Hippo Attack Survivor Turns Trauma Into Charity, Selling Pottery to Help Kids

Samuel McKee was thirty years old and ten days into his honeymoon when a hippo tore open his abdomen in the Okavango Delta. He and his wife Anna, both raised in Whatcom County and married after meeting at a county fair when they were teenagers, had chosen Botswana for their adventure after their wedding in Portugal. The mokoro—a traditional dugout canoe—drifted away from the group as they paddled through the flooded plains to see native plants. Then the hippo came.

The animal struck him in the side with the force of a car collision. Anna watched her husband horizontal in the creature's jaws and made a choice. She waded through waist-deep water, screaming what she described as a primal noise of grief, and punched the hippo with everything she had. The animal released him and backed away. She pulled Sam from the water before another strike could come, before crocodiles could be drawn to the blood spreading through the lagoon.

Sam could see a smooth, purplish organ protruding from his back. He had lost sensation in one leg. He was certain he would die. But he focused on his breathing—the one thing he could control—and refused to accept that thought. Anna, from the swamp, began the desperate work of contacting family across time zones and the U.S. embassy. A medivac helicopter was arranged, but it would not arrive until sunrise. Sam spent thirteen hours without painkillers, hypothermic and feverish, waiting.

When the helicopter came, he had been eviscerated for eighteen hours. Surgery in South Africa revealed the full damage: a transverse colostomy to bypass his colon, fractured vertebrae and ribs, a laceration on his left leg, and a hole the size of a softball in his back. Miraculously, despite the contamination—lagoon water, blood, bile—he avoided sepsis and infection. Recovery took months. He was hospitalized in Johannesburg, then Seattle, then underwent physical therapy while his body learned to move again.

The first months of their marriage unfolded in hospital rooms and rehabilitation clinics. Sam, an active person accustomed to motion, found himself confined to a bed, his muscles atrophied. Back in Port Angeles, where they both now work remotely for Bellingham companies, Anna gave him an outlet: a membership to the local pottery studio. At first he could manage only ten or fifteen minutes at the wheel before cramping forced him to stop. But he kept returning. Making pottery with his wife became the experience he thought he would never have.

Sam decided to transform his survival into purpose. As a snowboarder, surfer, and skateboarder, he began selling his pottery to raise money for skateboards for underprivileged children. He named the venture Liberty's Charity after a friend who introduced him to skating. Within months, he had raised nearly fourteen hundred dollars. He and Anna wrote a book about the attack and its aftermath, documenting both the horror and the strength that carried them through it. Their website, simplesoulshine.com, reflects Sam's philosophy: soulshine is when happiness pours out of your body so completely that others feel it. The day before the hippo attack, he had been journaling about exactly that—about how fortunate he was and how he needed to pay it forward. Now he is doing exactly that.