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earthquake or tidal wave and they would have decided that everyone should sleep in their own mud huts in future.
    â€œCan we have a chat later?” I said, suddenly remembering the toothbrush and holding it up. “When I’ve finished my teeth?”
    I finished the brushing, and scrunched across the gravel to my hut. I had a lot to do that day. I was the administrator of the camp, doing the organization for SUSTAIN, the charity which employed us all. I had been at Safila for just over four years. For the first two I had been assistant administrator, then I’d taken over the main job, with Henry joining as my assistant. I had to oversee supplies of food and drugs and medical equipment, the vehicles, the drinking water, the food—and the staff, which seemed to take up more time than anything.
    I opened the piece of corrugated iron which served as a door, and stepped inside my hut. My home in Safila was a thatched circle of wood and mud, about twenty feet in diameter with a hard earth floor covered in rush mats. It smelt of dust. I had a metal-framed bed with a mosquito net, a desk, shelves for my books and files, two metal armchairs with hideous floral foam-rubber cushions, and a Formica coffee table. Everything was covered in sand. It got between your teeth, into your ears, your pockets, your pants. I was fond of my hut, though I think it was the privacy rather than anything else about it which held the appeal.
    I say privacy, but two minutes later there was a halfhearted rattle at the door and Betty poked her head round, giving an understanding upside-down smile. She came in, without being asked, gave me a hug, and plonked herself on the bed. There was a scuffling in the ceiling, the ceiling being a large canvas sheet, which was there to catch creatures that would otherwise fall out of the thatch into the room.
    â€œHello, little friends,” said Betty, looking up.
    Oh, no, oh, no. It was a bit early in the morning to have Betty in your hut.
    â€œYou’re worried, Rosie, aren’t you? And, do you know, I think you’re right to be worried.”
    Here we go, I thought, Henry and Sian.
    â€œIt reminds me of when Judy Elliot was running Mikabele back in ’seventy-four. She’d had several arrivals in a very poor state, sent a message to head office asking for reinforcements and got her head bitten off for overreacting. Two months later there was a massive influx, a hundred a day dying during the worst of it, and of course she didn’t have the staff or the equipment.”
    So it wasn’t Henry and Sian. It was the locusts.
    â€œWhat have you heard? Do you think there’s anything in it?”
    Over the four years I had been in Safila there had been several famine scares, hordes of refugees about to flood over the border bringing plagues of cholera, meningitis, elephantiasis, God knows what, but it had never, in all the time I had been in Safila, come to anything serious. Sometimes we suspected it was just a refugee ruse to get more food.
    Betty gave a little toss of her head, offended. “You mustn’t think I’m in any way trying to tell you your job, Rosie dear. You know I have the greatest admiration for everything you do, the greatest admiration. But, you know, we must always listen to the voice of the African, the voice of Africa.”
    Suddenly I wanted to bite Betty, or just sort of pummel her face for quite a long time.
    â€œI’m worried too, Betty, but we can’t go raising an alert if we’ve nothing concrete to go on. Have you heard anything I haven’t heard?”
    â€œThey, the people, are our barometer, you know. And the Teeth of the Wind as the African calls them”—she paused for approval—“the Teeth of the Wind can be absolute shockers. They fly all day, you know. Miles and miles, they cover, thousands of miles.”
    â€œI know, that’s what they were saying down at the distribution yesterday, but have