Wine to Water
By Doc Hendley
Founder and President of Wine to Water & One of the Top 10 CNN Heroes of 2009
This post has been made possible by our wonderful partner Los Arcoiris.
(Wine to Water: a Bartenders Quest to Bring Clean Water to the World - excerpt pages 17-19) I was raised in one of those perfect families that most people only hear about or see on TV. My dad, he’s a gentle-tempered preacher man. Not the fire-and-brimstone type, but the Church has always been a huge part of his life. Mom, also a devout Christian, was a dedicated mother who stayed home to watch after me and my older sister, Kristy, and three brothers, Todd, Bo, and Billy.
My parents named me Dickson, but as a young kid my sister couldn’t say my name, so she called me “Dick-Doc.” Thank God that name didn’t stick. Instead, ever since then my family and friends have simply called me Doc.
When I was growing up we moved around a lot, from Augusta, Georgia to Chicago to (almost) Africa as missionaries - that’s another long story - and back to the South again to Greensboro, North Carolina, where I spent the bulk of my childhood.
While my sister and brothers were deeply committed to our religious upbringing and my parents’ passion for church, I never really drank the Kool-Aid the same way they did, I guess. Sure, I believed in God and went to church on Sundays, and did the things like handing out meals with my siblings down at the homeless shelter a couple days a month, which I actually enjoyed, because I felt like we were making a tangible difference.
But still, everyone in my family knew I was different. I distinctly remember when I was about twelve being on a family trip to Myrtle Beach, SC with all of us piled into our Chevy Suburban. We were sitting at a stoplight with some gospel station blaring on the radio when a man on a Harley-Davidson rumbled to a stop alongside us. He wore cowboy boots and riding leathers and rode alone. To me, he represented everything cool and independent, and was the total opposite of the people surrounding me in that car. I yearned to become that guy.
I never liked all of the rules that people were tossing at me at church, school, wherever. Rules were stifling. They were for other people. I understood that other people needed those kinds of rules or boundaries, but I saw them as chains that tied me down. And while my brothers and sisters, and most kids my age, for that matter, were busy hanging out with friends, going to birthday parties and the mall and crap like that, I was happiest watching old John Wayne westerns or exploring the woods with my BB gun.
My parents were mostly tolerant of my rebellious attitude (it was pretty harmless, after all), so as a young teenager I was allowed some of the freedom I craved. I camped out in the woods often, and hunted squirrels and rabbits and such. As long as I stayed out of trouble and made it back in time for church, they were fine with me.
I started this article with that excerpt from my book because it illustrates how, from an early age, I was a non-conformist. Therefore, I didn’t do well in strict church settings, where it seemed to me that the whole emphasis was on trying to make ourselves “better” people. In my mind, that meant how do I become a better rule keeper, which didn’t sit well with me. My feeling was why don’t we concentrate our efforts on what we can do to make other people better instead of focusing so much energy on how can I become a better Christian. It seemed to me like everyone had this cookie cutter mold of what a good Christian should be and I certainly didn’t fit that mold.
Dirt Bags and Authentic Christianity
Because that kind of Christianity was a turn-off to me, I’m glad I was able to experience a radically different kind of Christianity from my uncle John out in Montana. After dropping out of college, I moved out to Montana to work on a horse ranch that was right down the road from where my uncle lived. He was a Christian, but he was also a rugged individual who didn’t fit the mold of what I’d been used to. He started a Bible study that met in a bar of a casino on Friday mornings. The group called themselves the Dirt Bags and they were more authentic and real than most Christians I had met, so it began to change my perceptions a bit.
When I left there, I came back to work with a Christian organization called Young Life. But there was a problem, I was still my non-conformist self and it got me in trouble. I had to meet with the area director to address my behavior and she did a very wise thing. She shared, from her own experience, that something that changed her life was simply studying the Bible for herself. She had gone to a Bible School in New Zealand that offered a one-year course of in-depth Bible study. As a person who has always been intrigued with the Bible, even when church stuff turned me off, I agreed this was a good idea. So, I sold my Harley Davidson Motorcycle and went to New Zealand.
