Matt Damon's big idea -- that eureka moment during a journey when you see something or have a conversation with someone and you are, for an instant, touched and in some way transformed -- came in Zambia. He was there in 2006 with DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), the rock star-activist Bono's organization, wondering how he might put his own celebrity muscle to the best use.
Damon had already visited AIDS clinics and urban slums, and on this particular day, he was in a small village, trudging in the blazing sun alongside a young Zambian girl. As they marched to the village well, she told him proudly that she walks to school, three miles each way. He asked if she wanted to live in her village when she grew up. "No!" she said. "I want to go to Lusaka and become a nurse!"
Driving off a while later, Damon reflected on the moment and concluded that it was the village well which gave the girl permission to dream. "If someone hadn't put the well there, that girl would be spending her entire day trying to find water just to survive to the next day. You could forget about her going to school. That well gave her a future," he tells me. "I remembered as a kid sitting with Ben Affleck, dreaming of someday going to New York and becoming actors. Dreaming is a great thing."
Damon and I are in the restaurant at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Springfield, the empty, windswept capital of Illinois, discussing world poverty over a couple of Starbucks lattes. No one is paying any attention to us, and that seems to be the way he likes it. There are no bodyguards here -- Damon's beefy security man has already checked out the quiet restaurant and disappeared -- and no fans in sight. Dressed in his signature well-worn baseball cap and a hoodie sweatshirt, Damon is ready for another day of filming The Informant, a Steven Soderberg production about a whistle-blower at Archer Daniels Midland who exposed price-fixing in the 1990s. But the actor is clearly delighted to be talking not about Hollywood but rather about global poverty, water, and Africa.
Damon is as self-deprecating as you might expect from the soft-spoken roles he has played -- from the troubled kid in Good Will Hunting, to the nerdy member of the Ocean's Eleven team, to the amnesiac being chased down by the CIA in the Bourne films. Celebrity, he says, is "a tricky thing to navigate. There's no real pretty way to do it." He is also acutely aware of the power -- and the pitfalls -- of fame when it comes to shining light on international issues. Damon has wrestled with everything from not wanting to be used for the wrong causes to the fear of coming across as dumb. "For a lot of actors, our biggest fear is that were going to start talking about things we dont fully understand and sound like idiots," he says. "In the long run, I'll do much more good if, when I open my mouth, I have something worth saying."
And so Damon set out to educate himself, traveling to South Africa and Zambia in April 2006. As a subject, poverty and Africa "seemed daunting, and there's so much to learn," he tells me. "You have to give yourself permission to not know. It's a long process."
The travel was rugged but fantastic, Damon says -- moving from school to clinic, from one remote village to another. Damon's brother, Kyle, a sculptor who traveled with him on that first trip, has told me that the two were determined to downplay the star's fame, to be tough travelers and good students. But even the best of travelers can sometimes be undone by creepy crawlers in the night. Once, in a Zambian village, Kyle said, he and his brother "were outed as complete wusses." Confronted by giant bugs -- prehistoric is the word Kyle used -- the two of them hid under their mosquito nets and yelled for the bodyguard to come save them. "It was hard to view ourselves as tough guys, cowering under the net and clutching our malaria meds," Kyle says, with a typical Damon laugh.
After meeting the Zambian girl on the same trip, Damon became convinced that water was the issue to tackle. Ignoring his coffee, Damon leans forward and gives me the facts. Dirty water is the leading cause of cholera. Some two billion people worldwide live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every 15 seconds because of dirty water. "The world water crisis is one of the most important public health issues of our time," Damon says. "Clean water can help put people on the first rung of the development ladder."
Damon and a team of friends hatched the idea of the H2O Africa Foundation, which partners with Jeffrey Sachs's Millennium Villages Project to deliver funds for water wells, as well as with OneXOne, a foundation that supports children around the world; Ryan's Well, which provides water and sanitation education; A Glimmer of Hope Foundation; Living Water International, which provides wells for refugee communities in the Central African Republic; and the One Campaign, a grassroots U.S. organization that tries to pressure Washington to increase global aid.
Damon's philanthropic impulse has its roots in the commune-like group of six families of former hippies in which he grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His values were instilled in him by his mother, a children's education specialist, who remains his moral compass. Asked to do a voiceover for a bank commercial years ago, he turned to her to discuss the ethics. Was it okay to take money from a bank? Yes -- if he gave it all to great causes. "I thought it would be like that Paul Newman motto," he adds with a laugh, referring to Newman's Own, which gives its profits away to educational and charitable programs: "?'Shameless exploitation for the common good.'?"
Devoting significant time to philanthropy had to wait, however. "It's such a mountain to climb to get a career going in the entertainment industry, so it was always in the future," Damon says.
