“Oh Lord, I hope that you can forgive me. I want a new life” – The Murder of Nercy

The president’s war on drug

In June 2016, 71-year-old Rodrigo Duterte was inaugurated as the President of the Philippines. Among his election pledges were: “Forget legislation on human rights. You drug dealers, pistol holders and layabouts have better disappear– because  I will kill you. I will dump all your bodies into Manila Bay and fatten up all the fish with you”. 

Like in a national tv speech, when he said to the people: “Feel free to call us or the police or do it yourself, if you have a gun. You have my support.”

He has kept his election pledge. Since then over 7,000 people have been killed. On 24 April 2017, a Philippine lawyer complained about Duterte to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He accused the president of crimes against humanity.

Indblik Sunday 7 May 2017

Ten days before the funeral 

Her name is Nercy Galicio. She was born on 11 July 2000. Now she is dead.

It is Thursday night on 20 April. Nercy must be brought to the mortuary, so that the family can subsequently bring her home in an open coffin.

Her 22-year-old sister, Grace Galicio comes along during the transport of the deceased. Almost all her life she has slept on the floor with her younger sister Nercy by her side.

Right up until last Monday, when the sisters woke up next to each other for the last time on the chipboard that Nercy Galicio had covered with wallpaper of the cartoon figure Hello Kitty.

Grace Galicio explains that she called Nercy when her younger sister did not arrive home Tuesday night, and that the police replied the call and said that the owner of the phone was dead. Murdered by two shots in the head and one in the right side off her torso.

She was found in a roadside lying on her right side with her long black hair down before her face and a hand extended.

***

Grace Galicio has put her feet in Nercy’s Hello Kitty flip-flops when she walks down an alley in the dark. Down to a gate. Behind it her sister is loaded onto the hearse. A pack of dogs is sneaking around in the shadows. They bark. The sister holds her hands up before her mouth. Cries almost soundlessly with eyes open.

The hearse drives slowly out of the gate. Up across a small bridge, past a lake with fish farming and through Manila to reach the mortuary.

”Eusebio 24 hours” is the text on the luminescent sign in front of the shop. As if the mortuary was a corner shop.

The undertaker Eusebio opens the door. He is dressed in a white singlet. Two men are carrying Nercy Galicio from the garage and in behind a green curtain in a room painted blue. They lay her on a couch under a fluorescent lamp. It i around 28 degrees hot. The room is not cooled down. She has a blanket over her body. The face is uncovered. The left side of her forehead has fallen slightly inward, but otherwise you cannot see that she has been shot. She looks like a wax doll after the shot wounds have been covered by a brown cream, and the mouth by lipstick. An employee with Eusebio puts Hello Kitty-socks on her. The sister Grace Galicio decided that. Her own toe nails have been varnished with Hello Kitty figures. It was something the two of them had together. She smiles, when she mentions it. The smile exposes her dental braces. Ordinarily, she works at a dentist’s. The sister shows a photo on the phone of Nercy with their little niece. Nercy was beautiful. Had a childish expression. She kept a diary. The last time Nercy wrote in her diary was the day before she disappeared.

***

In the police report the murder of Nercy Galicio is dated to around 23.10 on 18 April 2017. Just like in so many other murder cases in the Philippines the murderer is unknown. At best, the perpetrator is recorded as a masked man on a motorbike. A 14-year-old girl is an example of this. Her name is Jezell Mallari. According to the police report she was shot dead the day after Nercy Galicio by two men on a motorbike.

In June, the newly elected Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte declared war on narcotics. He announced to kill drug addicts and drug dealers. In a speech on 4 June he said, “if you know someone who is a drug addict, just kill them”.

Since then, more than 7,600 people have been killed, according to Philippine police’s own data. 2,555 of them in police actions. According to Amnesty International the rest was probably killed by assassins and people who take the law into their own hands. In August Duterte stated: I don’t care about human rights, believe me”.

And during a press conference in September 2016, the president said: “Hitler massacred three million Jews to death. There are three million drug addicts. I would be pleased to kill them all. If Germany had Hitler, so do the Philippines…” whereupon he pointed at himself.

Nine days before the funeral 

Nercy Galicio has been brought home to her own neighbourhood. She lies in a beige dress embroidered with pearls behind the coffin glass.
The coffin stands on a carpet in the middle of the slum of Manila, in the neighbourhood of Navotas to be exact.

