If you watched CNN’s “Heroes: An All Star Trib­ute” on Thanks­giv­ing night you were intro­duced to Doc Hend­ley. He is the leader of Wine into Water, a char­ity that builds wells and fil­tra­tion sys­tems to pro­vide water for the world’s poor.

Hend­ley started the char­ity after trav­el­ing around the world as a break from school. Dur­ing his trav­els, he saw how great the need for water is and it sur­prised him that no one was doing any­thing about it. So he came back to the states to do a fundraiser, then that started his jour­ney into pro­vid­ing water.

From Yes Weekly Mag­a­zine, writer Ogi Over­man talks about how Hend­ley got started.

“I began tak­ing notice of this water cri­sis and don’t even know why,” said the 30 year old, “because nobody around me knew any­thing about it. I’d hear things like 1.1 bil­lion peo­ple don’t have access to clean water. I started research­ing it a lit­tle and found that more peo­ple die from [lack of potable] water than any­thing else, that malaria kills more peo­ple than bul­lets and that water kills more chil­dren than malaria, HIV/AIDS
and tuber­cu­lo­sis com­bined. Not only did I not know that but I didn’t know any­body who knew that.”

His curios­ity and then his pas­sions aroused, Hend­ley took it a step fur­ther, orga­niz­ing an event designed to raise both aware­ness and funds. He dubbed it “Wine To Water,” a dou­ble enten­dre revers­ing the order of Jesus’ mir­a­cle of turn­ing water into wine for the mar­riage cer­e­mony at Cana.

“My only skill set was as a bar­tender,” he said.

“There is noth­ing excep­tional about me except that I knew how to cre­ate rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers. So I had an event in a bar, with a DJ, mainly among peo­ple I knew in the ser­vice indus­try around Raleigh. But the response was over­whelm­ing; we had maybe 150 peo­ple and raised over $6,000.”

Hend­ley knew he was onto some­thing but still didn’t know exactly what it was, so he took the money to a large non-profit, Samaritan’s Purse, headed by Rev. Billy Graham’s son Rev. Franklin Gra­ham, that has a long his­tory of sup­port­ing human­i­tar­ian and char­i­ta­ble causes on a global scale. But rather than tak­ing the money, they told him to keep it and instead offered him a job.

“I told them to send me to the worst place where I could be of most use,” said Hend­ley, “which at the time I thought would be Afghanistan. But some­thing hap­pened and they said they didn’t have any­one on the ground yet in Dar­fur, Sudan, and asked if I’d be will­ing to go. So six months after I’d had my first event in Jan­u­ary 2004, here I found myself in Darfur.”

Hend­ley wound up spend­ing a full year in what is arguably the most hope­less region on earth. To say it was a life-altering expe­ri­ence would be a gross understatement.

“Dur­ing the year I was there, the Jan­jaweed mili­tia, which are the Sudanese death squads, killed over 120,000 peo­ple,” he said somberly. “Not only do they mow down black African Mus­lims indis­crim­i­nately but they put the dead bod­ies into the wells, pol­lut­ing the ground water and tak­ing this most des­per­ate resource that they need more than any­thing else. That was the first time I saw water used as a weapon, and it changed my view com­pletely. See­ing those hor­ri­ble things that could be done with water fueled my pas­sion even more and solid­i­fied my involve­ment.”
…

Dur­ing the next two years he decided to break away from Samaritan’s Purse and make Wine Into Water his life’s work. He gained 501©(3) sta­tus; met and mar­ried his wife Amber, who teaches spe­cial needs chil­dren at a com­mu­nity col­lege in Boone; con­tin­ued to raise funds through grants and pri­vate donors, wine-tasting events (often fea­tur­ing him on gui­tar and vocals); and began devel­op­ing ways to build cheaper and more effi­cient wells and water-filtration sys­tems. But he also had another real­iza­tion that his mis­sion had taken on a new dimen­sion, that it was now two-fold.

“My job is not just to try to fix the prob­lem hands-on, but to make sure that peo­ple know that this is a prob­lem,” he noted. “And part of the prob­lem is that most peo­ple just don’t really know about it, they’re sim­ply not aware of how bad it really is.”

Hend­ley does not believe that peo­ple sim­ply don’t care — quite the oppo­site, in fact — but that there is no frame of ref­er­ence in our soci­ety. He explained it with a sim­ple exam­ple: “We might know what it’s like to be hun­gry or to have a debil­i­tat­ing dis­ease or to be home­less. But any­one in this coun­try, no mat­ter how poor, whether you’ve lost loved ones or lost your job or are a bum on the street with noth­ing to your name, you can still walk into the near­est pub­lic restroom, turn on the tap and get clean water. We have no idea what it’s like to walk four miles every day to get water and know that it still might kill your child when you bring it back. It’s not that we in West­ern cul­ture are pur­posely ignor­ing it; it’s just not some­thing we think about because it’s some­thing we’ve never had to face.”

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