It’s Haiti v7 – A Door Knob and a Light Switch

   

View from outside the bathroom

View from inside the bathroom

     There is a doorknob on the door to our bathroom. It has a button lock just like the kind you probably have on the bathroom door in your house. You push in the button, and the door locks. On the other side of the doorknob is a keyhole so that you can unlock the door. We have no key. That is not the problem. The problem is that the doorknob is installed backwards. The button lock is on the outside of the bathroom. The keyhole is on the inside of the bathroom. Meer locked himself in the bathroom the other night. He could not get out. I was asleep and heard the banging on the door. I got up and opened the door for him. How long has this door been like this? What? No one ever noticed this before?
     Meer brought in Dale to fix it. Now we have a bathroom door with a doorknob in the right direction.

     There is a ceiling light in the entrance hallway to our house. I did not even know that there was a light since there was no bulb in the socket. Yesterday Meer came home with a couple of light bulbs. I screwed the bulb into the light socket and looked for the wall switch to turn it on. Meer chuckled. “Where do you think the light switch is?” he asked me. It took me a while to find the light switch. It is on the wall to the left of the front door as you come into the house. This less-than-brilliant (pardon the pun) wiring design means that the light switch for the entrance hall is behind the front door when you open the door from the outside. The logical design would be to have the light switch on the right hand side. You open the door, reach over on the wall on the right hand side, and turn on the light as you walk in. But not in our house. When you enter our house at night, you open the door in the dark, close the door in the dark, and reach around the door to turn on the light.

It’s Haiti. 

Entering our house

The light switch behind the door