On this day in 2018, the ferry MV Nyerere capsized on Lake Victoria, within sight of the pier at Ukara Island in Tanzania. She was making the short crossing from Ukerewe, a routine run of a few kilometres that people took as a matter of course. It was a market day, and the boat was carrying passengers and their goods home.

Two hundred and twenty-eight people died. Forty-one were rescued. Local boat crews were on the water first, as they almost always are, and divers worked the hull in the days that followed; the ferry was righted and brought in more than a week later, and the last of those aboard were accounted for then rather than on the day.

The crossings that ask the least of us are still crossings. I think today of the families on Ukerewe and Ukara who waited at the pier, and of the people who went into the water to bring them word.