The Samson Project Series #6

By this point, the boreholes were no longer new accomplishments on a project list or photographs in a donor update. They had become part of daily life in the communities that used them—woven into mornings, meals, school routines, household decisions, and the quiet calculations women make when water is scarce. I had seen enough to believe the work mattered, but belief was no longer enough. If we were going to speak honestly about impact, we needed to move beyond my impressions, beyond commissioning celebrations, and beyond the emotional power of seeing water flow for the first time. We needed to listen carefully to the people living closest to the change.

For that reason, I centered the study on women living in twenty villages where we had installed boreholes. Their perspectives were essential because women often carry the daily burden of water scarcity most directly. They know what it means to walk, wait, carry, ration, wash, cook, protect children, and manage a household when safe water is uncertain. They also know how those routines change when water becomes closer, cleaner, and more reliable. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 70, with an average age of 37.3 years, and most had lived in their communities for decades. On average, they had been there for 22.1 years, which gave them the ability to compare life before and after the boreholes with unusual depth and credibility. They were not outside observers of the work. They were the people whose days had been reshaped by it.

To capture both measurable patterns and personal meaning, we used semi-structured, in-person interviews that included closed-ended and open-ended questions based around the perceived effects of access to clean water in the aforementioned seven areas: health, hygiene, social life, vocational & educational activity, psychological well-being, personal security, and spiritual life. The closed-ended questions created a consistent way to assess perceived impact across key areas, while the open-ended questions allowed participants to explain, in their own words, how those changes appeared in daily life and why they mattered. That combination mattered to me. I did not want the research to become so statistical that it lost the human story, but I also did not want it to rely only on moving anecdotes. The goal was to hold both together: disciplined inquiry and lived experience, numbers and narrative, evidence and voice.

Because cultural sensitivity mattered, Samson and his team conducted the interviews. Their familiarity with the communities, languages, customs, and local dynamics helped create the trust necessary for honest responses. It also allowed them to ask follow-up questions naturally and recognize meaning an outsider might have missed. English proficiency, literacy levels, and local dialects varied across participants, so the interviews were conducted verbally rather than in writing. During each conversation, the interviewer recorded the responses. Answers to closed-ended questions were documented verbatim, while open-ended responses were generally summarized, with selected statements written word for word when they were especially clear, vivid, or meaningful. That process was not perfect in an academic laboratory sense, but it was appropriate for the setting. It respected the women’s voices while acknowledging the realities of language, literacy, trust, and access.

Taken together, the interviews confirmed what years of fieldwork had suggested, but with greater depth, discipline, and human detail: clean water was producing benefits across every area we examined. The strongest perceived improvements appeared in health and hygiene, psychological well-being, and personal safety and security. Those findings mattered because they moved the conversation beyond infrastructure alone. The boreholes were not simply shortening the distance to water. They were changing the conditions under which women organized their days, cared for their families, protected their bodies, and understood their own security and dignity. The projects were functioning not only as water systems, but as points of stability in communities where instability had too often been normal.

That was the most important contribution of the research for me. It gave evidence to what the communities had already been teaching us through experience. Clean water reduced anxiety, improved household routines, supported cleaner living conditions, and reshaped how women experienced movement, safety, and time. It also clarified the moral weight of the work. If the boreholes were producing this kind of change, then keeping them functional could not be treated as a technical detail or an operational preference. It became a responsibility owed to the people who had reorganized their lives around reliable access to water. Once a community begins to depend on a borehole, maintenance is no longer simply about protecting equipment. It is about honoring trust, safeguarding dignity, and refusing to let a promise become another broken system.

The safety findings stayed with me in a particular way. In a context where gender-based violence remains a serious concern, any improvement in women’s sense of safety deserves careful attention. Water scarcity can force women and girls onto long paths, into isolated areas, or into daily routines where exposure and vulnerability become part of survival. When water is closer, safer, and more reliable, the benefit is not simply convenience. It can mean fewer risky journeys, less time spent in vulnerable places, and a stronger sense of dignity, control, and peace. For me, this was one of the most sobering conclusions of the study: a borehole could change not only what women carried, but also what they feared.

