#kyle damon

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SMITH: How has your birth order informed who you are as a person?

MATT: I've thought about this a lot because my wife is the oldest of three and I'm the youngest of two. I really think that's one of the reasons we work so well. Because I think as the youngest— and you can tell me if this has been your experience, it certainly has been mine. I'm extremely adaptable. I have no need to be in charge.

And I remember, as a kid, my brother's girlfriend was on the YWCA swim team. And so my brother joined the YWA swim team, right, as the only boy. And I had to join the YWCA swim team because my mom, you know, is a professor— She was, you know, a single mom. My dad, they were divorced, but my dad had us like every other weekend and one day a week. So my mom had to figure out what to do with us after school. So I was just on the swim team with my brother. Like she just kept us together on the swim team. And it didn't strike me at the time that this was some kind of unfairness or injustice that I didn't want to be on the swim team. I just did it, you know, and I think I'm that way.

[In] my career— your career as an actor, you're living out of a duffel bag for the whole first part of your career. And you're in this Best Western Hotel and you kind of live in the production, which is always a little chaotic. And I never really had a problem with it. It never— it seemed like, "Yep, well, that's what I have to do." But I think Lucy and I gel together really well because she— She's five years younger than me, but she just takes on the role that kind of— naturally takes on that kind of leadership role. Then I'm completely fine with it.

We bought our house in L.A. years ago. We were living in New York, and we had talked about moving to L.A. And we were going out because I was going to shoot Behind The Candelabra in L.A., and so we needed to rent a house for the summer. And she went out to find the rental and saw a house for sale that was on the same street that Ben lived on, and called me and said, "There's this house and I love it!" And Ben came down and looked at it. And so I had my two favorite people on the phone. And Ben was like, "You should get this place." And Lucy said, "I love this place." And I was just like, "OK." Like we bought it and I'd never seen the house. But I knew if they love it, I'm sure it's great. And if she loves it and she's going to be happy, I know I'm going to be happy. I know it's nicer than some of the hotels I've stayed in while I'm shooting. So this is going to be totally fine. And it was. And we lived there for nine years.

SMITH: That's amazing. And now they run your company, basically, right? Artists Equity?

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He was buff. He was bad. He was dressed head to toe in tight red leather. And he hardly broke a sweat dangling from a ledge 10 stories above downtown L.A. without a safety net. No wonder Ben Affleck attracted crowds of adoring females when he did his own stunt work for his upcoming action film Daredevil. “We all swooned,” says his costar Jennifer Garner. “He’s your basic tall, dark and handsome. He’s it. You want him to save you. I can’t imagine anyone the world would rather see swoop in and save the day than Ben.”

Being a superhero takes more than good looks—and the same goes for being crowned this year’s Sexiest Man Alive. “Ben’s really loyal and really honest, really smart, really funny,” says Matt Damon, Affleck’s best buddy since boyhood. “He’s got more going for him than just about anyone I’ve ever met.”

The 30-year-old actor is also intriguingly complex. In private that big-screen big hunk (he’s 6’2″) displays impressive range: An easygoing charmer. A passionate political activist. An Oscar winner. A devoted son. A self-aware grownup. A flirt. A brainiac. A goofball. A head-over-heels romantic.

And—perhaps you’ve heard—husband-to-be to a certain Jennifer Lopez. Despite the hullabaloo over the joined-at-the-lips stars’ flashy four-month courtship—and much public clucking over Lopez’s short-lived pair of previous marriages—those close to Affleck applaud the engagement. “They understand each other,” says his mother, Chris, 59, a Cambridge, Mass., fifth-and sixth-grade teacher. “She’s just a lovely person. She’s very connected to her family. She’s very warm. She’s like the ideal daughter-in-law. The only downside is that she is so famous, but on the other hand, so is Ben, and who’s going to put up with that if they’re not in that same world?”

Meanwhile Affleck’s move into the world of commitment marks an important milestone for the never-wed star, who stepped out with the likes of Shoshanna Lonstein and Famke Janssen following the 1999 breakup of his intense romance with Gwyneth Paltrow. “Recently he has matured a lot,” says his mother. “It’s no longer ‘I’m in love, but I’m young,’ it’s ‘I want to make a life now, I’m ready for this.’ ” Before Lopez came on the scene, recalls Daredevil director Mark Steven Johnson, “I used to joke with him about how he was going to be in his 50s hitting on 18-year-old girls. He laughed and said, ‘No, I won’t.’ ” As Affleck himself told Good Morning America in April, “What’s going to mean the most to me [is] being a father, being a husband, being a person of whom I can really be proud.”

