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 thing" he has seen in his "22 or 23 years" of medical cooperation, traveling around the world, "16 times in Africa," he explains, and adds: "Four months ago I arrived from Guinea Bissau and now I'm going to Liberia.
For example, García Lanzas, a 44-year-old native of Jaén, says that he arrived in Haiti "on the third day of the earthquake [in 2010], with a Dantesque panorama: 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 being experienced these days in Ceuta, "is something very different," he says.
«But the reality is that in those places I have not suffered half the psychological burden as these days, this is affecting me psychologically much more. Even if you go to the other side of the world and have empathy with people, the problem is that here it is your home that is at risk, it is your people who feel harassed. From your house you hear people suffering, you hear the fights, people dying next door, in the sea... And here, in Ceuta, everyone is suffering: the children, the grandparents, the unemployed, the mothers, the fathers... The wear and tear is enormous and it is difficult to explain it. 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 treated the migrants each of the 21 days of these three weeks, in addition to the small Red Cross contingent: «I have gone every day to [the beach of] Trampolín, I have taken the motorcycle and I have gone to Tarajal, to Príncipe... Wherever you went, people came out to ask for help. If no one went, like many places, where no one has gone due to lack of means, then no one receives help. Let us remember that the forests and hills around Ceuta are full of migrants ambushed like maquis 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? «What is expected. At first cuts and blows. After four days, respiratory, gastrointestinal, skin and dermatosis infections began. And then chronic pathologies appeared, as they decompensated over time: epilepsy, diabetes, hypertension, psychiatric disorders. We could hardly handle the acute ones, imagine the chronic ones, but it has been very important to remove 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, in Trampolín, García Lanzas, the other volunteer doctor, and those from the Red Cross have treated "between 400 and 500 patients," he explains. Apart from the cases of scabies, 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 Tarajal and Trampolín warehouses, where there were 3,000-4,000 permanent people and the same number floating.
The Red Cross has suffered loss of members for helping migrants in this crisis: "Politics is poisoned," he begins, "their work is 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 the wind thanks above all to them," he says. "Médicos del Mundo is doing a very good job now, but it came three days ago," he adds.
And how does someone with so much experience in cooperation 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, that threshold is crossed and hatred appears. We have all felt it these days, all of us, and it is normal. And it's not that we have lost the possibility of going to the beach to have a beer, and that we have lost our summer. This has overwhelmed the most empathetic: this is as far as we have come. "It's human."
