The Samson Project Series #1

I have used this blog to share updates on our water project, but I have not used it to tell the story of how it all began. Lately, I have been reflecting on and documenting that story. Over the next few months, I will share those musings here. Here goes.

The Sleeping Dream

The year was 1987, and I was seven years old, small enough that the world still felt oversized, but old enough to recognize when something was wrong. My mother had us on a road trip across Arizona, the four of us (me, my mom, and my two sisters), packed into the back seat of her 1981 Ford Fairmont. She had bought it with the only savings she had and drove it as if it were both a lifeline and a liability. The air conditioner worked more in theory than in practice. It rattled, coughed, and pushed out a thin stream of warm air that smelled faintly of plastic and old upholstery. Our legs stuck to the vinyl whenever we shifted. The sweat along our hairlines never really dried.

Around midday, we pulled off Interstate 10 at a rest stop—one of those concrete oases that promise relief and mostly deliver a different kind of discomfort. In July, the desert does not just feel hot; it feels personal. The temperature hovered near 120 degrees, and when we opened the doors, it was like stepping into a blast furnace. Heat rolled off the asphalt in visible waves. The air smelled like sunbaked tar, dust, and the faint sourness of trash cans that had been cooking since morning. My mother told us, “Stay close,” and her voice carried that tight edge that meant she was managing more than she was saying. She moved with purpose—bathroom, water fountain, picnic table—as if the stop were a task to finish quickly before the car, the kids, or her patience gave out.

That is when I noticed him—another boy about my age, lingering near a bench in the thin strip of shade beneath a metal awning. He had the sun-reddened face and squinty eyes of someone who had been outside too long, but he was not running around the way kids usually do when they are finally freed from a car. He just stood there, watching people come and go. When our eyes met, he gave a small nod, like we were already members of the same club: kids who did not get to decide where they were going.

Kids can become friends in the time it takes adults to decide whether they should speak at all. We traded names and destinations in a matter of minutes. I told him we were “going somewhere” (which is how I understood most trips at the age of seven), and he said they were supposed to be headed farther west. He asked what we were eating. “Bologna,” I said, with the same resignation he seemed to feel. He laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh of a kid having fun; it was the laugh of a kid trying to act normal. Then he glanced over his shoulder toward a car parked a little too neatly at the far edge of the lot and said, like it was a secret he was tired of holding, “We ran out of gas.”

At first, I thought he meant they’d run out of gas the way people sometimes do—an inconvenience, a story you tell later. But his tone didn’t match that kind of problem. He pointed to a cluster of people under a picnic shelter: a dad, a mom, and six siblings gathered in a tight, tired knot, as if conserving energy. Some were younger than us and had the limp posture of kids who’d been told too many times to sit still. Their faces shone with sweat. A couple of them held empty cups like props, the way you might hold an empty plate to prove you belonged at the table. “We’ve been here for a few days,” he said. “My dad said someone would come back. But nobody did.”

He told me they’d run out of food and water the day before, and his eyes stayed on mine like he was checking whether I understood the seriousness of that sentence. I didn’t have grown-up vocabulary for it, but I felt it. There was a water fountain near the bathrooms, the kind with a sad little arc that barely cleared the spout. I remember thinking how ridiculous it was that water could be right there—metal and plumbing and the promise of relief—yet somehow not enough. In my child's mind, the world was supposed to be set up so the basics were accessible. Seeing a family sitting in that heat, waiting, made the whole place feel wrong, like a rule had been broken and no one in charge was coming to fix it.

Mom was busy shepherding my sisters—one to the restroom, the other to the shade—doing the logistical work that was constant for her. She was always counting minutes, miles, dollars, risks, etc. She scanned the rest stop with the alertness that comes from being a single mother with very little cushion. Meanwhile, I stood beside this boy and felt a different kind of math in my chest. We had food. They didn’t. In my seven-year-old logic, that meant we were carrying the solution. At seven, I didn’t have the instinct—or the ability—to think critically about what should be done. I didn’t consider whether their story was complicated or whether adults had already tried to help. I didn’t evaluate. I felt. And that feeling came with a simple instruction: do something.

While Mom’s attention was split between bathrooms, trash cans, and keeping track of three kids in a crowded place, I slipped back toward the Fairmont. The cooler sat on the floorboard like a treasure chest. I opened it and felt a brief, blessed puff of cold air. Inside were the things that made the road trip bearable: sandwiches wrapped in plastic, chips, maybe a couple of pieces of fruit, and several bottles of water Mom had been rationing for the drive. I didn’t take one. I took what I could carry, stacking items against my chest until my arms trembled. In my mind, if they were out of food and water, then “some” wasn’t enough. They needed “a lot.”

