Jill of all trades

Tyrone Reid, Sunday Gleaner Reporter

It is 'young woman time now' in Jamaica's construction and installation sector, says data from the Statistical Institute of Jamaica. According to the statistics, women now outnumber their once-dominant male counterparts by close to 6,500 in the 20-29 age cohort.

Forty-year-old Charmaine Wilks is not one of them, but she is a contemporary pioneer of this female invasion of a sector once ruled by men. This 'Jill of all trades', with an infectious smile and a youthful appearance, joined the sector as a trained plumber eight years ago, and she does not plan to leave until the age of retirement comes upon her.

When our news team met Wilks on Friday, she was not just prepared to talk the proverbial talk, but was ready to walk the walk, too, as she was decked out in her work-stained blue lab coat that bore the marks of hard work, blue jeans pants, steel-toe shoes, and a bandeau to maintain the feminine touch. She jokingly said that there are days that she wears her hard hat and people mistake her for a man.

Wilks is currently a maintenance plumber at the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) in Kingston and as such she does plumbing work on buildings owned by the state developer in Kingston and Portmore, namely Hellshire and Fort Clarence. "I do installation of pipes, fittings and fixtures like water closets, lavatory closets, (and) urinals," said Wilks, who lauded the forward-thinking management team at the UDC for giving her and another female, who does electrical installation, a chance to shine in the company's facilities-management department.

Before joining the corporation's team, Wilks worked with Urban Maintenance Limited, a subsidiary of the UDC, for four years.

Prior to becoming a HEART NTA-certified plumber, Wilks worked in a hardware store performing mainly administrative duties. After battling an illness for three years, she decided she needed to get a job that did not confine her to an office.

unskilled workmen

She was inspired to do plumbing after she visited her mother's house and saw the botched job left by unskilled workmen. "The tiles were zigzag, the face basin didn't have any trap. It just wasn't done properly," she remembered. She urges all women to learn a little about the various trades to prevent being ripped off by dishonest tradesmen who come a dime a dozen.

The final push into a life of plumbing came after she had a clogged kitchen sink at her home and did not have a plunger. Wilks did not call a handyman. Instead, she disconnected the piping herself and cleared the blockage. After that, she became more intrigued by pipes. "After putting it back together and I saw the water running out freely, I said 'This is interesting', and so I said I was going to learn plumbing," she recalled. That was 1999. She started studying the trade at the Portmore HEART Academy the following year. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eleven years later, Wilks is the holder of Level II qualifications from HEART and has become a contemporary pioneer in a sector that is accommodating more and more women. She was the only female in a batch of 40 students. In addition to the usual bravado and machismo displayed, Wilks had to contend with what she saw as inflated egos. But she stared down male chauvinism and graduated at the top of her class. "I didn't feel any way because I prefer working with the males, even though some of them feel I should be in the office because overall, I was getting better grades than them."

Wilks was forced to be a deputy class leader even though she said her instructor thought she was best suited for the post of class leader. But some of her male batchmates would have none of it. "They said that they didn't want any woman to lead them, so I had to be the deputy class leader," she recounted.

After completing her studies for the Level I certification, Wilks, who was awarded trainee of the batch for her graduating class which included classes from four other trade groups, was employed by the Portmore HEART Academy as a demonstrator, which is an instructor's assistant.

Now she just loves getting her hands dirty with Tangit. "I enjoy it," she said trying to hold back the smile. "Most females like to work in the office where the competition is high," she said.

dirty hands

But it was while studying that the former Top Hill, St Catherine, native realised that plumbing was a lot more than just fun and pipes. "You have to cut and thread, galvanise pipes, mix concrete, make manholes, and construct other drainage structures."

She added: "It's not easy. It is hard work, but I don't mind getting my hands dirty."

A gracious Wilks says she always asks the Lord to bless her handiwork. She even helps her neighbours with emergency plumbing for a nominal fee or sometimes free of cost. And she also does some farming on the side. She plants sorrel, ginger, carrot, pumpkin and other produce at her home in Mandeville. But the provision is not for sale as whatever she reaps from the ground is for personal use and she also shares it with her neighbours. She also does her own painting at home whenever the walls need a new coat. But that's not all she does: "I build my own yard, sharpen my machete with a file myself. I climb up on the housetop and fix the leaking roof myself," the mother of one said.

She encourages other women to think outside of the box when seeking a profession because the traditional sectors are saturated. "I would like to tell women to go into the construction sector because everybody wants to use a computer. Competition is so big in the office business, but they can go into building construction," she encouraged.

tyrone.reid@gleanerjm.com