What does Judith Isles love most about working at the Solid Waste Management Corporation (SWMC)? She loves dealing with different personalities and people. “I like people and I like to deal with people with all their different personalities and issues,” she tells the SWMC Insider. “You have a wide cross section of people…street sweepers right up to the professional level and it doesn’t matter to me. You have to treat everybody equal,” she adds.

For her, appreciating people and differing personalities is nothing hard. After all she comes from a big family in Newtown where her grandmother had 10 children. Hence, getting along with each other comes naturally. “My grandmother had 10 children,” she says. “Normally these little communities, everybody is related to everybody so you were always in a family environment, where everybody knew everybody; so it’s easy for me (to fit in a work environment).”

Judith mostly handles payroll as her main job at SWMC but worked her way through the ranks doing other tasks since she joined the corporation in May 2002. She first started substituting for the secretary, then working in finance as the acting financial officer before assuming her current duties.

When she is not busy at work, Judith is an avid sports fan and serves as a general and conditioning coach. She also played before injury forced her on the sidelines. “I was a national player for so many, many years and I got injured and stopped,” she says. “Every Wednesday and Saturday I have to train the referees for football. I am always around people doing group activities.”

So how on earth does she find time to do all these things while still working? “This is the second time I heard that question for the day,” Judith says chuckling. “I don’t know. I just keep going, man. From here go home, take care of my son, hit the gym or gone to some training session for some athletes. Sometimes I train the national footballers, sometimes they assign me to a national team…it’s basically organize my time and put things in place,” Judith says. To put it colloquially, Judith “tek night and mek day.”

Working with the Corporation’s finances is a joy for Judith. It’s even more satisfying to her that the SWMC was able to build its new state of the art office facilities in Taylor’s Range from its own finances without having to incur debt like most other corporations or government entities do. “For me, that’s a great achievement because I was here when it was very difficult to pay our bills. It’s like basically living from hand to mouth so when we reach the stage where we can build our own building for millions of dollars…out of our pockets it’s like, wow; that’s a great achievement and accomplishment.”

Judith enjoys working at SWMC and is looking for the day when the Corporation will expand and have another outlet in rural St. Kitts similar to the head office. “For one I would love to see us get a new landfill. Two, I would love to see that this is our main office and there is a branch somewhere down in the countryside with all the same responsibilities and ownership (as the main building),” she says. She also hopes that as the corporation expands, so will their wages. “Most of us we work for thanks. Just love of the job and loyalty to the corporation. (An increase in pay) would be nice,” she says with her trademark, effervescent smile.