That realization helped me see the next stage of the mission with greater clarity. If clean water touched so many dimensions of life, then maintaining access could never be treated as secondary. Maintenance was just as important as new development. A broken borehole did not merely interrupt a water source. It interrupted health, safety, school routines, household stability, economic activity, and trust. The dissertation gave academic language to what the field had already made plain: long-term impact depends on consistency. The work could not be judged only by how many projects we completed, but by how faithfully those projects continued serving people after the first celebration ended. In that sense, maintenance became one of the clearest expressions of our moral responsibility. It was how we proved that the communities were not merely project sites to us, but people whose dependence, dignity, and future deserved continued care.

An Afterthought to One Person Can Be Life-Changing for Another

Reflecting on the research also forced me to confront something in myself. Over time, I had become increasingly absorbed in the strategies, systems, protocols, and sustainability questions that surround water infrastructure development. That focus was necessary. Without clear processes, responsible funding, maintenance planning, and local accountability, good intentions can quickly become short-lived projects. But the data analysis phase reminded me that systems are never the heart of the work. People are. Systems matter only because they protect people, serve people, and help keep promises made to people.

Reading the women’s interview responses brought me back to the reason we began this work in the first place. Beneath the charts, categories, and coded answers were voices describing ordinary burdens being lifted: shorter walks, less fear, cleaner homes, healthier children, more time for work and school, and a renewed sense that their lives mattered. I was struck again by how something many of us treat as an afterthought—a tap, a container, a reliable source of clean water nearby—can become life-changing for someone who has spent years organizing every day around scarcity. What felt routine in my world was transformational in theirs.

That realization humbled me because I could see how subtly I had drifted from the heart of the work. It was like entering the ocean at one point, looking up later, and discovering the current had carried me far down the coast. The movement had not been intentional, but it mattered. In nonprofit and development work, we often rely on administrative language—projects, outcomes, beneficiaries, sustainability, investment, impact. Those words are useful because they help us plan, report, and remain accountable. But they can also create distance if we are not careful. The interviews closed that distance. They brought me back to real mornings, real mothers, real children, real bodies, and real choices. A functioning water source can shape whether a girl arrives at school exhausted or ready to learn, whether a mother spends her morning walking or working, whether a child drinks from a safer source, and whether a family moves through the day with less anxiety.

In that sense, the research did more than measure impact; it corrected my vision. It pulled me back from the mechanics of the mission and reminded me that infrastructure was never the goal by itself. It was the means. Restoration was the purpose. I have often emphasized the value of periodic recalibration, but while reading the data, I realized I needed one myself. The interviews reminded me that what may be an afterthought in one life can become a turning point in another. That realization renewed my understanding of our responsibility: not only to build more water systems, but to keep them working, keep listening, and keep remembering that every statistic represents people who have trusted us with part of their future.

Moral responsibility, in this work, means refusing to confuse completion with faithfulness. It means staying accountable after the celebration, after the photographs, and after the first flow of water becomes part of daily life.

A Turning Point

Just as I felt fully recalibrated—more grounded, more balanced, and more certain than ever about the path ahead—I received the most jarring news of my life. On August 10, 2024, a phone call came informing me that Samson had unexpectedly and tragically passed away.

At first, I could not process it. The words seemed to land somewhere outside of me, as if they belonged to another person’s story. Then reality broke through, and I was devastated.

The shock deepened when I learned that Samson had died from an asthma attack. I had always understood asthma through a Western lens—as manageable, treatable, and rarely fatal when care is available. That assumption revealed another kind of privilege I had not fully examined.

In places where access to inhalers, timely emergency care, accurate diagnosis, and consistent management are limited, asthma can become far more dangerous than many of us in the West imagine. Environmental triggers, delays in treatment, distance from medical help, and the cost or availability of medication can turn a condition I had mentally filed as minor into something life-threatening. The lesson was brutally clear. Just as many in the West take clean water for granted, we also take access to healthcare for granted. We live with invisible safety nets and often do not recognize them until we see what life looks like without them. Samson’s death forced that truth into the center of my grief.

Samson was the best man I had ever known. In many ways, he was the kind of man I was trying to become. I wanted to be the kind of husband and father he was. I wanted to endure difficulty with the steadiness, honor, and faith he carried so naturally. I wanted my character to have the same breadth and depth his did. I had never known someone so selfless, wise, caring, disciplined, and committed to improving the lives of the people of the people around him. Samson taught me a great deal about integrity, hope, and faith, but more than anything, he showed me what it looked like to bring your best self to every responsibility, every relationship, and every promise. He gave me confidence to believe in the impossible. He had taught me so much, but I was not done learning from him. And now he was gone.

