Hassan Akkad - Hope Not Fear: Finding My Way from Refugee to Filmmaker to NHS Hospital Cleaner and Activist

To the untold stories.

Hassan Akkad is a documentary filmmaker and an activist living in London. He fled Syria in 2012 and after a punishing three-month journey across Europe, he arrived in London. Akkad was part of the team that made Exodus: Our Journey to Europe which won the BAFTA for Best Factual Series or Strand in 2017. He worked in film and TV production and for Choose Love, a refugee advocacy organization, until the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when he took a job as an NHS hospital cleaner at Whipps Cross Hospital in East London. He documented the pandemic through photographs of his colleagues posted on social media. His posts went viral and he has since been featured in Vogue, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, BBC News and the Independent. Hope Not Fear is his first book.

It starts with a feeling in my stomach. A watchfulness that stops me sleeping. A sense that something is coming and Ill need to prepare. All my senses on high alert.

After all that has happened in my life, Ive developed a radar for danger. Its like my superpower. A software adaptation in my psyche.

I felt my early-warning system kick into gear as soon as people began posting memes on social media about the outbreak of a new virus in China, confident that such a thing could never reach the UK. I felt a creeping certainty that it would. As commuters streamed past Evening Standard billboards about Wuhan without a second glance, rushing home to hot dinners and Netflix, I wondered why they werent panicking. I was.

I can see danger on the horizon. Indeed, sometimes it feels as if it is following me around.

The general reaction to what was happening in Wuhan reminded me so much of that other time, before, in my home country of Syria, when things were changing quickly, falling apart, but people clung to their everyday routines like some sort of security blanket. Back then, my radar hadnt yet developed. Instead I had a young mans idealistic conviction that everything would be all right. Sometimes I miss feeling that way.

Ive changed a lot in the last ten years, but one thing has stayed constant. No matter what kind of danger I find myself confronting, I become overcome with an overwhelming desire to contribute as best as I can. To help. I dont know exactly where it comes from. But my first instinct is to question what I can do to try and make things better. To ask how I can personally contribute.

Thats how it was in March, when Italy became the new centre of the coronavirus. I watched news reports of people sitting on their balconies, playing musical instruments and singing to one another. By then I was certain that the virus was coming to my adopted city of London and that it was going to cause untold heartache. I recognized the feeling, of previous certainties shifting under my feet. But I also knew the best remedy for coping.

I understood that there would definitely be ways to help. There always are. And in my experience, sometimes being there for others is the only way we have of taking control over difficult things.

Thats why on 27 March 2019, sitting on my sofa in my flat in East London, I googled a simple question. How can I help the NHS? Like everyone, I knew the health service was under great strain, that it might struggle to cope with the influx of coronavirus cases. An agency link popped up with a job listing for cleaners and porters. Next to the word cleaners was another in brackets. Urgent.

I looked at the documentation required. It asked for a DBS check and a passport. I had already applied for the former for a previous job and I had my refugee travel document, which Id received just over four years earlier, after claiming asylum at Heathrow Airport. It was all I needed. I put scans of the documents in an email and hit send. Two hours later a woman rang me.

She outlined the desperate need for cleaning staff. Her tone was calm but the gravity of the situation was clear. I asked whether I would be provided with personal protective equipment or PPE, a term I had only just become acquainted with from all my obsessive watching of the news. She reassured me that they would be taking all necessary precautions. But I was still unsure about whether I could find the courage to go through with it. Reports were coming out about how many frontline staff were becoming infected and dying. Was I really prepared to put myself in harms way, just at a point in my life when I thought things were becoming easier for me?

Since claiming asylum in 2016, I had started to build myself a life beautiful for its ordinariness. Despite the legacy of PTSD symptoms claustrophobia, a constant restlessness, nightmares and flashbacks I was trying hard to make the most of the opportunity Id been given and that so many other Syrians will never have the chance to experience. Weekends away, holidays to cities I had never seen before, walks in Epping Forest, nights out with friends, fulfilling work. A future I thought I might never get the chance to have.

I paused.

But the voice on the phone explained that there were five hospitals in dire need of help and one was Whipps Cross the hospital just ten minutes from my house, that I walked past almost every day. The building serving the community I had grown to know and love. My doubt evaporated. I knew I had to do it.

Two days later, I found myself standing outside.

Whipps Cross is one of the oldest hospitals in London. A warren of Victorian buildings, many of them out of use, it looks like an intimidating cross between Hogwarts and an asylum. Its a place where lives change. Sick people are healed and some of them die. On the day I arrived there were already twelve wards full of coronavirus patients, many of them gasping into oxygen masks, others unconscious and being kept alive by tubes running deep into their lungs. Helping to look after them and keep the hospital running, was an army of nurses, healthcare assistants, porters and cleaners, many working for less than the London Living Wage. In a just a few months, these frontline workers would become as dear to me as family members. People like Gimba and Albert and Pilar and Giby and Vittorio, to name just a handful.

But I didnt know any of that back then, standing at the reception entrance. All I knew was that Id never been as terrified. Even when Id had my bones broken. Or been shut in a windowless cell and told I would never leave. Or when I was in a leaking dinghy full of other Syrians, including many children. Or during those afternoons when I longed for my distant parents and siblings so hard I thought my heart might break. Perhaps its strange to say, but none of those experiences rivalled the unadulterated terror I felt that morning.