A Well for Ọdògba

A woman returns to her village to fulfill a childhood promise to bring water.

Ọdògba had always been dry.
During the rains, yam vines reached for the skies and children danced in puddles. But when the dry season set in, the ground cracked open. The village borehole at the market square would run dry, and every household returned to the old way: walking miles to fetch water from the river.
Ezinne remembered her mother’s feet; cracked, swollen, wrapped in cloth against the heat. She remembered watching her disappear down the red clay path each morning, yellow jerrycans balanced on her head. And she remembered the day Mama collapsed halfway back. No one passed that way for hours.
That was the day ten-year-old Ezinne made a promise to herself: one day, she would bring water to Ọdògba.
A real well. One that never ran dry.
That was twenty-eight years ago.

Ezinne left Ọdògba at sixteen, scholarship in hand. From boarding school in Enugu to university in Ibadan, then a development internship in Abuja. She studied civil engineering, and then rural planning. She learned to write grant proposals, navigate government offices, and stretch naira like rubber.
But wherever she went, Ọdògba traveled with her. In her dreams, the village paths still cracked underfoot. She still saw her mother’s limp. Still heard the rattle of empty buckets.
Over the years, she sent money home, helped patch the school roof, and paid her cousins’ fees. But the well? Too big. Too expensive. Too remote. No one wanted to take on the risk.
Until now.
After three years of knocking on doors, she finally secured a rural development grant: $10,000 from a West African health initiative. It wasn’t enough for a full water system, but it would cover a deep borehole, a solar pump, and a small overhead tank. Enough to keep water flowing year-round.
She took leave from work. Packed her things. Hired a team of engineers. And returned home.

Some people were happy to see her. Many weren’t.
“What is she looking for here again?” Chief Okafor muttered at the meeting under the mango tree. “She’s been gone for how many years? Now she thinks she’s the savior?”
“She’ll come and go,” Mama Nkechi scoffed. “Let her dig her well. When it breaks, who will fix it?”
Ezinne kept her face still. She had expected this. People didn’t trust what felt too good. They had been promised things before, but most of them had never come.
So she listened. She held more meetings. Explained the borehole plans, printed in both Igbo and English. She answered every question, even the rude ones. She let people complain. She let them hope, carefully.
The youth group rallied behind her first. Then the women’s cooperative. And soon enough, the machines rolled in.

Drilling began in March.
It was harder than they expected. The red earth was stubborn, layered with hidden rock. A part snapped on the rig. The crew ran short on fuel. Then rain poured for three days straight and flooded the whole site. The engineers wanted to delay. The funders wanted reports.
Whispers started floating.
“Maybe she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“Maybe the ancestors are rejecting the well.”
She didn’t sleep much. Pacing the compound at night, she would stare at the sky and ask her mother, wherever she was, to hold her up.
One morning, she arrived at the site and found five children waiting. One of them, small and bright-eyed, handed her a sheet of paper: a drawing of the borehole, water spraying into buckets, flowers growing all around.
At the top, in careful block letters:
“Aunty Ezi, we are waiting for the water.”

She stayed.
She stayed through broken parts, missed deadlines, and side-eye from elders who had never liked her father. And finally, in early May, it happened.
On a clear, quiet morning, water burst out of the pipe.
Clean. Cold. Beautiful.
A few people screamed. Then everyone ran. Children danced barefoot in the puddles. Women sang. Elders cried openly. Someone brought out drums. Someone else killed a chicken.
Even Chief Okafor stood at the edge of the crowd, arms crossed, before nodding once and muttering, “Not bad.”
Ezinne didn’t say much. She just stood by the tank, hands clasped, her chest heavy with something bigger than joy.
She had done it.
But she also knew it didn’t end there.

Over the next six months, she stayed on.
She worked with the women’s group to form a water committee. Not just to run the borehole, but to own it. They set usage rules. Created a small emergency fund. Trained two young men to maintain the system. Taught a girl from SS2 how to monitor usage on a donated tablet.
The borehole became more than a water source. It became a meeting place. A point of pride. A place where girls stopped missing school during their periods. Where elders gathered under shade to talk about things they used to leave unsaid.
New things started to grow.
With water came better farming. People planted maize, tomatoes, and pepper. The harvests were strong. The market buzzed. A health worker from Nsukka began coming twice a week. The old school, once half-empty, started filling up again.
When people asked how it all started, they pointed to the well.
When they asked who started it, they pointed to her.

They offered her a chieftaincy title. She declined.
“I don’t need titles,” she said. “Just promise me the well won’t dry up.”
One evening, she sat with her niece Kamsi, watching the sunset stretch long across the sky. They sat quietly for a while, the only sound the distant splash of someone fetching evening water.
“Aunty,” Kamsi asked, “why didn’t you do something easier?”
Ezinne smiled. “Because easy things don’t last.”
She paused, watching a cluster of birds wheel through the air.
“But if you build something with your hands, mind, and whole heart,” she said, “it can feed people long after you’re gone.”
Kamsi nodded slowly, thoughtfully.
“I want to build something too.”
Ezinne didn’t reply right away. She brushed the dust off the girl’s sleeve and said softly, “Good. Start now.”