“The worst thing about this job is not the little bit of money we work for or even the long hours, it is how people treat us. Sometimes it is just the way they look at you, like if you invisible or something, like you don’t really matter. People fail to realise that we is just people like everybody else, we just working and trying to make a living. And all of we can’t get good jobs. Like who will guard you house if we all get good jobs?”
The 35-year-old woman speaking is a single mother of four who has been working as a security guard for years. I wanted to share her experience as a security guard, and I had expected her to start off with the conditions under which she works. The stories are countless about the long hours, meagre pay and the poor environment under which security guards work in this country. For women guards, it’s worse as there is seldom any consideration for their gender and like women in other sectors, they are also sexually harassed. But while all of this may be true, she chose to first talk about how they are treated by others simply because of their profession.
