Vik had been acting a little sluggish since returning from Liberia. She came in late to work, yawned a lot, and had trouble focusing on tasks. And then one day, she didn’t show up at all.
The timing was terrible. Our shoot for the PSA was coming up. We were scrambling to get the filming permits in order, scout locations, organize volunteers, and rent cameras and sound equipment.
It wasn’t like Vik to slack off. Lani called her cell phone a bunch of times, but she didn’t answer.
“Maybe she’s still fighting jet lag?” I guessed.
The next day, Vik dragged herself in late and plopped down on the couch. “Sorry, guys,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. I passed out in my apartment and slept for twenty-four hours.”
I looked up from my laptop and gave her a long, hard stare. She looked pale, weak, sleepy-eyed. Lani and I exchanged worried looks. I knew she was thinking the same thing.
“Vik,” I said. “You have malaria.”
“No, no, no—I’m fine! Really,” she said, laughing at us. But thirty minutes later, she was slumped over. “Okay,” she mumbled. “I’m not fine.”
When malaria hits, it feels like a raging flu. You’re nauseous. Your bones ache. Chills, sweats, and fatigue come in waves. You reach the point where lifting a hand feels like an impossible task.
“Vik, you’ve got to get to a hospital right now,” I said. “Did you take your malaria pills?”
“Yes! Wait…not all of them. Lani said I didn’t need to.”
“Oh, man, I’m so sorry,” Lani said, sheepishly.
Lani liked to tell doctors that she was immune to the mosquito-borne disease, even as they shook their heads and said that wasn’t possible. To her credit, she’d never taken the pills and had never gotten the virus, so who knows? As for Vik, she’d split the difference, taking the pills while in Africa and stopping after she got home. But malaria medication doesn’t work that way. It’s a prophylactic, which means you have to continue taking it after you leave a malaria-prone region. If you got bitten by an infected mosquito on your last day in-country, your body needs the full regimen to suppress the disease and kill the virus.
I called a board member to get some advice, and she happened to know an infectious-disease specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital.
“Go to Lenox Hill now,” I told Vik, sending an intern to accompany her to the hospital. To save money, they took the subway uptown. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a four-star move, sending a malaria-stricken employee to the hospital on the subway. But at the time, it didn’t cross my mind that, at the very least, I should have gone out and personally hailed a cab.
Vik ended up testing positive for malaria, and spent four days at Lenox Hill. They gave her quinine, but no one told her that a common side effect of the treatment was temporary deafness. She woke up in the middle of the night with sudden hearing loss. Terrified, she started praying.
On Vik’s third day in the hospital, Lani and I went to visit her, bringing her a care package of movies and books. Her parents, who’d escaped communism with no more than $2,000 in their pockets, went to see her every day. They lamented the fact that she’d quit her stable job to work for me. But when Vik recovered, she came right back—just in time to shoot the PSA.
Terry had decided he wanted to direct the video himself, and he even got Jennifer Connelly to star in it. But they both had only a short window of time between film projects to make it happen. It would be a fast-and-furious one-day shoot. Vik and Lani would drive trucks, move people and props to four or five different locations, and assist Terry’s crew. I’d handle catering, find seventy extras for the exterior shots, and secure a donor’s luxury apartment for the scene where our celebrity actress serves dirty brown water to her children with their lunch. Everything was coming together.
But in mid-June, about a week before the shoot, Vik handed me a piece of paper and broke down sobbing. It was a hospital bill for $40,000.
“I just don’t know what to do,” she said. “They keep sending me bills, and the numbers keep going up.”
I’d never seen her so fragile and scared. Her face was red, like she’d been crying all night. She worried that this debt would hang over her for the rest of her life.
I am an optimist and a problem-solver like my dad, but this really was bad news. I’d lured this talented woman away from a good job with health insurance, given her malaria and, as if that weren’t bad enough, a medical bill that exceeded her annual take-home pay.
“Vik,” I said, “we’ll figure this out. If charity: water has to pay your hospital bill…”
“No, I don’t want to put that burden on you!” she said. “I know how much you’re dealing with already.”
“Well, maybe we can go on a long-term payment plan with the hospital. We’ll just figure out a way to make it work.”
