Toughest Place to Be A...

Emergency nurse Maria Connolly leaves the A&E department of the Royal Preston Hospital to work in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico - the centre of a violent drug war.

Three Britons perform their regular jobs in tough locations, beginning with Staffordshire mine rescue worker Craig Notman working with unofficial gold miners in Mongolia.

Train driver Simon Davies usually drives the high speed Pendolino between London and Manchester, but now he faces a very different challenge as he travels to Peru and one of the highest and steepest railway lines on earth. Mining is the life blood of Peru and every day trains carry thousands of tons of metal ores down from huge mines in the high Andes. Coached by some of the toughest train drivers in the world, Simon has just days to learn how to handle a massive train down the spectacular and terrifying slopes, risking derailment and death on train lines at an altitude higher than Mont Blanc. He also discovers a community in crisis, where pollution from mining is poisoning the population.

London binman Wilbur Ramirez is heading to Jakarta, the vast mega city that is the capital of Indonesia. For ten days Wilbur works with Imam, one of the army of semi-destitute binmen who collect rubbish in one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the world. From the health and safety conscious world of British waste management, Wilbur enters a life of squalor and poverty - staying next to a fly-ridden dump and joining Imam's back breaking daily round as he collects the rubbish of Jakarta's wealthy. It's a moving journey as Wilbur discovers the insecurity and danger that dominates Imam's life, and his powerlessness to change his circumstances.

In the third programme in the series where British workers accept the challenge to do their jobs in some of the toughest conditions in the world, midwife Suzanne Saunders-Blundell abandons the high tech maternity unit at Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield to work in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia in West Africa. This is the third poorest country on earth, where one in twelve women dies in childbirth. Suzanne, a fan of natural child birth back in Britain, soon learns that there is little time for such luxuries at the Redemption Hospital. On her first day she has to deal with a traumatic still birth and during her stay a young woman she has helped to care for dies in front of her. Yet by the end of her stay Suzanne is amazed and inspired by the strength of the Liberian midwives she lives and works with, who in turn are keen to learn from her.

Angie Dymott is leaving her job as a paramedic in Cardiff, South Wales, to join the Bomberos of Guatemala City, capital of Guatemala and one of the most murderous places on earth. For two weeks, she will live and work with the Bomberos, combined paramedics and firemen, as they race to the scenes of gangland killings and drive-by shootings, trying to save lives and to stay alive. She will swap her roomy, high-tech, state-of-the-art ambulance for a cramped minibus. As the drug barons fight it out and innocents are caught in the crossfire, Angie will see more bloodshed and killings in a few days than in all her years on the job in Wales. Decades of civil war and increasing drug-related violence have left this Central American country close to chaos. The murder rate is bucking the global, downward, trend, and rising every year. Recently a leading international monitoring organisation described Guatemala as 'a paradise for criminals.' As she contemplates her departure, Angie is scared, not just of the violence but of failing her new colleagues. She knows she's a competent paramedic in the UK, but in Guatemala? Will she cope? Will she be a useful member of the team or merely a hindrance?