At the Well of Sychar: How One Woman’s Thirst for God Became a Fountain for Latin America’s Youth

In the dusty pages of John’s Gospel, a Samaritan woman meets Christ at Jacob’s well. Today, that ancient encounter is being reenacted across Latin America through a spiritual retreat named for that very place: Sicar. But the story behind the movement is as much about the thirst of its founder as it is about the young people it serves.

Mother María Elena Martínez, a Mexican religious with over 30 years of consecrated life, did not arrive at her vocation by a straight road. “Religious life wasn’t something that particularly appealed to me,” she admits. Her journey—from a degree in translation to the Missionaries of Charity, to a cloistered contemplative life—reflects a soul in genuine search. “I remember as a little girl I had a great thirst for God,” she recalls. That thirst, she says, gave rise to a “desire for purity” and a life of virginity, a prayer she offered insistently to the Virgin Mary.

The Sicar retreat, born from her discernment, now reaches thousands in Mexico, Guatemala, Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru. It is the fruit of a private association called “Mary, Mother of Love,” founded in 2015. The retreat’s name—spelled “Sychar” in English Bibles—evokes the woman who, after meeting Christ, became an evangelist to her whole town. Mother Elena’s own story suggests that the deepest wells of spiritual renewal are often dug by those who first knew their own emptiness.