Here in Hawaii, our Board of Water Supply, their motto that they have printed all over their trucks and their vehicles is kawai ola, water for life.
We cannot survive without clean drinking water.
My guest today is a fellow soldier in the Army Reserves, fellow civil affairs officer, and veteran of multiple deployments overseas.
Rob McQueen leads a nonprofit called Waves for Water.
And this nonprofit is centered around bringing access to clean drinking water to some of the most challenging environments in the world, to some of the people who need access to clean water the most.
You're going to hear in our conversation a lot about his experiences both in the military as well as working with this non-profit, Waves for Water, how we got to know each other and some of the shared experiences we've had.
But ultimately it comes down to this, that we became friends because we are two people who are deeply committed to service and understanding truly the importance of clean water.
I hope you enjoy the conversation.
I, uh, are you guys snowboarders, skiers, both?
Both, yeah.
I have an older daughter who is on snowboard team.
She's actually sickeningly good.
My youngest is on ski team.
I snowboarded for 30 years and just shifted back to skiing to kind of teach the kiddos.
So it's been good.
That's awesome.
I kind of equate, I've never tried skiing.
I like snowboarding, but I'm not going to pretend to be any good at it because it's so sporadic whenever I'm able to go.
I love it, but I kind of equate, I don't know if it's not totally the same, but like a crowded surf lineup with a crowd, yeah.
You're dodging people.
You're trying not to collide.
The only difference is you don't have to wait or fight for a wave when the wave comes in.
You're a surfer, too.
You've never been in some of the lift lines up here.
They're pretty brutal.
That's true.
That's actually true.
That's true.
No, it's good.
It's about the same.
There's just a lot less.
I remember being in a crowded lineup at Tamarack in California and dropping in on somebody and just almost getting my ass beat by like 15 different people.
So at least in snowboarding, like you're not quite that bad.
Fist fights, not so common.
I mean, they happen, but not so often.
It's good you can be home for a little stretch.
I feel like you're on the move quite a bit too.
Yeah, second half of the year was crazy.
So it's been really nice to get back on the road kind of in that way.
But at the same time, it's definitely nice to be down.
I think I'm home until we go to Costa Rica as a family in March and then back to Ukraine.
And that's kind of the first trip on my radar.
So that's nice.
That's awesome.
So just for those who are listening, I'm talking to my friend Rob McQueen.
And the way that we got to know each other is a little bit unexpected.
Yeah, pretty random.
I was going through a civil affairs course, and because of...
This was shortly after COVID kind of broke out, actually, and I was supposed to be at the course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in person, and then all of a sudden we got a message saying...
Well, we're not canceling it.
We're just going to do the whole thing online.
And I think it was either Zoom, Microsoft Teams, one of those.
But you were a guest speaker for this course that I was taking.
I know you're friends with one of our team instructors.
You are still a civil affairs officer in the Army Reserves.
You were formerly on active duty civil affairs and that was the course that I was taking and you were able to come and share some of your own experiences working in that area.
And I found it so fascinating because you've had such an incredible opportunity to go and do civil affairs work in different parts of the world.
And it really stuck with me.
But the thing that I ended up So providing me the opportunity to come back and reach out to you a few months later was you closed your talk with us talking about, well, what are you doing now?
And we're going to get into your work with Waves for Water.
But I really, that stuck with me because I first got involved with politics back in 2002 here in Hawaii running for state house because of water issues.
Because of just work that I had done, even as a teenager, around clean water, clean drinking water.
Fast forward from my civil affairs training, my initial civil affairs training that you spoke at, to then I was deployed to East Africa and in Somalia we faced a problem set that you are all too familiar with.
And I was working with the civil affairs team out there, and we were dealing with a group of people in a very difficult environment, surrounded by al-Shabaab terrorists.
And one of the acts of terrorism against these people and the leverage points this terrorist group was using against them was taking away their access to clean water, ruining their access to the drinking water wells that they had and so on.
And so as you're sitting there, like, gosh, what can we do?
Like, how can we help these people?
Because ultimately, they wanted nothing to do with terrorists, but were focusing on survival.
So, like, I have just the idea.
Call Rob McQueen.
And so here we are, full circle, and there's a lot of progress that's been made on that front.
That particular mission at that time didn't end up working out, but there's been a lot of progress made.
Gosh, there's so much I want to talk to you about, but let's just start there because I want to make sure I don't forget.
I want to bring it back to how it is that Waves for Water can do so much work in other parts of the world.
Yep.
But how when you're talking about places like Flint, Michigan, Jackson, Mississippi, and other places right here at home who are dealing with these exact same kinds of threats with lack of access to clean drinking water.
Your non-profit doesn't have the opportunity or ability to help.
Let's just start there, because we're there.
That's an easy one.
I guess let's start with the mission of Waves for Water.
I think that's the biggest piece.
We are a humanitarian aid organization, and we provide access to clean water to those that need it.
When I say those that need it, really where we focus is what we like to call the forgotten ones.
So we look at those pockets of people in remote, austere environments, combat zones, disaster zones, where our solution, our small filtration solution, and our training methodology can provide that access, right?
And so we're not a huge nonprofit.
And this is what I love about us, is we are a small team.
John Rose, the founder, kind of coined the phrase guerrilla humanitarianism, which I love, especially with the connection to unconventional warfare.
I love that guerrilla thought process.
And you just mentioned the connection to unconventional warfare.
For those who don't know what civil affairs is, how does guerrilla humanitarianism connect to unconventional warfare?
Just the term guerrilla, right?
Like the idea of upsetting the mainstream, of overthrowing that nascent power, right?
And that's what a guerrilla fighter is when you look at unconventional warfare, which is the art of overthrowing a country.
And so when you look at guerrilla humanitarianism, what we mean is we are that...
Turning that on its head.
We're turning up the basic, the large-scale nonprofit, the large NGO, non-governmental organization, large system, humanitarian process, and we're just going to find the people that aren't getting reached by that process, and we're going to go do it ourselves.
And sometimes that means we're just going to go...
We'll jump on the back of a race truck in Dakar or we'll get on a small boat and head deep into the Amazon and jump across the border from Brazil into Colombia or from Peru and Colombia to Peru.
We'll make it happen because that's what we do.
And so it is.
It's bring access to clean water to the forgotten ones, to those that are not getting it through the larger systems, either through government or through those larger humanitarian systems that focus on large problems like Flint and Jackson, Mississippi and Red Hill, which I know is close to your heart.
It's really where the systems that are supposed to provide large infrastructure and support don't work, and they're not reaching that for whatever reason.
So we're going to plug that gap, right?
We're not a long-term infrastructure solution, but we're a 15- to 20-year solution that maybe gives time for infrastructure to catch up.