It is covered by a home-made blind in pink Hello Kitty fabric, of course, and her entire white coffin is covered by stickers with the cartoon figure.
On the coffin lid the family has placed some of her favourite things: oranges, a chocolate drink, and the framed diploma from the bible school Born Again that she received when she had completed a course.

It was handed out to her the day before her disappearance. Grace Galicio explains that Nercy held the diploma up in front of her smiling her smile and said: “See, I did it. This is what you dreamt of on my behalf, right?”

The local church has paid for her autopsy. It cost around DKK 2,000. The family does not have that money. Her mother and father work with a little street cleaning. The mother explains that she earns DKK 250 a month.

Nercy Galicio is 1 out of 10 siblings. The family are believers in a country where the Catholic Church does not believe in contraception.

Around Nercy’s coffin about 50 people are seated on plastic chairs listening to Nercy’s favourite song from a loudspeaker, and a hip hop song. The young people are singing to her coffin with their necks craned: “Thank you and forgive me”.

When she is not serving bacon chips, Grace stands silent amidst the noise near a house wall looking at the coffin. She has a creased terry cloth in her hand. A few times she wipes it swiftly past her eyes.

One of the friends explains that Nercy had got a boyfriend, no one knew him, and that… Then the friend is interrupted to judge from the attitude by the leader of the group of girls. She sends a look that needs no translation. Shut up, the look means.

There are things here, which are not said…

***

Eusebio must open the gate to his mortuary again tonight. In the middle of Nercy’s ceremony a man is killed in the neighbourhood.

He lies on his back, half on the pavement, half on the heavily trafficked road. The feet are naked, jutting out into the road. His white blouse is coloured red by bloody stripes. Behind the main is dark night and barbed wire.

A skinny white cat comes shooting from the dark. It jumps over the man’s arm and sniffs at his face.

The police have put a yellow plastic cord around the area, their cars are blinking blue and red. The men from Crime Laboratory are taking pictures of the body from several angles.

A little girl, around four years old, is sitting quietly in the central reserve, her elbows resting on her knees and her hands under the cheek. Like approximately 50 other spectators she is observing the work of the police.

The little girl watches when one of the policemen – wearing gloves, but otherwise just in a short-sleeved police uniform – takes a firm grip of the body’s shoulder and turns it onto the side in a tough pull after which he empties the pockets. The police are looking for ID.

The policeman places himself standing astride on the man and pulls his trousers down over his hips exposing his read underpants. It happens in the middle of the street without any sealing off against gazes from passers-by.

A policeman takes a grip of the man’s armpits, and another one in his legs, and they swing him over into a black body bag and into a car.

The whole episode takes 10-15 minutes. Then it is over. The police remove the yellow plastic band. They drive off. No further investigation of the crime scene.

Only a puddle of blood remains on the pavement. A woman arrives to Eusebio’s mortuary driving a motor bike, she is a maternal aunt of the killed man. She says that he was 30 years old, was last seen alive five hours ago, and named Alvin Valladares. He is laid on the same couch behind the green curtain where Nercy Galicio lay 12 hours earlier.

The aunt’s friend ushers her gently forward towards the curtain, she must identify Alvin Valladares. She walks lightly stooped in behind the fabric. Gasps when she sees him. He was shot directly through his left hand. A man at the mortuary says that Alvin Valladares probably held his hand up in front of his face to protect himself.

The aunt says to a local reporter that Alvin Valladares was studying to become a craftsman and would finish his education next week, and that she believed that he was out of his earlier problems with drugs. Reportedly the police found methamphetamine in his pockets. Whether it was planted by someone, is not known.

Out on the other side of the fabric curtain in the garage lies a living person in a bunk bed. The wall is decorated by a pair of naked breasts in a pin-up calendar. Here, the living and the dead sleep together.

Six days before the funeral 

The atmosphere has changed around Nercy’s coffin at one o’clock PM. A little girl, around eight years old, is selling cigarettes individually from a plastic cup.

The street is also a home at night. There are too many children for too few houses. A baby is lying on a piece of cardboard, while grown woman is resting next to it and fanning the warmth away.

Little boys play men. An about 11-year-old boy is swinging on his plastic chair, and with a sprawled calmness and a firm wrinkle on his forehead he scratches his head with the cigarette in his hand. Takes a slow drag.

Booze has come on the table. Some youngsters play cards. They gamble. That is prohibited. But at funeral ceremonies nobody clamps down on a violation of the rules. They have been here since eight this morning, and it continues like that for a week. Those days neighbours can donate money for the upcoming funeral.

