Matt Damon
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And I'm peppering her with questions.
What's it like living here?
And then finally I go, is this where you wanna live when you grow up?
And she looks at me and she's like, no.
She's like, I'm getting out of here.
She goes, I'm going to Lusaka.
I'm going to be a nurse.
And the way she had this energy, it reminded me so much of me and Ben at that age.
Like, we're not staying here.
We're going to New York.
We're going to be actors.
It's like what every 14-year-old should be doing, dreaming about this life.
And it hit me later as I was driving away that had someone not had the foresight to sink a borewell,
near this kid's house, she wouldn't be in school.
She would be spending all of her time trying to find water for her family and not, you know, dreaming of this wonderful life where she's a frontline healthcare worker and she's in the capital city and she's contributing to the economic engine of her country.
And, you know, like, it just really... So it's not just the death and the pointlessness of that, but it's the stifled potential of human possibility, you know, and...
It's incalculable.
It's just massive.
And so that was my epiphany.
And nobody was talking about it for the reasons we just kind of laid out.