Nakiru reached the distribution point at Moroto at seven in the morning on the twenty-ninth of July, after walking since four from a village in Napak district that on the government's maps has a name, and that she calls by another, the old name, the one that designates the well and not the village, because in the village — an aid worker who kept the register that day later told me — the people of Karamoja give names to the water and not to the houses, since houses move with the herds and wells do not, wells stay where they are even when they are dry, and the one at Napak had been dry since March, which to Nakiru mattered and did not matter, because she no longer had the herds: the last three cows, a zebu and two short-horned crossbreeds, she had sold in February to a trader from Kotido for a price that by November would have been triple, and that in February was enough for two sacks of sorghum, which in turn lasted for as long as they lasted.

Of those two sacks, the aid worker who retold me the story some time later said, by July there remained the exact accounting of how they had ended: the first month as thick porridge for the evening; the second month at half ration; then a fistful of grains boiled a long time, because boiled a long time they deceive the stomach a little longer; then nothing, which in Karamoja is not named, and one walks.

At the distribution point the line was long and orderly, kept orderly by two volunteers in vests; and the ration, that day, was calculated per registered household: twelve kilos of sorghum, a litre of oil, a bag of pulses for each household, according to a list that had been drawn up in June, before this year's drought — the worst the region has known in decades — brought to Karamoja the numbers the UN would later give: a million and a half people at risk, nineteen deaths from hunger counted only in the districts where someone was counting them.

The June list carried Nakiru's name and the names of her two children. It did not carry the names of the other three.

The other three were her sister's children — her sister was called Achen, and had died in June, not of hunger directly, but of that thing which comes with hunger and takes the already weak first; and the three children, the eldest nine and the two little ones, had remained in the hut next door, which is in a sense the same hut, because between Nakiru's hut and Achen's there was a low thorn fence that the children had always climbed over, and now there was no longer even a reason to climb it, because on the other side no one cooked.

At the register table the aid worker asked her how many people were in the household. It is a procedural question, asked of everyone. Nakiru looked at the register, where the worker's finger sat still on the line with her name and the number three; and she said six.

She said six, and gave the names: her own two, and then Achen's three as if they were hers, changing the ending of just one, the small change enough to make him look like the son of another father and not of her sister's husband, and she kept the sixth, herself, for last.

The aid worker did not lift his eyes from the register. He corrected the number. He wrote six. Not every worker, that month, corrected the numbers; some asked for a death certificate, which does not exist in Napak, or asked that the children be brought in person, which meant making three children walk three hours under the sun when their legs did not have three hours of walking in them. This one corrected it.

Nakiru received double the ration her written entitlement allowed: twenty-four kilos of sorghum instead of twelve, two litres of oil, two bags of pulses. She loaded them onto a large gourd, the kind carried tied to the back, the same gourd that in March had carried water and that for months had carried everything except water.

And here the story settles where it had not set out from, because the gourd — that water-gourd carved with a lozenge pattern that the women of Karamoja hand down from mother to daughter, and that in peacetime is worth a goat — that gourd Nakiru did not fill to the brim: she filled it halfway for herself and her two, and the other half of the sorghum, before she had even reached home, she poured into a second, smaller container, which she would leave on the far side of the thorn fence, in the hut where no one cooked, because Achen's three children, on the register, were now hers, but in the hut they were still her sister's, and the sorghum knows the hand that divides it, not the line that writes it.