Over the years his charm has attracted plenty of hopefuls. “Chicks gravitate to him,” says longtime pal Kevin Smith, director of Affleck and Lopez’s upcoming Jersey Girl. “The word on the street is that he’s the ideal man, chatty, gorgeous, generous and intelligent.” Affleck’s friend and Daredevil costar Michael Clarke Duncan thinks Ben’s secret is simple: “If you can get a woman to laugh, no matter how much money you have, no matter how much charisma you have, you can have that woman, and Ben can do that. He’s not this stuck-up guy who you can’t talk to.”

On movie sets Affleck is known for his eagerness to chew the fat with anyone from electricians to camera operators. “He’s a hugger,” says Phil Alden Robinson, who directed him in this summer’s The Sum of All Fears. “He loves being around people, and consequently he makes them happy. You can’t fake that kind of warmth.”

Then there’s plain old brains, that attractive but all too rare accessory to brawn and a $350,000 Bentley. “Ben has this nerdy smart-guy side to him,” says Liv Tyler, his love interest in 1998’s Armageddon. “He’s obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle. He reads a lot. He’s really interested in knowing more about the world.” The die-hard Democrat’s homework shows in his dedication to causes, from stumping for Al Gore across the country to urging Harvard University to raise wages for blue-collar employees. At a rally at the university in 2000, Affleck and Damon addressed a crowd of more than 500. “They spoke very passionately,” says noted historian and author Howard Zinn, a fellow speaker, “Ben talked about how his father had worked at Harvard at a menial job [like Matt Damon‘s Good Will Hunting character, Tim Affleck, 59, labored as a custodian from 1988 to 1990] and how he understood what it was like to work for an enormously rich corporation and get a pittance.”

Tim and Chris (who separated when Ben was 11 and later divorced) raised Benjamin Geza Affleck and his brother Casey, 27, in a working-class neighborhood in Cambridgeport, Mass. A rambunctious, outgoing youngster, Ben “was very good at imitating people, even when he was 3 or 4,” says Chris, who still lives in the blue clapboard house her sons grew up in (although Ben bought her a summer home on Cape Cod). By 7, he was an avid reader, Little League baseball player and budding actor. Dark End of the Street, an independent film directed by a family friend, marked his movie debut in 1979—and the first time Affleck would be smitten by his leading lady. “He had an appropriate 7-year-old crush on the 19-year-old girl” who played his big sister, recalls Affleck’s childhood acting coach David Wheeler. At 9, Ben landed a role in an educational series, The Voyage of the Mimi. “He was very bright and intensely curious,” says Wheeler.

And soon he became just a bit devilish. Thanks to his acting gigs (including a Burger King commercial and the 1987 miniseries Hands of a Stranger), “he was adept at age 13 or 14 at dealing with adults,” says Gerry Speca, his drama teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin public high school. “When he had to, he could turn on the charm. Like the Eddie Haskell syndrome.” Unbeknownst to his mother, Ben sweet-talked bank tellers into letting him withdraw earnings that she was socking away in a college fund. Affleck was more of a partyer than was his neighbor Damon, two years older and a pal since 1980. But the two “weren’t heartthrobs by any means,” says Damon’s brother Kyle, 35. “They weren’t even considered cool kids. They were drama geeks.”

Affleck—who grew almost a foot his junior year of high school—attended his 1990 prom with a group of friends. He met his first serious girlfriend, Cheyenne Rothman, now 30, at summer camp when they were teens; their relationship would continue on and off over the next seven years. The following fall Affleck headed to the University of Vermont. (He applied to Harvard but was rejected despite high SAT scores.) He dropped out after one semester to head for Hollywood. “I would always say, ‘Oh, Ben, you shouldn’t do this. You should go to college,’ ” says his mother. “But secretly I sort of suspected that he was going to make it.”

She was right. Roles in 1993’s Dazed and Confused and 1995’s Mallrats raised Affleck’s profile as he and Damon, crashing with two other roommates in a cluttered apartment, labored on the Hunting screenplay. “He had a hard time getting cast as anything but the biggish bully type,” recalls Kevin Smith, who directed Mallrats. “I had some producer try to talk me out of casting Ben in Chasing Amy [1997] because he was ‘too big’ to be a romantic leading man. But I figured, if I’m a guy and I can see what a catch this dude is, there’ve gotta be women out there who’d agree.”