Her corpse will lie on display here in Navotas, out to the river, where the houses at best are small sheds. At worst, they are a mixture between torn parasols, plates of corrugated sheet, concrete, and car doors.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say that Duterte’s war on drugs is not a war on narcotics, but a war on the poor. The killings mainly take place in impoverished areas, where the big instigators walk free.

Based on 110 interviews, Amnesty International in January 2017 assessed that the national police in some instances pay assassins to kill.

In Amnesty International’s 66-page long report to persons explain for instance that they have taken orders from the police and that they get around USD 100 per kill.

NGO’s have pointed out that the President’s war on drugs discourage drug addicts from seeking rehabilitation. They are afraid that their name may come on the police watch lists of drug addicts and that the lists have the same effect as the Star of David on the Jews’ clothes had during World War II.

President Duterte is a product of democracy. He is elected by the people and still has popular support. For instance, from street traders Madjeeb Madid and Allan Cauvitongan, they sell Viagra and copy watches in the street in Manilla’s red-light district, respectively, and they approve the President’s project.

Allan Cauvitongan says this, while he pretends to cut his throat with his finger:

“Before, drug addicts were stumbling about everywhere in the street. It was dangerous. Now, they are gone. It has become safe again. I say: Stop human rights!”

Human rights organisations say: Don’t stop human rights, the President evades the underlying problem which leads to excessive drug abuse and drug dealing: that 12 million Philippines are living in extreme poverty. This means that they cannot afford three meals a day.  When you lack money, you find your way. One of the possible ways can be to deal in drugs.

 Three days before the funeral

Grace Galicio is serving cordial next to Nercy’s coffin. Around her the neighbours are playing bingo. Instead of tokens they use small pasta arcs. The ceremony has lasted five days by now, the flies have begun swarming around tables and coffin.

Grace wants to show where she and Nercy slept. She turns down an approximately one-and-a-half metre wide alley. In each side, there are small houses and a swarm of children. Paper, scissors, stone and basketball also works in the Philippines.

The entrance door to the family’s home is a half metre wide gate. You must bend to get to the only room in the shed – a small bamboo bunk surrounded by crowing cocks and hen in cages and piles of clothes and things. The bamboo bunk stands directly on the wet soil. A child is lying on it sleeping with a baby bottle in its mouth. There is a small TV set in the shed, no windows.

From here, Grace climbs up two fragile ladders, up on the bed loft below the ceiling, where she and her sister used to sleep.

Nercy lay outermost right up against the poster that represents Jesus at the last supper.

They have made their own small Hello Kitty universe up here on the bed loft with Hello Kitty blankets and curtain. And dresses on hangers and a Hello Kitty musical box, Grace winds it up and holds it out between her palms.

Among Nercy’s hairbands lies her diary. Grace mentions again that Nercy wrote in the diary the day before she disappeared. She wrote: Oh Lord, I hope that you can forgive me. I want a new life, I no longer want this type of life. It has been very hard (…) I open myself to you with all my heart. I hope that you can forgive me and my sins. I hope that you will give me a chance to start over”.

The family denies that Nercy was taking drugs. Their eyes lower when the talk falls on her boyfriend and his possible relation to drugs. Mourners don’t ask many questions to the police. This is a place where one must fear the police. During the bingo play at Nercy’s coffin, the photographer gets wind of something mystical under way at Police Station 1.  When he arrives, the following scene takes place:

In the official prison cells 70 people are crammed together in rooms intended for 40 people. But there is also another type of cell.

The Commission on Human Rights, an institution established by another Philippine President in 1986 has been at the police station and revealed that what looked like a bookcase in the police office is in fact a door to a secret prison cell of approx. three-square metre. Inside the cell 12 living people are crammed together. The room has no windows, no electric light.

None of them are charged with a crime. They tell The Commission on Human Rights that the police have arrested them and they demand money of their families for a release. The police seemingly earn money on keeping people captured in a secret room. The photographer was there. He saw it. He photographed the room.

But if he had not been there, who would have believed a person who told that he had been caught by corrupt policemen for no reason and had been thrown into a concealed cell behind a door designed as a bookcase, whereupon the police demanded money to let them out again?
The following day, President Durterte explained in local media that he would look into the case. The secretly imprisoned people are referred to in the article as suspect drug abusers. It is in this society that Nercy’s family must have faith that Nercy’s right killer is arrested and is put on trial.

