On July 20, 2011, on the same day that the mothers of Moale celebrated the well that would bring health to their children, a grief-stricken mother from EastLake Church was sitting vigil in a Seattle emergency room, praying for her child’s life.
When Ryan called from the airport on July 22, he told me about Samantha Paul and her daughter Rachel Beckwith.
Rachel, he said, had recently donated her ninth birthday with a campaign on mycharity: water. She fell just short of her $300 fundraising goal, but Rachel told her mom she wanted to try again next year, on her tenth birthday. I knew from the cracking sound in Ryan’s voice that he was about to tell me something awful.
“Rachel was in a terrible car accident two days ago,” Ryan said through tears. “Her doctors don’t think she’s going to make it.”
“Ryan, I’m so sorry,” I said. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Can you reopen her campaign?” Ryan asked.
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“She may not get another chance to hit her goal next year, and I know our community will crush her campaign. Maybe we can give her family some encouragement in the middle of this tragedy.”
“Absolutely. I’m almost home. I’ll get it reopened.”
Vik and I carried our bags up the stairs to our apartment, and I told her what had happened.
“Oh, Scott,” she said. “That’s awful. I can’t even imagine how her parents must feel.”
We didn’t have children of our own, at least not yet, but we felt an aching sadness for this girl we’d never met.
“She actually told her mother that her two heroes were me and Lady Gaga.”
Vik laughed out loud. “You and Gaga?”
“I know,” I said.
I went to the couch with my laptop and found Rachel’s campaign page. Her profile photo was sweet and innocent. She was looking into the camera, a toothy smile, rosy cheeks, dark blue eyes, and a big flower barrette in her brown hair. On her page, she’d written:
Tears streamed down my face as I thought to myself: This little girl totally gets it. I spent over a decade looking out for no one else but myself before I figured out that giving to others brought the greatest joy. But for her, it had been a no-brainer. I reopened Rachel’s campaign, pulled out my credit card, clicked on the Donate button, and made an $80 donation to close the gap on her $300 goal.
I’d never heard the name Rachel Beckwith before that night, but in the days to come, I’d learn so much about her. And looking back, that little girl from Seattle would become one of the most important supporters charity: water ever had.
Rachel, by all accounts, was a happy child with an extraordinary sense of empathy. One year, for Christmas, she told her mom that she wanted to buy gifts for a family in need. So Samantha found a local organization and picked up a list of items requested by one family.
“You obviously don’t have to buy everything on the list,” they’d told her.
But Rachel was adamant. “Mom,” she’d said excitedly. “I want to get every single thing on this list!”
“If we do that, it’s going to cut into your gifts a lot,” Samantha said, mindful of the fact that they weren’t exactly wealthy either.
“I don’t care,” Rachel said. “Let’s get them everything.”
The charity organizers looked surprised when Samantha and Rachel came back with armloads of toys, clothes, jackets, a basketball, Barbies, and more.
Samantha later told me that her child seemed mature beyond her years—perhaps because, for so long, it had been just the two of them. Samantha and Rachel’s father had divorced when she was about two, and Rachel only saw him every other weekend. Samantha remarried in 2008, giving Rachel a baby sister, Sienna. But that marriage also ended in divorce. Instead of dwelling on her pain, Samantha got more involved with church and focused all her attention on her girls.
Samantha and Rachel loved spending time together and sharing inside jokes—like when Samantha turned up the radio and said, “Rachel, you’ve got to hear this new song. It’s amazing!” Rachel agreed that it was really good, and Samantha said, “Ah, I got you! That was Justin Bieber! You do like Justin Bieber!” Rachel would never have admitted she was a Bieber fan, even though her mother always suspected it.
In July 2010, when Rachel was eight years old, she saw a video about charity: water in an EastLake Sunday school class. She came home and told her mom about my story and the birthday idea. A year later, as Rachel’s ninth birthday approached, Samantha helped her set up a mycharity: water page. They sent out emails, and Rachel’s parents, grandparents, and friends donated. When her campaign finished at $220—a worthy number, but a little short of her goal—Rachel wasn’t discouraged.
“Oh, well,” she said to her mom. “I’m just going to try again next year. I’ll start earlier. And I’ll tell more people!”
“That’s a good idea,” Samantha said. She was so proud of her daughter.
On the morning of July 20, the same day we struck water in CAR, Rachel woke up, got dressed, had breakfast, and brushed her teeth as her mother prepared for work and got Sienna ready. That day, the girls would stay at Rachel’s father’s place while Samantha went to her job at a doctor’s office.
“Mom, why don’t we just stay home today?” Rachel said.
Samantha thought about how nice it would be to spend the day together, just the two of them. Maybe I should, she thought to herself for a second. Maybe I could just call in.