Right.
You know what's interesting about those three examples that you gave of Flint, Jackson, and Red Hill here in Hawaii.
For those who don't know, Red Hill is kind of the moniker for this site that's been used since World War II, frankly, where there were over 20 massive underground fuel tanks.
That were put in place and it is a hill that kind of overlooks Pearl Harbor and so they were constructed very quickly with the idea that they would have these underground pipes that let gravity do its work and feed that fuel down to the ships and to the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.
World War II. Fast forward, here we are in 2023 And for years and years now, this very antiquated system has been leaking fuel, which is a problem in and of itself, but it is a huge problem because these underground fuel tanks were built over one of our three water aquifers on the island.
And this is such an unfortunate situation on its own.
Throughout my time in Congress, I was calling on them to...
Basically, do what is necessary to make it so that these tanks are un-leakable or shut them down.
The Navy stonewalled us time and time again, hid the fact that there were multiple leaks taking place, had no transparency, And frankly, they've lost the trust of the people here in Hawaii because of their arrogant approach and their unwillingness to do the right thing.
So we've gotten to a place now where finally the Navy has been forced to commit to shutting these tanks down because they can't protect They can't protect the water and because we just had another massive leak that resulted in, you know, people who were bathing their, people on base, on Pearl Harbor, you know, giving their baby a bath in the sink.
Meanwhile, there was fuel toxins coming out of that water, babies breaking out in rashes, people being rushed to the hospital, pets getting sick, all kinds of stuff.
And even then, while that was happening, the Navy still denied that it was a problem.
Oh.
We had that same issue when I was in Louisiana, even, where we took my brand new daughter in, born down there, and she had eczema, just brutal eczema.
We took her in there like, when are you leaving?
Like, well, we'll be out of here in about six months.
They're like, just wait.
The second you leave, it'll go away.
Oh my gosh.
And so it's brutal.
I mean, I've seen these throughout my career, and I know you have as well, is where...
You know, there's always that mission-focused attitude, which is one of the things I loved about the military, right?
We're going to make the mission happen no matter what.
But when you get to, you're not really in the mission, you're in that support side to the mission.
And sometimes politics starts to play, personal careers start to play, and then transparency gets hit.
And it's just like, hey, this is too big of a problem for us to deal with.
The next guy that takes over for me in the next year can take over for it.
We'll deal with it then.
And the soldiers and their families pay the price.
That's exactly what happened.
You know, I was in Congress for eight years, and so I saw all of these different admirals coming in and shifting out really every couple of years.
And every one of them would sit there and say, oh, we understand the seriousness of the situation, but really absolutely nothing, nothing would happen.
And the problem perpetuated and it brought us, unfortunately, to this point where a lot of people got really sick and suffered.
As a result.
But I think that's the thing, though, is with these different examples, you have, by the way, I don't know, this is not a fuel leak, but just, I think it was in November of this past year, there was 1,100 gallons of the PFAS firefighting foam that was spilled where?
At Red Hill, again, right over where the water aquifers are.
So, This has been a perpetual problem.
We saw the same thing in Flint, Michigan where the government stonewalled the people who were getting poisoned there.
I mention these different examples because you talk about forgotten places and forgotten people.
People who aren't being served by some of the biggest institutions, whether they be government, business, or non-profit.
But one of the big challenges that we have here at home in the United States where we should have these biggest, most powerful institutions working to solve these problems because it's not like we don't have the smarts, the engineering, the ingenuity, the resources to be able to do it.
They exist.
They're just not being channeled towards actually solving these problems and in a lot of cases are part of the problem, like you said, whether it's self-protectionism or careerism or frankly, it's just not a priority and they don't care because it's not their kid who's breaking out in a rash and having to go to the hospital, which is really sad to just put it bluntly, but that's often the situation that we find ourselves in.
We've got a lot of forgotten people here Who aren't being served.
What are the challenges that Waves for Water has as this guerrilla humanitarian non-profit?
I'm sure there are others who are in similar places.
Why is it that you can go to Ukraine?
You can go to different countries in Asia.
You can go to countries around the world and deploy the solutions, whether they be short-term, medium-term, long-term solutions.
To give people access to clean water, but your hands are tied behind your back to actually help people right here in our own backyard.
So when you look at our solution, and really when you look at it, it's a small filtration system that does all of your bacteria, cysts, protozoa, typhoid, all that cholera, all that nasty stuff that provides about 80% of the water contamination in the world.
So it creates a large swath of problem sets for us to attack.
The challenge is, is when you look at that system, one, in most...
In most first world countries, you're not going to want to take the very system that we use, which is a simple five-gallon bucket or a larger cistern, attach a filter to it and fill your water up every day.
That is a huge step that's difficult for people in the first world to address.
They oftentimes rather go buy the bottled water and wait and be like, hey, why hasn't this been fixed?
Because it feels like a step down.
So that's one issue that we run into here in the U.S. is our system doesn't really fit with where we are as a society.
Got it.
Right?
And number two is there's regulation.
And so often what we use in areas where there's maybe a heavier contamination that our system can't take is we look very heavily towards rain catchment.
So here in the U.S., we do work with the Lakota Sioux.
We also work with the Navajo, and we worked with them through COVID. We're able to set up rain catchment systems that then trap the water in a system and then use that filter to filter out any bacteria from that collection system, which works great, but you can't actually legally do rain catchment in the United States.
Then you run into the regulation and you run into competing lobbies and everything else that goes into managing large essential services.
Water being We're good to go.
Just ideas, just crazy.
He came up with an entire idea.
I think it was to use one of the larger sports stadiums as a collection mechanism, bottling and filtering all the water.
I was like, this is great, but there's no way this is going to go.
He had the entire thing drawn out.
like this would actually work but again it's just not one of those things and also and this is the challenge and especially as a small non-profit like we have to decide where we are going to put our resources and so not that the people in flint michigan and all these other areas aren't deserving it's that if we put our resources there that come from our donors the people that are supposed to put resources there it gives them another chance to step back put a little bit of money in their pocket and not deliver on the promises and the oath that they took to take care of those that that population.
And so it's a tough one, right? - Yeah. - And these are decisions that are made all the time where, how do we manage this?
How do we do this?
Where do we want to apply our resources?
Where are we going to have the biggest impact?
Where is it going to be close to who we are as an organization?
And really, what is going to come out on the backside?
And are we giving influence and leverage?
Because you can only imagine if we went to Flint and like, hey, we're bringing in a filter for every household and a rain catchment for every household, standing right next to me to do that would be the councilwoman or the councilman and the mayor and Every single person that was responsible for getting these things fixed, standing there taking credit and being like, look what I brought to you.
You're welcome.
