Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 12/7/2022
GRANVILLE — When the Granville Federated Church started a capital campaign fund for much-needed repairs in 2013, nobody knew how much that money would wind up reshaping the lives of an entire African village.
Bobbi Ayers-O’Connell, a trustee of the church on Granville’s Town Green, said the three-year campaign wound up raising more than $150,000, which Ayers-O’Connell called unheard of for a small town like Granville, home to fewer than 2,000 residents. Part of the planning included setting aside money for missionary work. The church set up a scholarship fund in honor of Marine 1st Lt. Travis Fuller, a Granville resident who died in a helicopter crash while serving in Iraq.
The church also set aside $5,000 to build a well in Africa. Former Pastor Patrick McMahon contacted the region’s American Baptist Missions coordinator in search of someone who knew what it would take and could help the church in its goal of bringing water to the thirsty. That someone turned out to be the Rev. Patti Ricotta of Chatham, on Cape Cod.
Ricotta runs a nonprofit called Life Together International. She has spent 19 years working in Africa, primarily in eastern countries like Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda.
“What Patrick said was, ‘Do you know of anybody who needs clean water in the areas you work?’ And I said the better question is, ‘do I know anybody who doesn’t need clean water,’” Ricotta said. “Everybody needs clean water.”
Ricotta narrowed down the options and the church eventually landed on Kaleko Village in the Butebo district of eastern Uganda. The church wanted to help a school and orphanage named Agape Academy, but the area is especially dry.
“They chose Agape, and man, I started praying,” Ricotta said. “I started doing research on who to hire to dig for water and that sort of thing. I looked everywhere. The cheapest drilling organizations, even the charity ones, charged between $32,000 and $35,000. And Granville had $5,000.”
Through a colleague of hers, Ricotta was eventually introduced to an individual named Geoffrey Oumo who owned a drilling rig and said he would drill three holes for $5,000.
But before Oumo’s first hole was even halfway to its maximum depth, he struck water.
“It was like God had X-ray vision,” Ricotta said. “He found the very perfect hole so that we got water on the first try. We didn’t even have to go down 300 feet, they found water at 121 feet. It was totally amazing.”
Later on, Ricotta remembers, Oumo took her to the road and pointed toward a compound 70 meters away. He told Ricotta about a project years ago when he drilled five holes, all 380 feet, and it took until the last hole to find water. To this day, that well fills 10 jerry cans a day. Ricotta says Oumo didn’t tell her the story before drilling because he thought it would make her hesitant about the odds of finding a better outcome in even fewer tries.
The church’s first goal was for the well to provide enough water for Agape Academy. The academy houses about 100 orphans and a primary school, which ends at around age 13. A similar well to the one at that compound would support the school but not the surrounding village.
“I said, ‘How much water do we have?’ And [Oumo] said, ‘Patti — this well will fill 1,000 jerry cans a day,’” Ricotta said. “A thousand jerry cans a day, and that was in January of 2016 and to this day, it still fills that many jerry cans a day.”
The school opens its doors for the entire village to use the well every day from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The work continued. Oumo charged less than the full $5,000 because it took just one try. Ricotta knows from experience that wells need maintenance or they tend to break down within two years. She had $1,800 left over, and the community opted to use the excess to open a well maintenance fund. Ricotta also had extra money from Ayers-O’Connell, who provided the funding her team needed to do this work on top of her regular work in Africa with Life Together International. Ayers-O’Connell agreed to divide the money into monthly payments for food.
In the ensuing years, the Granville church paid for Kaleko to purchase goats and chickens. Ayers-O’Connell, the church’s mission committee, and private donors from Granville Federated Church and Ricotta’s church still join forces to send hundreds every month for food and animal feed.
The church has since built more classrooms, dormitories and a boys’ and girls’ bathhouse at Agape Academy. Ricotta’s nonprofit raised funds to bring bunkbeds and blankets to the orphans, who previously slept on rubber mats on the floor. Ayers-O’Connell estimates the total given from the church to Kaleko since 2016 to be around $50,000.
