The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Bryan Mealer

small bedroom, located just behind his mother’s house. There we waited for customers, the floor below us strewn with heaps of wires, circuit boards, motors, shattered radio casings, and unidentifiable bits of metal and plastic that appeared along the way. Our usual exchange with clientele went something like this:

      “Odi, odi,” someone said, standing at the door. It was an old man from the next village, hiding his radio in his armpit like a chicken.

      “Come in,” I said.

      “I heard someone here fixes radios?”

      “Yes, that would be me and my colleague, Mister Geoffrey. What’s the problem?”

      “But you’re so young. How could this be?”

      “You mustn’t doubt us. Tell me the problem.”

      “I can’t find the station. It won’t listen.”

      “Let me see…hmmm…yes, I think we can manage. You’ll have it before supper.”

      “Make it before six! It’s Saturday, and I have my theater dramas.”

      “Sure, sure.”

      IF WE WERE GOING to determine what was broken in the radios, we needed a power source. With no electricity, this meant batteries. But batteries were expensive, and Geoffrey and I didn’t earn enough from our repairs to keep buying them. Instead, we’d walk to the trading center and look for used cells that had been tossed in the waste bins. We’d collect maybe five or six, along with an empty carton of Shake Shake booze. Even after all these years, I was still finding uses for these stinking cartons.