Once a high-flying Manhattan party promoter, Scott Harrison quit the club scene to help bring free healthcare to the poor along Liberia's coast. Here, his story in his own words
In 2004, Manhattan party promoter Scott Harrison quit the club scene to become a photographer aboard a ship of volunteer doctors offering free healthcare to the poor along the coast of Liberia. He shot more than 50,000 photos of the sick and the dying, many from diseases caused by a lack of clean water. In 2005, Harrison staged a show of his work in New York that raised some $96,000 for health care and freshwater wells in West Africa. Last year, he founded charity:water.org, which has raised $1.2 million to start 200 well projects in seven African nations. CONTRIBUTE’S Jesse Ellison interviewed Harrison. This is an edited version of his story.
When I was four, my mother became an invalid. I grew up taking care of her; I was an only child. When I turned 18, I left Philadelphia and moved to New York, to get away from the sheltered life.
I joined an alternative band and we played a lot of gigs around Manhattan. We had some success, and when the band broke up after about a year, I got involved in the club business. One of the guys who had been booking my band was working at a club called Nell’s on 14th Street; he was making a lot of money promoting parties, so I teamed up with him and we started an event company. We’d do parties for fashion shoots, magazines, record labels — high-profile parties at swanky places. And for a while there, I had, you know, what looked like the perfect life. Then, in 2004, at the 10-year mark of our business, I was vacationing in Uruguay and realized how unhappy I really was. I just looked around and realized that the perfect car, the perfect girlfriend — it would never be enough. All of the people around me had more money, more status, and more of the things I was chasing, but they weren’t very happy, either. I had become the most selfish person I knew, so I decided to get off the ride.
Then I found Mercy Ships, a global nonprofit that sails around the globe, bringing medical treatment to the world’s poor, and they were looking for a volunteer photojournalist. I found an opportunity to teach myself how to take photographs, and then, two months later, volunteered as a staff photographer on a ship bound for Liberia, which was impoverished and coming out of 14 years of a civil war.
Back in my days at the club, some of our patrons were from Africa and they would talk about how bad things were over there. I said I would never go in a million years. But now, suddenly, Africa was the place I wanted to go. I dropped everything related to my New York City life. The business went to my partner; I put my stuff in storage, left the city and hopped aboard this floating hospital. I traded my midtown loft for a 150- square-foot cabin with bunk beds, roommates, and cockroaches. I ate now in a mess hall, crammed in with 350 other volunteers. In West Africa, though, I realized how good I had it. I was utterly floored at the poverty that came into focus through my camera lens, suffering I’d thought impossible. Every time we docked, thousands of people would show up for help, and our medical staff would hold patient intake screenings. Thousands would wait in line to be seen.
I’ll never forget my third day there. I was asked to photograph about 5,000 people standing in a lot. The doctors treated some of the most horrific ailments imaginable that day — large tumors, cleft-palate cases, people nearly blinded by cataracts. But these people, this vast group I was photographing — these were the people we couldn’t help. It just hit me then, the enormity of it all, the need, and the incredible work people were attempting onboard this ship.
When I returned to Manhattan eight months later, it was a culture shock. I flew in from Liberia at 3:30 in the afternoon. By 5:30, I was on the roof of SoHo House, having a $16 margarita, and the two worlds simply collided. For 16 bucks, you can feed four people for a month in any of the villages I had visited in Africa. Right then and there, I just decided to do something about it. The Bible says that those without charity make noises like tinkling cymbals. Empty noises. I knew that well, living for more than a decade in New York, making empty sounds.
So I put an exhibition together of the photographs that I had taken for Mercy Ships, as a fundraiser for them. The exhibit was called Mercy, and I asked my old contacts in the club business to sponsor the show. We were overwhelmed by the support. People were sobbing in the gallery; we brought in $96,000 in nine days — enough to build five new water wells. And then I decided I wanted to start my own charity.
I went back to Africa in 2005, and traveled to Ethiopia and Rwanda. And in all my travels, nothing had really struck me more than the lack of clean drinking water. That was the biggest problem facing the poor; diarrhea from dirty water is probably the leading cause of death. We saw a lot of noma, or flesheating disease, which is directly caused by unsafe water and the lack of basic sanitation. Noma eats away the face, something last seen in concentration camps in World War II. It was eliminated from the developing world back then but still kills about 90,000 people in Africa every year.
The disconnect between the West and what radical poverty looks like is immense. I remember a clinic there that served about 110,000 people, and there was no doctor. The guy in charge, a nurse, took me to see a filthy pond; water was loaded with feces, and with contamination of all kinds. And yet women would walk two miles, three miles a day to take this back to their families for cooking and drinking. Another time, driving south of Addis Ababa, I spotted, out of the corner of my eye, a little kid digging with a gourd in a dirty riverbed after a rainstorm, in search of water.
I ended with Mercy Ships in 2006 and started charity: water in the fall. We use photos, videos, and stories to raise awareness. We’ve done events — including a Central Park exhibition; we sold $20 water bottles on the streets of New York; we were at Sundance this year.
I had wanted to change my life, make it the opposite of what it had been: when I was a kid, my full time was really taking care of mom. This past year, I’ve helped to raise more than $1 million for 200 water well projects in seven African nations. These wells will give more than 100,000 people clean water.
That’s not a bad start, but one in six people on the planet don’t have safe water to drink. There’s a lot of work yet to be done.
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