Water Wars

After spending his childhood caring for his ill mother, Scott Harrison rebelled at age 18, grew out his hair, joined a rock band and moved to New York City to become rich and famous.

It wasn’t long before he landed a job as a promoter at top nightclubs and fashion events. The big perk: He was paid to "drink for free."

"It’s a pretty crazy industry," the now 35-year-old Harrison told those gathered at a recent fundraiser for the nonprofit he founded in 2006 — charity: water, an organization that has provided clean water to more than 1.27 million people in 17 countries.

At the height of his career as a nightclub promoter, Budweiser and Bacardi paid Harrison $4,000 a month to promote their beer and spirits at hip nightclubs in the Big Apple. On the outside, Harrison seemed to have it all — the life of a playboy prince.

"I was chasing after models and bottles — flying in the back of other guys’ private planes," Harrison told the audience while showing a picture of himself partying at a posh nightclub. "I chose this picture because you can see how pretentious I was. I’m actually holding out the Rolex so the photographer knows I have a Rolex."

But at age 28 — after spending a decade living selfishly and arrogantly — Harrison realized he had become desperately unhappy. Spiritually bankrupt, Harrison came face to face with what he’d become. He decided it was time to make a change during a beach party in Uruguay with "all the right people" and "tons of cocaine and Ecstasy."

Like a modern Prodigal Son, Harrison came to his senses and felt the divine tug of his lost faith. He began reading theological books and wondered what his life would look like if he put his faith into action and became the exact opposite of what he had been.

Returning to New York, Harrison decided to live out his faith in an authentic way. He knew he wanted to help the poor, but when he applied to World Vision and Save the Children he was turned down because they were apprehensive about hiring a nightclub promoter to help sick and starving children.

Finally, Harrison discovered a nonprofit that would take him on — mainly because he was the only person who applied. Mercy Ships, a Texas-based humanitarian organization that sends “floating hospitals” to offer free medical care to the poor at ports around the world, asked Harrison to join them as a volunteer photojournalist.

Soon, Harrison went from his spacious midtown loft to a 250-square-foot cabin with bunk beds, two roommates and cockroaches scurrying around on the floor.

“Talk about culture shock,” Harrison says. “We sailed into Liberia. It had just come out of a 14-year civil war, and at the time there was no electricity, no running water, no sewage and no mail. Everything was shot up. The ship came in just after 14,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops.”

Harrison had a general idea what his job was going to be — taking pictures of sick people — but little did he know the types of illnesses and deformities people can develop from contaminated water and unsanitary living conditions.

“It turns out Mercy Ships specializes in giant facial tumors,” Harrison says. “The best doctors from all over the world would give up their vacation time, jump on the ship and see people. I was photographing enormous tumors, flesh-eating disease, facial reconstructions, cleft lips and palates and really bad burns.”

On his third day in the West African nation, the first patient to come in for a screening was Alfred, a boy who was “literally suffocating to death on his own face.”

Shocked and bewildered by the boy’s plight, Harrison took his picture, ran into a corner and cried. Hoping to comfort him and prepare him for his job, the chief medical officer came over and said, “Look, this is what we do. Did you not get the memo? It’s like day three and you are here for at least a year, aren’t you?” Later, Harrison befriended Alfred and got to see the “miracle” that happened when the doctors removed the benign tumor, and the boy went home a couple of weeks later. “They had a huge celebration,” Harrison says. “Hundreds of people came. Alfred was welcomed back into his village with a new face and a new life.”

During the next two years, Harrison took 50,000 pictures of people like Alfred. And although doctors performed surgeries on thousands, many were turned away.

“I’ll never forget standing on top of the Land Rover to try to fit everyone into the frame and just weeping again,” Harrison says. “All these people were told to go home. ‘We’re sorry. We just don’t have enough slots.’ That made me angry. It made me want to do something with my life to help them.”

During his stint with Mercy Ships, Harrison spent some time with an engineer who took him into communities to show him the local sources of drinking water — muddy puddles, polluted swamps and other sources of brackish water often contaminated with E. coli, salmonella, cholera and hepatitis A.

“We’d say to ourselves, ‘No wonder everyone is sick. It’s the water. It’s no wonder we’re seeing tumors.’” Returning home to New York City, Harrison had $40,000 in personal debt and owed back taxes, too. Despite these financial obstacles, he decided he wanted to dedicate his life to helping provide clean drinking water to those who don’t have access to safe water. Soon, Harrison learned that unsafe water and lack of sanitation cause 80 percent of the world’s diseases and kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including wars. Children are especially vulnerable to contaminated water because their immune systems aren’t strong enough to fight diarrhea, dysentery and other illnesses. Of the 42,000 worldwide deaths that occur each week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions, 90 percent involve children younger than 5 years old. The United Nations estimates one-tenth of diseases in the world could be prevented simply by improving water supply and sanitation.

“There are a billion people in the world who don’t have access to clean drinking water,” Harrison says. “It’s almost a number too big to conceive of. It’s a sixth of the world’s population. One out of every six people doesn’t have something I’m pretty sure everyone in this room takes for granted on a regular basis.”

