From Undocumented Immigrant to COVID-19 Nurse: Moroccan’s Remarkable Journey in Spain

The young man, originally from Meknes, had been photographed 16 years ago by Cristóbal Castro, a photojournalist from El País, as he was on a hunger strike to demand the regularization of his situation. The two recently crossed paths on the street. "I will never forget the cold I went through that night," says Achmine, who remembers his arrival in Rome a little over 17 years ago, where he stayed for nine days to attend an international volunteer seminar before joining Barcelona.

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"Several people were willing to pay up to 12,000 euros to give us a pre-contract that would allow us to regularize our situation and benefit from social security," he recalls. An amount too high for a student. This is how he and about twenty other migrants locked themselves up at the headquarters of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Terrassa to observe a hunger strike for about twenty days. It was in 2005. At the time, the case had caused a stir and they had obtained the support of health workers, NGOs, unions, religious figures, politicians and journalists.

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Lahcen tells the photojournalist about his journey. After the hunger strike, he had worked for two years in a call center, while teaching Catalan and Spanish in various language schools. "They refused my papers... The procedures are very long here: until 2007, I didn’t get them," he laments. That year, he obtained his papers and was hired in the warehouse of a multinational toy company where he worked as a simple agent before being promoted to a more important position until 2019.

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Then, he decided to join the nursing corps, like his brothers, one of whom "works in an intensive care unit in Morocco and the other, a military nurse." Last year, he obtained his nursing diploma, after five years of study. At the end of 2019, he was hired as an assistant at the Terrassa Mutual where he has vaccinated countless people. Later, Lahcen Achmine hopes to obtain a doctorate in hospital management.