Air in Makoko was thick, pulpy poison, and within five days, Reuben felt it burrowing into his bones. It was not the smell of sewage and rot; it was the weight of the place, the unbelievable, endless size of its desperation. The frantic early energy that had propelled him from Riverside had drained away, leaving a lethargic, bone-weariness.
They and Anna were automatons now. Their world had contracted to the little clinic, the endless queues of patients, the same SODIS technique, repeated endlessly, the dismal nightly tally of fresh cases on their paper map. The red pins were accumulating, an unstoppable, spreading blot. Their blue pins—the families adopting the sun-water treatment—were spreading, but so slowly that compared to the tide of disease, it seemed glacial.
The System's typhoid
