Women’s Chronicles

“My workplace ain’t give us anything. They just telling we to wash we hand and be careful but nothing to wash we hand with.

“Me, I just want to get more money to support me children, that is all.

“I can still feel like if my body is rocking. I am still feeling the effects of the music.

As she spoke, I saw the hurt in the face of the pretty young woman sitting across from me, although she initially said she had gotten over what had happened.

“I feel very stressed out. I feel upset, but I am accepting, in a way, that it happened.

“Well mine has stopped and I can’t say I have missed it.

“You know they say you mek you children but you ain’t mek they mind?

The video shows a hand opening a door and the camera pans on a man and woman engaged in a sexual act.

“Sometimes I would sit in my house for days and don’t come out and nobody would understand the depression I going through.

“You know what is the hardest thing?” she asked. I knew she was not expecting an answer.

A sister shared about her eye-opening experience during a recent visit to Mahdia, in Region Eight.

“For me, just getting a new start is good enough. I ain’t really putting no meaning to New Year’s Day but I just happy that in the new year I not the same way I start out and for that I just thanking God.

“Sometimes I want to do so much, and it just gets to me.

“Security guards work under terrible conditions and not just where you work, but also there is sometimes no paid leave… If you call in sick you are not paid.

“I have been living 22 years with HIV and if you look at me you cannot tell but I would not tell any and everybody that I have HIV because the stigma and discrimination is not nice and so I just trying to live my life,” the 46-year-old mother of six told me.

“Stigma and discrimination is still a big, big thing in Guyana and because of that people don’t want to say that they HIV positive.

It is the hardest thing I have had to deal with in my life and I don’t wish this on any other parent.

“The first time it happen, I can’t say I was shocked because even before we marry, I was afraid of him.

“The biggest emotion I felt on the annulment of my marriage was relief.

“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.