Exclusive: Matt Damon Gets Emotional About Global Water Crisis | National Geographic

So let's just have a fun conversation about poop, okay? Because how else does one really talk about this? It strikes me, in our trying to report this story, photograph this story, and write about it that one of the big issues is it's a hard thing to talk about for a lot of people. This is a problem that largely has been solved in our country for a hundred years, and so very hard to kind of clear that first hurdle of just raising awareness.

You know, in the developing world, a case of diarrhea is life-threatening. Whereas if it happens to one of our kids, maybe they miss a day of school. The world is full of all of these great causes, important causes. Why this issue? I think for me, as I started to look at issues of extreme poverty and wanted to get involved, water and sanitation just undergirded everything. It was just so massive, and I didn't hear anybody talking about it.

Then as I learned about it, it's just endlessly fascinating and vastly complex. There's no kind of one silver bullet that's going to fix it. So what happens a lot of times is we'll start with a water loan. They were fronted the money because they're already paying for water on a daily basis. They're paying but to use a public bathroom, right? They're paying every day to do that. So if you loan them the money, it actually works out to be about the same thing that they're paying.

Within a couple of years, they're free and clear. They've got water in their house, and they've got a latrine. So you talked about when you go to India, and you hear these people and their stories are moving. What kind of stories are they telling you?

This is probably five years ago. This was in Haiti. We helped bring water to this village that hadn't had it, and this young 13-year-old was no longer gonna have to scavenge for water and go on these water collections. She was putting in three to four hours a day. I said, "What are you gonna do with all this extra time? You're gonna have more time for homework." She looked at me like, "I don't need more time for homework. I'm the smartest kid in my class."

So I was just like, "All right, hotshot, what are you gonna do with this extra time?" And she looked at me and she said, "I'm gonna play!" Yeah, and it just buckled me because I went, you know, like that's, these kids shouldn't be burdened with these things. This extreme poverty is this tremendous burden, and whether you're scavenging for water or whether you're a little girl who's waiting for it to get dark so that you can go out and defecate, you know, just put yourself at risk.

Because that's a whole other aspect to it, is there are these, you know, predatory men who are waiting for these girls. Those kids should be playing; that's what they should be thinking about. That's what our kids think about.

So the UN, I think, has tried to say that by 2030 they want to make it, you know, a goal to really not have open defecation. Do you think there's any way that, you know, the world could come close to that? That's only 13 years. I know. Okay, I think it's happening so rapidly. I mean, in the last two and a half decades, two and a half billion people have been lifted out of poverty, so we're really trending in the right direction, and we'll continue to do so.

Then in terms of engaging, there are all levels of engagement. Whether it's, you know, donating or you know, you can go to water.org, and there are multiple ways you can donate and help. I think for the takeaway from me is because our loan programs, what we call water credit, has been working so well. It's a very positive experience, and that's what I would want your readers to know is that there are these solutions that work.