Wine To Water

Wine to Water: A Bartender’s Quest to Bring Clean Water to the World, is a 2012 memoir by former bartender and current humanitarian advocate Doc Hendley. Hendley is the founder and president of the eponymously-titled public health organization, Wine to Water, which focuses on providing clean water to people in countries with insufficient access. In the novel, Hendley recounts his journey from age twenty-five, navigating through tribal unrest in Africa to restore access to water to rural communities, up until the time of his writing, running a fully-fledged NGO. While Hendley highlights these personal struggles, he focuses ultimately on the possibilities for humanitarian intervention in ongoing international poverties.

Hendley begins his narrative as a college student in 2003. A typical student from the South, he self-consciously acknowledges his stereotypical affinities for a drinking culture and symbolic American goods, such as Harley Davidson motorcycles. As he approaches graduation, he begins to anxiously anticipate a stereotypical career in an office. One day, in passing, he hears about an international NGO called Samaritan’s Purse that provides relief to impoverished communities in countries around the world. He begins to brainstorm about ways to dedicate his career to a similar pursuit, waking up one night with the rough concept for Wine to Water fully formed in his mind.



Hendley then does independent research on the Internet to help decide how to best allocate his time to helping people. He is surprised to learn that, on average, contaminated water leads to a child’s death every twenty seconds, which is more frequent than the combined frequency of deaths from malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis. Not wanting to allocate his resources inefficiently, he decides to dedicate his project solely to clean water solutions.

As a young bartender and nomadic nightclub musician in the towns surrounding Raleigh, North Carolina, he decides to organize benefits to raise funds for communities without safe drinking water. Conceptualizing this “Robin Hood-esque” transfer of wealth from people with disposable income to impoverished and forgotten communities, Hendley chooses the biblical metaphor of Jesus transmuting water into wine to title the endeavor “Wine to Water.” He says that his initial aspiration was a generic one: to help solve the world’s freshwater crisis; his initial plan is to donate the funds he raises to traditional NGOs.

In January 2004, Hendley holds the first fundraiser at a popular Raleigh bar. The event is highly successful. Having become increasingly curious about the most water-needy regions in Africa, Hendley uses the proceeds to travel to war-torn Darfur in Sudan, securing a twelve-month job assignment from the NGO, Samaritan’s Purse, that had originally sparked his interest.



In Sudan, he begins to install water extraction and filtration systems for victims of government-sponsored genocide who have been denied basic rights to safe water, shelter, and nutrition. Comparing the withholding of water to the use of bullets, Hendley realizes that scarcity has become weaponized in the Sudan region for political ends. A group of terrorists, the Janjaweed, had discovered that destroying a community water tank holding more than 10,000 liters was as sure to cause mass death as ammunition or bombs. They would also dump rotting corpses and other biohazardous material into water reservoirs, systematically contaminating the water supply and introducing new diseases. Their actions had led to a death toll of more than one hundred thousand and displaced many millions more.

Following his first mission, he lives in Sudan for a year, witnessing the impacts of these government failures and atrocities through the lens of an outsider with little professional training, and spending much of his time learning about the historical complexities that generate unrest in Africa’s unstable nation-states. He sees great resilience in the people that are marginalized and forgotten at the hands of unstable and authoritarian leadership. He researches various cost models of restoring safe water in a scalable way, discovering that, although building a new water source costs, on average, $10,000, one can hire human labor to repair damaged wells for less than 1 percent of the cost of building one anew.

By the time he returns to the United States, Hendley has decided to focus full-time on Wine to Water’s programs, hoping to multiply the aid it provides in other countries. It expands its rebuilding of water containment systems to places such as India, Cambodia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Peru, South Africa, and Haiti.



While Hendley recalls he initially harbored a naive savior complex towards his future as a humanitarian, he acknowledges in his conclusion that the reality is extremely complex. Nevertheless, he argues that the same human values of connection and persistence are at play whether in a bar or in an engineering feat or interpersonal interaction in a foreign country. Hendley’s memoir is thus an argument in itself that even just one person’s altruistic pursuit can compound into massive change for humanity.