Kory Wait

Kory Wait was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate. Growing up, despite his attempts to push that part of his life to the back of his mind, he worried about what others thought of it.

He assumed their thoughts were mostly negative – that he was weird, different, unfit to lead. At best, maybe his birth defect would be met with indifference. Wait had settled on those impressions until he went to Wilmington, North Carolina, to sample water for residents with private wells. There, he handed a water sampling kit to a resident that had something else to say.