The funeral

The time is 13.45, and it is time to say farewell. Grace has had pink T-shirts printed for the immediate family: “We love you and we will miss you” is printed on the T-shirts under a picture of Nercy.

Her coffin is loaded onto a car at 14.40.

Today, the family’s mourning is load. Behind the family walks a procession of crying friends and neighbours. In front of them drives a local Hello Kitty moped club that wants to honour Nercy by acting as a caravan. They do this with Hello Kitty insignia and decorated mopeds.

They move like this for an hour and a half, until her coffin is pushed into the grave. She will be lying in the lowest storey in a concrete complex with six storeys of coffins. Each coffin has its narrow concrete chamber. Nercy Galicio was liquidated. We don’t know by whom, and we don’t know why the murder was committed in a display of power with not only one, but three shots.

Maybe it is not considered important at all. Because she is dead in a country in which the President has given all people a license to kill. 

‘I hope that you will give me a chance to make a fresh start.’

Nercy Galicio – in her diary

Hard to save someone when life is flooding the landing and dripping from 5th floor to the 4th

Water, gentlemen?

‘Code 1’ signifies the highest priority at the ambulance service, siren on. The whizzing engine of a tired Mercedes is giving its all, rushing to an 11-year-old boy. He has been reported to the 112 hotline with low blood pressure. Control room has passed all the info, the team is already on board. First left into Sosnkowskiego, siren full blast, then left into Pużaka, cars giving way. The team have been two minutes on the road, maybe three since leaving Warsaw’s Ursus depot, when the radio controller calls out their number and gives out a piercing yell:

“He’s stalled on you! Got it?! He’s stalled!!”

Inside the cab: Daniel, the rookie, barely into his twenties, only in his third month in the team. By comparison, the other paramedic, Mirek, is a dinosaur: a phenomenally experienced pro whose hands have returned people to life hundreds of times. And the doc. At 80, she would knock out every professor with her knowledge, but should she be out there, saving people?

An old tenement with peeling rendering, set amid narrow streets made even narrower by the ranks of parked cars. The ambulance’s desperate howling alerts neighbours to a drama playing out behind one of the walls. Onlookers are like vultures: always peeping out the windows, stopping with a trolley full of veggies to check out which entrance they have come to. With luck, perhaps, to see who’s coming out on the stretcher.

It is the fourth floor, no lift. A small flat awaits them, and in it the parents’ wailing. Get the kid down, from the bed onto the floor. Normally Mirek avoids it, but this time he applies mouth-to-mouth for the first five inhalations. To no effect. The attached monitor signals asystole (arrest of cardiac electrical impulse), like in the movies: a straight line, anticipating the worst possible outcome. Young Daniel dashes out to the ambulance for the rest of the gear. Running down the stairs, he passes the doc, working her way up on her last legs. When he is back, the boy has the tube fixed already and a central venous catheter in the neck. Mirek was not idle.

“Michał, the boy was called Michał,”- says Daniel.

“Remember anything else?”

“His icy hands. And empty eyes, open during resuscitation.”

Michał’s room is desperately small. The child is lying on the floor, between the bed and the table, resuscitation plays out in the middle of a rug. All around his toys in a mess: teddies, blocks, cars, a model railway on the table. An hour ago, Michał would have been dispatching trains there, or perhaps played ball, while mum would admonish from the kitchen to quit kicking indoors. For the last 40 minutes Daniel and Mirek have been alternating in this struggle, but to no effect, the boy needs adrenalin. The flat is hot as hell, sweat drips from their brows on the carpet. Mirek can already wring his T-shirt, Daniel will soon reach the same state.

“Water, gentlemen?” – asks the mother suddenly, looking at the paramedics, as they attempt to snatch her son back from death. Since the moment the child got into their hands, the parents have been silent, emanating calm. Only later, Daniel will understand the full dimension of this utterance, coming from the mortified mother as she watched the tragedy. But there is no time for water: press the chest, oxygen, one, two, three, four, five… Blow, blow.

“Will someone shut up the fucking dog!” (It is yapping in the other room). This bloody train on the table… No effect. Decision time: off to the hospital.

Patterns on milk froth

“What one word would best sum up working for emergency in Poland?”

“Humiliation.”

Daniel has graduated with honours from Warsaw Medical University, School of Emergency Medical Care. With his diploma in hand (pharmacology, toxicology, intensive care, and more – knows it all by heart) he had to look for a job in a popular chain café. Got a contract right away at 18 zlotys per hour before tax. A year later, he found a job in his profession. But he had to sign a contract as a self-employed.

