I was thirty-five thousand feet in the air, on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic. Outside my window, the sun was slowly setting under a blanket of cumulous clouds, turning the sky orange, yellow, and pink.
A couple weeks earlier, I’d officially wrapped up my time with Mercy Ships by throwing a huge party at a sushi restaurant inside Monrovia’s Royal Grand Hotel. I invited patients, ward translators, day workers, my UN buddies, friends from the U.S. embassy, and my shipmates. I even hired some teenagers from the ship to work the door.
When Dr. Gary Parker and his wife, Susan, showed up, my heart—and if I’m honest, my head, too—swelled with pride. “You know what?” Susan said to someone later that night. “This is what the kingdom of God looks like. It looks like Scott throwing a party and inviting everyone.”
Now, that evening seemed like ages ago. I’d flown through London on my way home, for a quick stop at the Apple flagship store there to give a lecture about Mercy Ships. And now I couldn’t stop thinking about $14 cocktails. The night before, I’d gone to dinner with two friends at a bustling brasserie in Notting Hill. I almost choked when the $336 bill came. Thankfully, my buddies smiled and grabbed it with a wink, before whisking me away to another bar for $14 margaritas.
I know London has never been cheap, especially for Americans, but after spending so much time in Liberia, I’d forgotten just how expensive things in the Western world really are. Our dinner bill in London would have practically paid for Alfred’s entire surgical care; our margarita bill could have bought a couple of new roofs to cover leaky homes.
This might be what I’ll miss the most, I thought, as I watched the sky outside my window turn from misty gray to black. I’m going to miss buying a $22 bag of rice that feeds a family of four for a month. I’ll miss paying a Monrovia landlord $120 (a year’s rent) so that a mother and her two previously blind children could live in a home and not a refugee camp. I’ll miss spending $55 to put a boy through school.
On the ship, I used to hear the term culture shock all the time. Volunteers would spend eight months in a country like Liberia, and then come home and start judging everyone around them: How could you spend so much on a pair of shoes, a dinner, a watch, a car? We’d talk about “reentry” like we were returning through Earth’s atmosphere from Mars. I never wanted to be someone who judged or finger-wagged, but my recent sticker shock did make me wonder if there was a nonjudgmental way to invite people to use their money for good.
I’d be turning thirty-one in a few months. If you’d asked me a few years earlier what I’d be doing on my thirty-first birthday, the answer certainly wouldn’t have been “Oh you know, just trying to save the world.” But now, as cliché and naïve and idealistic as it sounds, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I loved the feeling I got when my own small acts visibly changed lives. It was a high that outdid any other I’d ever known, and I wanted everyone to experience it with me.
The hard part was deciding where to focus my energies. It had become increasingly clear that Mercy Ships and I just weren’t meant to be. We couldn’t come to an agreement over what our partnership would look like. We struggled to find common ground over things as simple as reimbursement for a donors’ lunch and as big as who owned the copyright to the tens of thousands of images I’d taken during my tours.
Lately, Dr. Gary was constantly in my thoughts. I was inspired by his ability to stick with a single cause for so long. I felt ready to give my life to something bigger than myself, something that would help thousands, maybe even millions, of people. But I didn’t want to start over. I didn’t want to find another charity to join or butt heads with another bureaucracy.
“God has big plans for you,” Dr. Gary wrote to me after my tour had ended. “He’s invested great gifts and skills and put his heart in you. He’ll do great things through you…But there will be more tests. Stay strong.”
His words were like a blessing from afar, affirming my decision to go it alone. And the tests he wrote about would come sooner than I expected.
In late April 2006, I came home to New York completely broke, only to discover that it was worse than that. I was also badly in debt. Brantly and I met at his new place in SoHo one night to catch up. After talking about the new clubs he was working at, he let slip that he’d never dissolved our nightlife business.
“You didn’t disband the company?” I said incredulously.
“Nope,” he said.
“Did we ever pay taxes?”
“Nah, I don’t think so.” He pointed to a box on the floor filled with letters from the IRS. Brantly never opened the mail, because he felt like it was always bad news. “It’s probably all in there if you want to sort through it.”