Then Hunting sold for $600,000. On the first day on the set “Matt and Ben cried,” says coproducer Chris Moore, a longtime Affleck pal. “They had believed in it so much.” With his mom as his date—”It was such a rush,” she says—Affleck picked up the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 1998 alongside his best friend.

Hollywood quickly saw Affleck’s beefcake potential. For Armageddon, director Michael Bay got a dentist to cap his teeth and hired a trainer to pump him up. The cameras took over from there. “I remember Ben coming to me one day and saying, ‘You’re not going to believe what happened to me,’ ” recalls costar Liv Tyler. “Basically Michael Bay had just made him stand there and have running water poured over his bare torso. He didn’t even know what scene it was for.”

He also discovered the world of celebrity dating. Sparks flew between Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow at Good Will Hunting‘s 1997 premiere. The couple were an item on and off for the next two years and remain friendly. “In Gwyneth he found a match of the minds,” his Forces of Nature director Bronwen Hughes said earlier this year.

Affleck found the single life after their breakup action-packed—but unfulfilling. “I felt very adrift,” he told Talk magazine in 2000. “So I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll go to these parties. I’ll try to embrace this life people think I have.’…And I found myself even more miserable.” In July 2001 he made a move that surprised most pals: He checked himself into Promises rehab center in Malibu for treatment for alcoholism. According to friends, his excess drinking was a problem he wanted to tackle early. “I think he figured out, ‘If I keep doing this, I’m going to wind up in a place that I don’t want to be,’ ” says Michael Clarke Duncan. Affleck knew the perils better than most: His father, Tim, now a still-life photographer in Indio, Calif., is a recovering alcoholic who got sober in 1990 with his ex-wife’s help. “I’m proud that he took stock of himself,” says Tim. “And like most things in Ben’s life, whatever he’s decided to undertake, he’s been successful at.”

The experience has changed more than Affleck’s attitude toward partying. “It involved a lot of introspection,” says his mother. “He’s very, very happy right now, really easy to talk to about difficult things,” adds Don Roos, who directed him in 2000’s Bounce. That transformation made it the right time to meet Ms. Right. “When you first get sober, you’re nervous about staying sober and you tend to stay close to home,” says Roos. “I credit Jennifer”—herself a teetotaler—”with being there to open up his life for him again.”

Now, it seems, Lopez, 33, is his sole addiction—unless you count diamonds: Her tokens of affection from Affleck (whose Daredevil salary is $12.5 million) have included a yellow-and-white diamond bracelet and, of course, the 6.10-carat Harry Winston pink diamond ring he gave her when he proposed. In an e-mail to Diane Sawyer, Affleck called Lopez “a truly graceful beauty with an artist’s soul”—and himself “the luckiest man alive.”

The news came as little surprise for director Kevin Smith, who watched the relationship deepen over the past few months during the Jersey Girl shoot. “After day one of watching them in rehearsals, I pulled him aside and said, ‘Within a year,’ ” Smith says. “I know there are a ton of cynics out there, but they haven’t seen these guys together. This isn’t just Nookie Betwixt the Rich and Famous. There’s obscene mutual respect and adoration. They both came from working-class backgrounds that led to these over-the-top career successes. Plus she finds everything he says funny.”

Their jet-set itinerary has included a few unadvertised stops. In August Affleck took Lopez on a tour of his old haunts in South Boston, including a favorite chicken parmigiana joint and a bar featured in Good Will Hunting. They also recently lunched with Affleck’s father at Ben’s new Beverly Hills home, on the property where Drew Barrymore lived before a house fire last year. “I think she’s nifty,” Tim Affleck says of Lopez. “I didn’t see her as a flashy movie star any more than I see my son as a flashy movie star. They’re just a couple of schlub dubs like the rest of us.”

He may be a secret schlub, but Affleck seems comfortable with his celebrity—and savvy about how to leverage it for creative as well as political causes. “Ben is not a guy who is handled by handlers,” says pal Moore, a partner with Affleck, Damon and Sean Bailey in the entertainment company LivePlanet. “He does what he wants.” With LivePlanet, Affleck developed the innovative HBO reality series Project Greenlight and this fall’s critically acclaimed but short-lived ABC drama Push, Nevada.