As a paramedic, his hourly rate in Warsaw amounts to 18 zlotys per hour (14 zlotys after tax). He becomes a businessman. His invoices will show: date of SERVICE (circulatory & pulmonary resuscitation of a mother of three, children watching), name of SERVICE (defibrillation of a child, venous catheter, intubation), all of it neatly coded in the Polish Register of Business Activities as 86.90.B, Medical Emergency Work.

He has to pay his own National Insurance contributions (two years at a preferential rate of ca. 500 zlotys, then a full rate of 1200), plus transfer tax to the Revenue Office. He’s left with 1,500 in hand. As a barista, the only risk he is taking is to spoil a heart design on milk froth. A mistake in an ambulance can kill a patient. He earns more on little coffee hearts than the real ones, so he is forced to keep both jobs. After a 24-hour ambulance shift, he goes to the Gdański Railway Station to spend another 8 hours asking:

“Can I offer you a cookie with the espresso?”

He cannot afford to buy a car. He lives close to Wola town hall, so he gets up at 5 am in order to get in in time for his shift (7 till 7 shift pattern). First a bus ride to the city centre, still mightily sleepy, then changing to route 517, direction Ursus-Niedźwiadek. Earpieces in, always some energizing music. This is one of his passions. No, he does not play any instrument, but collects discs. He blows all the savings on gigs; heard Toni Braxton in Moscow, and Mary J. Blige in Frankfurt.

“I remember listening to Pulse after resuscitating a child. I still get goose-pimples when I hear that track,” he says with a glow in his eye.  

He was born in Orzechówka, a Carpathian village. Are they proud of him in Orzechówka?

“Don’t know.”

“Why do you do this?”

“Brewing coffee? For money. Saving lives? Out of passion.”

A few absent-minded hugs

Getting out of the flat involves near-acrobatics. Daniel is carrying Michał, but he needs to get in the bathroom first in order to leave the room. Mirek is in the hallway with the gear. And all is done with caution, ever so gently, not to disturb the ventilation tube.

“He’s been without pressure too long,” says Mirek, and he knows. They run down the stairs, one floor, two floors, three. The ambulance is waiting, trolley at the ready. Gently, Daniel lowers the child down and reapplies the pressure.  Michał is cold, just about hanging on the last thread. They cannot leave because some total idiot has parked blocking them, despite the flashing signal. At last, they are on their way, the siren on. Cars climb kerbs in a jam in Pużaka. And inside the ambulance the desperate struggle is continuing. As if in a trance, Daniel cannot feel his arms any longer, but the battle rages on auto-pilot: three, four… blow… The respirator tube has detached from the intubation, but the rookie cannot stop pressing the chest.

“Please, help me, madam. Put the tube back in!” he shouts at the mother.

“What tube? What do you mean?!” The mother is unhinged, but how can she keep composure when her only child is drifting away in front of her?

Daniel reconnects the respirator himself. At the A&E, a new team already awaits. Another 20 minutes. In the waiting room, the parents are going to pieces, asking again and again what is happening to their son. Daniel and Mirek have also stayed behind, although they do not normally do this. They are drenched and tired. A doctor comes out, throws the door wide open and says:

“Please, listen, that’s his heartbeat.”

He made it.

A few absent-minded hugs and Daniel and Mirek return to base. Replenishing supplies in the ambulance, two more minutes and another call-out. There will be ten more on that day.

A really neat loop

Control room info is hazy. Some suicide attempt, a teenager, here is the address. But is he alive? was it an overdose? a blade? That is not clear. At least the family managed to shout the address into the phone. The prospect is bleak: control room cannot spare an “S” team (this is a specialist ambulance, a team of three, including MD, despatched to the toughest cases), so they will send a basic team (two paramedics, no doctor), Marlena and Grzegorz.

Affluent houses of well-to-do owners, richly ornamented gardens, tall hedges, well-equipped cars on tidy, even drives. Everything suggests that residents of this neighbourhood have made it. But the siren’s wail echoes from the roofs exactly the same as from old tenements. And neighbours in shirt sleeves, behind net curtains, plus a guy on horseback, straight from a polo match, look out not unlike men from courtyards in the Right Bank, mates stripped to their wastes, flexing six-packs in the summer sun. Someone is out there, on the drive, waving, running up, stopping the ambulance, sobbing, shouting, even though she cannot be heard through the siren. OK, this is it.

