A young doctor in Singapore gets a phone call out of nowhere. His mentor asks if he wants to work for the World Health Organization in Indonesia, fighting bird flu. He says yes. That one call changes his career and puts Singapore on the global health map.
Part II ends with one of the most intense sequences in the entire novel. Dagny and Owen Kellogg are walking along the tracks in the dead of night, the Comet abandoned behind them, and what starts as a simple hike to a phone turns into something much bigger. This is where the dollar sign cigarettes finally get their explanation. And this is where Dagny makes a choice that sends her flying, literally, into Part III.
Ask someone what a UN worker looks like and they will probably describe a diplomat at a cocktail party in New York. The reality, especially for the people in this chapter, is more like 700 trucks driving food through the Ethiopian desert to millions of starving people.
This is the last chapter of Part II, and it’s a big one. Rand uses it as a hinge between the world that’s falling apart and the secret world that explains why. Everything that’s been building for nine chapters reaches a turning point here. We start on a dying train and end somewhere nobody expected to go.
It started with a casual conversation about textbooks. It ended with 115 African policymakers visiting Singapore, a major conference in Tunisia, and four published books. That is how knowledge sharing works when the right people get involved.
This is the final chapter of Part II. And it hits like a freight train. Three separate emotional collisions happen in this chapter, and by the end Rand has lit every fuse she’s been laying for hundreds of pages.
Can a mobile app help farmers sell their crops? Can slaughterhouse waste power a kitchen stove? These are the kinds of problems that infoDev at the World Bank works on. And the person running the whole thing is a Singaporean.
This chapter is built like a trap. Dagny spends a month in the woods trying to let go of the railroad. She almost makes it. Then the radio announces the tunnel disaster, and she runs back before Francisco can even finish his sentence. The chapter title is “By Our Love,” and that’s exactly the weapon being used against her.
Most countries that work with the World Bank stay borrowers for decades. Singapore borrowed for about ten years, then basically stopped needing the money. That is the short version of this chapter.
Janet Lim joined UNHCR in 1980. She spent over three decades working on refugee crises around the world. And she says something that’s hard to argue with: humanitarian work is probably the area where Singapore has been the least engaged with the UN.