Author Angie Kim shares that she was inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous book, The Little Prince, when she was a child in Seoul, Korea. Her attention riveted on these lines: “One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs and gleams. What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.”

No one knows this better than Sister Victoria Anyanwu.

In 2006, Sister Anyanwu, SC, a Sister of Charity of Cincinnati and a nurse, began visiting her native Nigeria periodically to provide medical service. She started with medical assessments of people in her village, Umunagbor Ihitte, and eventually secured six physicians to complete 685 villager evaluations. All who were evaluated suffered from diseases directly attributable to contaminated water that they drank and used for bathing, washing clothes and doing household chores. And people in surrounding villages also exhibited the same illnesses because of contaminated water.

Sister Anyanwu shudders when she describes this water, “It was all scum, no oxygen. It was brown, muddy water. Nothing could live in this water from ponds scattered throughout the villages.”

Year after year, Sister Anyanwu saw illnesses increase and asked herself, “Why treat the results of contaminated water without addressing the cause?”

She eventually determined that wells were the best solution as they would bring clean water to the surface. “I knew the water was there; we had to bring it up through wells,” she said.

But this required generators, so she enlisted Sister Louise Lears to help estimate the cost of generators that could pump the water from far beneath the desert-dry ground. At first, this seemed like a dream.

“Each of 10 villages was to get a generator, but the cost of fuel tripled, due to a new government and its policies,” said Sister Anyanwu. She remained undeterred.

“I love to bargain,” said Sister Anyanwu, with a wide smile. “I thought I should get solar panels and not rely on fuel-driven generators. Nobody was using solar
in the villages, [so they] could learn more from this, too.”

When she approached a company about purchasing and installing solar panels, they agreed to help because they supported her mission for clean water. Each of the five villages’ solar panel setup cost $3,600, which Sister Anyanwu paid using funds from selling the generators and from donors. Next, she had to drill the wells.

After careful research, Sister Anyanwu and her advisers determined that one well could service two villages, thus five wells provided for 10 villages, for a total of $60,520. They learned that they had to drill down 600 feet and install a tubular casing to prevent the well hole from collapsing,

and then cover the costs of tanks, wiring for power, control panels, storm protectors, chemical treatments and labor.

Today, the wells run with clean water 24/7. Going to the wells is easier for villagers than walking long distances to fetid pools.
Sister Anyanwu feels a deep personal pride for her own village.

“My mission is to give glory to God,” Sister Anyanwu said. She believes that the water project will keep people healthier, and that is surely a way of praising God. She recounts how her mother taught her to give what she could to make life better for others. “My mother had a difficult pregnancy when she carried me. She almost died when I was born, so when I lived and she lived, she dedicated me to God,” she said.

Sister Anyanwu has found a way to help her poor village and other villages, all because she realized that under the barren ground “something throbs and gleams and makes the desert beautiful [because] somewhere it hides a well.”

This article appeared in the April 2024 edition of The Catholic Telegraph Magazine. For your complimentary subscription, click here.