Lock, stock and 6 shiny keys

Yesterday I replaced the lock on my apartment door. It couldn’t wait any longer. I’d been having trouble with it for a while. At first it was a bit tough to turn. Then it got sticky. Then I had to shake the key to get it in the lock and wiggle, shake, pray, curse and sweat to get it to do anything.
Last week my neighbor gave me a totally new lock for free. Pretty cool gift. I just wasn’t sure I could install it. It looked a bit bigger than my current one, and instead of the lock being one bar it was three pins. Also, the strike plate on the door jamb didn’t work with the new lock. All this is a shame, really, because the new lock was pretty sweet. Oh well.

So, after spending about five minutes getting into the apartment yesterday afternoon I decided I could no longer wait for assistance from the maintenance guy at our school and would have to do this myself. It’s not that he didn’t want to help, it’s just that I never could find him. He works at our school and the town pool and he’s always busy. Though in the finest tradition of Murphy’s Law I saw him today. He was pretty impressed that I managed to fix the lock myself, for what it’s worth.

Back to my awesome repair job. So it’s like this, the lock consists of two pieces: the core with the tumbler and all that jazz and the bolt mechanism. For the princely sum of 260 tenge (that’s sarcasm, folks, it’s less than $2) I bought a new core. I wasn’t really sure how to get the old one out so I used the tried and true method of unscrewing everything. The method still works nicely. At first it seemed I’d done a lot of unnecessary work. That is until I pulled out the bolt assembly. this little slab of metal has a two-piece case with a few, simple inner workings. The case is held together by 3 screws. Of those three screws, only two had threads still connected to the other side of the case. And those two came out with one turn of the screwdriver. Nix that, one turn of my Leatherman Wave and it was in pieces. No big deal, I just put it all back together and in five minutes I no longer look like the sketchy German guy trying to break into someone’s apartment. Not that there’s anything sketchy about Germans. It’s just that nine times out of 10 people here think I’m German. And though it hasn’t happened lately, it’s always amusing when they ask me (in German) if I speak German and then continue to speak it to me after I tell them I don’t speak German but I’m an American and speak English. It never gets annoying, but it’s always funny.

Tomorrow is site visit from Peace Corps. I’ll get to meet my new regional manager and see Ekat, who has been acting regional manager until now. They were hoping to observe my lessons, but it looks like that won’t happen. Weather forecast looks cold enough for classes to be canceled all week. My director won’t be there, either. The regional akim invited all the directors to a meeting in Pavlodar, so she’s got to go to that. One of the things Peace Corps will likely ask about is whether or not the school wants another volunteer next year. When we asked the director about that today she wanted to know why I didn’t want to stay a third year. That’s pretty cool, I think. I told her (via my counterpart) that it’s difficult to extend for a third year and that they should probably plan ahead as if I might not be here. Though I have to say, it’s still really cool that they want me for another year. It’s nice to feel wanted.