Recently, I was seated in the living room determined to finish reading a book I had bought a month earlier when the curtains came crushing down.
I had been deeply engrossed in the book, so, as you can imagine, I was so startled, I almost jumped off my skin as a cascade of thoughts assailed my mind. Was it an earthquake?! Had the house just been bombed?! Wait a minute…had the rapture happened?!
Fortunately, it simply turned out that the curtain rod brackets had given in to the weight of the curtains and fallen off. When my heart finally stopped racing, it occurred to me that I needed to do something about it. It was around 7.30pm, and there was no way I was going to sit in a room with no curtains, especially because I was home alone. I mean, what if…?
I have said here before that I have a fertile imagination, therefore the ‘What ifs’ are many. In the movies, the woman being stalked by a serial killer never draws her curtains at night, for whatever reason, giving her eventual killer a front row seat to everything that she does when she arrives home in the evening until she goes to sleep. No thank you, I wasn’t going to be this woman.
With this in mind, the curtains had to go back up. I knew that there was a box of tools somewhere, only that I didn’t know where exactly. After looking everywhere for about 20 minutes, I finally found the toolbox where I should have looked in the first place, and lo and behold, there were even screws and nails of every size imaginable.
I quickly eliminated the nails because even though I had never built anything in my life, it was obvious that that nails would damage the wall. So far, so good. Screws it was. Next was to figure out which screwdrivers were suitable, an exercise that took me almost one year and a throbbing headache.
A leg balanced on the windowsill and the other on a seat, I set out to screw back the brackets, a task that took another year, buckets of sweat and sore wrists. I have to admit that I almost gave up many times, but the thought of a serial killer staring at me from across the road kept me going. I think I should stop watching those movies…
I had to get a fundi with a drill the next day, but I’m proud to say that the curtains survived until the next day. That incident reminded me why it is important to have multiple basic skills. Many of us were brought up in households where boys and girls were taught different sets of skills. Girls, mainly how to cook and clean, boys, how to build things.
That is why we are surrounded by helpless men and women yet within reach are tools to solve their problems, but since they were never taught how to use them and never bothered to learn how to use them, they find themselves in a crisis that should not be a crisis.
Knowing how to make soft chapatis will not be of any help to you should you get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, while knowing how to build a chicken coop will be of no use should your wife get held up somewhere and in your hands is a wailing child demanding food.
That curtain incident taught me that while we cannot do anything about the things our parents never taught us, we can now be proactive and learn to do them ourselves. It is empowering when we learn how to do things ourselves, and while it may seem difficult at the beginning, something new done often enough becomes easy, second nature.
