She's Watching You!

by Yoon Joo Cho, Su Min Jeon, and Emma Preston

Have you noticed that during the school days someone is watching you every second? You may feel afraid that she is watching all your actions, but you should thank her for watching you, because she is taking care of your safety.

There are many people who work to make our school lives convenient. However, we usually do not notice those helping hands around us. This might result from lack of communication and attention.

When we thought of those people, we thought first of guards, especially security guards. Therefore, we decided to interview one of them and let them know how much we appreciate them.

So we went to meet those people who work in the security room. At first we were nervous with the sober atmosphere in there and all the TVs. Those TVs were showing us every part of the school. We could see not only inside the school but also outside to the gardens and even over the fences. We spoke with a girl who watching those TVs.

Her name is Wang Yu Han, from Henan Province. She seemed little surprised with our visit. When we asked her for an interview, she was as nervous as we were. The room was so quiet we could even hear the second-hand of the clock.

We asked her age. “I was born in 1991,” she said. We were all surprised at how young she was. We assumed that she hadn't graduated yet and was too young to work. However, we didn't want to invade her privacy more, so we continued asking other questions.

We found out that most of the security guards aren't from Suzhou. They just came here to work. She came from Henan about half a year ago.

There is a good spirit of friendship in the security room. When Ms. Wang wasn't sure how to answer a certain question, her colleague tried to help her answer.

Her personality could also be seen during the interview. She hesitated to remind us of an event that happened the day before we interviewed, when one child didn’t come back home at that night and his or her parents seemed to attribute all the responsibility to them. Even though ensuring the children’s safety is their work, there are hundreds of children in the school and it is not all their fault. However, she said that it’s not the parents’ faults so that we could know that she considerate and mature.

Even though we had not asked her permission for an interview earlier and our interview went along with this serious mood, she tried very hard to find the best answers for our questions. The fact that most surprised us was her age. She is only two years older than us, but we are in school and she is at work.

From this interview, we realized that the SSIS support staff help us even more than we thought, and that made us re-examine our attitude toward them. There is no difference between people in this world, but we realized that many people actually do not know this. So we want to ask this question to you: What have you done today to show your appreciation to the people who are helping you and working hard for your safety and convenience?