Prayers to Our Lady of Guadalupe for Water Answered ...
A couple of weeks later we received a great favor through the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Here’s what happened.
The water situation here in Atchanvé has always been difficult. During the dry season, after working all day in their fields, the women walk almost a mile to the Zio River to bring back muddy water for their families. About 20 years ago four attempts at drilling small bore wells in the village failed. When the mission center was built last year, our first attempt failed also. We did find water on a second try, but very little – enough to install a pump for the mission center itself, but nowhere near enough water for the villagers.
On our third and final try we found even less water, not enough to warrant even a hand pump. After drilling 90 meters deep and finding only a trickle coming in at 15 meters, we were told by the drilling company that the only remaining hope was to try “hydro fracture”. This is a process by which water is pumped horizontally with great pressure into the existing veins in order to flush them out and increase their yield. However, this procedure involves some risk, since it can have the opposite effect as well, by clogging things up.
So much depended on the success of this – we needed water not only for the villagers but also for the dispensary and the sisters’ house – that we decided to offer a triduum of prayer to our patroness, Our Lady of Guadalupe, to ask for her help. Our three nights of prayer in the small village chapel were graciously answered. On the fourth day, the hydro fracture operation worked, and the yield of the well increased dramatically. So the fourth night we all returned to the chapel to give God praise and to offer thanks to Our Lady of Guadalupe for her intercession.
As the next photos show, we are currently in the process of installing a water system for the village. We’re digging a large reservoir or cistern around the small-bore well. Once we reach a depth of 12 meters, we will perforate the blue plastic pipe and the water should fill the cistern up each day to the 8 meter level, which is the level the water actually rose to in the pipe after the hydro fracture procedure. That will give us over 50 cubic meters of perfectly clean water daily, enough for the village for decades to come, which can be pumped – more economically than from the well itself – to a water tower we are building. From there it will be directed to ten public faucets for the villagers and also to the dispensary and the sisters’ house.
The villagers made a nominal financial donation of $100 for the water project, but more importantly they provide laborers each day for the digging. I’m sure one day they will tell their grandchildren about how they worked on it.
The cistern at two meters, and at six meters - halfway to where we need to dig.
Laying the pipe to the water tower
. . . and the Celebration of her Feast Day
Interest in Our Lady of Guadalupe peaked after that. In December we celebrated her feast day with a Mass followed by a dramatization of her appearance to Juan Diego by some of the youth in the village, using the porch of the mission center as a stage. I wrote a simple script in French and had it translated into Ewe, and we had someone read all the actors’ lines over a megaphone for the large crowd that attended from several villages belonging to the parish.