The Summer's Migration, Finally Counted, Finds Its Named Faces

TAMANRASSET — The summer's migration is being counted now, at the registration desks along the corridor routes, and the count is climbing toward numbers that will lead the autumn's briefings: another season, another wave of people the heat moved. But a number is a poor way to meet a person, and at the desk in Tamanrasset the persons keep arriving one at a time, each with a name the tally will dissolve. Ousmane Diallo, fifty-one, registered on Wednesday, a former millet farmer whose land stopped answering three summers ago; he had walked, ridden, and waited his way north across two borders, and he wanted it noted that he had not wanted to come. "The number will say I am migration," he told the clerk. "Write down that I am Ousmane, and that I grew things once." The registrar wrote it down, then entered him as a figure in a field. Both are true and only one will travel — the statistic to the ministries, the man to a shelter cot. The season's tally is real, and it is necessary, and it is not the same as the summer it counts. This paper prints the number because the world runs on it. We print the name because the number cannot.