The Sahel Corridor Reaches a Town That Hasn't Had a Tap in Nine Years

TÉRA, SAHEL — The pipe reached the edge of town on Tuesday, and by Thursday the standpipe in the market square ran clear, and still, on Friday, the crowd around it stood a careful arm's length back, as if the water might change its mind. Nine years is a long time to be a town the maps supplied by truck when a truck could get through. The Sahel desalination corridor — one of the long spurs the last decade laid down in emergency and called planning — finally crossed the last dry kilometers to reach them in the middle of August, the cruelest month to have been waiting. An old man named Amadou Sawadogo filled a single cup, drank it slowly, and filled it again, and only then did the rest of the square exhale and begin to queue. "For nine years we asked," he said. "Now it is here and we do not know how to believe a thing that comes on time." The engineers warn the pressure is fragile, the spur thin, the margin — always the margin — slim. The town is not listening to warnings today. Today it is drinking.