Scott D. Clary (4:51)

Hey, everyone, Scott here. I just want to take a second and say thanks for listening to the podcast over the past couple of years. Obviously this wouldn't be possible without each and every one of you. I have a favor to ask, so I would love to get some more information about you and why you listen to the podcast and why you listen to the show and why you tune in every week. And I have put together a short survey and we are using this to help us sort of inform what type of content we want to create and the direction of the podcast going forward. This information is not shared with anyone else, so this is just for us internally and I put together a link so scottdclary.com survey where you can go and you can fill in some information so we can know what kind of content you love. Also for the first 100 people that respond to the survey, you will be entered into a draw for a hundred dollars Amazon gift card. So we'll be giving out one of those to the first people that respond. It should not take more than two minutes of your time to fill out the whole survey. It's really not that long. And it will help you shape the future of the podcast. So I really appreciate each and every one of you and thank you for listening.

Host (6:00)

What was the organization? And is that how like outside of all the ones you apply to, is that how they operate? They actually get you to pay?

Guest (6:07)

They do, they do.

Host (6:08)

You're subsidizing.

Guest (6:10)

Exactly. It's a brilliant model. They're called Mercy ships. They sail a, well now a couple hospital ships up and down the coast of Africa. Very simple ideas. Let's recruit the best doctors and surgeons from around the world. Let's invite them, you know, on a, effectively a cruise liner that had been converted into the state of the art floating hospital. And then let's sail up and down the coast of Africa, pull into port and offer free life changing surgeries to people who can never afford them and who don't even have the medical facilities in their country. So what I joined as was the volunteer photojournalist for this.

Host (6:48)

I was going to say, what, what, what was a promoter going to do on these boats?

Guest (6:52)

And this is kind of funny because I was not technically a photojournalist, but I was a pretty good writer who. And I was a pretty good photographer. So I put up a blog with some of the stuff I'd written and I put up some of my hobby photographs in fashion and beautiful buildings in Prague, in Paris. And I don't even think I realized it at the time, but I was in so many ways uniquely qualified for this job because I brought with me a guest list of 15,000 people who I had emails of because I'd gotten them drunk over the last 10 years. So here I land as kind of the storyteller through pictures and words in West Africa for this medical ship and I get to work, you know, bombarding the 15,000 people that a few weeks earlier I had been inviting to come get drunk. And I start sharing photos of cleft lip surgeries and cleft palates and tumors being removed and cataracts being removed and people getting their sight for the first time. And I was so in awe of the work of these compassionate doctors who, like me, had flown into West Africa to pay, which, which all that money, like you said, helped the organization run and I'm just blitzing my list. And, you know, of course, there were some unsubscribes at first. You know, people didn't sign up for, you know, facial tumors in Africa being removed. But after that first wave, the list actually began to grow as people would forward these stories to their friends. And then they began to send money. And I. I started to realize maybe the same skills that I had developed, you know, filling up 40 different nightclubs over 10 years, you know, throwing the party, these skills could be used in a compassionate, redemptive way to actually save people's lives. And I wound up raising a lot of money for Mercy Ships that first year, raising a lot of awareness. And then when that year ended, I just didn't know what was next. So I just went back to Liberia for a second year. And that is really when I discovered why so many people were sick. And just to give you an example, you know, our third day on this mission, I remember waking up at five in the morning, putting them in hospital scrubs and jumping in this convoy of Land Rovers with doctors and surgeons and nurses. And I had two Nikon D1X cameras around my neck. And I learned that we're going to the patient screening, and this is where we receive all of the people who have heard about the coming of our doctors. It's kind of like a cattle call. It's like a big casting. It's an audition for surgery. And I knew we had 1500 available surgery slots to fill. We could hand out 1500 surgery cards. And I remember just thinking, you know, is it possible that there's 1500 people who need facial surgery or cleft lips or eye surgery? And it turns out the government had given us the soccer stadium, the football stadium in the center of the city to triage these patients. And as we approached the stadium, I'll never forget, there were more than 5,000 people standing in the parking lot waiting for our doctors to arrive, open the doors, and begin screening. And that hit me really hard, you know, realizing, oh, my gosh, we're going to send 3500 sick people home, 3500 people with deformities, because we just don't have enough doctors. We don't have enough time here in this country. And, you know, it was a really, really hard thing. I learned later that many of these people had walked for more than a month. Some of them had come from neighboring countries with their children, walking for a month just in the hope of getting their child to see a surgeon. And we didn't have Enough of them. So the first year was a lot of both sadness around the people we couldn't help, but then also learning the skill of focusing on the hope and focusing on the people who we could help and telling their stories, and hoping that by telling their stories, more people would want to contribute, more people would want to send money for surgeries, we could expand the capacity of the work and hopefully one day reach all 5,000 people. The second year was going into the villages and seeing how people were living in one of the poorest countries in the world. And I learned something very, very simple. Half of the people were drinking dirty water. Half of the people in the country were drinking from open swamps and ponds and muddy rivers. And I learned that half of the disease in the country, according to the World Health Organization, was waterborne. And in the second year, you know, so now I'm 29 years old, I'm back in Liberia. I just kind of feel like I have found the thing that I want to work on. You know, why not jump to the root cause of so much of this sickness? And for me, that was dirty water. And I finished that tour and I came back to New York City at 30 years old, completely broke, found myself actually $30,000 in debt because my club partner had not dissolved the business like he said he was going to do, nor had he paid taxes. So I had a big tax bill. But I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve in life, and that would be to try to bring clean water to every human being on planet Earth before I died.

Host (12:44)

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