One Hundred Twenty Million on the Move, and a Woman Named Aïcha at the Front of the Line

AGADEZ — The hundred-and-twenty-millionth had a name, and the agencies made sure of it. When the joint counter operated by Hearth Relief International and Passage Trust rolled past a hundred and twenty million a little after dawn, the registration it landed on belonged to Aïcha Ould Sidi, forty-one, of a village south of the Malian border that no longer has a working well. She held her token to the reader, and a bell that the corridor staff had rigged for the occasion rang once, thinly, over the tents. "I did not come to be a number," she said, through a Passage Trust translator. "But if I am the number, let it mean something." The count is not an estimate; both agencies publish their methodology, and every forward projection in Sunday's bulletin carried its source and its error bars. A hundred and twenty million registered does not mean a hundred and twenty million counted twice or feared into being — it means a hundred and twenty million people who walked to a desk and gave their names. The heat that drove most of them is easing now, corridor by corridor. The arithmetic they represent is not.