Scott Harrison is the
founder and CEO of charity: water.
Scott spent 10 years as a nightclub promoter in New York
City before leaving to volunteer on a hospital ship off the coast
of Liberia, Africa as a volunteer photojournalist. Returning home to New York City two years
later, he founded the non-profit organization charity: water in 2006. Turning
his full attention to the global water crisis and the one billion people
without clean water to drink, he created public installations and innovative
online fundraising platforms to spread international awareness of the issue. In
five years, with the help of more than 250,000 donors worldwide, charity: water
has raised over $60 million and funded 6,185 water projects in 19 developing
nations. Those projects will provide over 2.5 million people with clean, safe
drinking water. Scott was named an Utne Visionary in 2009.
In 2004, I left the streets of New York City
for the shores of West Africa. I’d made my
living for years in the Big Apple promoting top nightclubs and fashion events,
for the most part living selfishly and arrogantly. Desperately unhappy, I
needed to change. Faced with spiritual bankruptcy, I wanted desperately to
revive a lost Christian faith with action and asked the question: What would
the opposite of my life look like?
I signed up for volunteer service aboard a floating hospital with a group
called Mercy Ships, a humanitarian
organization which offered free medical care in the world’s poorest nations.
Operating on surgery ships, they’d built a 25-year track record of astonishing
results yet I’d never heard of them.
Top doctors and surgeons from all over the world left their practices and
fancy lives to operate for free on thousands who had no access to medical care.
I soon found the organization to be full of remarkable people. The chief
medical officer was a surgeon who left Los
Angeles to volunteer for two weeks–23 years ago. He
never looked or went back. I took the position of ship photojournalist, and
immediately traveled to Africa. At first,
being the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court felt strange. I traded my
spacious midtown loft for a 150-square-foot cabin with bunk beds, roommates and
cockroaches. Fancy restaurants were replaced by a mess hall feeding 400+ Army
style. A prince in New York,
now I was living in close community with 350 others. I felt like a pauper.
But once off the ship, I realized how good I really had it. In new
surroundings, I was utterly astonished at the poverty that came into focus
through my camera lens. Often through tears, I documented life and human
suffering I’d thought unimaginable. In West Africa,
I was a prince again. A king, in fact. A man with a bed and clean running water
and food in my stomach.
I fell in love with Liberia–a country with no public electricity, running water or sewage–spending time
in a leper colony and many remote villages, I put a face to the world’s 1.2
billion living in poverty. Those living on less than $365 a year–money I used
to blow on a bottle of Grey Goose vodka at a fancy club. Before tip.
Our medical staff would hold patient intake “screenings” and
thousands would wait in line to be seen, many afflicted with deformities even
Clive Barker hadn’t thought of. Enormous, suffocating tumors – cleft lips,
faces eaten by bacteria from water-borne diseases. I learned many of these
medical conditions also existed here in the west, but were taken care of–never allowed to progress. The amount of blind people without access to the
20-minute cataract surgery that could restore their sight astonished me–all
part of this new world.
Over the next eight months, I met patients who taught me the meaning of
courage. Many of them had been slowly suffocating to death for years and yet
pressing on. Praying, hoping, surviving. It was an honor to photograph them. It
was an honor to know them.
Charity.
For me, charity is practical. It’s sometimes easy, more often inconvenient,
but always necessary. It’s the ability to use one’s position of influence,
relative wealth and power to affect lives for the better. charity is singular
and achievable.
There’s a biblical parable about a man beaten near death by robbers. He’s
stripped naked and lying roadside. Most people pass him by, but one man stops.
He picks him up and bandages his wounds. He puts him on his horse and walks
alongside until they reach an inn. He checks him in and throws down his Amex.
“Whatever he needs until he gets better.”
Because he could.
The dictionary defines charity as simply the act of giving voluntarily to
those in need. It’s taken from the word “caritas,” or simply, love.
In Colossians 3, the Bible instructs readers to “put on charity, which is
the bond of perfectness.”
Although I’m still not sure what that means, I love the idea. To wear
charity.