The Bible Became Real to Me
The school was great for studying the Bible, but it was very “rule-oriented,” which meant trouble. I broke curfews and butted heads with the administration, but the Bible became very real to me. One time, when I was reading about Jesus on the cross and how He willingly became separated from His own fellowship with God to bear the sins of the world, it registered with me on a deep level. I was so moved I ran out of class and found a place to be alone. I felt dirty as I thought about my own sinfulness and selfishness. It was in that moment that I opened my heart to God in ways I never had before and I know there was an inward transformation that took place. However, I still kept breaking the school’s rules, and it just about got me kicked out. In fact, I was suspended for two weeks because I pranked some of the girls in the school. When I was suspended, the dean of the school told me that when I returned I would need to tell him why I thought he should let me graduate from the school.
Upon my return to school, I told the dean something like this: “if this school was called a ‘Bible and Rule-Following School’ than I don’t deserve to graduate because I haven’t followed all the rules. But, if it’s a Bible School and I’m being judged on the merit of what I’ve accomplished in my studies and my grades, then I certainly need to be allowed back to finish my course and graduate.” Upon hearing that, the dean sat silent for a while and then he said “If you’ll promise not to cause any more trouble between now and graduation I’ll let you back in.”
After graduating from Bible School, I returned to the states and enrolled in NC State University. I needed a job to help support myself and I got one, working in a bar. The more I worked there, the more I got involved in the whole bar scene in Raleigh. Though it’s sad to say, I actually felt more accepted and had more of a sense of community in the bars than I’d ever had in church.
“But I am living proof that God even uses screw-ups like me to further His Kingdom. ”
A Dream and a Purpose
(Wine to Water: A Bartender’s Quest to Bring Clean Water to the World - excerpt pages 29-32) It was in this time period that something strange happened to me. One night I woke bolt upright in bed with a string of words spinning around my brain: Wine, water, wine and water, Wine to water.
“Funny, that’s backward,” I thought. Obviously I was familiar with the story of Jesus changing the water to wine, because I’d heard my dad preach on it many times. It was actually my favorite. The way I saw it, the story proved Jesus was a way cooler dude than what all the churchy folk back home had taught me.
But what did it mean? I asked myself, What? Is there something about water? I don’t understand. My mind was racing. I was turning and tossing. Backward or not, it was definitely a catchy phrase, I thought as I peeled back the covers on my bed and stood up. I grabbed a pen and paper off my bedside table and wrote it down. Wine to Water. Then I went to the computer and started Googling. Up until that point I was ignorant about the world’s water crisis - didn’t even know that one existed.
What I was reading startled me. It couldn’t be true. I was just learning to use the internet, so I wasn’t totally confident that what I was reading was accurate…unclean water kills a child every twenty seconds - it’s more lethal than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. One in every six people on our planet has no access to clean water - that’s over a billion folks. In many developing countries, like Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, India, Cambodia, women and children have to walk as much as four to five hours each day to gather water. And once they get it, it’s often dirty enough to cause members of their family to die. The details were dizzying.
The more articles I read, the more I realized these stats and figured were indeed true. There was a tight knot growing in my stomach. How come I’d never heard about this before? Why wasn’t anyone doing something to fix this?
Then something happened. Those words, wine to water, all started making sense. I decided right then and there, there’s no sense in just getting worked up about it unless I do something to really fight it. Once I learned the hard truth about the world’s water crisis I really had no choice. I had to help.
I stayed up all night researching and sketching out the concept for what would eventually become my nonprofit, Wine to Water. Deep down I think I had been yearning for a way out of the rut I was digging for myself. The thought of somehow being able to one day serve people who were desperate for help felt right to me. I had been feeling guilty about where my life was headed, and in a way this seemed like an opportunity to start making up for some of the stupid, selfish things I’d been doing for the past handful of years.
I called Tasha, a close friend of mine, the very next morning. I was yearning to tell her, to tell anyone, about my new plan. From all those years working at bars, it dawned on me that our regulars and patrons were mostly good people who cared about the world around them and would happily do their part to make a difference. They just didn’t know how or where to start. I’d simply throw a party at a local bar to benefit the world’s water crisis, and they could have fun while helping others in need.
Tasha immediately bought into what I was saying and together we put the first Wine to Water event into motion. I began spending less time pounding beers at the bars and instead channeled by free time and energy into this project. Neither I nor Tasha had any experience planning an event like this; we simply used the contacts we’d developed locally in the bartending world.
I contacted a friend who ran a big nightclub in Raleigh, the Office, and got him to donate the space on a Wednesday, a night he’d normally be closed. Tasha hooked up some free cases of wine through a distributor, while I scored a few kegs from the local Anheuser-Busch folks. We got a friend to agree to deejay late-night, and I’d play live music for the early crowd. We settled a date about a month out, February 4, 2004, and bam! - Wine to Water was a reality.
