The canal fills a little every year

When a section of canal bank gives way in a village outside Minya, the whole village turns out. Men with shovels, boys with sacks of sand, someone on a motorbike fetching the man with the digger. By nightfall the bank is patched and everyone has a story to tell.

In the same canal, silt has been settling for twenty years. Each season the water runs a little shallower, reaches a little less of the land at the far end, and the fields there grow a little thinner. Nobody has ever turned out for the silt. There is no evening on which it becomes an emergency, so there is no evening on which anyone picks up a shovel.

Almost everything we notice works like the collapsed bank. The sudden thing gets the crowd, the conversation and the effort. It is visible, it has a beginning and an end, and fixing it feels like a victory.

But the slow thing is the one writing the ending. Villages rarely fail because of one broken bank. Health, trust, a reputation, the habits of a family: they are made and unmade gradually, by changes too small on any given day to be worth a phone call.

The village has a crowd ready for any collapse and nobody at all whose job is the silt. Most places are like that: well organised for emergencies, barely organised for the slow work of keeping something sound. Imagine if even a small share of the attention the sudden thing gets went, steadily, every week, to the chronic one instead.