During his two-month tenure as a salesclerk at Home Depot, Rekson made his mark by repeatedly spilling boxes of nails onthefloor and accidentally banging into customers with large pieces of lumber.
Many of them he keeps in a roughly 35-square-foot, mahogany-paneled room in his basement, which houses boxes of cigars piled on shelves to the ceiling and in columns rising a few feet off thefloor.
In a Trincomalee town hall with views of the glittering Indian Ocean, more than 80 families sleep on a concrete floor amid battered cardboard boxes of possessions.