It is half past one in the day when the alarm comes to the Red Cross.

A man with covid disease in one of Beirut's suburbs has seizures and difficulty breathing. 

Reem el-Gharib and her colleagues put on the white spacesuit-like protective overalls and rush towards the ambulance.

With blue lights and deafening sirens, they take the highway north. 

Julien Farjallah is driving.

On a daily basis, he works as an architect.

Next to him sits film student Andrew Habib.

Reem earns his living as a piano teacher.

As an ambulance nurse, she does not get paid, but still invests everything.

Almost all ambulances that take corona patients to hospitals here in Lebanon are run by volunteers. 

"Sometimes we have to wait for two or three hours"

The patient is in his thirties and has been diagnosed with covid-19.

His mother meets the team out on the street and explains that his son's fever is only rising.

Her gaze is taken and worried.

Reem takes the coughing man under his arm and leads him down the stairs to the ambulance. 

Now the ringing begins.

The first five hospitals say no.

The intensive care units in and around Beirut are more than full.

Finally, the team drives to the nearest hospital emergency room in Bsalim north of Beirut to negotiate on the spot.

On the way there, the patient gets cramps. 

It is also full at Bsalim Hospital.

But after a while of discussion, the patient gets a place in the corridor of the emergency room.

The team sighs in relief. 

 - Sometimes when the hospitals say no, we have to wait for two or three hours.

Meanwhile, the oxygen in the ambulance may run out.

It affects me so much that I start to cry sometimes, says Reem el-Gharib.

"If we did not do this, who would do it?"

On a couple of occasions, it has happened that the Red Cross ambulance team parked an ambulance with a Covid patient in a hospital driveway and left the vehicle themselves to put pressure on the hospital to take over responsibility for the patient.

Despite the stress, Reem says that her job has never felt more important than now. 

 - It is difficult to imagine what would happen without the volunteers.

If we did not do this, who would do it?