Protest!

Yesterday i had planned on getting a blog post out, but then i remembered that i had already planned to head into town with Marie and Mikaela to protest about the closing of the local hospital where myself, Marie & Marie's mum all work.

So to catch you all up to speed on the story it basically goes like this:

All the hospitals in the region are in a massive amount of debt and most of this debt is owned by the largest hospital in Gothenburg with Lidköping only owing around 10 million which is nothing compared to the rest of them and Gothenburg themselves.

But because we aren't as big as say Gothenburg and Skövde (Skövde is roughly around 1 hour 30 mins+ drive away from Lidköping) the politicians have decided that Lidköping will play the Martyr and will be closed to save pretty much all the money owed.

There has been articles in the paper on numerous occasions stating that the Emergency Ward will not be closed but everything else will be.

This means that a hell of amount of people including myself, Marie & her mum will loose their jobs, which in my opinion is not right, ok right now i'm not actually technically employed as i'm only on a Practice Job which is due to end in the next 4 weeks, but i have as i mentioned in my previous post asked for a extension and from what my boss has said there is a good chance that i could be kept on after that extra 3 months is ended, but if the hospital is closed down there won't be enough work to keep the company i work for (Närservice) going at the hospital which means the chance of getting a job with them, will have gone from a 50% chance to a 0% chance.
So you can understand why i'm totally against it being closed, along with the fact i do not want to see my fiancée or her mother being made unemployed (We honestly can't afford to have 2 people out of work).

So yesterday we all went into town and i got to say damn what a turn out, there was about 100+ people on Facebook that said they would be attending, and then we expected a few people from the hospital who aren't on facebook to attend also and then after that a few people from town since the woman who had arranged all of it had written into the local newspaper (NLT), but when we got there it was shocking there must have been a good 1500+ if not more there at least that's what it looked like.

Photo Marie Had Taken From The Entrance To The Hospital.

This was only some of them, by the time we set of on our protest train as we called it there was a hell of alot more people and even when most of us hit the town square where we were all to gather after walking from the hospital, it was said that there was still people leaving the hospital, this is about a 15 minute walk in total so that should give you a rough idea of how many people attended, since myself and Marie and our little gang we had were roughly in the middle of the train.

I was however surprised, because it was meant to be a protest, and there was no chanting while walking, we actually stopped on several occasions to let traffic that had been stopped go by and basically it was silent, it was more like a sad protest than anything that would gain anyone's attention. 

Sure we had signs and banners and once we actually reached the town square a few people started to chant about saving the hospital and for some strange reason saving the Emergency Ward, which as i stated above has already been mentioned a good few times in the paper that it will still be there. But it wasn't something i would have said would have grabbed peoples attention except for the fact there was so many of us.

I think if there would have been some sort of screaming, or well not screaming but chanting about saving the hospital and stuff, we might have got more people's attention, i also expected the local news reporters to be out to be filming it but they didn't seem to be there either.

However the local newspaper NLT was there and thanks to Marie's great idea about going to see if the little kiosk was open (it wasn't by the way) but we ended up standing on the small stairs leading up to the entrance to the hospital and what happened when we stood there well the news reporter for NLT newspaper came up and started talking to Marie about it asking if we worked here etc, and then guess what? yes we got our picture taken.

Mikaela (My Daughter), Myself & Marie

It turns out the picture was placed on the NLT website along side all of the pictures of the protest, fun? i think not. They have said to keep your eyes out that there will be a continued story about the protest on Monday, so i'm just praying to the high heavens that he doesn't place the photo on there! I seriously will not want to attend work on Monday if they do, since all the cleaning team and the caretakers that i work with all read the paper in the morning when we first come in, and i don't want to have my ugly mug splattered in the paper.

But it was a great day in all, and i hope it helped but only time will tell, i think the current count on signatures is around 4500+ but obviously this will grow and grow quickly.

But for now i think i'm going to go off and chill out, so until next time i hope everyone has had a great week!