Creative Carpentry

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One day I noticed that the lock on the front door of the school was coming loose. I asked, Mansour, our fixer, if he knew a good locksmith and he said he did.

A little later that day Mansour appeared upstairs at my office with a man who bore a remarkable resemblance to him. He introduced him as his cousin the carpenter. 

"Why do we need a carpenter, Mansour?" I asked. He took me downstairs and showed me that the wood around the lock was rotten and would not hold a new lock. So we needed a carpenter to cut out the section of rotten wood and replace it with a new piece. As this seemed logical, I told them to go ahead with the repairs.

A couple of hours went by and then Mansour appeared and took me down to inspect the front door. His cousin the carpenter had done a very neat job. He had cut away a 2" by 6" section from the edge of the door and replaced it with new wood. He had then stained the new wood to match the rest of the door. It all looked very good to me and so I paid the carpenter and asked Mansour to find a locksmith. I wanted the lock fixed before we closed for the night.

Just before our closing time Mansour again appeared at my office, this time with a man he introduced as the locksmith. After exchanging the usual greetings, I asked the locksmith if he had replaced the lock. He looked rather uncomfortable. "There's a problem," Mansour said, looking down and shuffling his feet. 

They led me downstairs and showed me the problem. The locksmith had tried to attach the new lock to the section of new wood with screws. This hadn't worked. In fact, all that had happened was that the new wood had disintegrated. How strange! I looked more closely. No wonder the new wood had disintegrated. It wasn't wood at all. Rather it was a chunk of stale bread that had been cut to shape, sanded and varnished. 

I looked at Mansour. Mansour looked nervously at me and then at the locksmith. The locksmith looked at me. I couldn't help it: I started giggling. And it ended up with all three of us laughing and laughing and laughing.

That's how Libya was sometimes. You just had to laugh. 
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