And it's something that we have to avoid and pay attention to as a non-profit.
Because water is influence.
Water is life, but water is influence.
And you know this as well as I do on the mission sets you've been on.
Yeah.
We'll just show real quick on this screen we have from your website, from Waves for Water, some of the different systems you have and the things that you've used to deploy to different places.
And just to highlight your point, water is life.
Here in Hawaii, our Honolulu Board of Water Supply, their motto that's on all of their trucks and vehicles is ka vai ola, which means water for life.
But it is.
It is that singular thing that none of us, no human life, no life can survive without a lot of other things.
We might be struggling and suffering and we might go hungry for a little while, but water is that singular thing that is absolutely essential.
Yeah.
Was it three days?
Three days.
Three days.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So what was the genesis behind Waves for Water?
How did it start, and what was kind of the problem that was identified that drove the beginning of this organization?
Oh, man.
So I hope I do John's story justice, because it really is.
Like, the first time he told it to me, I loved it.
So John was a professional surfer and was on his way out of surfing.
And so as he's trying to figure out what he's going to do, he traveled to so many really cool communities surfing around the world.
He's like, I want to find a way to give back.
But in a little bit more of a selfish way, I also want to go back and surf my family.
my favorite breaks and not tell my boss that, "Hey, I'm going surfing.
I'm actually going to do humanitarian aid." So I love that part of the story.
It's a little bit of altruism and a little bit of, "I've got to find the right break," which you know as a surfer, once you find a good break, you're not giving it up.
And so John was out on a surf trip, kind of had pondered this and his idea.
So he went to Sumatra, and he ended up bringing just outside the city of Padang.
That's in Indonesia.
In Indonesia.
And he brought 10 filters.
And so his whole plan was I'm going to surf for a little bit, then I'll go drop these filters off.
Uh, and so they're out on the boat, long day surfing an offshore break.
Uh, and they decide, you know what, we're just going to sleep on the boat.
We're not going to come in.
And that night a huge earthquake hits.
Like they look on shore and like the city is on me.
It's pedangs 2.2 plus million people.
Uh, and like the hotel they were in has dropped and everything.
And John in a moment is like, Hey, take me ashore.
I've got these filters.
And so the captain's like, what are you doing?
And like, what do you mean?
I'm not going to take you ashore.
Like, Everything is burning.
And he's like, no, take me ashore.
So he gets ashore.
He finds a guy with a moped.
He's like, I've got these filters.
And the guy with the moped is like, all right, hey, let's go.
And so he took him to a casualty collection point.
And so this is where all the doctors are working on every single major casualty from this huge disaster it brought in.
And he basically goes, okay, cool.
And he starts showing the doctors, hey, I can make clean water.
And they're like, perfect.
And in my mind, I'm like, oh great, we're going to give water to the people that are injured.
No, this went to cleaning all of the tools and all of their instruments and preventing bacterial infection because in this moment, you think about it, you're working on hundreds and thousands of casualties and there's nothing that can take care of your tools and maintain a clean environment except now you have this pro surfer who brought in some water filters, like the old ceramic dome drip water filters where he could create clean water.
So he went collection point to collection point to collection point, saved water I think it was over 50,000 lives in that afternoon.
And then that was the beginning of it.
And so he went back, kind of worked on it, and then ended up going after the Haiti earthquakes, going to Haiti for living there for two plus years, connecting with some military foreign area officers that worked down there, and just really working out the methodology of train the trainer, small footprint, large impact, filtration-based training small footprint, large impact, filtration-based training that has been the genesis of Waves for Water ever since.
And so that brought John all the way forward.
And then how I came into the picture was John went to Afghanistan with a good friend of mine from 25th ID in Hawaii.
And so he actually was in Afghanistan as a company commander and was looking through Surfer Magazine and saw an article on John in Haiti and was like, we have a water problem here in Afghanistan.
This would be great.
And I love the story from both their sides.
You have Mike, my friend, calling him from Afghanistan, from Kunar.
And then you have John on the other side driving down PCH. It's like, hey, this is Captain Mike Brabner, commander of the Wolfhounds.
And he's like, what?
Who are you?
He's like, I'm calling you from Afghanistan.
You got a minute?
And so they end up going over to Afghanistan, doing work.
And then this was, I want to say, 2011. And so...
They're finished their trip.
Mike finishes deployment.
I'm getting ready to go to Afghanistan in 2012. And they give me a shout.
Mike's like, look, if you're going to Afghanistan, you have to do this waves for water thing.
He's like, it was a huge win.
I was like, all right, I'll give it a shot.
So I jump on the phone.
I talk to John a little bit.
He sends me a few filters.
But I'm fully vested in the mission set.
I'm going over with a small team, a few Navy SEALs, my team.
It's like 20 people in the middle of the mountains.
There's nothing else around us.
What was your specific mission set there?
Yeah, so our mission was to basically degrade the networks that the Taliban was using to basically run shadow governance and also basically establish security, education, and infrastructure in all these small villages in the mountains of Afghanistan.
And so I was in Zabul, the Argandot River Valley, and we went village to village, basically living in a small camp in the middle of the mountains.
And then we would go village to village trying to get them to build up their own security element like a local police force.
Try to start schools and work internally, be like, hey, you can stand on your own.
Like you don't have to rely on the national government, which we think we all know even in 2012.
We're like, well, we'll see how far the national Afghani government is going to go.
But here, we try to create these own systems so that they can manage themselves and be less open to the influence of the Taliban.
Because for them at that time, it was kind of the choice between one and the other, right?
You're either going to try to rely on this national government that's still trying to figure things out and a lot of corruption, or you're going to have to rely on this shadow government that the Taliban had in place.
And it worked both ways.
What a lot of people don't understand, especially in the mountains, seasons dictate a lot of fighting.
This isn't Iraq where it was warm pretty much all the time except for one month out of the year.
When the snow comes in and the pass is closed, Nobody's coming in to fight.
And so you have this entire fighting season.
So I got there in January of 2012. And basically all the way through spring, we made a lot of headway.
We opened up a lot of white space.
Because that was not fighting season.
Because it was not fighting season, right?
You could basically take a snowboard to climb up the mountain and ride down a little bit.
And so we're able to build relationships and expand our influence, and then fighting season happens, you get this entire flow of fighters coming in from Pakistan, and you have these people are stuck in between two people just battling it out.
And they have to play both sides, and they had to do their best.
I remember having a conversation.
We'd started four or five small schools, which, I mean, a school is a chalkboard by the river and a few people there.
Very little support from the national government, just enough to get them books.
And then I remember having this conversation with who was kind of a local Taliban guy, but was willing to just, he just wanted to do the best by his community.
And then when the shadow came, he's like, hey man, I have to stop.
