A love beyond words

READY TO ROLL: When merrymaking turns ugly along Soi Bangla, Lars and his Kusoldharm colleagues are ready to rush any casualties to a hospital.

 

After nine months working with the Kusoldharm Rescue Foundation in Phuket as a volunteer, photographer Lars G Dikander has become a fixture at many accident scenes across the island, helping the injured and taking pictures when he can.
A man of a varied background, including welder, taxi driver and trained hospital orderly, he seems to be an enigma that fits in perfectly with Phuket.
Ulf Peder Johansson asks Lars what keeps him on the roads, helping accident victims time and again.

Love it or hate it, most people would argue that Patong’s Soi Bangla is one of the more interesting places to take a late-night stroll in Phuket.

Suit-hawking touts of dubious immigration status, package tourists pushing baby strollers, ladyboys so spectacularly festooned that a peacock would cringe at the sight: it’s all just part of the spectacle of mass humanity on display there every evening.

In such a chaotic visual milieu, one could easily fail to notice a white ambulance marked with Chinese characters parked nightly near the top of the soi – and the bespectacled European man standing at the ready by its side.

That man is Swedish volunteer rescue worker Lars G Dikander, 58, who risks his life three nights a week with the Kusoldharm Volunteer Rescue Foundation, which maintains 10 rescue pickups and three ambulances on the island.

With 25 paid workers and 50 volunteers, Kusoldharm is by far Phuket’s largest rescue organization. Equipped with police radios, its workers often arrive at gory accident and crimes scenes before even the police can get there – and are often greeted by horrific scenes of death and dying.

So how does a Swede reaching retirement age end up on a Phuket ambulance crew, responding to some of the island’s worst accidents?

Lars came to Thailand for the first time in early January, 2005, as part of a Swedish tsunami rescue team organized by a Swedish branch of the Lion’s Club. He first visited Railey Beach in Krabi, where he helped a relative, married to a Thai, who was living there.

After that, he began to divide his time between Sweden and Thailand, taking part in post-tsunami reconstruction efforts in hard-hit areas including Khao Lak, Kamala and Patong.

Given his varied background, it is no surprise Lars volunteered to help out. Born in 1949 in the city of Borlange in central Sweden, Lars’ life history includes stints as a factory worker, welder, hotel worker and taxi driver – to name just a few of the jobs he has done.

He has lived and worked in many different parts of Sweden, where he still has two children: Alexander, born in 1987, and Jennifer, born three years later. His mother died in Sweden last year and his father just this year.

“I hope my kids can come and visit soon. I miss them,” he told the Gazette.

It was in 1979 that Lars first began to work as a freelance photographer, a job he continues to do for a wide variety of news agencies, including some of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, such as Expressen and Aftonbladet.

Although many of Lars’ pictures these days are taken at crime and accident scenes and are too graphic for most English-language media, they have been commonly featured in the Thai media, including numerous accident-scene photos that have appeared on the front page of Siang Tai, Phuket’s Thai-language daily newspaper.

Most of the photographs he sells these days involve Swedes and are sold to Swedish newspapers, he said.

Lars began his medical training at about the same time as he began snapping pictures. In the early ’80s he worked as a hospital orderly. Interested in the work, he studied to become a nurse and before long found himself helping doctors treat patients in the Intensive Care Unit of Gavle-Sandvikens Hospital, in the Swedish city of Gavle.

That experience and training continues to help him to this day in his work with the Kusoldharm Foundation.

It was while living in the large Swedish cities of Stockholm and Malmo that he began contributing many photos to the big Swedish newspapers: fights, fires, car accidents, burglaries – Lars has just about seen it all during his many years behind the lens.
When asked what was the worst accident scene he had ever encountered, he said: “Road accident scenes can be very bad. About four months ago, a Swede got crushed by a 10-wheel truck after falling off his motorbike in Kata. That was a very bad scene. Shootings and stabbings are often very gory too,” he said.

When asked what has been his all-time favorite photo, he replied with a laugh, “I don’t know… all the ones that were published.”

After he started visiting Thailand regularly he met his future wife Somniang Pengthong, an office worker at Siang Tai at the time. After two years of courtship, the couple were married in March this year.

“She is the best wife. We married out of love, nothing else. Sometimes we have a bit of a language barrier, but we are working on it,” he said.

Asked why he goes on rescue missions three nights a week with no remuneration, Lars said, “The danger has become a part of my everyday existence. We have an expression in Swedish that goes ‘My heart pumps to help others,’” said Lars, adding that he likes the excitement of rescue work.

“The sound of sirens is like the soundtrack of my life.”

During the nine months that Lars has been with the Kusoldharm Foundation, many of the calls he has responded to have involved road accidents involving drunk drivers. Those who survive are seldom model patients, he has observed.

“Many people who are in accidents are drunk, confused or in shock. Sometimes they try to rip off the oxygen mask or pull out the intravenous feeds we use to treat them on the way to hospital,” he said.

Though he tries to talk to them and calm them down, it doesn’t always work: some patients need to be restrained to prevent them from hurting themselves – or others.

At crime scenes, Lars is sometimes called upon to help police. He once had a finger broken when, at a police officer’s request, he assisted in trying to drag a violently drunk man into a cell at a police station. Lars said he had to punch the man to get him to let go of the finger.

What is alleged to have been a drunk driving accident also cost the life of a friend and fellow Kusoldharm worker Apirak Suemuang, 24, who was one of two killed when a Kusoldharm truck rushing four accident victims to hospital and a Toyota sedan collided at high speed at the Tesco intersection on May 6.

Despite the dangers, Lars said he feels comfortable and satisfied with the work he is doing and has integrated with Thailand and the Thai way of doing things.

He has great respect for the Thai Royal Family, he said, adding with pride that he was the only photographer from Phuket invited to take pictures at HM The King’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in Bangkok last year.

Asked how he can afford to do so much volunteer work, Lars said he was lucky to get a medical pension from the Swedish government about eight years ago that allows him to live here comfortably – if everything goes according to plan, that is.

Lars explained that Phuket is now his permanent home, following a series of events that began with a burglary of his rented house in Chalong. That robbery, which left him without any valuables or cash, meant he could not afford to fly back to Sweden or pay the rent on his apartment there.

Eventually, all of the possession he had stored there – furniture, old photos, almost everything he owns – were removed. He has not seen them since.

When not working as an emergency rescue volunteer, Lars enjoys music – and not just as a consumer. He can play several instruments, including the guitar, accordion, harmonica and drums. Back in Sweden, his love for music dovetailed well with his photography skills and he often photographed Swedish bands.

Asked how he deals with the stress of emergency medical work, Lars said that he doesn’t drink but admits that his does smoke quite a bit.

“I also believe in the idea of ‘heal thyself’. It is not easy to turn to my family for support because of the language problems… Anyway, I have been doing this type of work for a long time so I am used to it,” he said.

While life in Phuket is going well, Lars admits that he does need to improve his language skills. Unlike most Swedes living in Phuket, he is not fluent in English – and his Thai language skills are minimal.

His co-workers at Kusoldharm have encouraged him to study Thai, he added with a laugh.

Lars enjoys his life as a rescue team member and plans to continue doing it as long as he can. “I think I might have a guardian angel looking over me, helping me from being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

Perhaps to the accident victims he helps, Lars himself appears to be a guardian angel.

To view samples of Lars’ photography, visit his website at www.newsweb24th.com (Swedish language only).