The Samson Project Series #3

The third installment in the Samson Series explores our first 2 water project and shares all the lessons we learned in doing them.

From Intent to Action

Intention is the desire to reach a goal; action is the decision to pursue it, with all the cost, uncertainty, and responsibility that pursuit requires. That distinction had been growing clearer to me for months. For more than a year, I had been building systems, learning the language of nonprofit work, assembling the right people, and trying to create something sturdy enough to carry a mission larger than my own enthusiasm. On paper, that season looked productive. We had infrastructure. We had a strategy. We had growing conviction. But planning eventually reaches its limit. At some point, ideas on paper have to survive contact with real roads, real people, real obstacles, and real needs.

The proverb often credited to Benjamin Franklin “Well done is better than well said” captured exactly what I was feeling as we approached that moment. It was no longer enough to care deeply, speak convincingly, or build careful plans from a distance. If this mission was going to mean anything, it had to become tangible. It had to take shape in places where water was scarce, where communities had heard promises before, and where our integrity would be tested not by our intentions, but by what we actually delivered. I knew by then that good motives were not the same as good outcomes. If we were going to do this, we needed to move from aspiration to execution.

In October 2018, I returned to Nigeria with a small team to witness our first project move from concept to reality. The group was made up of people who had chosen to believe in the mission before there was much to show for it: my wife, a board member, and several donors and friends who wanted to see the work firsthand. In one sense, we were simply travelers boarding a plane with luggage, itineraries, and expectations. In another, we were carrying something less visible and far more fragile—trust, hope, and the question of whether this vision could become something real.

What followed was far more than a routine visit or a ceremonial milestone. This was the moment when the mission stopped living primarily in meetings, documents, and fundraising conversations and started taking on the messier shape of real life. It was exciting, but it was also exposing. Once you begin, your weaknesses surface quickly. Assumptions get tested. Systems strain. Logistics become a form of theology, because what you truly believe about the work is revealed by how you respond when the first complications arrive. And from the beginning, complications came. Before we could focus on drilling, community engagement, or construction, we ran into a problem that reminded me how different it is to support a project in theory than to execute one across borders: getting money into the country was far more difficult than I had imagined.

The First Real Test

Our original plan seemed straightforward: send the project funds to Samson’s team through Western Union before we arrived, so the money would already be in place when the work began. On paper, it was efficient. In practice, it became my first close-up lesson in how quickly cross-border logistics can become complicated. Because of heightened scrutiny tied to security concerns in northern Nigeria, the transfer triggered an extensive review. Western Union needed to verify to whom the money was going, why it was being sent, and whether the stated purpose could be documented. None of those questions were unreasonable, but the timing caught me off guard. I had not fully appreciated how difficult it could be to move money into the country quickly, even for a legitimate project with a clear purpose.

That delay taught me something important: some lessons can only be learned in motion. You can read, ask questions, and prepare from a distance, but certain realities do not reveal themselves until you are trying to make a plan work in real time. This was one of those moments. The mission was real, the people were real, and the friction was real, too.

Improvising Under Pressure

By the time it became clear how long the review would take, the funds would not arrive before we did. So, we improvised. Instead of sending the money ahead, we carried it with us and adjusted the plan on the fly. It was not a good option; it was simply the only option left if we wanted the project to move forward on schedule.

Traveling with that much cash, about $9,000 USD, was neither wise nor safe. It introduced a new set of risks that I had not wanted for our team and should have anticipated more carefully. Once we arrived, I not only had to explain the cash through customs but also think about what would happen after customs—when those dollars had to be exchanged into Nigerian naira and physically moved without drawing the wrong kind of attention.

At the time, the exchange rate was about 360 naira to 1 U.S. dollar. That meant our funds turned into more than 3 million naira—an amount large enough to feel abstract until it was sitting in front of us in physical form. Suddenly, we were no longer carrying “project funds” in the tidy, conceptual way people use those words in meetings. We were carrying a literal duffel bag of cash, which is never a good idea (no matter where you are in the world).

Luckily, there were no negative consequences for my lack of planning in this area, but there were a few positive ones. Several essential gaps were exposed:

1. First, our funding process was not yet mature enough for the realities of international fieldwork.

2. Security and compliance had to be planned with the same seriousness as construction and community engagement.

3. Good intentions do not reduce operational risk; if anything, they can blind you to it when you are eager to move forward.

Looking back, I am grateful for the lesson, even though I could have done without the fear and the guilt of realizing I had put my team at unnecessary risk. That experience forced me to see that building a water project was not only about drilling, donors, or vision. It was also about handling money responsibly, protecting people, and thinking several steps ahead in environments where one weak assumption could create a serious problem. In that sense, the setback was not separate from the mission. It was part of the education required to carry it well.

The Anatomy of a Water Project

Now that the money issue was resolved, we could turn to the reason we had come to Nigeria in the first place: building a water project. A borehole project begins long before drilling. First comes the survey work, which tells us if a site has a strong likelihood of reaching a sustainable groundwater source and enough yield to meet the community’s needs. Only then do you bring in the rig and begin drilling down into the aquifer, which can be several hundred feet underground.

