Every child deserves to be someone’s whole world.

The wind came at two in the morning, and by half past, the roof of the volunteers’ house was in the bean field. Forty children in pyjamas stood in the kitchen doorway watching it go, which is not the evacuation drill we taught them, but it is the one they chose.

By breakfast the older boys had already found the tarps; by evening, half the town was on our roof, hammering, arguing about hammering, and drinking our tea. Nobody slept in the cold — the town saw to that, and so did you: the repairs were the first thing your gifts paid for that year.

We stopped buying Emmanuel toys years ago — he only ever wanted the box and the screwdriver. When the generator died the winter he was fourteen, the mechanic quoted us three weeks and a sum that made Ruth sit down.

Emmanuel asked for one afternoon and a lamp. It ran by evening. He is in his first year of engineering now, on a Shina scholarship, and writes home about torque. We have to look it up.

Our social workers traced Grace’s family for two years — a grandmother who had moved to a market town three hundred kilometres away, and never stopped asking after the granddaughter she couldn’t afford to raise.

They talk every Sunday now, and Grace spends the long holidays shelling beans in her grandmother’s yard. Belonging, it turns out, was never a single address. We count this one twice: once as a child reunited, and once as proof the slow work is worth doing.

Once a year the children write to the companions who fund their houses. We publish three, unedited: “Dear friend, the hens are laying again. We named the new one after you. She is very bossy.” — Amina, 9.

“I am writing to inform you that I have come first in mathematics. My teacher says so, and she is not a person who jokes.” — Joseph, 13. And our favourite, from the youngest: “Thank you for the food. Yesterday we had the good kind of rice.”