Book Review: Wine to Water
Doc Hendley repairs a well in the Sudan.
All I could think was, What the hell is a guy like me doing in the Sudanese desert, getting shot at in the middle of the largest humanitarian crisis of our lifetime?
Moreover, what would drive a man like Doc Hendley, a tattooed biker and bartender, to found a nonprofit and venture into a no-go area in Darfur, Sudan?
He’d been raised a preacher’s son and gone on a motorcycle trip across the country. Doc had done a stint in college and as a bartender in Raleigh, N.C. He realized that if his heart was empty, if he lived for simply the next drink or party, something would always feel as if it were missing.
“My life had gotten very small,” he wrote. “Like a hangover that haunted me every morning was the feeling that I was wasting my life.”
The name for his organization Wine to Water came to him in a dream. It spurred him to look deeper into water access around the world. He learned unclean water kills a child every twenty seconds—more than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Over a billion people around the world do not have access to clean water.
He wondered why anyone wasn’t doing anything to fix it. But who could make a dent into a problem so massive in scale, one that has so many causes? The answer was part naiveté, part ambition, part blind hope: Doc Hendley.
Water, Water Everywhere
He founded Wine to Water and began raising money. Then $6,000 in pocket, he partnered with other aid organizations and learned the ropes in Darfur, Sudan, one of the world’s most dangerous areas. That decision—to make his cause serving others—sparked the adventure that would become his life. It would lead him into ambushes from Janjaweed soldiers. It would make him a witness to mass murder of school children. It drove him to persevere, to teach villagers to maintain their own wells and ensure clean waters for years to come.
Ultimately, that one leap of faith would lead him to so much more. Amazing people. National awards. Places around the world where he could help. A family of his own, which drove home how precious and fragile life was.
In spite of and because of this grand journey Doc will always be changing, yet always the same. Doc Hendley: family man who strives to save the world’s children. The hero who bare knuckle boxes friends in his spare time. The small town guy who became a global citizen. More than anything, Doc’s the man who hopes one day to solve the water crisis, one of the defining problems of the generation.
