When in Uniform

"The man in uniform is nice to see, but the man inside the uniform is hard to be"

Wearing a police uniform is a privelege, before we can wear it we have to make some sacrifices and undergo rigorous training, from that I learned and gained a lot that it does not only changed my life it changed me too.

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Haircut.

Coco Chanel once said that " a woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life", we know that hair helps in bringing out ones beauty but when we took our oath to enter in the police service we are obliged to cut it short for it may be a hindrance during our training. Honestly, if I will look good today it would depend on how my hair looks haha but the idea of cutting my hair short excites me for it marks the beginning of a new adventure.

Breaking Period.

We will be confided inside the training center for 6 months, there will be no cellphone or any gadgets, visitation is only allowed in cases of emergency and contact with anyone outside the training center is highly prohibited. Our class consist of 756 trainess, 56 of us are women. We are divided to 15 companies, 4 or 3 women in each company. Our day starts at 4 in the morning, around 4:30am we have to be in formation to be accounted, at 5:00am we will be doing our warm up exercises and road run, then we will clean our barracks afterwhich we will have our breakfast at around 7:00am and will do our personal necesities after ( this is the time for our bath ). Then they will teach us about drills during ceremonies and we'll have a series of exercises even in the heat of the sun. Before we take our meals we have to do random exercises or road run around the camp, this last for 45 days. This is being done for us to remove our civilian mentality, we are trained to act and think like a military men. After our breaking period academic classes, lectures about laws, police operational procedures and other related subjects to law enforcement are given.

Discipline.

Discipline is one of the most important thing we learned during training. For them to instill us discipline, everytime we made mistakes exercises or demerits is given as a form of punishment. If we accumulated 127 demerits we will be out of the training , so everytime, we prefer to receive exercises as punishment than demerits.

Punishments are given for simple offenses like not folding our bed linens properly, or forgetting to do sidewalks when a senior trainee or officer passed by, when caught of possessing outside food, or just walking alone within the camp. Even in the simplest mistakes we get to be punished in this way discipline is being instilled and also to remind us that we always have to do the right thing even in the tiniest form.

Mase Mase and Camaraderie.

This is a military language that means a series of non stop exercise a form of punishment. I remember during my training days, one of our instructor caught a female trainee eating biscuits as a punishment all of the female trainees are ask to roll on the mud, do push ups, squathrust and a lot of other exercises. Mase mase is really hard and exhausting but this makes our training unforgettable, this is where camaraderie and brotherhood are built, a fault of one is a fault of all. Sometimes, when you're dead-tired you can't help to get mad to your classmate for being punished for his faults and there are also time that you just laugh it off. Since we were only 4 females in our company, during our roadrun when one of our company member can get a bottled water they are letting us drink first then whatevers left will shared by the remaining members of the company. We celebrated Christmas and New Year inside the training camp, we became each others family. We experienced a lot from training from non-stop exercises, crying moments and funny experiences this is where we learned the essence of sharing and camaraderie.

Frolics.

A frolic defined as a light-hearted, fun, often silly activity. This is where each company has to present something to amused each one of us, some would sing, act or dance.
We also had our sportfest, this where the trainees showed off their skills on different sports like basketball, volleyball, chess, darts and a lot more and I am proud to say that our company is the over-all champion in our class. For a moment this made us forget the difficulty in our training, that it's just a week of games and fun.

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Being away from your family and comfort zone for months is already hard but being away from them without communication is heartbreaking. When I was inside the training camp, 6 months feels like a short time but when we finished the training and finally got out I realized I've missed a lot of things from family reunion, friends getting married and will still be missing a lot of things. Senior Officers would often tell us that we no longer belongs to our family we are now being owned by the government that we should understand that most of our time will be spent on duties and service to the community and if you are passionate to your job, you'll love everything that you're doing.