DOC ON OTHER FAITHS AND CULTURES: Although Doc Hendley doesn’t consider Wine toWater to be a religious organization, he personally is a believer. But that doesn’t mean he’s a prosyletizer. “Some of my best friends that I’ve made throughout these travels are Muslims,” Hendley said. “And I love them [and their culture] to death, and would never try to force them to believe the way I believe. All that I want to do is love them and help them and their families have access to clean water.”

ness, Industrial Housing Services. “I…got exposed to this Christian-ministry-style life versus then seeing him go into an actual business life,” Hendley said.“We [went] from one extreme to the other,…[and] I actually got to see and compare…how my dad was more happy” when he was doing service work.

Divine Inspiration After New Zealand, Hendley returned to the United States and went back to school, first at a community college, and then, in 2003, atNCState. Which led him to that restless night in his parents’ house, wondering what it was he was supposed to do with his life. Hendley awoke in the middle of the night with the phrase “wine to water” stuck in his head. “And I was like, ‘Why?’” he said.“Wine to water—isn’t that backwards?” That led him to stay up all night Googling phrases such as

“water problems” and “water crises.” “I was just shocked at what I was finding,” he said. “How bad the world’s water cri-

On_the_Web

To learn more about Wine toWater—including how to host a fundraising wine event or donate money— visit http://winetowater.org. Doc Hendley was named a “CNN Hero” in 2009; to watch videos about him and Wine toWater, visitwww.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn.heroes /archive09/doc.hendley.html.

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sis was, by far killing more children than anything else—more children than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, which were the top three [killers behind] water—yet it was heavily underfunded.” Hendley, who was working as a bartender at the time, envi-

sioned how he could utilize “the bar and service crowd” to address the world’s water crisis. He went full-steam ahead, and within a month and a halfwas holding his first wine-tasting fundraiser, which enjoyed “phenomenal success.” Soon, “restaurant and bar owners wanted to do the same thing,” Hendley said, “and then within six months ofthat first event, just later that summer of 2004, I was living in Darfur.”

Teaching a Man to Fish Raising money turned out to be the easy part. In a short amount oftime, Hendley had filled theWine toWater bank account with “tens ofthousands ofdollars.” But how was he going to get it to the people who needed it? He went to Boone, N.C., to visit an organization called Samaritan’s Purse, which “had a great water program going around the world.” Deter- mined to make sure that the money he’d raised went to “water and only water,” Hendley began by asking the Samaritan’s Purse representative pointed questions about where and how his funds would be put to use. “At some point in the conversation,” Hendley said, “he completely turned it around on me and said, ‘Listen, why don’t you keep your money? Don’t give it to me. You worked hard to raise it. Why don’t you put it to use?’” The man offered to

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF WINE TO WATER