Marcel must have taken a good while to accomplish such a neat loop on the line. Then he had to haul down the punching bag and store it under the window, move the stool right under the hook in the ceiling. Next, to thread the line through the hook. As he was wobbling the stool and then promptly saying goodbye to life and the basement gym (a gift from dad), the family were returning from the shops, taking the last turn towards the house. Reactions. Father: the knife, initial struggle, mouth-to-mouth, press the chest. Sister: the phone, emergency and shouting over the siren in the driveway, in pieces. Mother: in pieces.

“Save him, save him!”

“Where”

“Down in the basement, he’s just 17!”

Marlena and Grzegorz take the challenge. Press, blow, press. Between the first series and the next they call out for support.

“Send us an S- team!”

And on with the struggle, press, mother’s lament, press, sister yelling. After 20 minutes, the S-team arrives.  40 minutes, and still fighting. 74 minutes, Marcel, 17, lies stretched under the window, next to the punching bag (he put it there himself), denying hope.

 “Defibrillator, try the defibrillator!” – that’s the father. Sister in pieces. Mother in pieces.  

Granny calls me doctor

A city dweller cannot easily understand a girl who would do anything to escape from classy, seaside Sopot to Warsaw. Dreaming throughout her middle school and high school of escaping for good. It’s difficult to understand a boy who ignores lovely mountain view from his family home and wants to be in the capital.

Marlena wanted to, and did escape:

“My family don’t get it. They keep telling me: ‘You are from such a beautiful place, what do you want with Warsaw’s concrete?’ But for me, my home town was grey, and cloudy, and without prospects. I did everything to run away and I’ve succeeded.”

In Warsaw, she studied English at uni. But she could not find a decent job, so after graduation she worked in a fast food bar downtown. Sandwiches, an ocean of crunchy batter, a sea of coke on tap, rivers of people in the queues. One Thursday morning, people drop by for their chips and coffee, as always. Someone places an order, Marlena turns to get it and hears something awful happening behind her back. Another turn and she sees a colleague convulsing in an epileptic fit. Each client volunteers a tip, and each one different: “Put something in his hand! Something in his teeth! Hold him!” But the girl is at a loss what to do, beyond calling out to the kitchen. A week later she is training as a paramedic.

“My family are proud of me. And granny calls me ‘doctor’. I know about medicines, what to do, how to behave, but it’s way from being a doc.”

Your turn

You fought for this boy the full 74 minutes. But Marcel, 17, lies stretched by the punching bag (he got it down himself). Get up, tuck in the sweaty blouse, pull off surgical gloves, look the father in the eyes (knife, mouth-to-mouth, defibrillator), the sister (phone, driveway, in pieces), the mother (in pieces), and say:

– The doctor confirmed death at 17 hours 23 minutes.

It’s time, over and out.

How not to get soppy

Sometimes, what you see is frightening, events devastate your psyche, and you can only rely on yourself to save your sanity. It is a Summer holiday season, Friday night, Daniel is praying for a quiet shift, because it is his friends’ wedding party this Saturday. His prayers may reach the Deity, but not the Control Room Operator: “An accident: a tram and a BMW.”

Left, left, right, siren on. The girls are all broken up, caught up in what used to be a sports car, but alive. The man (or so he seems to be) is not. An impossibility, after the impact pressed him into glass and metal, the steering wheel and the dashboard. The girls are off to the hospital, the man begins his last journey. Daniel jumps into a suit, shiny shoes, and rushes to the wedding.  

“Fortunately, I quickly dump such images. I am not scared on the way to emergencies. We work like automatons,” he says.

Marlena looks like someone who just won’t be moved.

“I’ve got nothing stuck in my memory that would pain or bother me. I don’t get thrown, and I don’t take work back home with me,” she declares. “You can’t carry on in this job without a shell. Without it, paramedics would all be alcoholics or suicides. We don’t have access to counselling like our colleagues in the West.”

Still, in the depth of her memory, Marlena does carry a story, which keeps coming back. A call-out to a woman with cancer. It was the end, and everyone present in the flat knew it, but it did hit Marlena hard when she departed, holding her by the hand.

“Because the moment of passing is the hardest.”

Thoughts rushing through your head

– No shit!

Guess how often Daniel has heard it in reply to his assertion that paramedics put their lives on line to save others. Often enough.

