I looked to the horizon at the sun that would soon be setting. Xavier couldn’t work in the dark, so there wasn’t much time left. I was about to start sieving leftover sunflower oil through a sock, to serve as lubricant in case Xavier needed it, when I heard my name being called.

I turned to see Doctor grinning wildly and running at me while waving something in his hand. Everyone stepped back as he made his way through the playground. He was like Moses parting the Red Sea. “Granny! Granny!” he shouted.

That’s how all the children naturally addressed anyone over forty and, being closer to sixty, I more than qualified. When I was much younger and starting out as an aid worker across the border, I’d been called “Mother.” It had felt like a slap in the face to be named that, as if they were mocking me for my childless state, which of course they weren’t. All those countries and missions later, after all the thousands of children I’d tended, I’d finally grown used to it.

As Doctor ran at me, I should have chided him for his recklessness around the machinery but I didn’t. His joy at being alive was so pure that I found myself favoring him, even granting him amnesty from the rules all the others were expected to live by. My partiality for the boy wasn’t solely based on his positive outlook on life; I’d delivered him five years before.

Despite having had no child-birthing training, I’d stepped in when all the other midwives had refused to help his HIV-positive mother, back when HIV was so rare that it was considered more black magic than a disease. His mother had gone into labor a few weeks premature after almost being stoned to death as she was chased from her village. I’d refused to allow her to go through another ordeal alone.

Coached over satellite telephone by a Doctors Without Borders obstetrician, I’d kitted up in a makeshift kind of hazmat suit before helping bring Doctor into the world. We were lucky. Despite his mother’s health issues, it had been a textbook birth.

She’d cradled him to her chest for an hour afterward, too weak to sit up but too fierce to allow me to take him from her. She held him while I held her, my gloved hand over her bare one, which was resting on his scrawny buttocks.

“He will be a great man, this one,” she said, smiling weakly. “I name him Doctor.” It was the highest honor she could think to bestow on him. It depressed me, given that the medical profession had been able to do nothing for her.