I walked back to the picnic shelter with my awkward, wobbling load. The father stood up first, cautious, not sure what a kid carrying food toward them meant. The mother’s eyes flicked from my hands to my face, and for a second, she looked like she might tell me no—like pride was trying to keep her upright. Then one of the smaller kids reached instinctively for what I was giving, and whatever pride was left gave way to need. I handed a drink to the boy I’d been talking to. His hands were warm and dry when he grabbed it. “Here,” I said, like it was obvious. “You guys can have this.”

The whole exchange took less than a minute, but it felt like time slowed. Plastic crinkled. Caps twisted. A sandwich disappeared into a kid’s lap as it had always belonged there. I felt relief—clean, bright relief—like I’d fixed something. Only afterward did the other thought arrive: that cooler was our cooler. That food was our plan. I looked toward the bathrooms and saw my mom turning, her eyes searching for me with the quick, inventory-taking glance she used all day. Her gaze landed on me, then on the family, then on the food in their hands. Her face changed in stages.

To say my mother was annoyed wouldn’t do justice to what rose in her. She crossed the distance fast, grabbed my arm, and pulled me just far enough away to keep her voice low. “Jason,” she said, and the way she said my name carried an entire paragraph: What were you thinking? Do you understand what you just did? Do you know what it costs to be out here with nothing? Her face held frustration, anger, and something that looked like fear wearing anger as a mask. She wasn’t opposed to generosity; she was opposed to unpredictability. She was a single mother on a limited budget, and I had just given away the food and water we’d packed for the drive as if we had an endless supply of both.

Anxious is a good word for my mother. She’d been a teenage mom at sixteen and carried a web of mistakes that left very little margin. She was raising kids with visible differences in a decade that wasn’t always kind about differences—my sister and I are bi-racial (black and white), and she was a Caucasian single mother in the 1980s. Every stop on that trip was a calculation: gas, food, safety, time. A rest stop wasn’t neutral ground; it was a place where things could go wrong quickly, and she lived with a constant internal alarm that never fully shut off.

Back in the car, once my sisters were buckled and the Fairmont was rolling again, Mom’s anger softened into something more complicated. She didn’t apologize—life hadn’t trained her for that—but her voice shifted into explanation. “You don’t give everything away,” she said, eyes fixed on the road. “You don’t know what people are going to do. And we have to eat too.” She said it like a rule, like gravity. I stared out at the desert flashing by and felt two things at once: guilt that I’d made her life harder, and defiance that the rule existed at all. In my head, I argued with her the way only a kid can—purely, stubbornly, without nuance. They were hungry. We weren’t. So why couldn’t we just fix it?

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that stubbornness—about the deep urge to step in and make a dent in whatever felt unfair. The simplest explanation is that it was my way of taking control. As a kid, I couldn’t control much of anything. There was never enough money, never enough family time, never enough food, never enough anything. Scarcity wasn’t an idea; it was the atmosphere in our house. It shaped how my mother moved through the world, and it shaped what I decided to push against.

When you grow up feeling like life is happening to you—money problems, adult problems, consequences you didn’t create but still have to live inside—you look for any lever you can pull. I couldn’t solve the big things: my mom’s stress, the instability, the ways we stood out in public spaces. But I could solve one small thing in front of me. I could hand someone a sandwich. I could make an empty hand not empty anymore. At that rest stop, my choice wasn’t heroic; it was a grasp for certainty—my attempt to force a “before” and an “after” into a world that felt unpredictable.

That reflex—move first, think later—followed me through childhood and adolescence. If it wasn’t giving away my lunch or lunch money, it was stepping into the middle of a bullying situation, or emptying my wallet for someone I believed needed it more than I did. Sometimes it was wise. Sometimes it was naïve. Often it got me in trouble, because trouble is what happens when a kid tries to operate like a grown-up without grown-up resources. But it was who I was then and, in many ways, who I still am.

If I had to name the most common lesson adults tried to teach me, it would be this: “Jason, you can’t save the world.” It wasn’t always said gently; sometimes it was exasperated, sometimes protective, sometimes like a warning. They were trying to teach me boundaries in a world where boundaries were the only thing keeping us afloat. But whenever I heard it, something in me pushed back hard: Yes, I can. I still can’t fully explain that wiring. I help without weighing consequences, the way most people do. If someone needs it, I feel compelled to find a way to give—effort, attention, time, money, presence—whatever I have.

In hindsight, that rest stop in Arizona was more than a childhood memory; it was an early draft of the life I would eventually live. Long before I had language for philanthropy, development work, or partnership, I already had the impulse to move toward need instead of away from it. I did not understand systems or long-term solutions. I understood one family in the heat, one problem in front of me, and a choice that felt simple even if it was not. Years later, when I encountered need on a scale that dwarfed a desert rest stop, that same inner voice returned—not as childish defiance, but as a stubborn insistence that doing something, even imperfectly, was better than doing nothing.