He has already done his 24 hours and should go home. He has covered 14 trips, resuscitated, calmed down, injected, chosen treatments, has not slept a second. He is sitting there, at the depot, thinking of bed and asking himself: “Where the hell is my replacement?” But he is not there by 7, nor 27 past, he is running late. A call-out: Code 1, just his luck, he has to do his 15^th emergency.

Was it a Thursday? It was summertime, that’s for sure, baking sun despite the early hour. The door slid shut, the siren on, the team ready, off they go. Andrzej, also a medic, behind the steering wheel. Beside him Natalia, a very young rescuer, new but ambitious. How much do we know? A man, uncommunicative, profuse bleeding, possibly a junkie. A huge apartment block, a beehive already abuzz, people getting ready for work, quite a lot of traffic on the stairs. They sprint a few floors up. A semicircle of neighbours, an open door, a man on the floor. It is 7:40. This is it.

Assertively: “Ladies and Gentlemen, make room, please step aside!”

He is naked, perhaps 30, not older. They lie in the hallway side by side: he and a syringe. Minutes ago, he was searching for pleasure with the needle. Pierced arms directed him down to the groin. But the artery refused to co-operate. There is so much blood that wellies would not go amiss.

Assertively: “It’s too tight here, rookie, get him out on the landing!”

Andrzej is dragging the young man, Daniel is helping, Natalia is watching maroon smudges left by the limp legs on the stone floor. S-team are on their way to assist.

Andrzej keeps pressing the chest, Natalia installs the tube, Daniel inserts a needle for intraosseous injection. A neighbour from across the landing comes out, perhaps to get rolls, pork loin and strawberry jam, but one glance at the action and she withdraws. Must have lost appetite for breakfast. Everything around is maroon. Daniel exchanges gloves, but that does not help, another minute and they are all bloody again. He grabs a vial of adrenaline – quick, quick, faster – ah, it breaks in his fingers. No matter, he grabs another, passes it on. They carry on battling. A doctor arrives with the second ambulance. It is 8:20. This is the time he will enter in the death certificate. The team have done all they could, but it is hard to save someone when life is flooding the landing and dripping from 5th floor to 4th.

Daniel pulls off the gloves, takes a look and connects the pieces of a puzzle. The vial… “Fuck…” he cannot say anything else. A deep cut on his thumb, piercing the skin.

Guess what thoughts keep racing in his head.

Straight from the scene, he goes to take tests in the hospital. For the next 30 hours, he cannot get this image out of his mind: the syringe in a pool of blood. Before results are in, he will have read so much online on HIV and AIDS that he could write his own book on the subject. But he draws the line on photographs. The day after, the tests declare him clean, but he needs to begin a course of antiviral HIV therapy as soon as possible.

“The drugs are very potent, you will certainly feel them,” says the doctor.

“No worries, I’ve done worse…” he replies with self-assurance.

But the drugs are very potent, and Daniel does feel them. They literally knock him out flat. He gets such runs that, ideally, he ought to move to the loo permanently. But that is not an option, he needs to go on another shift. Fast forward three days, and he is comfortable again, just nauseous plus a headache. He finishes the course. Final verdict: while ending his stormy encounter with life, the junkie did not leave Daniel a surprise gift, after all.

No shit?

Breakfast for lunch, lunch for dinner

There is no such thing as regular work schedules, coffee breaks, lunch hour, soup of the day. Daniel hops off the 517 at the Sosnkowskiego stop at 6:32, goes back 150 metres, turns left and visits the Galeria Wypieków patisserie. Two Danish, three smiles and off to the depot. If he is lucky, he will have the pastries for breakfast.

But he is not lucky today: ambulance check-up, topping-up drugs and supplies, and immediately off on the first job. Then the second, third, fourth. He has the pastries for lunch and the lunch for dinner, between call-outs nine and ten. His favourite Chinese takeaway from a tub. Fried rice with chicken, mild sauce, plastic cutlery (just a fork, knife is unnecessary), he eats sitting on a hospital stretcher.

“I know it’s unhygienic, but if I don’t eat it like that I won’t eat at all.” And another call-out, when he is half-way through the tub. He will finish it at night, if he is lucky.

“Well, yes, there are nights with fewer call-outs, so one can sleep a little, rest a little, sit down, but it is a rarity. Some shifts, you have 19-20 emergencies.” Actually, this is Daniel’s record: “Physically, it was terribly demanding. The last calls were, like, ‘Are you coming with us? If yes, then jump in the ambulance, please. If not, then see you’.”

