WITHIN moments of the young girl collapsing, any thought of putting her in a taxi was quickly replaced by the need for an ambulance – and fast.
Simon, a vicar in Walsall, dialled 999 as Chris, a teacher in Great Barr, knelt by the unconscious girl’s side. And Richard, a deputy chief executive, pulled out a foil blanket from a shabby, black hold-all to cover the girl as she lay on the pavement.
All around were her friends, each the worse for alcohol, and the rest of the Street Pastors team. Soon, a First Responder paramedic arrived and the girl, who’d simply had way too much to drink, started to show signs of recovery.
As an ambulance turned up, the girl started to come around and the pastors team called it a night.
It was their first night in Walsall, with identical schemes already in place in parts of Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stourbridge among others. It’s a scheme manned by CRB-cleared and First Aid-trained volunteers from local churches.
Co-ordinating this new team is Mark Desorgher, a 36-year-old landscape gardener from Rushall.
“Our aim is to help the local authorities and the emergency services make Walsall a safer place to go out at night,” said the dad-of-three.
“Like making sure people get to a taxi safely, tending to someone passed out on the ground, diffusing a potentially volatile situation, handing out flip-flops to women who’ve taken off their shoes for the long walk home or just providing a listening ear for someone.”
Only once was the team drawn on matters religious all night, when two men – again the worse for alcohol – questioned them, sometimes aggressively, about how their beliefs differed from those held by Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was an exchange the pastors sought to end first.
Street Pastor Mrs Hill, a 48-year-old technology teacher at a Great Barr secondary school, said: “They weren’t in serious need of us so the longer we stayed there talking to them, the less time we spend looking for people who may really need us.”
The night had started so quietly as the team set out from their base at St Paul’s Church, in the town centre, at around 10pm.