“It means a great deal to us, I get pretty choked up about it,” Ayers-O’Connell said. “You don’t ever think you would be able to touch children’s lives that are that far away, but we’ve done that. It makes our church very humble but very, very proud at the same time.”
Ongoing connection
In a society with strong gender roles, it’s the girls, starting from a young age, who are tasked with walking to the nearest source and bringing back water for everyone. For the women of Kaleko, that source is 3.7 miles away, according to Ricotta. Girls would carry 40-pound jerry cans on their heads every day, contributing to developmental and educational detriments.
About a year after installing the well, Ricotta returned to Kaleko. While admiring the well, an elderly woman walked up to her and used the school’s director as a translator. The lady gestured toward a mud hut with a thatched roof.
“She said, ‘That is my home. All my life I have traveled all those miles to get water every single day,’” Ricotta recalled. “She was so skinny and frail and she got on her knees and started to hug my knees. She said, ‘Never in my life would I think that I could have to just walk across the road and get water for my home. I am eternally grateful.’”
“It’s just amazing what this tiny little church has been able to do,” Ricotta said. “It all started because the community of Granville wanted to serve people they would never know or never meet, but they knew that it was the right thing to do. It’s like the small village of Granville Federated Church has helped the small village of Kaleko in the Butebo District in Uganda. The connection is so precious and it’s thriving.”
The work continues. Seeing the improvements that Granville had started, a man from a nearby compound wanted to help. He donated three acres of land for the village to grow crops and asked for the church to build a library and dining hall for the students. The church still needs that funding, and any donations can be mailed to the Granville Federated Church at P.O. Box 246, Granville, MA 01034, with checks made out to Agape School.
That man died and his children were left to pay off his debts. Knowing what their father wanted the land to be used for, Ricotta said they needed 10,000,000 Ugandan shillings, or about $5,000 in U.S. funds, to be able to keep the land. Again, someone from Granville stepped up.
“What I have seen between Granville and Agape Academy is a connection,” Ricotta said. “A web of life that enhances the lives of those who give to the extent of, if not beyond, those who receive.”
“It has been such a blessing to this community and it has changed the entire community,” Ricotta said. “What they did is so much bigger than the $5,000 they put in.”
Doing good in the world
Ricotta said her nonprofit group would ultimately like to bring a secondary school to the village and fill it with supplies and teachers. The government pays for primary school, but attending secondary school is expensive and especially difficult for orphans. Ricotta says most of them have nowhere to go after aging out of Agape.
“I have seen with my own eyes how much a little bit of money can do to improve the lives of people who are in the most desperate, dire situations that we can’t even begin to understand,” Ricotta said. “Kaleko Village still doesn’t have electricity. There are things people can do with a few dollars every month that will make it so that people can live longer, they can live happier.”
“Think about how much more we have,” Ayers-O’Connell said. “I get out of a hot shower sometimes and I think to myself, ‘Will these children ever feel a hot shower?’ I don’t know if they ever will. We take such for granted, some things.”
Both women encourage people to be more conscious of how they can positively impact the lives of people around the globe, even with just small contributions. For Ricotta, that type of giving is essential to living a complete life. She said we’re not given in order to hoard for ourselves, and instead we should acknowledge that everything we receive has something we can give away.
“There’s not a better feeling,” Ricotta said. “You can get a brand-new house, a brand-new car, you can get anything. But those things are like a sugar high. I believe that we are all created with an infinite vacuum in our souls and we try to fill that infinite vacuum with finite things, and it creates a sugar high for a little while but then we need another finite thing to fill that infinite vacuum. We’re constantly trying to get more because we’re not looking beyond ourselves.”
“That attachment of making the world a better place is something that is so soul-satisfying that once you start doing it, you don’t ever want to stop. Because you know that you’re doing good in the world, not just in your house or in your own personal life,” Ricotta said.
And so still, with a well and a fund for upkeep, with beds, classrooms, food, livestock and more, the Granville Federated Church continues to raise funds. There are still dreams that need to become reality. The work continues.
Correction: This article was edited Dec. 13, 2022, to clarify that 1st Lt. Travis Fuller was a passenger in the helicopter crash.