By Kai Mansa-Musa
Alice Sesay, a female auto engineer at You and I Garage, Upper Brook Street Freetown has told Premier News that her work has increased her income and contribution to the welfare of her family, and has reduced conflict with her husband.
She got married in 2014 and together with the two kids her husband had before she bore two more, they make a family of six. The kids attend School.
Born in Samaya Bendugu, a village in Tonkolili District, Northern Sierra Leone, to where she makes regular visits to her parents and the rest of her extended family. She had been there recently to observe the funeral rites of a cousin recently deceased. She is the youngest of four siblings, three boys and one girl. Alice is the most junior and she came to Freetown in the year 2009 where she completed her secondary education in 2012 when she sat to the West African Senior School Examination (WASSCE). She took the same exam in 2013. She has three credit passes at WASSCE, but because her mother who paid for her education was then too old, she could not complete her credit passes to the minimum of five inclusive of Mathematics and English language which is what she is required for entry into university.
“After getting married in 2013, I was not engaged in anything productive in my life. I used to depend on my husband for my welfare and those of the kids. He grumbled a lot and we frequently had arguments,” she said.
In 2020, she enrolled as a trainee at the Police Wives Vocational School at Kingtom Police Barracks and started her training as an auto-mechanic. She says that at first, she had not wanted to be an auto mechanic as she had a negative perception built in her head as before then she usually saw the “fitters”, as they are called in local parlance often with dirty, oily, and tattered clothes. He said that her prejudice subsided when her tutors told her that those in the same field who choose to appear in tattered and oily clothes do not define the job of an auto mechanic as a dirty job.
“Also, when we go to do practical, I see other women doing the same job, so I said to myself if they can do it then I also could do it and more better than even any man,” she said.
Alice Sesay emphasized that gone are those days when her husband used to grumble after she would ask for something.
“Now even on days when he does not give money for food, I prepare food without having to ask him, and at times when there are financial commitments with regards the welfare of the kids in school I address them with the resources I now have from my job to the extent that sometimes he only gets to know about them after I would have addressed them. Previously, these issues caused a lot of conflicts between us, but now they have reduced. Although we have conflicts from time to time, they are few and far between now,” she says.
Sesay says her focus is on perfecting her knowledge of the workings of the internal combustion of the engine and how all the parts of the automobile machine function. When asked by Premier News about her knowledge of the engine he rates herself six on a scale of ten.
By her estimation, in about three years from now she would have attained absolute mastery of the internal combustion engine.
She emphasizes that because she used to be a Science Student, she will complete her requirement to gain admission into university and proceed to study Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sierra Leone. She hopes to own her own establishment in nine years’ time.
He has now completed her course at the Police Wives Vocational School and has been retained at the You and I auto-mechanic Workshop at Upper Brook Street, so that she could be adept in her handling of the automobile engine.