Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Rescuing Annie

Three days a week, when I'm teaching, Annie stays home with Grace for a couple of hours. Grace gets her dressed, feeds her breakfast, does her hair adorably and plays with her. It's like having a stay-at-home-mom only better. Yesterday, I was surprised to get a call from Grace because not much can go wrong between 7-10 am. But, my growing girl had locked herself into our bedroom. In America, that's an easy thing to do because babies love to push buttons. It's also an easy thing to fix because you grab a bobby pin off the top of the door frame and pop, baby is freed.
In Rwanda, it's actually a bit of an achievement for a small child to lock themselves in, which is why I've never worried about it. It involves turning a key and what two year old has the attention span for that?
So Grace called and said "Annie locked herself in your room." So, ok, I'm coming home. I have a key to my bedroom. But then, I remembered that we leave keys to the rooms somewhere else (not gonna tell you where :)!!!!!!), so I called her back and told her where the key was. Grace (who is more Rwanda-experienced than I am) reminded me that as long as Annie has a key in her side, no one can unlock the door from the outside. Crap.
Theophile, one of our maintenance staff at KICS came home with me to rescue her. Of course, Annie had no idea she needed rescuing. She was chatting through the window to Grace who was outside keeping an eye on her. I'm so glad Annie didn't head to electric outlets, because there was exactly nothing Grace could have done from outside the bars except scream at her.
While Eddie was hatching a scheme to squeeze Annie through the bars (impossible), Theophile disassembled the lock and Annie was rescued. I mean, I had a feeling like I was pulling up a starving Chilean miner, but of course, Annie had no idea she was stuck.
Despite a whole day of reciting, "Annie no keys"and  "No doors Annie," I found her stabbing our door with a key last night. Gladly, the locking mechanism had been removed.

Grace babysitting from the window

It wasn't until my arrival that Annie realized she couldn't get out. 

Can I squeeze through those bars?


1 comment:

  1. So, Johannes did this and was stuck for two hours, only we couldn't get the door off it's hinges, or the key out the other side. He was 2 yrs old and couldn't do it. Had to break down the mahogany door and then get it fixed... It's a funny story now. Not so funny then.

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