He works about 200 hours a month at the ambulance station, sometimes on 36-hour shifts. And the part-time barista job, too. On a trot, from one work to the other. If he has a day off, he just sleeps. He knows people who spend several days in a row at the depot. A friend of his has worked the equivalent of 15 years in just 6. Credit, mortgage, what can you do?

And then, there is this contract: no annual leave, no paid sick-leave. Sometimes, he goes to work with a 39-degree fever. On 30th December he worked 24 hours at the depot, and on New Year’s Eve, straight to the café, followed by another 24-hour shift on 1st January. Who cares if he’s down with a virus? Have you found a replacement? No? so hop in the ambulance and stop moaning. On his first call-out, he threw up on the entrance door of an apartment block. Then vomited into a carrier bag in an ambulance carrying the second patient.

“I am 24, but mentally I feel 40,” he says.

It is not like this tiredness never reflects on the patient. Daniel tries to be professional, but he can become irritable, cursing everyone and everything mentally.

One hot day, on a call-out to an elderly, obese lady (so obese that she is too bulky to be carried down to the ambulance), the team insist that she should walk down on her own. There is tension, nervousness, half-way through a very demanding shift. In the end she walks down. She can barely fit in the ambulance, Daniel loses it:

“Sit down here, please, what is it you don’t understand?!”

She sits down, the ambulance starts, a while later the woman collapses on the floor.

• Oh, shit, stop, she’s stalled!

Action stations, resuscitation, signal on, the ambulance rushes her to the hospital. The woman dies in A&E.

“The last words she heard in her life were mine: ‘What is it you don’t understand?!'”

Marlena knows people who work 300 or 400 hours a month. They are permanently tired, irritable, harsh. But what if they have to do it? if they need the money? Marlena has no family; she works once every four days, 192 hours per month, earning around 3 thousand zlotys, before tax. As per usual, she is self-employed, so subtract National Insurance, tax, it’s not difficult to work out how much she is left with.

England will welcome you all

Daniel, now 26, is no longer in Poland. He lives in Oxford. He is just in the middle of a training course. It will still take a while before he can start as a fully-fledged paramedic in an English ambulance, but to have just one job will be a real luxury. At an induction course, he is talking to a local female paramedic:

“In Warsaw, we worked a 24-hour shift pattern. There were some who worked 400 hours a month.”

Her eyes widen. Two days later, this is all her colleagues can talk about, they have not heard anything like it for ages.

Daniel has a simple plan, which he could not realise in Poland: to have one job, enough time to relax, to travel, to go to gigs. He dreams of another trip to his beloved Moscow and on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

“Well, and I’ve bought the car.”

Marlena is also leaving Poland. An ambulance service job is already waiting for her in the UK, she only needs a professional class driving licence. Everybody is leaving: doctors, nurses, paramedics.

“Polish paramedics are the best qualified in Europe, but the money we are paid is disproportionate to all we need to learn and all the work we undertake. Every paramedic in Poland is authorised to dispense 49 drugs. It used to be 27, but our responsibilities are constantly extended. But we get no more money for that, no pay rises. 18 zlotys per hour, equivalent of 14 net of tax and NI, is a joke… A team leader at McDonald’s earns more. Last year three of my acquaintances left already. When I told my manager I’d go, too, she asked: ‘How can you do this to me?’ Well, I can.”

You don’t have to be good, you’ve got to be cheap

“We put up stickers on the ambulances, wore T-shirts. But I suspect the public were more impressed by the taxi drivers’ strike than ours,” says Marlena.

In case you have not heard, paramedics have been fighting for quite some time to improve working conditions, to get a pay rise on a par with nurses (1,600 zlotys per month), plus subsidised training and training leave, also to secure regular jobs in place of self-employment. These are but some of their demands submitted to the Ministry of Health.

“Our strike won’t change a thing. We cannot just leave the patients, we carry too much responsibility. And we always hear the same argument: ‘We don’t have the money to spend on you.’ We would all have to quit to force changes,” says Marlena and adds: “The truth about the Polish emergency service is very sad. In order to get to work there, you don’t have to be super-educated, to stun them with knowledge. It’s enough if you are cheap.”

A call-out, info from the control room: “Sorry, have to dash.”

First left, then straight on, the siren blasting, cars scattering to find the hard shoulder. Code 1, Marlena to the rescue. But who will rescue Marlena?