He's like, I love that we did this, but we can't do it anymore.
He's like, they're coming in.
He's like, I have to choose between you two.
You're 10 miles away from me.
You come out every day, but you're 10 miles away from me.
Like, this isn't going to work.
And he's like, they're going to kill me and my family.
So we have to shift.
And I was like...
It was the most honest conversation I had in that 11 months I was there, 10 months I was there.
Because he was just like, I would love to keep doing this, but I have to turn it off.
I have to stop.
And I understand it.
And I saw the same thing in Iraq, and you see the same thing everywhere in the world where it's just trying to make a decision.
I feel like I've gone completely off topic here.
No, you haven't.
You haven't.
You're painting the full picture of your trip to Afghanistan and how this new connection between you and Waves for Water was coming into play.
I appreciate you bringing me back on.
So Afghanistan, it ended up being too kinetic of an environment for me to bring.
I mean, we had a small package of 20 US. I couldn't bring in four or five guys and a videographer.
It just didn't fit.
And in the mountains, water wasn't as big of an issue, so I just couldn't justify it.
Sure.
I finished the Afghanistan trip.
John and I kind of came and kept in touch.
And then we bumped to, it's kind of funny, it's actually similar to your story and how you and I connected, is that I moved to Bosnia and I'm working out of the embassy in Sarajevo.
And I happened to be there during the hundred year floods in 2000, beginning 2014.
And so my team got trapped in the flood plane.
We eventually coordinate a lot of international response.
We get out of the floodplain up north, get back down to Sarajevo.
And as we start kind of laying out the map, and I meet with the ministers of health, I was like, Hey, where are the issues?
There's about 15 communities that are completely cut off.
And it's just their water, most of their water systems are open source.
So think of like a small pond or lake outside just up the hillside from your village.
So gravity fed down.
Well, once all the rain hits, it washes a ton of contamination into that and just immediately contaminates it.
And landslides cut it off so they couldn't get a resupply.
So we're like, oh, this looks perfect for a filtration system.
So kind of like you did, like, hey, where's that filter guy?
Yeah, exactly.
So I called back.
I was like, what's his name?
And so I called John.
I was like, hey, I don't know if you remember me.
We chatted a little bit in 2012. Do you want to come to Bosnia and work with me here?
He's like, I'm in.
And he got a duffel bag full of filters, flew over with a cool videographer, and I borrowed, stole, borrowed a Bosnian helicopter and pilots.
I mean, like...
Interesting choice of words.
I thought you were going to say like, you know, a motorcycle, a car to pick him up from the airport.
Nope.
It was borrowed, but it was, you know, you build relationships.
And you're like, hey, I need a helicopter.
And the commander there's like, oh, fine, take him.
He'll be fine.
It'll be great.
And so I showed up and this guy barely spoke English.
At least at the time, I thought he barely spoke English.
She was like 50 years old, standing outside a helicopter that's twice his age.
I mean, this was a UH-1 Huey.
The door was orange.
There were Post-it notes.
The GPS on the inside of it was like an old TomTom Aviation GPS.
I can't make this up.
And there's a great video.
You can see me talking to him.
I don't think you can see the fear on my face.
But I'm talking to him.
He's like, yes, I will fly you to here.
And then we will fly it here.
Good.
Do we have this video?
I think I forgot.
I'll send it over to you.
It's on YouTube for just Waves for Water Bosnia.
And so you can see he and I talking.
He's like, yes, I will fly you here.
And we get in and he just kind of gives me a thumbs up and then he just takes off.
And we fly into the mountains and the mountains of Bosnia are crazy.
Let's just stop for a second.
I think we're gonna be real quick The worst rainfall to hit the Balkans in living memory the government in Bosnia has been comparing the destruction to that of the country's Yeah, it was it was a mess struggling to cope with the scale of the disaster with more than a million homes cut off from clean water supplies.
Water of Bosnia's four million people are without clean water.
The spread of disease is the latest concern of the authorities.
Is this next part your waves for water video?
Waves for Water was ultimately born out of disaster.
You get a little bit of the history here from John.
...that struck the city of Padang in Sumatra.
What we've realized is how tight-knit The surfing community is in a time of crisis.
Since then, we've responded to nine more disasters, including Hurricane Sandy, a huge tsunami in Japan, and more recently the catastrophic floods in Bosnia.
I apologize for this up front.
This was my first time on video, so it's terrible.
Stop.
The scope of the floods has been the worst they've seen in about 150 years.
And you're a civil affairs team leader at this time?
Yep.
That helicopter's a beaut.
We decided to work in both Orajovice and Brodots.
Those two small isolated communities were fairly self-sufficient, but lacked their own capacity to provide clean water for the people.
Bet your heart was beating pretty fast at that point.
The second place where we go to land, you'll see the LZ and you won't believe it.
You drink so I drink.
This place.
On the hillside.
Poster stamped.
So you had a skillful pilot then?
He was unreal.
Look how close he is to that building.
Yeah, I know.
That's really close.
Fill it up and clean it.
It's perfectly potable.
I don't think the victims in Bosnia have any idea about surfing.
But I can tell you, they're incredibly grateful.
That's awesome.
It was so rad.
I cannot explain.
Giving me goosebumps just watching that.
It changed my life.
It absolutely changed my life.
And there's two reasons.
One, that pilot cracked me up.
Because he pretended not to speak English for almost an entire day.
And so we're landing.
He wanted to check you out first.
Oh, 100%.
He was just having fun.
He was like, oh, you pulled me away from my family.
My boss is telling me I have to fly this random American and his water guy around the country.
And so we hopped in.
He put us on a postage stamp.
I'm on comms, I'm looking out, and I'm watching us, and I've landed in a lot of crazy places on a helicopter.
That Huey barely fit, and it's a school on one side and power lines on the other three sides.
Oh my gosh.
And the side of a mountain, and he dropped it right in the center of it.
And John is like, this is amazing!
I'm like, we're going to die.
We're going to die right now.
This is it.
And we land, and the pilot, right after that, turns and looks at me and goes, how'd you like my landing?
Perfect.
I was like, "You've got to be messing with him." He had something like 3,000 hours in the Bosnian War.
It was nuts.
But that experience, what I really loved about that is I went back to the country team meeting after doing four of these different missions and spoke to the charge day affair, the ambassador, the whole crew, and was like, "Hey, we were able to provide access to clean water to 25,000 It was the most tangible impact I had in my military career because I've done, I don't know how many raids in Iraq.
I don't know how many, you know, 600 plus combat missions.
You were an infantryman before you became a civil affairs officer.
So I was an infantryman in Iraq for 15 months in 07, 08. And so I don't know how many recon missions, I don't know how many raids, I don't know how many combat missions I've led or been on.
