But Americans are Rich!

My homologue has a habit of asking the price of different items I own. He asks about one item at a time, perhaps thinking I won't notice or be upset if he only asks about one item per day.
One day I decided I would try and explain why we volunteers are not as rich as he thinks. I asked how much it was for a student to go to college (roughly $600/year here). I showed him how much many million CFA it took for one year of school at my university.
“But your parents paid for it,” he said with a smile.
“No, a lot of parents don't pay for college.” This quickly took the smile off of his face, which was replaced with a frown.
“A da ka gelen (It is expensive),” he tells me.
Next, I showed him how much money I earned for each hour that I worked and divided the cost of school in dollars by the amount earned per hour of work and showed him the amount in CFA. I think he started to understand. And then I told him that was only the cost for class and did not include your housing or food costs.
I felt good knowing he had a better idea of how expensive things are in America and that many of us are coming straight from college.
Flash forward two weeks. I'm eating an orange. It is one of five that I bought for 50 CFA a few days earlier in a village several miles away that I had biked to. It may have been only $0.10, but it was the most difficult $0.10 I may have ever spent.
So there I was eating my $0.02 orange when up comes my homologue. He watches me fight the peel and asks if we have oranges in America. Ha ha. I get it. I can't peel an orange, but yes, we do have them in America. So then I explain that we have all sorts of fruits because we buy them from other countries. Subsequently, this also makes them expensive I say.
Sly grin.
A chance to ask his favorite question.
“So how much is den kelen (one child/ one orange)?”
“Keme.” It means 100, but you have to multiply numbers by five here to get their actual price. This means that 100 is actually 500 CFA here. In the States this is roughly $1.00, which can be a lot here.
He agrees that keme is indeed a steep price for one orange but shrugs it off saying, “But Americans have money.”
Right. This again.
This time I try saying we don't all have money. I say many people right now cannot baara soro (work find/ find work), and he finishes my sentence saying this means they can't wari soro (money find/ find money). Bingo. I only wish I would say, and they can't survive off of sending their 5-20 children out to do subsistence farmings because that isn't the way America works.
At any rate, he seemed satisfied, or perhaps figured out I was annoyed by the conversation, and tells me he is headed out to the field to work on his corn.