At Kenya's Dadaab refugee camps, women and children queued every day under intense sun for water. UNHCR's account describes water lines alongside registration waits in three congested camps holding about 230,000 people.
The queue did not arise from the popularity of a service. Water resources and distribution capacity had not kept pace with population growth, requiring families to receive an essential daily supply in order.
The wait to fill a container expressed the camp's scale in its most immediate unit. A population statistic in the hundreds of thousands appeared in daily life as people waiting for one household's water.