It’s around 4:30 and I’m walking to work in the darkness. It’s always nerve-racking walking down the alleyways and the closed markets.
I’m at work now its 5:10 I’m late because the queue to get in is so long. At my work station I have a sowing machine fixed to the desk, the pedal clamped to the concrete floor and a pile of material, cut, ready to be sown together. A shiver runs down my spine as one of the guards glare at us if they catch us taking things or slacking off they will beat us.
I’ve been working for about 7 hours 40 and everybody are dragging themselves almost literally to the canteen, where we get our daily watered down soup and our thin slice of Nan bread. I protect my bread in my clenched hand and swallow my soup in one gulp, it makes me gag it’s so horrible and then stuff the bread in my mouth. The reason I eat so fast is not because I want to get back to work it’s because people will take your food out of your hand if you leave it unguarded.
I sleep for about ten minutes at the metal table and wake up to find my hair pin gone and everybody start to leave the courtyard to get back to work, thankfully they did not find my ring. The managers do not like us having our hair down so I get up sneak up behind one of the younger girls and pull out one of theirs, they turn around to see who it was but I jumped into the crowd and tie my hair up and go to my station and work with my mask off because I don’t like it. Everybody sweats so much that everybody wears only