It's 600, 700 in my career.
But the most tangible impact where it's like, hey, I did something.
I've removed people from the battlefield.
I've adjusted the space.
But you don't feel that.
You're like, okay, this is great.
And the next day starts the same.
After four days of doing this with Waves for Water, we'd physically changed the landscape of our influence in the space, and we had provided life-saving aid to 25,000 people in four days.
It changed, and I remember being able to brief that, and it was the first time in every briefing I'd ever done where I was like, this is what my team did.
And it changed my life.
And it was such a positive impact.
I've taken that with me since then.
And that was how John and I met.
We became friends.
And thankfully, he reached out to me in 2015 with the idea of starting the Clean Water Corps.
And it's just been a sprint ever since.
It's been amazing.
One of the things that I really love about your sharing that story and your experience is it exemplifies what is the best of the Special Operations ability to go and deploy small teams to solve very real problems and help people.
To build those relationships, to identify a problem that can provide a lasting solution and empower people where they are towards working those, you know, the short-term filter solution but working that towards a long-term solution.
It's a sustainable solution that empowers them.
It's not somebody else coming in and saying, okay, well you just step aside and we're going to do this for you.
And having the flexibility to be able to do exactly what you did.
To go and grab like, okay, who do I need?
What do I need?
Find me a way to get there and just go and actually do it.
And not getting stuck in all the freaking red tape bureaucracy of this or that or whatever.
And people being served.
And helped in the process.
And those people who've been helped, that memory of what you were able to do is a reflection of how they view what we stand for as a country.
That you would be able to go do that.
Absolutely.
And what I love about being a soft team leader is...
You get four guys.
A soft CA team is four people, right?
So I have four people, limited resources, and a giant problem set.
And it's just like, go forth and do great things.
Figure it out.
Figure it out.
Exactly.
And the best part about this, and I liked what you said from the soft community, the key phrase that sticks heavily with what we do at Waves for Water 2 is buy with and through.
Mm-hmm.
I can't do it by myself.
I'm not 150 people.
I'm not a battalion of 1,800 people.
I'm not all these resources.
I'm four people that can make some phone calls and be creative.
And so that means you find local partners, you train them, you work by them, you work with them, you bring resources to them, and then the impact is done through them.
And that is what we do.
We train the trainer at Waves for Water.
I love it.
I've gone to countries four or five times, and then I don't have to go back.
Because the program itself is running.
The people on the ground have it.
They own it.
They are providing clean water to their own communities, not some random white guy from Idaho that's flying in on a plane for two weeks.
I love that more than anything.
It just allows us also to not get bogged down in large infrastructure.
It allows us to stay light, and it allows us to have such a clarity of mission and purpose that it's incredibly important.
And you've enlisted a lot of, we'll get into the surfing aspect in a little bit, but you've brought on and actually created a program under the Waves for Water umbrella that you talk about purpose, and our brothers and sisters in uniform, you know, once they step away from that life, Are often caught in a position of feeling purposeless.
Like, okay, I've just literally dedicated my life towards serving this greater good, towards serving the country and fulfilling this bigger mission.
Now what?
That's the question, right?
Now what?
What does this look like?
Because it's not like there's this entire runway of like, hey, let's work you out of this.
Let's do a few small things to wean you off of the last 10 years of your life of doing nothing but a mission focus with a team.
It doesn't happen.
So how have you been able to help answer that question for people?
Yes.
So that's the Clean Water Corps.
And that's why John brought me into Waves for Water.
And I'll never forget the phone call.
He's like, hey, I want to build a veteran division inside of Waves for Water, and I want you to help.
I was like, I'm in.
Sold.
I don't care what it takes.
I'm in.
I'm done with active duty.
You don't get a call like that every now and then.
And so when it popped up, I looked at my wife.
I was like, it's time.
This is what we're going to do.
We're leaving active duty.
It's time to go do this.
And it...
The Clean Water Corps has turned into, and there's a lot of stories to go into it, and I'll hit a few, but the baseline of the Clean Water Corps is to bring in the skill sets of veterans to enable Waves for Water's mission to be even more aggressive, right?
Go to the more dangerous areas, go to the more rough areas, take the skills that we have and apply that to the global water crisis, right?
That's one.
And then two, which is kind of an initiative into itself, is provide purpose, a clear mission, and a team and support structure for veterans after leaving active duty and military service.
Because that is so critical.
The loss of identity when you take away a person's team, mission, and purpose is catastrophic.
You can't count the number of people that I've watched go down the bottle or just depression and everything that happens post-military service.
And worse yet, our friends who take their own lives because they feel like they have no purpose, no reason to live anymore.
Exactly.
Far too familiar with that piece.
I think that becomes a...
It's gone down to about every other quarter nowadays, but at one point it was like, every other month, here's a phone call.
Another one didn't make it.
And it's...
So being able to build that structure and that system, and right now we have 40 veterans as members of Clean Water Corps.
We've been doing it for five years now.
Oh, God.
No, let me do the math.
I still can't believe it's 2023. I know.
So we founded in 2016. The end of 2016, our first mission was 2017. Okay.
So we're at almost six years, six years now, of Clean Water Corps missions.
And really, we've built a small family and community that allows us to lean on each other.
And a big moment for me, and I think this describes the Clean Water Corps as best as I can, is so during the hurricanes in Puerto Rico, so we went down after Hurricane Irma.
Yeah, right.
We'll go back to 2017 because this is really where it clicked for me.
So we went down there following Hurricane Irma and went to the U.S. Virgin Islands, the British Virgin Islands, did some work there.
Amazing time.
Great, great, great work.
And while we're down there, Hurricane Maria popped up in the Atlantic.
And this is where I gained a lot of respect for surf and the craft of reading storms.
I didn't even understand that because I was down there with two great surfers, Dylan Graves and Ben Bourgeois.
And before we even got off the plane in the Virgin Islands, they're like, do you see this popping up?
And I'm looking at – I have no idea what they're looking at.
And they're like, oh, this is going to be a big one.
I'm like, how do you even know this?
But so while we're down there, we work for about three or four days and then Hurricane Maria pops up and we know it's going to hit the St. Croix.
We know it's going to go into Puerto Rico.
Part of the team with me was Puerto Rican surfers.
And so John and I got together.
We're like, hey, let's split.
So John stayed with the team on St. Croix.
I went with Otto Flores and the other Puerto Rican contingent up to Puerto Rico.
And then we rode out Hurricane Maria.
So my 36th birthday was riding out.
I think at that point when it hit San Juan, it was a cat four, a storm, which a guy from the mountains, that was an experience to say the least.
I'm sure.
We sat there.
I watched water start coming through the walls.