The week he passed away, Samson and I had been texting about the next water project. That was not unusual. We were always talking about what came next—another village, another challenge, another way to strengthen the work and serve more people. We bounced ideas off each other with the kind of confidence that comes from deep trust. Each of us believed the other could help make difficult things possible. We often spoke as if the future were waiting for us to reach it together. That made the news feel even more impossible. At first, I could only think about my own loss: my friend, my partner, my mentor. But as reality widened, I began to think about his wife, his two sons who were always by his side, his daughter that was the apple of his eye, the organizations he led, the communities that depended on him, and the countless people who looked to him for wisdom and direction. Once I saw the scale of what had been lost, I became inconsolable.

I could not fathom the mission without him. Samson had not merely participated in the work; he had embodied so much of its credibility, wisdom, and direction. He knew the communities, understood the culture, carried the trust of local leaders, and held together relationships I could not replace. Without him, I found myself wondering not only how I would keep going, but how the institution he represented could continue to stand, lead, and serve with the same strength. The loss felt personal, but it was also structural. A friendship had been severed, and at the same time, the foundation beneath the mission seemed to tremble.

Without Samson’s vision, credibility, discipline, and love for his people, none of what had been accomplished in Nigeria would have been possible. I had adopted his dreams for his country, his people, and his family, but they were his before they were ever mine. He had carried them longer, understood them more deeply, and paid a higher personal cost to pursue them. The thought of continuing the vision without him felt almost unbearable. But the thought of allowing his dream to fade because he was gone felt even more intolerable.

Samson was my partner, my mentor, and, most of all, my friend. He embodied so much of what I aspire to be as a leader and as a man. I did not yet know how to keep going without him, but I knew I had to. Grief left me hollow, but love made one thing clear: the work could not end with his death. Continuing the work was not a way to replace him; nothing could do that. It was a way to honor him, to protect what he had built, and to carry forward the promise we had made together.

Finishing the Research Project

Shortly after his untimely passing, I presented my research to my dissertation committee, the panel that had advised, mentored, and evaluated me throughout the dissertation process. The committee already knew of Samson because I had presented my research proposal to them earlier, and he and his team had been identified as central partners in the data collection process. In academic terms, he appeared in the study as a field partner and local leader. To me, he was far more than that. He was the reason the research existed at all.

The presentation went well until I reached the section on data collection. That was the moment when the professional composure I had been holding together finally broke. I had managed to speak with a measured, confident tone through most of the presentation, but explaining Samson’s role—and the role his team had played—made the loss impossible to keep at a distance.

In that instant, the dissertation stopped feeling like an academic exercise and became a living record of what we had built together. The data, the interviews, the fieldwork, and the communities we had served all pointed back to him. I could not separate the research from the friend, partner, and local leader who had made it possible.

Grief overtook me before I could regain control. I cried through the next section, not because I wanted the moment to become emotional, but because the weight of his absence finally caught up with the meaning of the work. The harder I tried to hold it back, the more impossible it became.

I imagine that moment was uncomfortable for the PhDs on my committee. It is not common for doctoral candidates to cry through the presentation of their research. But they knew me, and by then they understood enough of the story to know that this was not merely a study about water infrastructure. It was about partnership, responsibility, and the moral weight of continuing a mission after the person who helped give it life was gone. No one corrected me or hurried me through it. They gave me space, and I was grateful for that grace.

They accepted my presentation and gave me the clearance to publish. At the outset of the dissertation, I included the following acknowledgement: “I would like to acknowledge and dedicate this project to Dr. Chuga Samson, the head of the Committee on Water Projects at Chuga and Friends Foundation, who unexpectedly and tragically passed away during the completion of this dissertation. Without his vision and dedication, this project and the water infrastructure intervention program in Nasarawa State, Nigeria, would not have been possible.”

Even as I wrote those words, they felt inadequate. How could a few sentences carry the weight of a life, a friendship, a partnership, and a mission? They could not. But they were what I had at the time. They were the best offering I could make inside the formal boundaries of an academic document. The deeper tribute would have to be lived. It would have to appear in how the work continued, whether the boreholes remained functional, whether the communities Samson loved were still served with dignity, and whether I became the kind of steward his trust deserved.