On a recent morning – let’s say it’s this morning – in red-earthed or grassy or cinnamon-sanded villages; in harried, beeping towns of asphalt and cantilevered concrete; in neglected urban thickets, towers bowing as they rise; in one-roomed clinics, plastic sandals waiting obediently on the porch; or in neat structures behind well-pruned rows of flowering bushes; under the stretched shade of a wide tree, or in the black shadow of a cloud, or under the furnace blast of the desert sun, a fridge door opened.
Inside, a bulb zinged on, flinging light at the face of a health worker. She is the runner of the penultimate mile in a very long relay race that has been going non-stop since the mid-1970s.