I'm just talking to Otto like, hey man, is this what's supposed to happen?
He goes, oh yeah, this is fine.
Don't worry about it.
Like the walls bleed like that during a hurricane.
I'm just watching cars roll down the street.
I'm like, this is mind blowing to me.
And really the next day is where it started, right?
The novelty, it's the same thing with combat.
Gunfight's great.
But then the next day, you're like, oh, the adrenaline's gone.
Now I'm dealing with what happened.
Where are we at?
And so it's the same thing.
I remember walking out of the hotel we stayed in to kind of get to a little better shelter and walking out to just absolute destruction.
Going and getting Otto's car, getting his family, his kids, finding a place to stay, like calling people from Airbnb and like, hey, yeah, they're like, yeah, you can go in, but like you can't get in there.
It's like, oh, I'm going to lean back and break into an apartment building now.
Like, oh, let me lean back on the skills I gained at Sears School and let's figure this out.
And going through that process, and really it was amazing for me.
I remember after doing this, getting settled, working incredibly hard for six or seven months, finding a light at the end of the tunnel.
We've made progress.
We've helped at this point.
I think we'd helped maybe 50,000 or 60,000 people.
We were really, really moving.
It was just a beautiful thing to be a part of.
I remember sitting on Wilderness, a few of my team members out there, Jorge and Jose, surfing.
I remember sitting there and realizing that Is Wilderness a surf spot?
It is.
Oh, it's beautiful.
You've got to go do it.
Wilderness is on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico.
Absolutely beautiful.
Great break.
Rincon is the famous one.
Rincon is the famous one.
It's probably the crowded one, too.
Hobos is one of my favorites because I'm a terrible surfer.
And it's almost like the current basically just kicks you out right behind the break.
So it's as close to a chairlift as you're going to get in surfing.
Got it.
You take the break in and you just stay on your board and the current will pop you right back out behind the break.
It's the lazy gringo surf spot.
It's great.
That's not a bad thing.
But it's super fun.
And then Wilderness is another one just up the coast from it and it's beautiful.
But I remember sitting on the back of Jorge's truck and realizing that the experience of going through that disaster and not just doing it and the same thing in the military where you go hit a village and then you leave.
Where you go talk to somebody or you fly into a village in Bosnia and you provide help and then you leave and you don't go back.
You get to put a band-aid on it or you get to cause the issue and the trauma and then you walk away and you do your best and then six months later you rotate out and somebody else comes in.
Being able to be a part of that recovery was unbelievable for me.
It showed me how much I had lost in the way of compassion, empathy, what a cynic in the world I'd come with just from what I'd been exposed to in war and in disaster.
And I think probably for the first time in a long time I kind of just sat there and cried.
And then I wrote and I realized that not just for me but the impact on my family because I had gone from one mission to another.
I'd gone from Iraq to Afghanistan to Europe to a training post and then out and now went right into building the Clean Water Corps and travel after travel after travel.
And I didn't realize that I never took two seconds to realize that I was as broken as anybody else.
So when I thought I was building the Clean Water Corps for the other veterans, because I was fine.
I was great.
I was moving 100 miles an hour.
I was successful.
It was great.
I didn't realize that I built it for myself.
And in that moment, I was like, this may have helped other people, but in the end, it saved me.
And that, to me, was the most eye-opening thing it could be and really pushed me like, hey, this needs to go forward.
Because if I built it thinking I was helping everybody else and it showed me where I was at and it helped my family and my relationship with my kids and my wife...
What can it do for other people?
And that's really where we just kind of took off.
And I've been so lucky to have some of the most talented people on the planet jump on the Clean Water Corps piece with me and really make it what it is today and where we're going to go next.
That's such a beautiful and powerful realization because it speaks to...
I mean, you're talking about the experience of service members and veterans very specifically.
And how, what you realized about yourself, but also about what could actually help others.
But for those who are listening or watching who don't have a military background, I mean, the underlying problem is one that...
We all feel at different times in our lives where you can go 100 miles an hour every day.
You can chase this goal or that objective or that title or that degree or that bonus at your job or whatever it is.
But ultimately, when you really just stop for a moment, often unless you're spending that time Doing something that is truly fulfilling, helping others, serving others, serving that higher purpose, that bigger mission, you end up just empty.
You end up feeling empty.
Yeah, chasing money is not a purpose.
Exactly.
And I've realized that a lot.
And it doesn't make you happy.
No, not at all.
The importance of one's, for the person, of having an identity and a purpose is so...
I think that has to be nested in more than your job, more than the things that we can't control.
It has to be nested in what you want to accomplish and what you want to do.
It's interesting because what I learned a ton from this was how much me leaving the military actually affected my wife, Tiffany, my spouse.
Because When I left, I went right into working for Waves.
And she did what she's done.
She's held down the, oh my god, I cannot even...
If you've never been a part of the military, you don't understand the weight that a military spouse carries.
You can't.
When I went to Iraq, I left and she was four months pregnant.
I got an email that I was a dad.
I went to Afghanistan and she deals with...
Kids, sickness, crisis, death, catastrophe on multiple levels, and all I have to do is execute the mission I've got to do today, hit the gym, get a little bit of food, and get ready to do it again the next day.
It's so much more complicated.
What I look back on, and I kick myself that I didn't understand this, is when I left active duty, I lost my identity, but I jumped right into a new one.
She lost that military spouse identity, so all of a sudden I'm traveling the world doing waves for water, and there's no one there to support her.
There's no structure.
There's no one else to commiserate because there's always a group of military spouses that can rely on each other.
And so she lost her identity overnight and I didn't even notice.
It took two years for me to look back and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Wait a minute.
What is this?
How did I miss this?
She just literally, for lack of a better term, suffered in silence and just tried to figure it out as she was holding down the house.
And so that led to really figuring out that, like, hey, this is so much more important because I can look at it from, you know, we can have the discussion from a veteran's perspective, PTSD experiences.
She didn't experience all those things, but she carried such a level of stress and support and continuous, like, rely on her for everything, right?
And it's that...
That created an identity and a purpose in her that was also gone the second that I left the military.
And that's so often overlooked.
So we've tried to find ways to also integrate the military spouse piece into it.
We have a program that we've been trying to fundraise for in Nepal, which is geared towards some of our female veterans and military spouses to get them out the door to get the experiences in the team that we get and bring them into a tighter fold to try to create that community because it's just so important.
And again, I kick myself for not even having noticed.
It's the way it goes sometimes.
But you did, and when you had this realization, I think that's what I appreciate about you, Rob, is that you didn't just like, oh, gosh, well, now I get it.
Okay, let's move on.
You've actually taken action to do what you've done throughout your professional life, certainly, is just like, okay, how do we actually start to solve this and pay that forward to help other people?
