While working as a migrant rescue paramedic on a ship off the coast of Libya in 2017, I met people who had nothing but the clothes on their back.
At best, they would have their family’s phone number written on the inside of their jacket because they didn’t have any paper to write it on.
I also saw women and children covered in burns from electric shock torture. Nothing prepares you for that.
As an NHS paramedic, I wanted to be able to provide a good level of medical care for people who really need it. So I started working with MOAS, a charity which operates a rescue boat in the Mediterranean.
The truth is, I didn’t really understand the intensity of what I would be involved in on that ship in 2017.
The boats carried asylum seekers who came from landlocked countries and none of them could swim. Many of them had been caught by gangs in Libya, and tortured until their families paid their kidnappers money.
Then they’d be forced to work as slaves until they’d raised enough money to pay for their passage. They couldn’t go back – they had no paperwork to travel out of Libya.
These desperate people would be steered by smugglers out about 20 miles to sea. Then the smugglers would take the engines off and abandon the passengers, leaving them floating there to be rescued with no water or food for days at a time in the blistering heat.
I’d spent 18 years working in the ambulance service and had never seen anything like it. We’d have one of the crew acting as look out, and they would notify us that there was a vessel or inflatable dinghy. I would get everything ready in the clinic on board.
We would process everyone we saved, asking them their name, country of origin, and age, and I would screen them to see who was most in need of medical attention. It took another three days to travel to Italy, where we could take them to the Red Cross.
For those three days, the bodies of those we didn’t manage to save lay on the port side of the boat. The majority of people who died were children who had drowned in the water.
In all my time in the ambulance service, I had never experienced a child who needed emergency cardiac support. Within 20 minutes, three children under the age of three were brought to me. I tried to revive them but none of them made it.
I don’t think people really understand how desperate you must be to get on a rubber dinghy with no engine, and try to cross the open sea. Surely if there was a safer option, people would take it.
The Nationality and Borders Bill looks to criminalise those who arrive via unofficial routes, and those who ‘knowingly facilitate’ them in doing so.
Although the Home Office said on Twitter that the legislation does not apply to lifesaving organisations, and the Immigration Act from 1971 should protect organisations who have an explicit mandate to assist asylum seekers, the fact that this aspect is not formally written into the new bill is worrying.
It feels like the Government is punishing people who help other human beings.
I fear we’re already losing sight of the nation we should be. This week, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was forced to defend its work after Nigel Farage called it a ‘migrant taxi service’.
If Farage spent one day at sea with us – people who save lives out at sea – he would discover how desperate people have to be to put their families in boats when they can’t swim. He might even discover something called compassion.
It’s not like I woke up one day and said to myself ‘I’m going to be a migrant taxi service’.
Mark Dowie, chief executive of the RNLI, hit back at the criticism and said: ‘Imagine being out of sight of land, running out of fuel, coming across incredibly busy shipping lanes when you’re frightened and you don’t know which direction you’re going in. That is by anyone’s standards, distress. Our role in this is incredibly important: simply to respond to a need to save lives.’
If obeying the law meant watching someone drown, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. I would have to look at myself every night as I brushed my teeth and know that I did that.
In my role as a paramedic in the UK, I go with the ambulance to answer 999 calls all the time, but I never ask the patients if they’re entitled to healthcare.
My worry isn’t whether or not they’re resident in the UK or if they can afford treatment, it’s the fact that we provide a service and I give it to them to the best of my ability.
Has the Government forgotten about the principle of being a good samaritan?
If people had the money and the right documents, then obviously they would arrive here in a less risky way – but it’s clearly not an option for everybody.
MOAS was founded after a couple saw a life jacket floating in the water and realised that people were dying at sea. Every day, someone dies like this – we just don’t know about it. We only really know about the ones who are saved.
One day, I rescued an Eritrean woman at sea. She had nothing but a yellow bracelet, and she gave it to me to say thank you, and I swore I’d get it back to her.
Almost four years to the day, I met her again in the UK. It was hugely emotional. I can’t even process what it would have been like if the boat hadn’t been there. I had to take photos of so many bodies, and here was somebody living their life, having friends, still existing.
When I think of encounters like that, I know I’d go back on that rescue ship to help people stranded at sea on the scariest day of their lives at the risk of being prosecuted and do it all again. Every time.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing James.Besanvalle@metro.co.uk.
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