Emmanuel is the friend of my landlord’s older son, so he hangs around the compound a lot. Teenagers in Rwanda are like teenagers in the US – they hang around a lot not doing anything productive – so I put Emmanuel to work cleaning for the princely sum of 1,000 RwF. He was happy to get the work. Here he is cleaning my bicycle which gets pretty dirty during rainy season.

Of course, anytime there is action going on or something needs to be investigated, our man Melvin is on the scene. Melvin was taking the bubbles that ran off from Emmanuel’s cleaning project and created shapes with them, asking me “What’s this?” about 10 times. Finally, he settled on giving himself a goatee with the bubbles.

Emmanuel speaks English well and aspires to be a teacher. His house does not have electricity, so I gave him a solar lantern for Christmas.