One crusade close to Affleck’s heart began serendipitously. In 1998 he noticed Joe Kindregan, then 10, in a motorized wheelchair watching him film a scene for Forces of Nature at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C. Affleck came over to joke with the boy, who suffers from the rare degenerative disease ataxia-telangiectasia. The two struck up an e-mail friendship, and last year Affleck testified before Congress about the need for medical research into the condition. Affleck arranges for Joe and his family to see him about four times a year, including a recent 14th-birthday party on the set of his romantic comedy Gigli in L.A. “They had cheeseburgers and chocolate cake in his trailer,” says Joe’s mother, Suzi, 44, a Springfield, Va., homemaker. “I’ll love Ben forever for the way he puts light in my son’s eyes.”

Moments like that make it easy to envision Affleck doting on a child of his own. “You can just tell he’ll be a fantastic dad,” says Mark Steven Johnson, whom Affleck often quizzed about his experience as a father of three on the Daredevil shoot. “He’s a Boston boy. He wants his kid playing baseball—you know, a Red Sox boy.” Chris Affleck can’t wait. “I’ve been urging him for the longest time,” she says. “I want grandchildren.”

Like, how insane is this? And that we have photographic evidence of it?

Given their history of clothes sharing, it's not surprising that they'd wear the same jacket. We've seen them do it before. But this is not just any jacket. This was Matt's cool older brother leather jacket: Matt's "favorite thing in the world". Something that he identifies as important in shaping his personal identity, because wearing it made him feel "cool" like his brother.

He loved it so much he borrowed it for his yearbook portrait. This is how he wanted to be remembered. And then that summer Kyle gives him the jacket as a graduation gift. It is finally his. This piece of clothing that gives him so much comfort and confidence. Precisely what he'll need as he starts a new stage in his life: going off to university. And Harvard no less! That place with the stuck up kids, not like us townies. Now Matt will somehow be amongst enemy ranks, feeling like an outsider. But cloaked in his brother's leather jacket — now his — there's nothing that can make him feel small. With the confidence that jacket inspires in him, there's nowhere he can't go, nothing he can't do. Matt loves it so much he wears it all Summer and just waits for Fall.

1984-1985

Matt is a freshman. His brother, Kyle, is a senior.

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Kyle's yearbook portrait, which also lists the Damon's address (p. 62)

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1985-1986

Matt is a sophomore.

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Summer '85 production of "Guys and Dolls". Matt, a freshman, plays one of the gamblers (p. 126-127).

Fall-Winter '85 production of "Lysistrata".

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1986-1987

Matt is a junior and Ben is a freshman.

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Spring '86 production of "Bravo Cappucino!", which won 4th place in the Massachusetts High School Drama Festival (p. 120). Matt, a sophomore, plays Humpty Dumpty (AKA Toast).

Summer '86 production of "Brigadoon" (p. 122). If Matt participated, he wasn't in the main cast.

Fall-Winter '86 production of "The Visit" (p. 121). Ben, a freshman, plays Matt's son. This is also when the famous "It's not about your looks, it's about the work" conversation took place.

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1987-1988

Matt is a senior and Ben is a sophomore.

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Matt in the colored candids section (p. 8)

Matt's yearbook portrait (p. 63)

Spring '87 production of "Blood Wedding", which wins 1st place at the Massachusetts High School Drama Festival (p. 111). The Spring '88 production of "Homestead" wins 1st place too.

Summer '87 production of "Pippin" (p. 112). Matt starred as Pippin. Ben couldn't sing so he worked on the crew.

Fall '88 production of "Stage Door" (p. 110).

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Matt (4th from the left on the back row) was part of the National Honor Society (p. 130).

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1988-1989

Ben is a junior. Casey is a freshman.

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Possible Ben sighting in the colored candids section (p. 6).

Fall '89 production of "Alice in Wonderland" (p. 128). Ben plays the Caterpillar. The pictures on the left page are likely from the Summer '88 production, whose name is not mentioned.

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1989-1990

Ben is a senior. Casey is a sophomore.

Ben's yearbook portrait (p. 98); Note: "SR" is likely Soren Garcia-Rey, with whom Matt and Ben lived while writing Good Will Hunting. "AS" is likely Aaron Stockard, with whom Ben later wrote Gone Baby Gone and The Town. "CA" is likely his brother, Casey Affleck.

p. 106

p. 117

Casey Affleck on the Boys Indoor Track and Cross-Country teams (p. 147-148).

Spring '89 production of "Comedia Mania", which won 1st place at the Massachusetts High School Drama Festival (p. 28).

