[Music]
SCOTT HARRISON: I'm Scott and I'm helping to bring clean drinking water to people all
around the world.
[Music]
So at 19, I'm working at a famous nightclub, a nightclub on 14th Street called Nell's and
I'm co-producing this huge R&B night and this was kinda a great life.
Y'know you walk in and you're handed tons of drink tickets.
You invite all your friends.
They drink for free and you actually get paid to party.
So that lasted almost a decade.
So when I was 28, something happened that shook me a little and then started this personal
transformation or this personal faith journey, really.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night and my right arm was—felt numb.
Something felt really wrong with my body.
Now, if you looked at my life, you would say, that dude is like completely destroying his
body.
He's going out at 10 PM, he's coming back at noon.
Y'know, he's hanging out in all of the wrong places.
He's abusing his body with a variety of substances, so no frigging wonder his arm is a little
numb.
There was nothing to it.
It just eventually went away.
But I think I was faced y'know for the first time really in that decade with my mortality.
What if there was something wrong with me?
What is the state of my life?
What is the state of my soul?
Soon after that, I went out to Puente Alesta in Uruguay on vacation and y'know had my girlfriend
and our friend and I remember we rented this beautiful house and there were servants and
horses to ride and we spent a thousand dollars on fireworks.
Y'know, magnums of Don Perignon everywhere and I should have been really happy and I
just remember feeling so empty and so deeply, really miserable and it's almost like the
veil was lifted or was starting to lift.
I had been raised with a pretty traditional and meaningful faith background and I didn't
realize I was not right with God.
I was—I was no friend to God, let's put it that way.
I came back to New York and now nightlife had been ruined for me.
Really, I remember just starting to pray for a way out and say y'know God, I wanna get
out of this.
I want my life to look different.
And that's when I found kind of the way.
What if my life looked 180 degrees opposite than it did right now and what did that look
like?
And I started looking into humanitarian service.
Thankfully, one organization, an amazing group called Mercy Ships—I had applied there to
be a photojournalist.
Mercy Ships was a—I think they had been around for 26 years operating hospital ships
and bringing the hospital to the poor.
So we sailed—we sail in to Benin, the first country where we're stopping and I knew that
we were taking over a huge soccer stadium that people had been queuing up, lining up
for days and some people had actually walked from Central Africa.
Like walked a month to see our doctors and I knew that we had about 1,000—1,500 surgery
spots and they're like five, six thousand people outside this stadium and that was a
really sobering moment knowing that y'know the majority of them would be turned away.
Would have to go home just because we didn't have enough capacity.
Off to the side, little Mercy Ships was primarily a medical organization.
There was a guy called Leif and he was going out into villages and he was helping dig a
few wells and I decided to document everything on the trip.
I would ride out with him in land rovers and I would see the current sources of drinking
water for these communities and it as crazy.
People were drinking from swamps and ponds and rivers.
There were algae in the water, there were bugs.
So I watched him go through his whole process of giving communities clean water and how
easy it was to train the locals who wanted to work to dig a well.
Y'know.
our surgeries were pretty expensive.
Here was a guy tackling the water problem at y'know $20, $30 a person off to the side.
And that impact just stuck with me.
In the operating theater, doctors would tell me that water and sanitation, or lack thereof
of clean water and access to sanitation was causing so much of this disease.
So here was a guy off to the side kind of attacking, y'know, the roots of sickness and
if 80% of people were really sick because of water would have had enough surgery slots.
We wouldn't have had to turn anyone away.
So as I came back to New York, although I had now done two outreaches and met oh gosh
hundreds, y'know, probably 1,000 patients, I'd taken 50,000 plus photographs.
I had written a bunch of stories.
This guy off to the side helping people get clean water really stuck with me.
[Music]
So when a community doesn't have clean water, it affects so many things.
One of the things that surprised me most as I continued to learn about water was the economic
benefit.
Water makes people healthier but it really makes wealthier and there's an amazing report
from the United Nations that came out that said every dollar you invest actually makes
a community 8 times richer.
Sometimes as much as 24 times richer.
It's a job culturally, typically for the women and the children to go and get the water and
this is an incredible burden to them.
They're often spending up to four hours a day back and forth to the water hole, being
able to get that time back.
Being able to use that time productively.
Whether it's starting a small business or selling rice or peanuts at market.
Some women will tell us that they'll spend more time with their kids to be better mothers,
so having this extra time back, having this extra money back in the family, y'know having
the improved health the ability to get a better education.
Y'know, water does so much.
You get so much bang for your buck.
I'm Scott Harrison and you are watching Epiphany.