I had no idea how to make it work. We were struggling to raise money for our salaries and operating costs. And our financial position was actually worse than anyone knew. We had exactly $141 in the overhead account, and I was deferring my own salary, hoping some donations that had been pledged would come in soon. My head was spinning. Should I offer to pay the hospital bill myself? I was barely scraping by, and the thought of this overwhelmed me. But Vik was in a dark place, and I needed her to come back. We had so much work left to do.
“Let’s pray about this,” I said. It was the only thing I could think to do. She closed her eyes. “God,” I said. “We could sure use your help right now.” We prayed as hard as I’d ever prayed for anything. “Let’s give it a few days,” I said, giving Vik a hug.
She mustered a smile and then pulled away. “Back to work,” she said with a soft laugh as she walked to the kitchen and opened her computer.
A week later, I stood behind the cameras on set in Central Park, watching Jennifer Connelly queue up behind a long line of hip-looking New Yorkers (our extras) who were waiting to step up to the pond one by one to collect the murky water in yellow Jerry Cans.
Somehow everything came together in time. Terry had recruited a decorated cinematographer, and she leaned on Panavision to donate cameras for the day. And the legendary New York restaurant Balthazar (the owner’s daughter was one of our interns) catered the shoot. Best of all, Jennifer Connelly agreed to star in the piece for free, with her own children. If we pulled this off, we’d have a $250,000 PSA from an award-winning team on a $5,000 budget.
That was a big “if,” though. The shoot started late. Dark clouds threatened to rain us out. The city gave our crew strict instructions not to remove any water from Central Park’s pond, making it difficult for us to get an important shot. Terry worried that we’d lose light before we got everything we needed.
Meanwhile, Vik and Lani drove a van around town all day like Teamsters, picking up and dropping off crew and running errands in multiple locations. I hardly saw or spoke to them. But then my cell phone rang during an afternoon break.
“You’re never going to believe this.” It was Vik on the line.
“Try me.”
“I was sitting here, parked in the van, when a thought came to me: Call your old employer.”
On a whim, she’d called the design agency where she used to work, and was connected with a woman in HR whom she’d never met, in a satellite office across the country. She explained her situation to the woman—the charity trip, the malaria, the hospital bills—and asked if she had any recourse. She hadn’t worked at the agency in four months, but maybe there was a health care grace period she didn’t know about.
“She was so nice, and she put me on hold.”
“Okay…And…?”
“Scott, they never canceled my health insurance. Someone screwed up, and they totally forgot.”
“Wait, what?”
“I know!” Vik said. “I’m still fully covered as if I’m working there! I’m flipping out. I can’t believe it. The woman said to send her the paperwork, that they’d process my hospital bill and then cancel my insurance once the claim is closed.”
“Are you serious?” I said. This was the best day ever.
“It feels like a total miracle. Like our prayers were really answered…”
I wanted to reach through the phone line and give her a hug. I was so happy for her, and for us. “Thank you, God,” I heard myself saying aloud.
We don’t always get breaks. And believe me, not all my prayers have been met with miraculous solutions. Yet, over time, I’ve come to embrace the mystery of faith. I think it’s my job to work as hard as I possibly can, but also to pray. And when the breakthroughs do come, I try to hold on to them as proof that something much bigger might just be at work.
The rain held off all day. Then, just as we wrapped shooting, the clouds broke, sending a downpour onto the streets of New York. Over the next few weeks, we would edit the PSA, get it up online, and try to get it played on TV. Months later, a nightlife friend would put me in touch with the producers of American Idol in Los Angeles, who agreed to run our sixty-second spot during a $1 million time slot the following spring. Our PSA was eventually seen by more than twenty-four million people.
Back in New York, at the end of our shooting day, I finally caught up with Vik.
“You pulled it off!” she said.
“We did, you mean,” I said.
Vik always has my back, I thought, as we hugged. She never doubted my crazy ideas or rolled her eyes at me. Nobody worked harder than she did. Nobody valued excellence more than she did. And nobody, not even Lani, cared more about the mission. I thought about how much I looked forward to coming to the office each day and being greeted by her warm smile. She was always all in.
This was a good thing, too, because I had a big idea for charity: water’s one-year anniversary in September, and I would need Vik’s help to make it come alive.