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SMITH: So do you see some of these attributes in your own daughters? Like oldest, youngest?

MATT: Yeah, I mean, I definitely see that effect of birth order. But also, I don't know if it's been your— I really— Kids come out as who they are. And I don't think I appreciated that until I had kids.

SMITH: Absolutely.

MATT: Really see that, you know...

SMITH: And so I joke I could take all the natal vitamins. I can do all the things. These kids come out hardwired.

MATT: They really are hardwired.

SMITH: It's amazing.

MATT: Their spirits are, you know—

SMITH: Totally.

MATT: That is what makes me believe that there is something else. It really does. I also had that experience when my father passed away; of seeing that happen before my eyes and then instantly not recognizing him. And it was me and my brother. And if you had given me a hundred chances at a line of dialogue — and I write professionally — I never would have gotten it right. I said, "Kyle, have you ever seen this man before?" And he said, "I've never seen that man in my life." And so it really made me appreciate that idea that— They say Namaste and what that means is the light in me sees the light in you, right? That really, in a very deep way, kind of brought that home. Like, "Oh, I get it." And that's what I see with my kids. When they come, it's like you see who they are from the second you look at them.

MATT: Wow, I never thought of that. I lost both my parents a while ago, but I've never thought about that: looking completely different. That's just the way in which you just articulated that.

MATT: It was like he was replaced, in the blink of an eye, by some old man from central casting; that just was there. And yeah, they said at the place, "People like to stay with the body." And my brother and I were like, "We're good." We'd been there for 48 straight hours. And we were like, we don't ever want to see this place again. See you later. Like, he's not here.

1. WHAT THE HELL IS THE “WATER ISSUE”?

POV: Matt Damon

I’ve spent most of my life telling stories on-screen, not on the page—so as I was thinking about how to begin this book, I thought about how I’d start the movie. We’d fade in on a hut I visited in rural Zambia in 2006. I can still see it clearly in my mind: earthen brick walls, dirt floor, thatched roof. The landscape around it was usually dry, but because this was April, the end of the rainy season, the ground was covered, in parts, with a thin blanket of green. I was sitting outside the hut, waiting for a teenager to get home from school.

I was in Zambia because Bono—the rock star who spends his spare time fighting to end extreme poverty—had been pestering me to go. “Pest” is Bono’s word. He wears it like a badge of honor. He takes pride in getting people—politicians especially, but others, too—to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do, if he wasn’t pestering them. The guy is really good at it. Bono believes that seeing poverty up close can change a person’s priorities, can compel them to go out and do something about it. So he and his colleagues at the organization he started, DATA—which would eventually become the ONE Campaign—had been pressuring me to join them on a trip to Africa. He’d been pressuring me with the zeal of a telemarketer. He was not going to take no for an answer.

My answer wasn’t no, exactly. I just had a lot going on in my life. My wife would be seven months pregnant at the time of the trip, and I had only a small window of time before my next movie. So I told Bono it just wasn’t a good time. He looked at me and said, “It’s never going to be a good time.” Which, of course, was totally right.

I had no grand illusions about the point of going on this trip. It’s not like I’d be changing anybody’s life. Bono likes to say that there’s nothing worse than a rock star with a cause, but an actor with a cause is a close second. I winced at the mental image of me walking through the bush or an urban slum somewhere, looking concerned, and then flying home to my comfortable life. But then I thought: that’s an even dumber excuse for not going than “I’m busy.” The more I thought about the trip, the more I realized that I wanted to go and meet some of the people who live in these extremely poor places, to see firsthand the challenges they face, and to figure out whether there was something something I could be doing to help. So I told Bono I’d go, and my older brother, Kyle, agreed to come along, too.

The trip was about two weeks long. It took us to slums and rural villages across South Africa and Zambia. DATA had set it up like a college mini course. Each day, we learned about a different challenge that kept people from breaking the cycle of poverty: underfunded health systems, the challenges of life in a slum, the HIV/AIDS crisis. We read briefing books about each issue, visited organizations that were trying to tackle them, and, most important, talked with the people.

On one of our last days in Zambia, we were going to learn about water. It wasn’t clear to me why. I understood why we had been focusing on HIV/AIDS and education—these were issues that you read about in the news, issues that people talked about or signed petitions about or donated in support of. But when I heard we’d be spending the day on the “water issue,” I wasn’t sure what issue that was, exactly. I guessed the water was contaminated.