Once drilled, the borehole is then lined with casing to prevent wall collapse and screened at the point where water enters, with gravel packing and a sanitary seal used to help protect the source from sand, silt, and surface contamination. Once the hole is developed and tested, a submersible pump is installed below ground and connected to surface power—often a diesel generator in the kind of rural settings where we were working. From there, water is pumped up through piping into an elevated storage tank, typically holding several thousand liters, so gravity can help distribute it through taps at ground level. In simple terms, the system is straightforward: find water, protect it, lift it, store it, and make it accessible. But each step has to be done well, because a borehole is not just a hole in the ground. It is an engineered system, and if any part of that system is poorly planned or poorly built, the promise of clean water can fail before it truly begins.

Siting our first location

Between my first trip to Nigeria in 2017 and our return in October 2018, Samson took me to visit the community of Rija. Rija lies within the ancestral heartland of the Mada people, the ethnic community Samson comes from, and from the moment I arrived, it felt like more than just another stop on an itinerary. There was a gravity to the place that reached me immediately, the warmth of the people, the history held quietly in the land, and the unmistakable sense that this was a community carrying both deep need and deep potential. I found myself hoping, almost instinctively, that Rija might become the site of our first water project. Later, when the CFFteam completed its survey work and confirmed that a viable groundwater source could be reached there, that hope turned into a decision. Rija would be the place where our plans stopped living on paper and began taking physical form.

By then, Samson and his team had already done a remarkable amount of groundwork. They had identified the location, built trust with community leaders, secured the construction crew, and lined up the plumbing expertise needed to build out the system once water was reached. In many respects, the project appeared ready to move. The vision had a site, a plan, local support, and people prepared to work. But one critical piece was still missing: the drilling contractor. That missing piece outweighed everything else, because without someone to bore into the earth and reach the aquifer, every other preparation remained suspended in possibility. You can have community buy-in, survey data, labor, materials, and a shared sense of purpose—but if no one can drill the well, the project does not begin. It was one of our first real lessons in development work: progress is rarely linear. You can be almost fully prepared and still be stopped cold by the one missing element that matters most.

And securing that contractor proved far harder than any of us expected. Samson and his team were already in conversation with several drilling companies, but the moment it became clear that an American organization was involved in the project, pricing began to shift. Quotes that had once seemed workable suddenly rose—sometimes sharply, sometimes without much explanation beyond vague references to cost, complexity, or timing. We had known in theory that Western involvement could distort local pricing. We had heard the stories. We understood, at least abstractly, that the presence of foreign money could lead people to assume deeper pockets than actually existed. What we had not yet understood was how quickly that assumption could alter the entire economics of a project. Our presence changed the negotiation before we had even said much. To some contractors, an American partner did not signal careful stewardship or limited nonprofit funds; it signaled access, leverage, and a chance to charge more. In that sense, we were learning one of the harder truths of cross-cultural development work: even when your motives are sincere, your identity changes the environment. Prices shift. Expectations change. Trust becomes more complicated. What looked, from a distance, like a simple vendor problem was, in fact, our first encounter with the invisible tax that outsider involvement can impose. We were no longer just trying to build a borehole. We were learning how to operate in a system where our good intentions could unintentionally distort the very realities we hoped to serve.

We eventually realized that our involvement was not helping the negotiation; it was distorting it. So, we stepped back and allowed Samson’s cultural connections and local relationships to carry the conversation in the way they knew best. That did not mean disappearing from the project or abandoning responsibility. It meant recognizing that trust, context, and credibility often travel through channels outsiders cannot access, no matter how sincere they may be. Once we stopped forcing the process through our own presence, the negotiations began to settle into something more realistic. Expectations lowered. The conversation became less performative and more practical. In time, a workable price was agreed upon, and the project finally moved forward. In the end, the full cost came to a little over $4,500 USD, below what many had initially estimated and significantly less than the average price at the time. That outcome mattered not only because it protected our limited funds, but because it taught us an early lesson we would return to repeatedly: effective partnership does not always mean taking the lead. Sometimes it means knowing when to step aside so local trust, local wisdom, and local social capital can do the work outsiders cannot.

It is still hard for me to describe what it felt like to watch that first project become real. We stayed in the village deep into the night, standing under a sky that seemed wider than anything I had known, listening to the rig groan and bite into the earth. No one wanted to leave. It felt as if the whole community had decided, together, that sleep could wait. Men stood with their arms folded, women gathered in clusters, children drifted in and out of the circle of light, all of us held by the same fragile hope: maybe tonight the ground would answer. And then it did. When the water finally came, the reaction was immediate and unforgettable, gasps, shouts, laughter, people surging toward the sound as if joy itself had broken through the soil.