But it was Wednesday, she had a lot to do, and it didn’t make sense to miss a day of work in the middle of the week.
“No, honey. I just can’t today,” she said. “I wish I could.”
They piled into Samantha’s four-door sedan, drove to the I-90 freeway, and joined the morning stop-and-go traffic. Rachel sat behind her mother in a booster seat, and Sienna sat in a car seat next to Rachel.
A little before 8 a.m., Samantha was stopped in traffic when she heard the sound of squealing tires behind her. She glanced in her rearview mirror to see a giant semi-trailer truck barreling straight toward her back bumper.
This could be really bad, she thought, seconds before impact.
Samantha recalls only bits and pieces of the accident: crunching metal, logs rolling across the pavement, waking up confused with a stranger holding her and crying.
Police later determined that the driver of the semi had entered the freeway going about sixty miles per hour. Failing to brake in time, his truck had jackknifed a logging truck, sending logs and metal flying in the air, and then crashed into several more cars. The accident resulted in a fifteen-car pileup.
When emergency medical responders arrived, they saw that the logging truck’s rear axle had landed on top of the left side of Samantha’s car. Sienna was completely unharmed in her car seat. Samantha’s head and face were bleeding. But Rachel, pinned beneath the worst of the damage, was unresponsive. An ambulance rushed them all to Harborview Medical Center, where the most serious high-trauma cases in all of Washington State are handled.
“Is she okay? Is my daughter going to be okay?” Samantha kept asking the nurses in the emergency room. But no one would give her a straight answer, except to say that Rachel had spinal cord injuries and needed surgery. Immediately. While doctors set about putting seventeen staples in Samantha’s head to stitch up a nasty gash, Samantha closed her eyes and prayed for her child.
A couple of hours later, they brought Samantha to see Rachel in the children’s ICU. Rachel was unconscious, covered in bandages, breathing through tubes, and surrounded by beeping machines. Soon, Rachel’s father and other family members arrived. A doctor took Rachel’s parents aside to tell them that their little girl had suffered serious brain trauma, and her spine had been broken in several different places. He didn’t believe she was going to wake up.
“I know this is a very difficult time for you,” the doctor said. Then he explained that they would need to decide whether to turn off the machines that were keeping Rachel alive in a vegetative state.
Rachel’s father was hysterical with grief. He punched a wall in the hospital and fractured his wrist. Samantha recalled him saying to her, “I can’t make that decision. You have to do it.”
As difficult as it must have been, Samantha remained calm.
“I don’t even know how to start thinking about this,” she told the doctor. “Please help me.”
The doctor sat with Samantha, and they quietly talked through her options. He had a daughter, too, he said. And if it were his own daughter in this condition, he would want, first, to know if she’d ever be able to speak or move or think again. He believed that Rachel would not.
That was all Samantha needed to hear. She knew Rachel was gone.
“Okay,” she said. “Can we have a couple days to wrap our heads around this, and make sure we’re making the correct decision?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “There’s no need to rush. I think that’s a good idea.”
Two days later, I got the call from Ryan to reopen Rachel’s campaign. Samantha had spent the last two days by her child’s bedside, talking to her quietly and not expecting a response. She held Rachel close, not knowing if any of it made a difference, but wanting to be there all the same.
Although she was totally focused on her daughter, she knew the EastLake community and the local news were talking about the accident and about Rachel’s charity: water campaign. Someone had even set up a computer in the hospital room so they could watch the numbers on her page go up and the warm wishes continue to flood in.
Ryan and I were watching, too. Each new donor was a name he knew. His community was crushing it—she went from $300 into the thousands, all within the first few hours.
Three days after the accident, on July 23, Rachel’s family and friends gathered around her bedside to say good-bye. Her parents stood on each side of her bed, holding her hands, as the hospital staff gently removed the breathing tubes and turned off the machines that were keeping Rachel alive. As Samantha looked into her daughter’s face, she started singing Rachel’s favorite bedtime song, one that had always helped her go to sleep.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy when skies are gray.
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you.
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
It was only Samantha at first, singing softly, but soon others joined in, until the whole room filled with loving voices. They sang “You Are My Sunshine” to Rachel until she slipped away.
Thousands of people came to Rachel’s memorial service at EastLake. Some had heard about her through church or the news and just wanted to honor her. Others had known her through school. They told Samantha stories she’d never heard before, about small moments of kindness that Rachel had shown them or their children.
Samantha stayed at her aunt’s house for a few days, keeping a computer nearby so she could keep refreshing Rachel’s campaign page. It was a welcome distraction, she said, to read the comments from donors.
