Planting Water for Future Generations: Pope Leo XIV’s September Prayer Intention and a Story of Hope from Timor-Leste
Each month, Pope Leo XIV invites the whole Church into a shared intention for prayer, a single thread joining believers across every continent. For September, that thread is water. The Pope’s prayer intention calls us to pray “for the just and sustainable management of water, a vital resource, so that everyone may have equal access to it”.
It is a simple request, but not a small one. Water is the most basic of human needs, and yet for hundreds of millions of people around the world, it remains the hardest thing to reach. In too many places, water is scarce, contaminated, or simply too far away. And it is almost always women and children who carry the heaviest share of that burden, quite literally, on their backs.
A Hard Geography
In the highlands of Timor-Leste, this is exactly the story that has played out for generations. Villages are built along the ridgelines, while the springs that sustain them sit far below. Through the long dry season, from August into November, those springs would slow to little more than a trickle.
Families walked more than a kilometre downhill and queued from before dawn, carrying twenty-litre containers back up steep slopes, day after day, season after season.
A Community Changes its Own Story
Today, in the village of Railaco, that story is changing, and it is community itself leading the change.
Through Mary MacKillop Today’s Sustainable Agriculture and Women’s Empowerment Project, in partnership with TILOFE (Timor Leste Organic Fertilizer), farmers have learned a powerful technique. Rather than letting rain race downhill and strip away the soil, they now dig infiltration trenches and recharge pits across the hillsides.
The rain pools, slows, and sinks into the ground, quietly recharging the very springs the community relies on.
What makes the work last is that it belongs to the people who built it. Neighbours in one village pooled labour, along with small contributions of money for pipes, sand and cement.
The project is grounded in hamutuk, the Timorese practice of mutual help, and guided by tara bandu, the customary law that protects land and water for the whole community.
As one community leader reflected, this is a project the community can now manage for itself, a quiet act of self-determination. For another, the gift of water is one that reaches beyond his own lifetime. This, he says, is “planting water for future generations”.
A Story that Answers the Pope’s Call
It would be hard to find a clearer picture of what Pope Leo XIV is asking us to pray for this September.
The springs of Railaco are not owned by any one family, company or nation. They are shared, and their management now reflects that. The project has not simply delivered water to a community. It has restored the community’s own capacity to manage a vital, shared resource, justly and sustainably, for everyone who depends on it.
This is the just and sustainable management of water made visible: not water hoarded or fought over, but water held in trust for this generation and for the grandchildren who are not yet born.
Emilia Nicholas
Community Engagement Officer, Josephite Justice Network
Schools and Community Engagement Coordinator, Mary MacKillop Today