Although he admits that Ceuta “is close” to suffering “a real public health problem” due to the impact of the 10,000 migrants who have been roaming there without food or hygiene for three weeks now, cardiologist Fran García Lanzas admits that this crisis “is far from being the hardest” he has seen in his “22 or 23 years” of medical cooperation, traveling around the world, “16 times to Africa,” he explains, adding: “Four months ago I arrived from Guinea Bissau and now I am going to Liberia.”
For example, García Lanzas, a 44-year-old from Jaén, says he arrived in Haiti “on the third day of the earthquake [in 2010], with a Dantean scenario: in the first 30 seconds of the earthquake, 200,000 people had died, and in the following months another 100,000.” That, compared to what is happening these days in Ceuta, “is something very different,” he says.
“But the reality is that in those places I have not suffered even half the psychological burden that these days, this is affecting me psychologically much more. Even if you go to the other side of the world and have empathy with the people, the problem is that here it is your home that is at risk, it is your people who feel harassed. From your home you hear people suffering, you listen to fights, people dying nearby, in the sea… And here, in Ceuta, everyone is suffering: children, grandparents, the unemployed, mothers, fathers… The wear is enormous and it is difficult to explain. People sleeping all over the city… Ceuta is defeated, with very low spirits. This, emotionally, destroys you.”
And also, probably, being one of the only two volunteer doctors who have attended to migrants every one of the 21 days of these three weeks, besides the small contingent of the Red Cross: “I have gone every day to [the beach of] Trampolín, I have taken the motorcycle and gone to Tarajal, to Príncipe… Wherever you went, people came out asking for help. If no one went, as to many places, where no one has gone due to lack of resources, then no one receives help.” Let us remember that the forests and hills around Ceuta are full of migrants hiding like guerrillas from the Civil War. “Some colleagues have helped a few days here and others there, and many have doubled shifts at the hospital and health centers, the effort has been very great.”
What diagnoses have been the most common? “The expected. At first cuts and bruises. After four days, respiratory infections, gastrointestinal, skin infections, dermatosis began. And then, as time went by and they became unbalanced, chronic pathologies appeared: epilepsy, diabetes, hypertension, psychiatric disorders. We could hardly handle the acute cases, imagine the chronic ones, but it has been very important to take out between three and five cases of severe infections every day and send them to the hospital. Thanks to that, the system has not collapsed.”
Every day, at Trampolín, García Lanzas, the other volunteer doctor, and the Red Cross have attended to “between 400 and 500 patients”, he explains. Apart from the scabies cases, García Lanzas says he has not seen “any exotic virus or anything different from what was expected. What there has been the most, logically, are gastrointestinal infections, for obvious reasons: the lack of drinking water and the overcrowding of the warehouses of Tarajal and Trampolín, where there were 3,000-4,000 fixed people and the same floating number.”
The Red Cross has suffered member losses for helping migrants in this crisis: “Politics is poisoned,” he begins, “their work has been essential, but not only for providing food and medical assistance, but for the emotional support of all these people, to whom the Red Cross has contributed a lot. All this has not gone to waste thanks mainly to them,” he says. “Doctors of the World is now doing a very good job, but they came three days ago,” he adds.
And how does someone with so much cooperation experience see the citizen reactions to the crisis? “Look, human beings, all of us, have empathy and solidarity, but also a threshold. And if you see your integrity harassed, you protect yourself, you surpass that threshold and hatred appears. We have all felt it these days, all of us, and it is normal. And it is not that we have lost the possibility of going to the beach to have a beer, and that we have lost our little summer. The most empathetic have been overwhelmed: this is as far as we go. It is human.”
This Friday will be the first day García Lanzas rests since the jump on July 30: “I can’t take it anymore”, he admits. He carries in his retina, as he has lived so many times in Africa – “where I lived five years,” he explains – the “good-naturedness” of the sub-Saharans: “That is why I keep going there, they have other values. They are generous, they take care of family, of the elders… And they know how to live. For some reason it is said that we have the clock, but they have the time.”
