In order to familiarize myself with the local carpentry practices, I helped out at the local woodworking shop. I learned how to make desks, chairs, tables, and shelves by hand for the local school in our town. I was constantly the only woman in these spaces and had to persevere through various physical and social obstacles to break a lot of pre-conceived notions about myself.
Eventually, I built a very strong reputation for myself as a skilled and hard worker, and was invited to do more work in helping others building houses, which I considered to be a high honor and a foreign woman in the community. They entrusted me to help build walls and roofing for new house compounds, so amazingly, I was able to experience providing houses for others with my own hands.
The temporary bed that I had purchased in Madagascar completely broke, so I decided to make my own bed, but better. With the help of the machine shop carpenters I had built good relationships with, we built a lofted bed with stairs that can also serve as shelf space.
This is the finished product! I was even invited to present my work as part of Peace Corps' advisory committee to program stakeholders. I spoke about my experience working in carpentry at site, and shared my American perspective on gender roles at my site and ideas for how to bring more opportunities for women to safely enter spaces like these.
These are the chairs and table I built for my room. I also made a simple rope closet to hang all my clothes on. This was particularly useful because the north east coast is very wet and humid, so hanging clothes prevents them from molding.
I made some cute flower curtains for my doorway! They make me feel like I'm entering a magical world every time I walk in and out of my house.
My host father helped me make a gate for my fence, complete with a sliding lock.
This is the shelf that I added spontaneously one morning with scrap pieces of wood. It helped take a lot of my items off the ground and just put more color on my walls. The bottles that you see on the top shelf are eco-bricks filled with plastic trash that I store instead of burning like typical trash in Menatany. I also wrapped smaller hard plastic containers with rope and added plants and flowers to them for decoration. This shelf of trash is a really interesting display of how much plastic I have been consuming in country, something I don't always know back in the US.