The Birth of a Partnership

Samson Kyuni Chuga was born on June 7, 1972, in the rural village of Nghere in Nasarawa State, Nigeria—a place where daily life was shaped by scarcity and improvisation. He grew up without electricity, plumbing, or running water, in a home where the most basic tasks required time, physical effort, and resilience. Yet those limitations never narrowed his horizon. If anything, they sharpened his resolve.

Samson was never “large” in stature. Still, he was a giant in influence—someone people noticed because of the steadiness of his character and the way he carried responsibility long before he had any formal title to justify it. Against the odds, he persevered through school and advanced academically while many around him were forced to drop out early. He earned his undergraduate degree in 1996, completed graduate studies in 2011, and finished his doctorate in 2016—an extraordinary arc of achievement for a man who started with so little infrastructure beneath his feet.

Samson accomplished all of this while building a family. He married Anne in 2002, and together they raised three children: Abraham (2004), Nina (2006), and Aaron (2009). Those who know him best often describe him as a husband and father first—present, attentive, and deeply committed, bringing the same discipline to his home that he brought to his work. Over time, Samson became a trusted community leader, not through charisma or self-promotion, but through consistent service. He chaired key committees that addressed urgent local needs, including the community relations service, the local chapter of the AIDS Care Education and Training Society (ACET), and the Christian Health Association of Nigeria (CHAN).

People relied on him because he listened, followed through, and kept the community’s well-being at the center of every decision. Later, he chaired Chuga and Friends Foundation (CFF), which became the Nigerian partner NGO to Partners For Water—the U.S.-based organization we would establish to raise funds and support community-led water development projects across Nigeria. In many ways, CFF reflected what Samson had been doing his whole life: mobilizing people, earning trust, and turning shared concern into practical, on-the-ground action.

I met Samson in 2014, when he walked into the Southern California church I attended. It was not a grand entrance, nothing theatrical or attention-seeking, just a new face taking in the room with the calm focus of someone who knew why he was there. After the service, we exchanged a few words, the kind of polite conversation church people are good at, but something about him stayed with me. He was in Los Angeles for a doctoral program at the International Theological Seminary. Yet, he carried himself less like a student chasing credentials and more like a man gathering tools for a mission already set in his bones. Even in those first conversations, I sensed it: quiet steadiness, unmistakable purpose, and a humility that did not feel performative.

One moment from those early days has stayed with me because it captured Samson in a way a biography never could. We were having breakfast at a local diner, the kind of place with laminated menus, vinyl booths, and coffee that never stopped coming. Morning light poured through the front windows, making the chrome fixtures glow. We talked the way new friends do—small things, big things, jokes, seriousness. Then the plates arrived. I did what I always did: I dug in, grateful and hungry without thinking much about it. Samson did not move right away. He looked at his food for a beat, almost like he was doing math. Then, with practiced patience, he began dividing his meal into five portions—carefully, evenly—using his fork like a measuring tool. At the time, I did not understand what I was watching. I remember feeling slightly embarrassed, like I had missed a rule everyone else knew. He asked the waitress for a to-go container, ate only one portion, and packed the rest as neatly as if he were closing a file. Later, I learned what the number meant: one portion for each member of his family —his wife, their three children, and himself—he would stretch these across the week in his dorm, like a plan he refused to abandon.

I couldn’t keep my curiosity to myself. I asked him, probably with more disbelief than tact, why he treated a diner breakfast like it was a week’s worth of provisions. He didn’t bristle or act offended. He just explained with the same calm certainty I’d noticed since the day we met, like the answer had been settled long ago. “I love America, but I’m going home when I finish school. If I start eating like you guys, I’ll get used to it. Then I’ll want to stay—like many of my classmates. I’m not staying. I have work to do in my country. I’m going to live here the same way I would live back home.”

That conversation landed in me like a marker in the road—one of those moments you don’t fully understand until years later, when you realize it quietly shaped your direction. I knew right then we were going to do something together for a long time. I didn’t know what the work would be, what form it would take, or how hard it would eventually become, but I knew I wanted to stand alongside him in it. There was a rare integrity to the way he held his commitments. He wasn’t talking about “one day” or “someday.” He was living as if his future had already been chosen, and he was walking toward it. 

Over the next few years, our friendship deepened the way real friendships do—slowly, through ordinary conversation and shared trust. We talked about our families, our goals, the kind of people we hoped to become, and the pressures we carried that most people never saw. But more than anything, we talked about Nigeria. Samson spoke about it the way someone speaks about home, both beloved and burdened. He described challenges that weren’t theoretical to him, problems tied to names, villages, roads, and real people he felt responsible for. He wasn’t romantic about it. He was resolved. And the more I listened, the more I realized his dream wasn’t a vague desire to “help.” It was a lifelong decision to return and serve, regardless of what comfort or opportunity might tempt him to stay away.