Tasha and I were both nervous that night, but the event went off better than we could’ve expected. More than three hundred people showed up, easily filling the Office’s bar, dance floor, and the VIP lounge. It was a good crowd. Early in the night, lots of my friends and family came. Even my parents and some of their church friends drove down from Boone to be a part of the event. By late evening, the crowd had grown larger and louder as all of my bar friends and the local service industry folks showed up.
The whole event happened really organically. People were simply having fun and donating money to a good cause. I didn’t have to hard-sell anyone. I just stood up and gave a quick twenty-second speech.
“Look, folks, we’re here tonight because I’ve learned about this global water crisis and it’s scary stuff. Over a billion people in this world don’t have access to clean water. And I think we need to do something about it. All the money you guys donate tonight will go directly to fighting for clean water for these folks. Just by y’all being here and enjoying life, we can make a difference.”
That very first event was a huge success and through some crazy circumstances just 6 months later I found myself on a plane headed to Darfur, Sudan with a local Boone based non-profit that I have come to both love and respect, Samaritan’s Purse. I stayed in Darfur for a year providing water to thousands of people displaced by the genocide that was happening all around me. When my year contract ended in August 2005, I moved to Boone, where my parents were living, to try and continue building the organization that I had started 18 months before.
Boone blessed me and my organization in two huge ways. The first was meeting a local girl named Amber Waters who I immediately fell in love with and soon would marry. Amber helped me to regain some of the sanity that I had lost during my time in Darfur, and she helped me to believe in myself when I didn’t think I had the strength to continue building Wine to Water. The second major blessing was meeting and hiring Annie Clawson to help me actually get this organization off the ground. By nature, I am a dreamer and a complete mess in every way. However, Annie was not only organized but she was passionate and driven to see this organization grow and her gifts seem to perfectly balance mine in a way that allowed us to harmoniously work to see the mission of Wine to Water come to life. As far as the organization goes, imagine my surprise in March of 2009 when I got what I figured was a prank telephone call.
(Wine To Water: A Bartender’s Quest to Bring Clean Water to the World - excerpt pages 252-255)
“Hello, is this Doc?”
“It is. Who’s this?”
“This is Danielle, from CNN,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was hoping I could ask you some questions. Do you have a minute?”
Wine to Water has been receiving a small amount of publicity with articles in local newspapers when we hosted events, but it turned out Danielle wasn’t interested in an interview. Apparently, I had been nominated for the 2009 CNN Heroes award. Basically, the network has an annual program that highlights everyday folks who are doing something to better the world. Viewers nominate and vote on the “heroes” and then they have a big awards ceremony to feature the top-ten heroes with the most votes. Prior to that day, I’d never heard of the program, and was equally surprised to learn that I was nominated by my old friend Tasha from Raleigh.
That phone call kicked off weeks of heavy vetting, as the CNN staff checked out Wine to Water’s history, looked into our finances, checked my references, and more. Then, in late April, it was officially announced that I had been selected as one of the 2009 CNN Heroes, an honor I shared with twenty-seven other very deserving individuals. I was hopeful that the exposure with CNN would raise Wine to Water’s profile and potentially lead to more donations. What I wasn’t expecting was that I would be selected by an esteemed panel of judges, including folks like Colin Powell, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sir Elton John, as one of the top-ten most influential heroes on their list. That honor, and being recognized on national television as part of a huge gala event hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, was one of the most inspiring and humbling times of my life.
CNN Heroes aired on Thanksgiving night and prompted a flood of new donations for Wine to Water. Prior to that, we had raised just under two hundred thousand dollars for the year, but in the next thirty-four days of 2009 we raised another two hundred thousand.
That exposure also led to more valuable publicity, including an interview on Larry King Live. It also set the stage to make 2010 a huge year for Wine to Water, enabling us to bring clean water to more people than ever.
By the end of this year (2011) Wine To Water has worked in 12 different countries around the world and has reached approximately 100,000 people with clean drinking water. And as for the future we hope to have reached one million people with clean drinking water by the end of 2015.
It’s hard for me when I look at what I used to believe and what some people still believe. Which is, that you have to be perfect or have your act together to have an impact on the world and serve “the least of these.” But I am living proof that God even uses screw-ups like me to further His Kingdom.
This article was originally written for the Winter 2011 Edition of the Journey magazine.
