“I felt like I was trapped inside a box – of just a black box. There were people around me and I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t see them properly. I did nothing […] You’re just alone.”

My oxygen is dipping. I have blacked out. When I wake up, the nurse is telling me I should lose weight. Am I going to survive? I must be. No one tells a dying person to lose weight, do they?

A cynical observer of their battles with the judiciary and fines from the EU over “rule of law” might ask if they named themselves after what they intended to trample over.

“I saw that the children were malnourished, blackened teeth and gum issues were common and women frequently reported miscarriages and still births. All of these issues quickly made me realize that this area probably had lead.”

“I heard the noise of a scouting plane… It was so close. I knew it was going to fall down, but I did not imagine it would crash into my farmland,” says Amin*, who rushed at the time to see the flames devouring his land.