“There are two things I want to do before I die:
Provide access to clean water and give people a
charity they can believe in.”
When he started to apply for volunteer
work in humanitarian organizations, every
single one turned him down. “They have
no interest in taking on a nightclub promoter to their mission,” he says. Finally,
he heard from one organization called
Mercy Ships, an international hospital
ship that provides lifesaving surgeries to
people without access to medical care.
“They called me and said, ‘If you’re
willing to pay us US$500 a month, you
can volunteer with us.” He boarded Mercy
Ships with 300 volunteers and headed for
Africa.
4.
He loves telling stories
through his lens.
With his passion to tell stories
through photography, he volunteered to
document Mercy Ships’ work through his
lens. Although he was ready to share each
patient’s story, he realized he wasn’t emotionally prepared for what he was about
to see. At the time, Mercy Ships can only
provide 1,500 medical surgeries, but close
to 7,000 people with medical conditions
showed up in the stadium. “Knowing that
more than 5,000 people will be turned
away was really hard,” he says. Then he
saw the first person in line—a boy named
Alfred with a giant tumor on his face. “I
just remembered looking at his eyes, and I
was terrified,” he says. “I ran into the
corner of the stadium—I lost it.”
Despite the initial shock, he soon realized how transformative it is to see
patients embraced back into their community after the surgery. “It was a really
unique position to be the photographer
and see unimaginable suffering, and then
see hope brought by these doctors and
volunteers who have served,” he says.
5.
On his second Mercy
Ships trip as a volunteer,
he learned of the immensity of the global water crisis
and was moved to do something about it.
Harrison’s second tour with Mercy Ships
brought him to Liberia, a country torn
by poverty and civil war for many years.
It was during this trip that he met an
engineer volunteer from Colorado who
dug up wells for rural communities and
showed him the immensely dirty water
sources from where people drink. He
couldn’t believe what he was seeing
and hearing about the lack of clean