To be able to do the same.
And I think that's what's so amazing about the Clean Water Corps is that you're providing that sense of purpose and providing that open door to other service members and spouses to feel that sense of happiness and fulfillment that really truly only comes from when you're dedicating yourself to serving and helping others.
And I know throughout the time we've known each other Whenever I've called you and asked you, like, oh, how's it going?
What you're up to?
Like, waves for water.
You're not making a lot of money from waves for water, if any.
And always, whenever it's like, oh, what are you up to?
You, like, bumble through and mention these other things that you're doing to pay the bills.
Yep.
But really, your passion is to serve.
And what I appreciate about Waves for Water is that there are so many different outlets for people to be a part of this, even if they can't go and deploy to another country themselves.
And to help execute that mission, you've got pro surfers who are supporting.
Talk a little bit about the support network around you because I found out we have a lot of mutual friends in the surfing community.
Who are the hands that are helping to support and move this mission forward who may not physically be those boots on the ground?
You know, the surf community has absolutely blown me away.
And my experience with surf prior to wastewater and John Rose has been, you know, I lived a couple months on Ponto in San Diego and would basically just get rolled over every time I could chance, or every time I could, because I just tried to teach myself to surf.
Terrible.
Getting to know the surf community, and John and I talk about this all the time, is there is a lot of similarities between a special operator and a surfer.
The ability to go to a small community and get to know them, the ability to build a network and give back and just find a problem and solve it on their own, because the best surf breaks in the world aren't on a beach where you take a train to get there.
They're buried, and you have to work to get to it, and you have to have a network and a support structure.
It's been amazing.
The people that have supported this, John's crew and his network is phenomenal.
They are always there to support us, and he's done a great job of bringing in amazing commercial partners that have worked with us.
We're a very different organization.
We have never been able to, and John and I love this, we've never been the organization that's going to go out and just ask for money.
We've never been able to do that.
It's so hard to go out and just be like, hey, we do good things, please give us money.
So we've always tried to create programs and ways to involve people in the mission because I would rather have somebody that believes in what we do, can support us on the backside and provide a little bit of financial support to make it happen, than somebody that's sitting 1,000 miles away writing us a big check and just pretending...
Yeah, that's great.
And then, you know, posting it on their own piece.
So it's become a network of incredibly supportive individuals.
John's crew, I mean, I have to, like, specifically to names, Otto Flores, Dylan Graves, Ben Bourgeois, like, those guys have been everywhere, and they're amazing.
I've been lucky enough to have them try to push me into waves multiple times.
John and his crew, and just...
It's been amazing to be exposed to that.
And then one of my favorites is Gabriel Villaran.
He's a big wave surfer from Peru, become a good friend of mine.
And just every time I pick up the phone and make a phone call, I mean, he's a big time surfer, like a Red Bull athlete, incredible dude.
And I can pick up a phone call and whatever he's doing, he answers like, what do you need, man?
We're there.
It is just incredible to have the support of the surf community tied into it.
It's amazing.
What does it look like then?
One of the things that I wasn't surprised by but that I was impressed by was that when we got on the phone while I was deployed and I outlined the problem set to you, there was no hesitation.
You're like, yeah, of course we can help.
I've worked with a lot of non-profits, small and large.
It's hard to imagine most of those, I actually can't think of any off the tip of my tongue, who would not hesitate and would state with confidence, yes, we can do this mission in an active battle space in a country like Somalia.
So, first of all, awesome, and thank you.
And second of all, Walk me through, what does it look like for you?
So Somalia is one example, but you've gone and done others in other places.
What is the process?
What do you do from that point where you get the call saying, hey, we need your help.
Here's the situation, the people, the place, the risk involved.
What happens next?
Yeah, so it's such a smooth process.
I love it.
So once we get that call, right, either I get the call for a mission or John does, like, we get a quick phone call, like, hey, we're going to do this.
Cool.
What do we need?
Perfect.
So we initially, we find our local team, whoever that's going to be.
We make a few phone calls.
It usually takes two phone calls.
Like, the depth of the network is amazing.
So two phone calls, we have a local team member that can start to assess things on the ground.
And then we make sure, and this is the biggest one, right?
And this is where I lose a lot of, this is what I really like where we fit in the community.
If our system and our solution is not a good fit, we say no.
It's that simple.
I don't need to push a mission to get content.
I don't want to push a mission to do content.
I don't ever want to do a project just to do a project.
So that's the first thing.
Is this a viable solution?
Are we the right answer or should we put them in touch with somebody else?
That's one.
Two, can we do it?
That's a yes.
With the group of people we have, there is not one person in the crew where I was like, hey, can we do this deep and small?
Yes.
There's not even a hesitation.
Everyone is like, where are we going?
Antarctica?
Done.
I don't think they have an issue with water, but we can be Let's make it happen.
There's just not one person who's going to say no.
We're all like, cool, what's the challenge?
Because that's what we want.
How do we get there?
Let's make it happen.
So that process happens.
And then we look at funding.
And we're like, okay, so now we know what we take.
How much is it going to cost?
We're light.
We don't need to stay in a fancy hotel.
You don't have to take care of us.
Put us on the ground into the dirt and we'll do it.
And so we then look back and John has some great people that support us at small projects where he's like, hey, this is important.
We can make a phone call and they'll take care of it.
And that's what we did with Somalia.
I was like, hey, this is something we really want to do.
I think it's a great fit for the core.
I think it's a good project.
We reach back in and make a phone call and he's like, yep, done.
Can I just insert really quickly there?
You talk about how you guys, you know, you don't need to stay in fancy hotels.
You're happy to sleep in the dirt or, you know, wherever necessary.
There's a few places that I've been.
I know Syria is one.
Somalia is another.
Actually, specifically in Syria, I remember when I was there in early 2017 driving by a fancy Four Seasons-type hotel and learning very quickly that that is essentially where all of the big NGO, the non-governmental organization people like the UN types and others, that's where they live.
That's where they live.
It's not like, okay, we'll go stay there for a week.
And so when you look at the amount of overhead that so many of these organizations have, whether they be the NGO, UN types, or if they are some of the very big non-profits, that's the thing when I'm looking at, okay, well, who do I want to support and contribute to?
Immediately I go there to like, okay, how much are you spending on overhead?
Because I've been to a lot of these places and I met with a lot of these people who have no problem, just themselves, like forget the organizational structure, but just as an individual, that you're okay with going and spending thousands of dollars a night, perhaps, Certainly a week, what to speak of month by month, to go and stay at this place when you're surrounded with the people you're supposed to be there to help and serve in squalor without clean water, without food, and so on.
It's such a stark, gosh, I don't know if dichotomy is the right word, but hypocrisy perhaps is the better word.
