Building is 'man's work'

After tearing apart the old house I was looking at one of the doors for the window of the house. It really was quite beautiful but needed to be worked on. I thought it was a shame for these old boards to just be tossed aside so I decided I was going to make a table out of it. We took out several of the cross beams of the ceiling too so I searched through the scraps to find something that would be suitable for the table. It would be a lovely little end table for beside the bed. However most of the Haitians thought I was crazy for wanting to salvage this old yucky door; they thought it might be ok if I painted it. But I wanted it the natural wood color and instead of putting new 2x4’s for the legs as they suggested I wanted to use the old wood. I wanted to celebrate the life of this old house. Any work with ‘tools’ in Haiti is ‘man’s work’. So I was determined I was going to build this table without the help of the boys. They watched me puzzled not sure that a girl was capable of doing this, or at least she would need help. It became increasingly obvious I was at least going to need another set of hands so I pulled in Gabriel to help me out. She was intreiged by the idea, and when her older brother who had not been there all day stepped into help she proudly and teasingly told him ‘No, only women are making this table.’ You could tell she was excited about this project so the two of us sawed away making the legs for the table.

We had finished and shortly after I looked over and a proud smile came across my face. Gabriel had jumped into help shovel cement when one of her brothers left. She just had this look of determination and empowerment on her face as She did the ‘man’s work’. I am a very independent woman and take pride on being able to do ‘men’s work’, I am also always encouraging the men to do the ‘women’s work’ such as washing dishes and clothes. There are definitely still specific roles that each gender play in Haiti similar to those roles we have in the US but you don’t see them being broke as often as you do in the states. (As a side note one of our staff for Living Media the other day informed us that men can’t be nurses in Haiti. He knew that it is not true but that is just the way it is here. I have also heard one of our students say she wants to be a doctor and one of the young men in the class said you mean a nurse and she said very confidently, ‘no, a doctor’.)
Sometimes we don’t ever know how a little thing we might do, have an effect on someone or how it might affect the future. Yesterday Gabriel was looking for the other scrap piece of wood that was in my house because she wanted to make a table for her pati selling business in the market. I looked at the scraps of material she had and thought there is no way she can make a table that will stand out of that. As I heard her sawing away I wanted to step in and say something but I decided not to. It was more important that she had this idea and was following through with it, then whether or not it would work. And who knows no one thought I could build a table either. (of course mine isn’t exactly finished yet, but it has a really nice top.)