Hospital staff and family traumatised by eviction that included knives and gun

THE eviction exercises by National Housing Corporation in Lae has traumatised a hospital worker and her family.
Bafiguo Don, the senior physiotherapist with the Angau Memorial Hospital, said it was really sad and disturbing that she was assisting a doctor together with a trainee therapist attending a patient when she was told that her family had been locked out of their home.
“I was actually overseeing with the doctor trying to do alignment of an eight-month-old boy’s leg when I had the call that my family was evicted by National Housing Corporation.”
She said she had to decide between sticking to her job or attending to her family’s plight following the eviction.
Being the breadwinner in the family, she felt she had to take her family and home as her priority.
“I had to leave the doctor and my trainee to see what they were doing at my house and assist my family,” Don said.
She described the approach taken by National Housing Corporation officers and their associates as scary in a sense that knives, iron rods, abusive language and a gun were used during the eviction exercise two weeks ago.
In an interview yesterday she said that her children, aged between two and seven, were left traumatised after the incident.
“Even now when those kids walk out of the house to go to market or town and when they see a police 10-seater vehicle, they will try to take cover,” she said.
“In their minds those people who had evicted them might identify them and harm them.
“They sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and start shouting something they had experienced during the eviction.”
The senior therapist said these were the results of the violent eviction carried out two weeks ago.
“We are back in our home but we still feel insecure as we all, including my parents and kids, were traumatised during eviction.”