I remember after Hurricane Maria, my first real exposure.
I saw it with the UN working with them in Bosnia and other places.
But the Sheridan, and this blew my mind.
Maria hits and we're on the West Coast.
We were the first one on the West Coast.
We were providing filters to National Guard members who were living at the base because their command had left to go get support and hadn't gotten it so they hadn't come back.
I'm providing water filters to soldiers who don't have clean water.
I'm like, this is driving me insane.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so when we get back to San Juan and we're kind of resetting and we're in like Airbnbs we've broken into that don't have power and like we're making everything work.
And then sitting in the Sheridan Convention Center is every nonprofit, all the government, and they're the only ones with power, the only ones internet.
They've got a great sushi restaurant, a great bar, and it's just basically a party.
And they're doing all these coordination meetings.
I went to one and they're like, well, we're out here.
I was like, they're like, well, we can't get here.
I was like, I was there today.
Yeah.
They're like, oh, well, we'll see if we can make it.
And I'm like, I'm done.
Yeah.
I remember sitting in, and this really wrote the piece, when I first got back down to Sarajevo, I went from dirty and messy, I put a suit on, I went over to a meeting with the washcluster at the UN. What's the washcluster?
So WASH is water, sanitation, and hygiene.
And so this is the cluster system in large disasters.
Each cluster manages safe spaces, infrastructure.
Water, sanitation, and hygiene is where we fit in with the water project.
I went and sat in a room with 100 other NGOs.
You have the head of the WHO in the country that's on an elevated platform running the meeting.
Walking in, and I will never forget this, is this guy in a Bosnian guy, white t-shirt, sweated through with holding maps, rolled up maps, walking in.
You can tell he hasn't slept in days and he sits down and he's holding the maps.
And the WHO rep goes, hey, thank you very much for the Minister of Health from the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina for coming in.
We're going to start this cluster and go through.
Let's start on the left.
And I figured he would give us a sit temp and he would say, this is what I need.
And all the NGOs would be like, hey, I can do that.
I can do that.
Delineate it out.
No.
We started on the back corner and they were like, today I went here and I delivered backpacks.
Because each organization did its own thing.
And they basically could have drawn a circle around Sarajevo that was an hour.
And they just had started doing their own project where they could get to, where they could do it.
And it went on for about 30 minutes of just people being like, this is what I've done.
And I could see the guy up front who'd come in hopeful, holding all his maps and just get sad.
And I was finally like, I'm done.
I've been up in this.
I'm over it.
I stood up.
I was like, hey, I'm sorry.
Are we going to actually get to like the meat and potatoes of this?
Or what are you saying?
Yeah, we're going to get through everybody.
I was like, I don't have time for that.
Rob McQueen, U.S. Embassy, this is not how I'm going to do this.
If you need me, I'm going to go.
I handed my card to the minister and I was like, if you want anything from the U.S., call me and we'll work together.
I was just up there and I walked out of the room.
The WHO guy chased me out.
He's like, no, no.
I was like, stop.
This is unreal to me that we are wasting this guy's time in his country patting ourselves on the back.
I cannot be a part of this.
All he wanted was And this has been a frustration of mine forever.
All he wanted was a website that people could call into and say they lost their home, they lost somebody, they need water, they need power.
He just wanted somebody because those maps were red dots that have phone calls he'd been taking and his team had been taking in his little office for days.
And then I go into the WHO the next day.
He called me.
He's like, hey, come in for a meeting.
I'll show you what we have.
And he had this big, beautiful Palantir level heat map of aid and everything.
I was like, cool.
Can they access that?
And he goes, well, they don't have a license.
I was like, great, so this is nothing.
Like, the host nation country can't even read this beautiful multi-million dollar license system you have.
It's worthless.
And he goes, oh.
I was like, maybe just, can you build him a website?
And he goes, I don't have the funding for that.
I was like, I'm done.
I'm done.
I'm not coming back over here again.
And in order for, you talk about a license, in order for them to get access to it, to purchase the license...
Yep.
Not even an option.
Not even close.
It's crazy.
It's absolutely nuts.
But that's, again, that's why I love this job is because I don't have to do that.
I don't have to deal with that.
I get to find the people that have a need and I get to take my fellow veterans that want nothing more than to find a purpose and a mission and we get to go do it.
And it's amazing.
So when you called for Somalia, it was like, oh, done.
Absolutely done.
Plus I had a few friends that were already working over there.
So it was going to be a twofer.
It was great.
Yeah.
I think at different times I've told you, sign me up.
Tell me where we're going.
This is such an incredible thing.
I think the thing that I want to close on, because you said you guys don't ask people for money.
I would like to ask people if you appreciate the importance of clean water and if you appreciate this incredible service that's being performed by these guerrilla humanitarians, which I love that.
Such a good term.
Tell us where they can go and then just talk a little bit about how they can donate, how they can contribute to support, and then also just if you could talk about what their support would be going toward.
Yeah.
So go to wavesforwater.org and look and hit donate.
So the way that we like to do this and what I love is we create programs and projects that we believe are great causes.
And then you can then support those specific projects.
So it's not donating to a general piece.
piece.
It's not donating to the whole organization.
You are donating to a project and an impact that we are going to have.
So there's a few beautiful ones up there that I love.
One that's very close to my heart is a military spouse project.
So we have a network in Nepal of probably one of the most amazing women I've met who stood up an entire midwife network.
I think at this point, the only midwife network heading from Kathmandu up into the Himalayas.
And so we've set up a project with military spouses, my wife being one of them, helping design the project, and then also some of our female Clean Water Corps veterans to go support those midwife centers with clean water filtration systems.
And I think that's just an amazing project.
That's a huge one.
Also, we're trying to show you who we are and what we do.
In an effort to keep with that value proposition piece, we're going to do a fundraiser that is actually an opportunity.
If you donate to the fundraiser, you get an opportunity to come on a Clean Water Corps trip with me and one other Clean Water Corps veteran to Thailand.
We're going to do a project on the Myanmar border.
Which I've done work before.
We get to go back to a village, see the impact, and also do more.
And that's an amazing piece that'll happen later this year.
And so if you get a chance, donate to that fundraiser, and you have a chance to come and see what we do firsthand and do it with us.
But yeah, that's it.
That's us.
Amazing.
Thank you, Rob.
Thanks for your service to our country.
Thank you for your continuing to do all that you can to help and serve others.
And as I said when we opened this conversation, the mission of Clean Water is a personal one for me, and I just appreciate you and John, the organization, all the volunteers, and those who are supporting helping bring life to people through Clean Water.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tulsi.
Thank you so much for having me on and giving the opportunity to share what we do at Waves for Water and the Clean Water Corps.