Tearing through the stack of unopened notices, I discovered that we’d never filed returns, made estimated payments, or kept current with tax payments for Brantly&Scott Inc. Now we were both on the hook for about forty grand in back taxes, late fees, and penalties.
I was furious. Brantly didn’t seem to be interested in coming up with the money for the IRS. In fact, he seemed indifferent to most things in his life at that point.
“Sorry about that,” he said with a shrug. “You can live here for free if you want, while you’re figuring it all out.”
I was planning to start a world-changing charity. How was I supposed to do that in a two-bedroom SoHo loft with bill collectors at the door and Brantly’s friends coming by to snort drugs off the coffee table? How could I ask people to give me money for a cause when I owed $40,000 in back taxes?
I took him up on his offer. After all, a free place in New York City was worth something, and I had nowhere else to live. At first, I slept in a small bed on a raised loft at the back of the apartment. Later, when Brantly needed that space, I took my pillows and a few blankets to the walk-in closet and slept on the floor beneath a rack of shirts and sweaters.
In July 2006, I opened a bank account and deposited $1,100—all I had in the world—for my new charity. I also hired a personal accountant to dissolve Brantly&Scott Inc., file our tax returns, and set up a payment plan with the IRS. Now I just had to figure out what this new charity would actually do.
During all those hours I’d spent on Thinkers Beach in Liberia, I’d given a lot of consideration to the act of charity. The word charity is derived from the Latin caritas, which means love. I once heard it defined as “helping your neighbor in need and not getting anything in return.” That sounded so beautiful and simple to me. Regardless of one’s religion or politics, regardless of race or geography, we all could use a little more caritas. More action motivated by love, with no strings attached.
Dr. Gary had kept in touch over email, and I shared my next steps with him:
I think he could tell that my head was spinning with ideas. I wanted to do it all. But Dr. Gary provided a much-needed voice of reason.
“Scott, rather than five or ten different issues, perhaps God wants you to focus on one intensely,” he counseled. “Pick that one issue carefully.”
Focus on one intensely. What if I did just that? Picked one issue to start with? And once I got a handle on it, added new things to tackle from there?
I thought back to the conversation with Craig and the doctors on Thinkers Beach. To the women in Bomi County who were drinking the unthinkable. To my time with Lafe, watching him train locals on well construction and sustainability. I thought about the first well I’d been personally involved in, at Mama Vic’s orphanage. And I wondered, What if I chose water?
I thought of what water had meant to me growing up—or rather, how little it had meant. It was just always there whenever I needed it: coming out of taps and showerheads, clean and never-ending. But the more I learned, the more I realized that those doctors weren’t exaggerating when they said that dirty water and lack of sanitation caused half of all illnesses in the developing world. The real number was 52 percent. For years, dirty water was the number one cause of disease and death worldwide. It killed more people than all the wars, terrorism, and violence in the world combined.
But unlike cancer, malaria, and other problems that have sent thousands of smart people searching frantically for a cure—dirty water already has a cure. It’s a completely solvable problem. Very often, clean water is already there, even in the poorest of villages, flowing like liquid gold in aquifers just beneath people’s feet.
I was no hydrogeologist, but I knew from all those trips with Lafe to well sites that many countries already had amazing local organizations working to create solutions—from the most basic hand-dug wells like Mama Vic’s to deep-drilled wells, rainwater-harvesting systems, and biosand filters that could be built for as little as $60. If you weren’t married to a single kind of intervention, there were countless ways to eradicate dirty water and improve the lives of millions of people.
“We know that the single most powerful thing we can do for the whole human race is to get everyone safe drinking water,” Dr. Gary had said once in a speech. “That will affect more lives than anything else.”
I loved that he’d said “will.” Not “would,” not “could,” but “will.”
I had no seed money or personal savings to draw on, but I was willing to work day and night and do whatever it would take to get this thing off the ground. I wanted to start helping as many people as possible, as quickly as I could.
But first, I was going to need some help myself.