The life of a woman in K-land

Well, as you might expect in a country like this, the lives of the women here are different than in the US.  It is very true that their lives tend to revolve around cooking and cleaning.  What you might not know is how much of a communal activity those things can be:

 We helped this family make special cookies for their upcoming holiday.  It is truly a family and neighbors event.  They started making these cookies around 8pm that night and didn't finish til 1 or 2 in the morning.  But they were okay with that.  During that particular time of the year, they were pretty much staying up all night and sleeping all day anyways.  Plus, it's much more pleasant to do hard work in the cool night air than it is to do it during the day.

Take regular household chores, for instance:

I hope you're glad you have a good vacuum cleaner!  A few times a year, we have to wash our rugs, and we do it by hand.  Recently, we hauled the heavy rugs and cleaning supplies up to the roof in the early evening and used a little elbow grease.  We finished when the moon was high in the sky.  Then we hung the rugs over the railing for a day until they all dried out.  (However, they were too heavy to lift back up, so we had to drop them down into our courtyard and carry them back up the steps to our living room.)

The nice thing about all of our work is this:  it almost always has to be a community activity.  And if it's a community activity, it means we get more involved in the lives of the nationals around us.  They like to offer help and assistance most of the time, and it shows them that we want to learn about the way that they do things in their society.  It also gives us opportunities to share about our own society.  Sometimes that means looking like we don't know how to do anything right, like a child that's never done a chore before:

But sometimes it shows them that we care about their lives and the way that they do things, that we could have tried to fend for ourselves, in our own ways, and we might have turned out fine, but we chose to involve them anyways.

Fortunately, when we chose to do things their way, it often earns us some merit for when we might want  to talk about a few of the things that we do differently.  We helped our national friends get ready for their holiday and we participated in visits for it and helped them ooh and aah over their new clothes and all the candy that the children got to eat.  At the close of one evening, I told one of our sisters about some of the differences between her and our main holidays, because we have a lot of things in common but many times, the point of the holiday is different.  Of course, our main holidays are based on what we have read, so that we can remember.  I think that it's always important that the point of the holiday is more important than the tradition of the holiday.  I like to remember what happened on the event for which the holiday is based so that I can better celebrate it.

Hopefully, when our holidays roll around again, we'll be able to be good representations of the main points of our holiday so that we don't confuse others based on some of our traditions that may not be in keeping with the reasons.