A twelve-year-old girl fell into a cistern twenty-five feet deep.
She should have drowned. She came up wearing a rosary. The child, Nousseira Habib, had gone to draw water for the sisters who taught nearby. She slipped and vanished into the dark well. Minutes passed. Men finally arrived with a rope. The crowd grew angry and helpless. One of the sisters, who had been praying, pushed through, threw her rosary down into the water, and went on with the Hail Marys. When they lowered a bucket again, the rope moved. They pulled. The girl’s head appeared.
Then she stood in the bucket, alive, calm, with the rosary around her neck. She said that while she was under the water the shining beads fell onto her hands and throat, the whole cistern filled with light, and she felt as if she were resting, not drowning. A voice told her to take the rope. She did, and she came out unharmed. She had been Greek Orthodox.
After that day she and her family entered the Catholic Church. Others who saw it did the same. It is a testimony kept by the sisters and those who stood at the well: a child at the point of death, a rosary cast into the dark, and a life given back. The prayer Our Lady taught the Church ends with the hour that well represented, “now and at the hour of our death.” That hour came early for a little girl in a cistern. Mary did not leave her in there.