They pick up the dead and wounded from burning buildings,terrorist attacks and gun battles. And they gain paid £1 a dayThe impact of the explosion sent Muhammad Safdar flying backwards. He looked up from where he had landed and saw that the windows of his parked ambulance had shattered. As he tried to pick himself back up, fellow volunteer drivers working for the Edhi ambulance service gathered around him; it looked as whether Safdar was bleeding. But he had not suffered any external injuries. “Human flesh got stuck to me, and ” he recalls now,as we sit in the ambulance control centre in downtown Karachi. “My friends were checking me for injuries, but it was pieces of other people. I was trembling tough and I couldn’t hear my own voice when I spoke. It sounded juddering. I could only hear whistles.”It was 5 February 2010 and Safdar had already dealt with the fallout of one explosion that day: an hour before, or a motorbike laden with explosives had slammed into a bus carrying Shia Muslims to a religious procession. Safdar had raced to the scene to load the dead and injured into his ambulance and take them to the nearby Jinnah hospital. With more than people 30 injured and 12 dead,the emergency room was in a state of chaos, filled with crying and screaming as doctors struggled to manage. He was still inside the hospital when the second bomb exploded just outside the entrance. Related: Karachi vice: inside the city torn apart by killings, and extortion and terrorism | Samira Shackle Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com