In that moment, something in me gave way. I cried without trying not to. I cried because I had never witnessed anything so practical and so holy at the same time. It was just water, and it was never just water. It was relief. It was dignity. It was time returned to families. It was a small village hearing, maybe for the first time in a long time, that their needs mattered enough for someone to stay, to work, and to keep going until something changed. As I stood there wiping my face, I could hear the old voices that had followed me for years, the ones that said I was unrealistic, that the problems were too big, that people like me do not really change the world.

But that night another voice rose above them, clearer than all the rest: yes, you can. Not by fixing everything. Not by becoming a hero. But by saying yes to the work in front of you—one need, one community, one faithful step at a time. Standing there in Rija, with dust on my shoes and tears still drying on my face, I understood something I had been reaching toward since childhood but had never fully named. The world rarely changes all at once. More often, it changes when ordinary people decide not to look away from what is right in front of them. That night did not make me believe I could save the world. It taught me something better, something truer: a single act of obedience, joined to courage, humility, and partnership, can change the world for someone. And sometimes, for one family or one village, that is where hope begins—not as an idea, but as something you can hear in laughter, see in movement, and hold in your hands like water rising from the ground.

Over the next few days, we returned to Rija several times to check on the construction team as they worked to finish the plumbing, housing, and final details before our departure. I had done enough reading to understand the technical side of the project, but no amount of research had prepared me for the way a community receives a blessing it has waited years to see. There was an expectancy in the village that felt almost physical. People moved with a different kind of energy. Children hovered near the site. Adults stopped by to watch, ask questions, and smile at one another with the quiet excitement of people beginning to believe that what they had hoped for might last. The CFF team worked with determination to ensure we witnessed the commissioning celebration before we left. When the day finally came, the village did what villages do when joy becomes communal: it gathered. The celebration was not polished or performative. It was real. There was gratitude in the air, but also pride—pride that something life-giving now stood in their community, pride that this was not merely a donation but a turning point. I remember the sound of voices rising together, the sight of people dressed for the occasion, the sense that what had happened here was larger than infrastructure. It was recognition. It was dignity made visible. I will never forget that day or the way the community marked it, and neither will the team who stood there with me. In many ways, that celebration widened the vision in my heart. It showed me that clean water does more than meet a need; it changes the story a community can tell about itself. And once I saw that, I knew this work was only beginning.

A Serendipitous Opportunity

As we celebrated with the community—laughing, clapping, and even dancing with the women and children—Samson pulled me aside with the calm look he always wore when he was about to say something important. Around us, joy was still rising from the village like music. People were gathered close to the new water point, dressed in their best, smiling in the way people smile when relief and pride arrive at the same time. Amid all that movement and gratitude, Samson quietly told me that the drilling company had reached out with an unexpected offer. They were still working in the area and wanted to know whether we had another local site in mind. Because they would not need to remobilize their crew and equipment, they were willing to drill at a second location for a significantly lower price. Whether that discount came purely from logistics or from reasons we could not fully see, I cannot say with certainty. What I knew in that moment was simpler: an unexpected door had opened, and in work like this, you learn to pay attention when that happens.

What Samson then explained moved the moment from practical to deeply personal. His team had already surveyed a second site as a backup in case Rija proved nonviable. The location had tested well. The need there was real. What I had not known—because Samson had never told me—was where that second site was. It was in his own neighborhood, adjacent to his home. He had kept that from me on purpose. He knew that if I had known from the beginning, I would have pushed hard to make his community our first project. But Samson had grown up understanding something I was still learning: proximity should not automatically determine priority. He knew Rija well. He knew the scale of the need there. And even though his own family and neighbors also lived without reliable water, he made the harder choice and placed another community first. Only after Rija had been completed, only after more than 650 people each day now had access to clean, sustainable water—did he tell me that the second opportunity could bring water to the place he called home. That detail told me more about Samson’s character than almost anything else I had witnessed. He was not building this work around himself. He was stewarding it with a discipline that put need ahead of preference, mission ahead of proximity, and service ahead of recognition.

When he shared that with me, again, I got quite emotional. Part of it was joy—joy that another community might receive water sooner than we had imagined. Part of it was honor—that Samson trusted me enough to let me see not only the mission, but the personal cost and restraint behind it. And part of it was awe. I was standing beside a man who had every reason to place his own household first and had chosen not to. That moment deepened my respect for him in a way words can barely hold. His humility was not performative. It was embedded in the way he led, the way he prioritized, and the way he carried responsibility. He had not partnered with me to elevate himself or to secure benefits for his own circle. He had partnered to serve. And in that moment, I felt again what I had sensed from the beginning of our friendship: this was the kind of partner I had always hoped to find. Looking back, I can see that the opportunity for a second project marked more than a fortunate discount. It marked the widening of the vision. Until then, one successful borehole had felt extraordinary. Suddenly, I could imagine something larger: not a single act of compassion, but a pattern; not one answered need, but the beginning of a model we could repeat with integrity. The mission was no longer merely proving itself. It was starting to multiply.

Taking part in the festivities after the team finished the second project felt different. Not less exciting, just different. This one felt like only the second in a long line of celebrations we would be a part of. At that time, I had no idea what the future held, but I knew it was big.