Lionel usually asks that the job you are hiring him to do also includes a job for his younger cousin Melvin. Together with Melvin and his Uncle Tito, Melvin’s father, Lionel lives in an indistinct concrete block building without lights or power or running water on a road that comes complete with them all.

Lionel says that he is twenty-seven and that Melvin just recently turned twenty-one. I first met Lionel in front of his home which I pass by each time I make my way down the road to my own.

One day as I passed I was offered for purchase a small green Parakeet. Since that day, Lionel or Melvin have tried to sell me everything from fake Maya artefacts to shotgun shells to over ripe oranges.

When it comes to negotiating for carpentry work tendered by the Lionel and Melvin Construction Company Limited, Lionel does all the talking, as Melvin avoids all eye contact whatsoever. The duo of Melvin and Lionel work quite well together moving in unison in their carpenter’s dance with the tools as they carve this or hammer and concrete that. Never once have I heard of them having words with each other, a rarity in the delicate world of construction workers.

In the end I guess the only real problem with Lionel and Melvin is that everyone in the village refers to them both as 'the local thieves'. That's right, the villagers almost unanimously say that when Melvin steals in the night he robs while completely nude. They say he does so in order to escape being caught by having nothing to be held on to grab.

Despite the malicious rumours and the occasionally misplaced machete during the course of any given work project the two are employed to carry out, the villagers have all hired Lionel and Melvin and continue to do so as I write. For the cousins are extremely talented when it comes to being fair and honest contractually as it pertains to their chosen trade. I guess you might say in their case, one man's thief is another man's savoir.