Matt Damon's Passion For Africa
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The stars aligned a few years ago around Running the Sahara, a documentary about three marathoners running across the Sahara through such water-starved countries as Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, and Libya. Damon decided that the film, which will be released this month, would be a perfect vehicle to highlight the problems of Africa.
There was a precedent. Damon and his pals George Clooney, Don Cheadle, and Brad Pitt had used the release of Ocean's Eleven to highlight the tragedy in Darfur. They formed Not On Our Watch, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending mass atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere around the world. Clooney has said that if fans are crazy enough to follow him, well, then he will take them to Sudan. Damon also feels that celebrity brings with it an opportunity to do good. "You start to feel a level of responsibility to direct attention to things that actually matter more than to silly things like who you're dating." (For the record, he's been married for almost three years and has a ten-year-old stepdaughter, a two-year-old daughter, and a baby due this fall.)
Damon talks about Africa with a passion that comes from spending time there. Never once during our conversation does he plug or even talk about a movie project. The actor says that his trips have made the solutions real to him, brought them to life. In Tanzania, for instance, he visited a clinic and spoke with a 21-year-old mother with a baby in her arms. The child was slack-jawed, his head lolling back and forth. "I thought he was going to die right in front of me," Damon says. When he asked if there was something he could do, the child's doctor said the baby was going to be fine: He had already received life-saving anti-malarial medicine. Damon spoke with the mother, who lived on less than a dollar a day in a village that was a two-hour walk away from the clinic, and learned that her other child had died from malaria. "Then I realized that because of President Bush's malaria initiative, this baby had survived," says Damon, referring to Bush's 2005 pledge to increase malaria funding by $1.5 billion over five years. "American taxpayer money saved this baby's life."
Damon believes in the power of travel to transform people. He wishes that Americans were less insular, and quotes the fact that only 21 percent of Americans have passports. "I think many of our problems as a country would be solved if people had thick passports," he says. "There's just no substitute for actually going and seeing things."
Contrary to what you might expect from a celebrity, Damon comes across as a regular -- albeit very thoughtful -- guy, grappling with the values of our fame-obsessed culture and asking soul-searching questions about how to raise his children. We talk about kids, and he tells me that he wants his to see the world. He describes how Cheadle took his own daughters to Johannesburg's Soweto slum while he was filming Hotel Rwanda. "He didn't even have to say, 'This is why you're lucky.' He just let them take it in," Damon says. Being such a successful actor, he knows that his own children "will have incredible advantages that I can't even imagine and that I worry about sometimes." Seeing the world, he adds, "is the way they will remain grounded"
It turns out that Damon is seriously patriotic -- not the chest-thumping, America-is-the-strongest-country-in-the-world kind of patriotism but the kind that allows for criticism of U.S. policies when they seem wrong but that believes in the generosity and good which Americans can do. His recent films -- Syriana, about U.S. oil interests and corruption in the Middle East; The Good Shepherd, which raises questions about the ethics of a patriotic CIA agent; and Green Zone, which will come out next year, about U.S. involvement in Iraq -- have explored America's policies with a critical eye. And yet he speaks with admiration -- and knowledgeably -- about PEPFAR, President Bush's $15 billion AIDS initiative in Africa, as well as the $698 million aid package the United States recently gave to Tanzania.
Damon says he hopes the next president will urge a new era of service in America. He is encouraged that both John McCain and Barack Obama have promised to travel to Africa and step up aid to the continent. "We are about to turn a wonderful corner and close this chapter of aggression, where the only American face that people see on foreign soil is the face of a soldier," Damon says. "As well-meaning as that soldier is, that sends a certain message. But when you go to a country and see your fellow Americans feeding people or getting clean water or saving their lives, you are really seeing the best of us. We are exporting the best of who we are -- and who we should be."
I am impressed. I knew that Damon was committed, but we live in such an age of cynicism that I don't exactly expect Hollywood stars to talk about their desire to stand up and serve their country. But here is Matt Damon, as canned music plays in the background at this Midwestern hotel restaurant, telling me he hopes that the next president will use Hollywood activists "in a more organized way." So do we need all these celebrities running around saving the world? Maybe our cynicism is misplaced. After all, Damon's H2O Africa Foundation has brought safe drinking water to millions of people. Clooney and Cheadle have raised awareness of the violence and poverty in Darfur. Pitt and Angelina Jolie are rebuilding large sections of New Orleans. Even "Idol Gives Back," the slickest use of fame for global causes in history, raised an astounding $76 million for African and American charities last year. And in the process, the celebs have inspired us to contribute and to take action, too. What could be bad about that?
Maybe I'm just intoxicated by this dreamy movie star chatting with me as if we were just a couple of policy wonks, but by this point my journalistic skepticism has all but evaporated. A black SUV is waiting outside, ready to drive Damon back to the set. We exchange e-mail addresses, and he tells me to keep in touch. With that, the water crusader heads off to his day job: Hollywood idol.
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