Mansa.

Mansa is eight years old, lives in the Boseja neighborhood in Maun, Botswana, and leaves home every morning at seven ten. The route never changes. It never does. She walks out the door, turns left, crosses the patch of waste ground where the dogs sleep piled against the block wall, and crosses the bridge over the Thamalakane — the river that borders the east of Maun, which sometimes holds water and sometimes holds dust. From the bridge you can see the trees on the other bank and, on a clear morning, the orange reflection of the sun on the mud. Mansa doesn't look at the view. What she looks at is Rra Otsile's shop, right past the bridge on the right.

Rra Otsile is seventy, has a shop the size of a shipping container, and has the habit of keeping a strawberry Chappie for Mansa every day. Chappie is a cheap gum, artificial flavor, waxed paper that sticks to your fingers. In Botswana you can buy it at any tuck shop for a few coins. For Mansa it's part of the route: bridge, shop, "Ee rra" — good morning, sir —, gum, school. If he doesn't have strawberry one day, Mansa takes the grape one without a word. But you can tell.

Sometimes she stops for a moment and tells him something she read in a wildlife book her science teacher loaned her. Rra Otsile listens, nods, and asks: "Is that true?" Mansa nods, serious, and keeps walking.

In Maun, June and July mornings drop to five or six degrees. The Okavango Delta is nearby, humidity rises from the river before dawn, and the cold gets into your clothes before the sun comes up. By ten it can be twenty-five degrees; at seven, you need something on.

Mansa almost always wears her knitted pink sweater. But on the coldest days she uses it as a mid-layer: a t-shirt underneath, something else on top. The logic is the same as any kid who walks twenty minutes to school along an unpaved road and doesn't want to arrive with goosebumps. The layers come off through the morning as the sun picks up. Mansa folds them and leaves them on her desk, one on top of the other, always in the same order.

The sweatshirt works the same way. It's an outer layer: the one you put on when you leave home and don't know whether it'll be cold or warm by mid-morning. The full-coverage print means Mansa's portrait runs across the whole fabric — sleeves, back — with no white edges or blank patches. The result is a garment you wear like any everyday sweatshirt.