Academy Award winner Matt Damon been busy in Toronto hosting a gala fundraising event for One x One and he also helps promote Debt AIDS Trade Africa and ONE.
The gala fundraising event was attended by Brad Pitt and featuring performances from singers John Legend, Raine Maida and Chantal Kreviazuk.
One X One was established in 2005 with an aim to improve the lives of children around the world.
Matt Damon and producing partner Marc Joubert are making a documentary about the lack of clean water in Africa in hopes of raising money and awareness.
Some women have to walk 10-12 kilometers a day in order to find fresh water.
And those are people who are lucky. I went and collected water with a girl there and we walked a couple miles to get the water and a couple miles back and she was lugging this water, she was incredibly strong. And the reason she was, is because she had access to clean drinking water.
As inconvenient as that was for her, and as much of her day that took up and took away from her studying, and took away from her time to focus on her life. Because that’s another thing, your chance for economic success down the road is determined by how much time you are spending on your own survival.
We don’t think about it, we go and get a glass of water and then we can go to school or read a book or do whatever we want. If a lot of our time spent is trying to just survive, that obviously takes away time for us just focusing on things that might just lift us out of poverty.
This girl that I met and collected water with had a chance because she had access to clean water. I asked her what she wanted to do when she got older, if she wanted to stay in her village. She broke out into a smile and said no, she wanted to go to the big city, to Moussaka in Zambia, and she said ‘I want to move to Moussaka and I want to be a nurse.