this role for a year now, and I love it. He helped to develop a number of leaders who are amazing at leading their teams and great at doing their jobs. That really helps me, because I still get to do what I’m good at. I’m a dreamer, someone who can help the organization shift when something like COVID hits. I can help the organization be nimble and maneuver. I’m not an operations guy. Thanks to David, we have those people on staff now. That allows me the freedom to dream and chase ideas and fail along the way.
You don’t strike me as someone who seeks the limelight. What was it like to be recognized by CNN Heroes in 2009?
That was a very surreal experience. I remember getting on the stage and looking out, and, I was kind of in shock. Being backstage moments before that, with all of these different celebrities who were going to introduce the nominees…it was surreal. It was such an honor. The next sixth months were a blur. I had an opportunity to write a book about the story of Wine To Water, and from there I got to share the story through what seemed an endless stream of speaking engagements.
It’s funny, but in the early years of Wine To Water I couldn’t help but think about how awesome it would be if the whole world knew about our mission. I wanted more people to hear our story, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to do that. Then I thought how great it would be if some Hollywood movie star told our story. I just thought that would be super cool. So, it was totally surreal when CNN Heroes came along when it did. Movie stars were talking about Wine To Water in a way that I had fantasized about early on. It was a great way to get the word out about our cause. But the thing that makes us unique is that our organization isn’t made up of big-name people. That’s what I love about who we are. We’re a team of ordinary people who come together to do extraordinary things.
Photo courtesy Wine to Water
Final Question: If you had one piece of advice in terms of making a difference, what would that be?
I hear it a lot: A lot of people, especially the younger generation, want to do something to make a difference. They tell me that they want to start an organization like Wine To Water, and then they tell me that they don’t have all of their ducks in a row. They feel like they’ve got to have their act together first – a college degree at a minimum, or a master’s degree, or maybe even a doctorate. Again, I think that’s one of those lies that we’ve been told that limit us. Subliminally, we’re told that we need to have all of this stuff before we can do this or that.
My advice to those who want to make a difference is simple: The best thing you can do is just start. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t wait until you have enough degrees. Just do it. Go ahead and take that first step. Is it gonna be an immediate success? Probably not. Are you going to fail? Probably so – and probably more times that you care to count. But I promise you, you’re going to learn a lot more from your failures than you ever will by hitting the ball out of the park.
