Joy through mindfulness

Actor Matt Damon, famous as the hero of the three Bourne movies, is also the star of films such as The Departed and The Informant! But the Oscar winner spends a lot of time working for charitable causes.

"When I was a boy, my mom had a magnet on the refrigerator with a little picture of Gandhi along with a quote from him. It said: “No matter how insignificant what you do may seem, it is important that you do it.” As a child, I was raised to believe that, and to this day I do my best to live it.

Nowadays, sentimental magnetized credos have gone the way of nostalgia, and technology has forever changed the way younger generations communicate. But those are still really good words to live by.

I got an allowance of $5 a week when I was a kid, but I never spent much money on anything. My mother was involved in all sorts of causes, and when I was about 12, I started sending a little bit every month to one of them. I learned then that you find one thing that matters to you, and it changes your whole mind-set.

Here’s something that matters to me right now. Every 15 seconds, a child dies because of a lack of clean water and sanitation. I should probably repeat that: Every 15 seconds, a child dies because of a lack of clean water and sanitation. A billion people on our planet will never have a clean drink of water. There are 2.5 billion people in the world without toilet facilities. That kind of deprivation isn’t even on our radar in the U.S., but in Africa it’s the central preoccupation of many people’s lives. And the most devastating thing about it is that it takes so little to change it. Just $25 will give someone clean water for life—yes, just $25 will change someone’s future forever.

I’ve taken a lot of trips in the last few years to places like Africa and India and Haiti to try to learn what conditions are like. You can read about extreme poverty and possible solutions, but it’s really powerful when you get to meet the people and shake their hands and listen to their stories. There’s so much I don’t know. In the future, I know these trips are something we’ll do as a family.

There’s so much need, it’s so hard to decide where to give. For me, I look at the organizations that are actually doing the work on the ground. I co-founded Water.org, which focuses on water and sanitation. I was in Ethiopia earlier this year, and I watched children taking filthy water out of a hand-dug well and putting it in bottles to take to school. The water was so dirty, it looked like chocolate milk. I wanted to knock it out of their hands and say, “Don’t drink that—it could kill you.” The dilemma is that drinking nothing at all will kill them even faster. Parents in these impoverished areas lose children every year to diseases that could be completely prevented if they had access to clean water.

In poor rural areas, people can spend five hours each day just getting clean water. Water.org is creating a microfinance model that gives individuals loans they can use to connect their homes to a water source. As a result of not having to spend time walking to the clean-water source, they are able to spend more time working—so in short order, the loans get paid off, and they have extra money in their pockets and clean water in their homes. These loans are being paid back at such a high rate that commercial banks now want to get involved.

Poverty feeds into the clean-water crisis, which contributes to hunger, and so on. There’s undeniable interconnectivity among these issues. Just one of these problems can be deadly on its own, but in the most disadvantaged areas there is a perfect storm of problems. And it takes its greatest toll on children.

Taken from Parade, 10/11/09