The Door

Gender roles in Kazakh culture can be very traditional. That is to say that women do most of the work, specifically around the home and family. Several of the currently serving volunteers that have talked to us at our training have talked about both cultural sensitivity and community education to promote gender role awareness. In my home this is definitely not true though. I cook, help clean and wash my own clothes blah blah blah…but as the only man of the house I am often asked to fix things – which I totally dig. But one day my sister mentioned to me that a door needed installing. Which I have never done before, but I mean im sure with the help of one of my buddies we can figure it out and high five each other and whatnot – how hard could it be? The next day she showed us the door and gave us a hammer and some polyurethane foam. Not ideal but we figure we can make due. When we bring the door to the jam we notice that the door is too big. Through a lot of gesturing with my Aunt we realize that with our hammer and two cans of foam we are supposed to break the stone wall to fit the metal door and attach the metal frame to the stone wall with regular screws and re-mortar the wall. After about three hours we finally finished, had a couple cold beers and the door works like a dream. Just kidding, we were too nervous to destroy the walls of the apartment building, they called some masonry guys to do it and, now, it is obvious, question our manhood. So it goes.