After he finished his doctorate, Samson returned to Nigeria—just as he had promised. He went

home not only with his conviction intact but with a doctoral degree from an American institution, an extraordinary accomplishment for a man from a poor village in Nasarawa State, Nigeria. Watching him prepare to leave was more emotional for me than I expected. There’s a particular kind of humility that comes from seeing someone choose the harder road on purpose. Before he boarded that plane, I promised I would visit him.

I had already traveled to sub-Saharan Africa—Kenya twice and Ghana once—so I assumed Nigeria would feel like familiar territory. I thought I understood what life in the developing world looked like. I thought I understood poverty. I thought I understood resilience. I did not. And I realized how wrong I was almost immediately, starting with the moment I landed in Nigeria in February 2017. The heat felt heavier, the air thicker, and the movement around the airport faster and louder than anything I was used to. Everything—the sounds, the smells, the press of people, even the way time seemed to operate—told me I was not simply visiting another country. I was stepping into a reality I had only ever seen from a distance. Whatever assumptions I had packed alongside my suitcase began to unravel, and I could feel it: the beginning of a lesson I had not known I needed, and a story that was about to become personal in a way I could not yet name.

A New Burden

It wasn’t only Nigeria’s heat, noise, and pace that unsettled me—it was the way it pressed in on every sense, leaving no space to stay detached. I’d traveled in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and I expected to recognize the rhythms: the busy roads, the informal commerce, the constant motion. But Nigeria felt different, sharper around the edges. The moment the trip stopped being a “visit” and became something I felt in my body was inside Samson’s home, when I reached for the kind of everyday certainty I’d always taken for granted and realized it wasn’t there: running water.

As a middle-class Westerner, life without running water lived in my mind as an extreme—something that happened “somewhere else,” to people I’d never meet. I knew, in theory, that many families lacked reliable access. I’d read the statistics and seen the photos. But I also carried an unspoken belief that education and leadership insulated a person from the most basic hardships. That’s why Samson’s home short-circuited my expectations. He wasn’t a faceless figure in a report. He was my friend—an American-educated community leader, a man I associated with competence, influence, and capability. In my mental model, someone like Samson would not have been affected by the water crisis. Realizing he was like the majority of society in this area felt jarring, almost absurd. Looking back, my reaction was embarrassingly naïve, but it was honest. It was the sound of a worldview cracking—of me realizing how small my definition of “normal” really was.

After spending time at Samson’s home, it felt like something in me recalibrated. It was as if my eyes finally adjusted to a dim room and I could see what had been there all along. On the roads and footpaths, in markets and neighborhoods, I began to notice the quiet choreography of scarcity, the routines people build when the basics aren’t guaranteed. Families collecting water from streams—moving in with jerrycans, waiting their turn, then carrying the weight back home as if it were simply part of the day. People dipping containers into rain-filled pools—water shared with runoff, dust, and whatever else the storm had gathered, because “available” often mattered more than “safe.” Vendors selling water in small bags—transactions measured in coins and necessity, where a drink wasn’t a given but a purchase you had to plan for.

I had read about the water crisis in the developing world. Still, I assumed it touched only a small slice of the population—the poorest, the most remote, the people furthest from opportunity. It didn’t. In many places, this was everyday life, not an exception. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. My Western framework didn’t have a category for a country where millions of people build their days around the search for something as basic as water. That realization followed me out of Nigeria like an extra piece of luggage—heavy, awkward, impossible to set down.

I flew back to Los Angeles expecting to return to “normal,” but my mind made it clear that normal was gone. Airports blurred together—hours stacked on hours. I stared out airplane windows at nothing and felt a heaviness in my chest that sleep couldn’t touch. I kept replaying small images—containers, footpaths, the absence of a faucet—like my mind was trying to make sense of them by repetition. Somewhere during that 25-hour journey, a decision hardened into resolve: I was going to do something about Nigeria’s water challenges, even though I didn’t yet know what “something” could realistically look like. It wasn’t optimism. It was a necessity—the feeling that if I went back to my old life unchanged, I would be betraying what I’d just seen.

Of course, resolve doesn’t erase reality. The practical questions came rushing in as soon as I stopped feeling brave and started thinking like an adult again. I remember the voice in my head tightening into a blunt interrogation: “You’re not a geologist, a humanitarian, a philanthropist—nothing. You have no resources or specialized knowledge. How can you possibly help?” Even so, I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen. I didn’t know what to do yet, but I was determined to figure it out—and once I did, I wouldn’t quit. The only next step I could take was the simplest one: start learning, start asking questions, and start moving. I’ve since learned that the work and the learning are never really finished.