Of Our First Well in Togo

After four days, we finished drilling, not knowing if we had water.

We made a make-shift pump to empty the water from the hole, to see if it would recharge. The water came out cloudy, then clear, then cloudy, then clear - signals that new water channels were opening below. After half an hour, we still had not been able to pump our 28.5-foot well dry. And the water became colder, as one would expect water hidden from the sun to be.

Slowly smiles spread across the faces of the village drillers. Children began laughing and playing with the water. A few women started to clap in rhythm and sing bits of a song. But I wouldn't say it was a well, cautious as I am, pessimistic as I was.

Generally one pumps the well dry, and lets it recharge, then pumps it dry, then lets it recharge until enough new channels of water open up so that one cannot pump it dry again. The process can take weeks.

After 1.5 hours, we were never able to pump our hole dry. We had a well.

I came to Togo dubious about whether or not we could succeed, considering our three dry holes in Ethiopia. And when I saw gargantuan chunks of granite protruding from the ground at every turn, my morale dropped deeper I've ever drilled. Rock had been our demise at the new work area in Awashbuni, and I was nearly certain it would undo us here.

My fears were not eased by shopping for materials. One shop owner (whom we had not told about our well-making intent) told us that the pulleys we sought were in short supply because their most frequent buyers used them for hand-digging wells, and no one was digging wells anymore because they continually reached rock and could go no further.

"Please, come to my village," one chief said to me, according to my translators at a church retreat. "We have no water because there is too much rock."

However, the situation at least seemed hopeful when we surveyed our first drill site on Tuesday. The village had a large, hand-dug well which would provide us the water necessary to drill. Its water started at 18 feet, and those who drilled the well said it was "dirt" all the way down to the water.

We soon discovered said dirt to be gravel held together by sandy soil. This is problematic because gravel cannot squeeze through our drill-tip valve. Neither can the gravel be ground into smaller sediment because the arrow-head point cannot get a solid hit on individual pieces.

By Wednesday's end, we hadn't reached 10 feet because gravel continually fell into the hole, and our hole had beveled out to where we had no way of ensuring a straight hole. We moved our tools and derrick and prepared to start again the next day.

Thursday we sharpened a steel coupling, attached it to some of our plastic drill stem pipe and jabbed it into the ground, slightly moistening the ground with water. Thus we stuffed dirt into our pipe, took it out and cleaned it until we were 10 feet down. Then we attached our steel pipe and drill bit and began again.

After some trouble with the pulley, and after some experimentation with a piece of large plastic pipe to keep gravel from falling into our hole, we were on our way. We were on our way - until we hit another layer of gravel.

For this new layer, we removed the bit, put on the sharp steel coupling and used our hand to make a one-way valve at the top of the drill pipe. We covered the top of our pipe on the way up and uncovered it on the way down, thereby lifting the column of water on the way up, and flinging the rig down fast enough so that the water spewed out. The method is also known as Chinese sludging, a 3,000-year-old technique.

Once we were through that layer of gravel, we hit rock. For the remainder of the day, we pounded the layer and made a bit progress. Then we put on new pipe - plastic pipe instead of more steal pipe, which we had been using to force our way through the rock – and the plastic pipe came apart where we had glued on couplings. We tried a piece of pipe on which we used different glue, and we got the same result. So we pulled out the rig for the day and we saw that the sharp teeth of our coupling had been pounded back inside the coupling.

We spent the first half of Friday buying and threading cheap galvanized pipe to replace our plastic pipe, hoping that our drilling rig wouldn't be too hard to pull. And we also brought a drill bit made specifically for rock. We drilled the rest of the day, progressed through the rock, two feet of it (I'm assuming it was a fractured rock; I don't believe we could've drilled so quickly through granite), and then through a foot of sand.

We drilled hard again half of the next day, Saturday, without incident until we were at a total of 28.5 feet. The workers, to my encouragement, wanted to continue to 36 feet, but I insisted that we stop where we were. We started at a lower level than the hand-dug well, and that the water table started around 18 feet, and we were in sand that should, theoretically, make a good aquifer. We didn't need to be pushing our luck.

So we reamed the hole wide enough for our casing (the wall of the well, in essence), put in our casing, poured buckets of water down the casing that stuck up a meter above ground level so as to flush out dirty water, and then tried to pump the well dry using a quickly thrown together inertia pump. As aforementioned, we could not pump it dry, and we had our well.

Once we were sure it was a well, we put gravel, then sand, then clay around the casing to create essentially a giant bio-sand filter to keep surface water from contaminating the aquifer.

We'll spend this next week installing a nice, steal pump since the entire village will use it and it will hold up better than the standard plastic pump we put together for individual families. I hope to have a ridiculous amount of pictures posted by that time.

All in all, we praise God for Togolese villager's hard work and for David Reeves' long hours put to finding all of our materials, and for all of his communications work, and always for your prayers. We fought hard and won a victory. May it be the first of many.