In countries throughout the world, millions of women and children walk three miles every day or wait for hours in line to fill up yellow, 20-liter fuel cans with water that is likely to make them sick. “All these kids have their Jerry cans,” Harrison says. “It’s the iPod of Africa. They come from the river every morning and bring the dirty water with them to school.”

Harrison also learned half of the world’s schools don’t have clean water. Many also don’t have toilets — factors that make it very difficult for the youth to get good educations.

Transformed by these revelations, Harrison founded charity: water out of the living room of his apartment in August 2006. The organization’s purpose is to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. By inspiring giving and empowering others to fundraise, charity: water uses 100 percent of public donations to directly fund water projects throughout the world. A group of private donors, foundations and corporate sponsors help pay for the everyday costs of running charity: water.

Safe water is often just 100 to 300 feet underground in aquifers and can be tapped using a drill. These freshwater wells can provide at least 250 people clean and safe drinking water for up to 20 years. The nonprofit also funds well rehabilitations, spring protections, rainwater catchment systems and biosand filters.

A typical well costs $5,000, but deeper ones — sometimes up to 1,200 feet underground — cost $10,000 to $25,000. A well can deliver about 7 million bottles of clean water every year.

“The community contributes the labor under supervision of a couple of masons,” Harrison says. “They are more than willing to work. Six weeks of digging; sometimes you hit rock and pick axes come out. We have one partner in Ethiopia that likes to blow the well up with dynamite.”

Amazingly, something as seemingly simple as clean water changes everything in a community, bringing hope and restoring dignity to women and children. In Africa alone, 40 billion hours are wasted collecting water — more than the entire annual workforce of France. The overall economic loss due to the lack of safe water and sanitation is $28 billion, or 5 percent of Africa’s GDP. “It puts so much time back into the community,” Harrison says. “Disease rates start plummeting when clean water is brought into a community.”

In these communities, charity: water helps create water committees to ensure the wells are maintained and protected from contamination and remain in operation. The committees collect $1 per individual or family to put into a special account to ensure money is available for repairs and maintenance of the wells.

“This is so exciting because it’s often the first time the women have ever been given a position of power, authority and responsibility in a community,” Harrison says. “We hear that time and time again. They have a treasurer, a vice chairman, caretakers and sanitation trainees and they make sure the community is building and keeping up the latrines so the water source stays clean.”

Demonstrating the difference a well makes, at the recent fundraiser in Omaha, Neb., Harrison showed the audience a video of women in Ethiopia ankle-deep in muck, cow feces and cow urine, bending over to try to get at the eye of a spring to give their kids this water.

“A month later, standing in the same spot, clean water is now coming out of the ground and 326 people are shouting, dancing, clapping, and screaming,” Harrison says. “The community called it liquid gold.”

As a way of connecting donors to their water projects, the organization proves the projects have been completed by providing GPS coordinates and photos on Google Maps on its website, Charitywater.org. “GPS technology, photos and cheap cameras are everywhere,” Harrison says. “So we said we’ll never do a water project anywhere in the world unless we can get a GPS, and then we’ll make all that information public. So we trained our partners how to use GPS devices and just put it up on Google Earth from day one.”

Today, the organization has been featured by more than 100 media outlets, from The New York Times and Vanity Fair to CNN and Forbes.com, and it has posted commercials and other videos on YouTube and similar websites. The charity has caught the attention of numerous celebrities, including actor Hugh Jackman, who sent out a tweet offering to donate $100,000 to someone’s favorite charity if they could convince him in 140 characters or less. In 2009, charity: water became the first nonprofit to have more than a million Twitter followers.

Harrison has employed a myriad of ways to raise money, including charity balls, cold pitches to business owners, partnerships with socially conscious companies, and an online fundraising platform that empowers individuals to raise funds for water projects.

Anyone can sign up in a matter of minutes and start their own campaign. The campaign page tracks every donation and 100 percent goes directly to funding water projects. These campaigns include a man who biked across America to raise $11,530, actress Alyssa Milano’s effort to raise $92,568 by asking people to donate to charity: water for her 37th birthday and 8-year-old Riley Goodfellow, who raised $5,500 by eating rice and beans to save money on meals.

On his 31st birthday, Harrison invited more than 700 people to a club and charged them $20 — raising $15,000. The money was used at a refuge camp in northern Uganda to fix three wells and construct three more. Later, pictures and GPS coordinates were e-mailed to everyone who attended the party.

“People couldn’t believe a charity actually bothered to tell them where their $20 went,” Harrison says. “Many of my friends didn’t even remember attending the party. They thought it was great, though, that they had given $20.”

Despite the recent success, Harrison says the organization has barely scratched the surface of addressing the worldwide need for clean water. A billion people need clean water. By 2020, Harrison hopes to raise $2 billion to help at least 100 million people get access to clean water.

“I worked it out in time,” Harrison says. “The million people we have helped in seconds are 12 days of seconds. The billion people we are trying to help are 32 years. We are at the very beginning. We’ve solved less than two weeks of a 32-year problem.”