With the Heat Breaking, the Sahel Counts What the Corridor Actually Delivered

NIAMEY — Now that the worst heat has broken, the households of the southern Sahel are doing their own accounting, and it is more precise than any ministry's. Amina Sagara can tell you to the liter what the corridor delivered to her lane this summer: enough that no child on her block queued at a dry standpipe in August, and not one liter more than that. "We did not have plenty," she said, filling a jerrican at the shared tap that ran, this year, every day. "We had exactly enough, which after last summer felt like plenty, and I have not decided yet whether that is gratitude or a trap." The Sahel spine held through the season, and the relief in the standpipe lanes is real. But the families who lived on the margin all summer measure it in the language of margins — the two hours a day the pressure dipped, the week in August the interior districts went back on the alternating schedule, the knowledge that a single fouled membrane two thousand kilometers away would have reached their tap within a day. The heat is breaking. The counting, standpipe by standpipe, has only started.