“Rachel…Thank you for making me pause and remember what is important in this world. Rest in peace,” wrote a donor named Michael who’d given $25.
“I wish I could give more, but I’m only 8 years old, and this is my week’s allowance,” wrote a donor named Simon, who gave $5.
Samantha realized that she didn’t recognize the donors’ names anymore. Neither did Ryan. They were total strangers, moved by Rachel’s love for others. When her campaign beat the $47,000 that Justin Bieber had raised for his seventeenth birthday, Samantha smiled and said out loud, “Well, Rachel, you really did it. You just passed Justin Bieber.”
But Rachel was just getting started. By the end of the week, she had inspired the largest fundraising campaign in mycharity: water’s history: $750,000. And she still had another eight weeks to go.
“Please remember, this isn’t about us. This is about her legacy. This is about her spirit of selflessness,” I said to our staff during a meeting one week after Rachel’s death. Her story had spread to news outlets across the country. Nicholas Kristof wrote about her in his New York Times column, and both NBC and ABC nightly news ran segments.
I didn’t want anyone to miss the point, and nobody did. Everyone at charity: water was so moved by Rachel’s example. One Friday night, the team stayed long after Vik and I had left. They ordered beer and pizza and just hung out together reading the comments from donors that were coming in minute by minute. People were writing directly to Rachel as if she was still alive.
“Rachel, you’ve done more to make a difference in your 9 years here than most will do in 90—you’ve inspired millions,” wrote a donor named Russell, who gave $90.
Like all of us in the office, people were returning to her campaign like it was fuel. As if it gave them some kind of hope that had been missing from their lives.
“I come here many times a day to be touched by those who also have been touched by this little angel. This is my third donation, with the hopes that I will give more,” wrote a woman named Sheryl, who gave $50.
We heard from people in Singapore, Australia, East Africa, and other far-flung regions where Rachel’s story had somehow reached them and inspired them to act. People around the world were donating money for clean water all because a little girl from Seattle had believed that everyone around the world deserved life’s most basic need.
This was the reinvention of charity I’d dreamed of. This was a global movement of compassion, spreading in real time across the planet. It blew my mind. A child was truly changing the world with a single act of selflessness.
A few days later, on August 1, Samantha flew to New York to appear on the morning TV shows. Afterward, we’d planned for her to visit the charity: water offices. I wanted her to meet the staff and personally open the letters for Rachel that had been piling up in the mail room.
As I got dressed for the TV appearance that morning, Vik looked a little worried.
“What’s wrong, babe?” I said.
“I’m just nervous about today,” she said. “Scott, what do you say to a mom who’s just lost her child?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Should I avoid talking about Rachel?”
“Let’s just follow her lead, okay? It’s going to go fine.”
Honestly, I was as anxious as Vik. I’d never met Samantha and had no idea what to expect. In the green room at the TV station that morning, I fidgeted and bit my nails as I waited for her to arrive.
I already knew we’d be sending Rachel’s campaign dollars to Ethiopia, where we had incredible local partners. So, what I’d planned to say to Samantha was this: The only gift I can give you is to show you the true human impact of what your daughter has created. I’d love to bring you to Ethiopia next year, so you can see Rachel’s wells for yourself. And see the legacy she’s created.
The speech sounded beautiful in my head. But, of course, when she walked in, weary from a red-eye flight, I marched up to her and blurted out, “Hi, Samantha. I’m Scott. It’s so good to meet you—you…you have to come to Ethiopia with me!”
“Um, okay,” she said, giving me a sideways glance, perhaps wondering if I said this to everyone I met. But then she smiled and laughed.
As we got mic’d up and walked together to the set, Samantha looked tender but stoic. It had been a week since she buried her daughter. If she had been living in her pajamas, crying herself to sleep, and cursing the world, no one would have blamed her. But she didn’t look tearstained or sleep-deprived or angry. She walked into the room and took her seat in the chair across from mine with ease and grace, despite the weight of what had to be unbearable pain.
“What a special young lady,” the host said, offering his condolences to Samantha.
“I’ve always been so unbelievably proud of Rachel for all the choices she’s made through her life,” Samantha said. “I’m just so glad that everyone else can share in the Rachel experience now.”
Rachel’s campaign closed on September 30, 2011, with 31,997 donations. Tens of thousands of people, most of them strangers, gave a total of $1,265,823 to make her birthday wish come true. And it was up to us to make sure that her wish was flawlessly executed.
Just a few months earlier, all I could think about was conquering sustainability. And then Rachel Beckwith came into our lives. Now all I could think about was how best to honor her legacy. Getting Rachel’s wells ready and preparing for Samantha’s trip would keep me focused over the next year—a year that would spiral into one of the most difficult and confusing periods of my life.