Then I read my issue brief. It said, yes, the water was contaminated—so much so that waterborne diseases were killing a child about every twenty seconds. But the water was also hard to access. There were no water pipes in these villages, no water taps in people’s homes. Somebody had to go get the water and bring it back, and that somebody was almost always a woman or a girl. This was their responsibility: to walk as far as necessary to whatever water source they could find and fill their plastic jerrican, a five-gallon water jug that weighs more than forty pounds when full. Then they turn around and carry it home. And the next day they wake up and do it again.

To see what that was like, we drove four hours from Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, to a village with a well that a partner of DATA’s helped build. The staff knew of a family who lived close to the road. Their daughter Wema was fourteen, and every day after school she walked to the well to get water for her family. She’d agreed to let us walk with her, but when we arrived at her home, it was empty. Not just the home, but the whole area. There was no village center that I could see; all the huts were spread out. It was very still, very quiet, and we just sat there for a while, waiting.

Eventually we saw Wema coming toward us down the path. She was carrying books and wearing a simple blue dress that looked like a school uniform. She greeted us shyly, then put down her books and went to fetch her family’s jerrican.

At first, as we started walking to the well, the conversation was awkward. Which wasn’t really a surprise. Wema, who walked alone to this well every day, suddenly had an entourage of trip coordinators and village officials, plus an overeager movie actor. She and I didn’t speak the same language, so we had to rely on an interpreter. Still, as we walked, everybody else hung back a bit, giving us some space. Her responses to my questions were pretty short, but after a while we both relaxed a little, and even the silences felt natural enough. It was a peaceful walk down a country road.

After half an hour or so, we arrived at the well. Somebody suggested I try my hand at it. I had just finished filming one of the Jason Bourne movies, so I thought I was in pretty good shape. But pumping water from this well was harder than it looked. Wema and I laughed as I struggled with it. She had this incredibly practiced way of working the pump and then hefting this big, heavy yellow can up onto her head, where she kept it balanced with the help of one hand. This was easy to admire until you remembered (if you’d let yourself forget) that this was work for her: an inescapable, essential chore.

On our way back, it started to rain. Nobody said anything about it; we just kept walking. There’s something about succumbing to the rain and accepting you’re going to get soaked that loosens people up. The conversation got easier. I asked the girl if she wanted to live in the same village when she grew up. She smiled at me, a little shy again—as if she was debating whether or not to answer. After a moment, she did. “I want to go to Lusaka,” she said, “and become a nurse.”

I had this feeling that she mostly kept this ambition to herself. I wondered if her parents even knew, and if she’d hesitated to tell me because I might tell them. It was no small thing for her to have this dream—to think about leaving the place she’d always known, to head out on her own and show what she could do. It really resonated with me. And look, I know it’s a cliché to meet someone halfway across the world whose life is dramatically different from your own, and suddenly see yourself in them—but I did. She brought to mind that feeling of restlessness, that eagerness to get out and do something new, somewhere new. I knew exactly what it felt like to be a teenager with a dream. I spent my teenage years pooling the money from my summer jobs in a joint bank account with Ben Affleck so we could move to New York and become actors. Not the same thing, obviously. But not so different that we couldn’t connect. As I talked with her, it seemed clear to me that she was going to do it. She had a spark, a kind of self-possession that made it easy for me to imagine that one day, she’d work up the courage to tell her parents she was going to chase her dream to Lusaka. Maybe they’d be angry about that, or sad about losing her, or proud that she was thinking big. Maybe all three. But she’d study, and she’d work, and she’d meet her goal. More than fifteen years later I’m still convinced she’s made it. That she’s not still walking that path and carrying that jerrican. I hope I’m right.

The main reason I’m optimistic—actually, the only reason I can be optimistic—is that Wema was able to go to school. It took half an hour to walk to the well we visited, but an hour of walking every day left her enough time to attend school and do her homework before the sun set—the village had no electricity, so after dark it was impossible to read a book. DATA introduced me to her because she was, in relative terms, a success story—a girl lucky enough to have a well close by so she could spend a good part of her days learning. Millions of girls aren’t so lucky. For them, getting water doesn’t take one hour; it takes three or four or six. It’s what they do: they walk for water. That necessity keeps them from going to school, or working in the fields to earn money for their families, or creating something they can sell at a market. In fact, in some regions of India, water is so scarce that men take “water wives”—second and even third wives who spend all day, every day, gathering water for the family.